In which shit gets real.


A week later, the Avengers are making landfall on Antarctica.

Loki did not much care for the frozen continent the last time he was here, and it does not improve with repetition. The entire landmass is barren, dead rock buried under miles of dirty ice. It reminds him too much of Jotunheim, except at least Jotunheim still showed signs of life. This place brings only death.

Fury and SHIELD provided transportation - not the Helicarrier but a boat, swift and well-stocked for the expedition. Hank and Jan have between them managed to produce cold-weather gear versions of all their uniforms; it will protect them from the worst of the continent's ravages while still allowing them enough freedom of movement to fight.

They are fortunate for both of these boons, for even after arriving at their destination, Loki is not entirely sure where they should go. He's been here once before, during the initial invasion - but then, he had other things on his mind. Then, the Chitauri's beachhead had been an unmistakable, ugly scar on the landscape; without that, there are few landmarks to orient him. Antarctica is huge, featureless and trackless, and Loki is not entirely sure where the portal will open - or even precisely when.

They're already several days late from the original invasion date, presumably because Fury's shell-game with the Tesseract caused them delay; but Loki can deduce that there is a set amount of time that must pass in preparation between the theft and the opening of the portal, and he knows that the latter must come soon.

At last he gets a faint reading from the Tesseract - the thief can no longer keep it hidden belowground, or in wave-shielded caves, and Loki can feel its presence at last. But the signal is a weak, erratic thing - Loki can only get a sense of its direction, not a fix on its location or distance. He suspects that it is moving, as it never seems to come from exactly the same place twice, and he cannot triangulate its position no matter how fast he and the Avengers move over the frozen ground.

The other Avengers follow him, loyal and obedient... so far. But Loki can see the sidelong glances they shoot at him at times, the dubious whispered conferences they hold with each other when they think they are out of the range of his hearing. Loki does not bother to argue with them any further, or give any more fine speeches. Time will prove him right, or wrong, soon enough.

"How can you be so sure of when it's going to happen?" Steve asks at last, too honest to sneak whispers as the others do. "I mean, I guess it's possible what you're saying, that there is some race of alien beings out there that could come to Earth some day. How do you know that it will and why are you so sure of when?"

He is not so foolish as to tell them the truth of how he knows. He has learned that lesson well. "A prophecy," he says instead, reverting to a more simplistic truth. "Long written by the seers of Asgard."

Jan Pym snorts in an unladylike fashion, huddling in her fur-lined parka against the stinging icy wind. "Well, here on Earth, we don't really believe in prophecies," she tells him. "The future's not decided yet. Anything could happen, and we won't know until it does."

For just a moment, Loki hates them as passionately as he envies them for their ignorance. For their innocence.

But before he can muster the patience, or they the breath, to argue the matter further, there is a deep rumbling sound that shivers the snow around them. Loki whips his head around to stare into the sky in the distance - not quite in the direction they'd been heading - to see a seething mass of blue lightning arcing through the otherwise clear sky. It catches, steadies and spins smoothly into a hypnotic loop, a perfect ring cut out of the sky that leads to elsewhere.

The portal.

For a moment they are all transfixed, rooted in place as they watch a hole torn in space; Loki sees varying expressions of fear, awe and wonder on their faces. He is reminded once more of how young and inexperienced the peoples of Midgard are; the other Realms are long since accustomed to intrusions from beyond the borders of their world, and know well that it rarely heralds anything good.

"They come," Loki growls, snapping them out of their entrancement. They look at him now, and there is a new respect in their eyes, a shadow of what they saw while looking at the portal to another world: amazement and just the slightest touch of fear.

"Loki, what should we do?" Spider-man asks him, just a touch plaintively.

"We must stem the flow at its source," Loki says grimly. "We must stop them as they come through, until we can get close enough to shut down the portal. Left unchecked, they will spread out over the surface and burrow down, bring in materials to build fortifications and facilities." He remembers the jagged tower, the looming walls; the deep blood-filled trenches dug in precise array. "Above all, we must not allow them to entrench themselves."

"We'll stop them before they get that far," Steve says, full of confidence as he ever is. "And hey, I've busted a few bunkers in my day. "

A voice crackles in Loki's ear, over the communicators they all wear that links them back to the Helicarrier. "We see them too," Fury says, his voice grim. "Avengers, I have troops ready to advance on your position."

"No!" Loki snaps, loud enough to make the device squeal in protest. "Keep them back. Ordinary soldiers will be useless against this foe. Send your drones if you must, but send nothing that you would care to see bleed." Human blood is what they came for, Loki knows; they need it to perform their dark summoning. Loki means to deny them.

"Leave it to us, Director. These bugs won't stand a chance." Steve lowers his cowl over his face, the reinforced material protecting his head as the built-in goggles shield his eyes from the wind and glare, and becomes Captain America. "Avengers, assemble!"

And then the battle is joined.

The portal is several meters across by the time they reach it, the edges slowly peeling back to reveal the rift beyond it. Beneath it a bright arc of energy leads down to a dark point in the snow, surrounded by a faint shimmer, that must be the Tesseract. They must reach it, must find a way to break the connection as soon as possible.

But the first scouts are already coming through, chitin-armored figures crouched on sleek metal fliers. Each one bears three Chitauri; one to pilot the flyer, another to operate a mounted turret, and the third to drop to the ground and charge into battle. There are a dozen already, falling into defensive formation about the portal and the Tesseract, and more come through every second.

The Avengers fall into battle naturally, their tactics sure and practiced. Goliath strides forward, growing as he does in size until he can swat the fliers from the sky with his hands. Jan becomes a golden blur, shrinking as her wings appear and she zooms upwards; she quickly disappears from sight, but her passage is marked by the bright flashes of arcing electricity that are her stingers. At her size the Wasp can crawl right up into the machinery of a flyer, tear out wires and short the rest, sending the machine tumbling to ruin on the icy waste below.

Hawkeye and Spider-Man have found themselves an exposed rocky outcropping; Hawkeye climbs to the top of it and perches there, picking off the pilots of the flyers as they pass by or shooting grappling arrows that wrap around the delicate fins and yank them out of the air. Spider-Man plants himself on a rock face and snags passing flyers with his webbing, swinging them on the end of the long arc to use their own momentum to crash them onto the ground. Once grounded, they are easy prey.

Loki and Captain America are the only two members of the team that cannot fly (well, Loki can, but he cannot fly and fight at the same time) so they remain to cover the ground. Captain America's bright coloring makes him a distinctive, easy target, and the Chitauri crowd themselves to shoot at him or mob him to the ground; he fends them all off, using his shield to deflect the bolts while his superior strength flings the aliens like ragdolls to the side. Loki slips like a shadow in and out of the melee, sending doubles of himself to distract and confuse while he teleports quickly from place to place, slipping up behind one Chitauri soldier and another and driving a knife into their spine.

The Avengers fight with practice, but too gently; they have spent too long fighting only humans. Loki turns away with his blade still steaming with blood to find Spider-Man pinning an enemy Chitauri to a rock face, binding him with a cocoon that will leave him helpless but unharmed. "What are you doing?" Loki snarls over the communicator. "This is no time for mercy! Kill them!"

Spider-Man looks up at him, eyes wide. "But -" he begins.

"Every enemy you leave alive is one that will rise up to face us again later," Loki says, cutting him off. Several of the others have broken off to stare at them, at Loki with his hands dripping with blood. "There is no margin for error here. This is your very planet you are fighting for! Now fight!"

"Don't need to tell me twice," Hawkeye mutters grimly. "After what these sons of bitches did to Tasha."

"They're right," Captain America confirms, his voice stern. "There's no time for second-guessing in combat. Give them all you've got."

Shakily the Avengers resume the battle, and it is not without hesitation that they change their preferred tactics for more lethal ones. Goliath crushes enemies under his hands instead of only stunning them; the Wasp's electric blasts grow more brutal. When the clip of his own weapon runs dry Steve snatches up one of the energy staffs from a fallen enemy, and it does not take him long to learn to use it. Slowly the battlefield fills with the smell of blood and offal, the burnt ozone smell of lightning and charred flesh. To Loki, it is strangely nostalgic.

It is well that they do. The rift is wider now, the Chitauri coming through in the dozens at a time. Despite all their efforts, they are slowly being pushed back, further away from the portal and its power source. The air is thick with buzzing flyers, the ground swarms with Chitauri drones. It is no longer enough to kill them one at a time, it is taking too long. They need to be more efficient.

Loki is a powerful, able fighter, both in close quarters and at range with his knives, and he knows many useful spells. Yet his magic stems from within himself, and as such is fundamentally limited; he cannot simply hurl around bolts of fire or electricity, not without an enchanted weapon such as Gungnir or Mjolnir made for that very purpose. He can slow and distract, inconvenience or confuse; he can cast doubles of himself to confuse the enemy, or veil their eyes with darkness, or transmute their weapons into chalk, or jam the engines of their flyers, or stick their feet to the edge of their flyer so that they tumble off-balance when they try to leap off. Yet without an external power source he has only his own life-force to draw on, and as powerful a sorcerer as he is even that has limits. If he drains himself down to his own core, there will be nothing left.

Steve is right, this is no time to hold back. Loki reaches into his interdimensional pocket and draws out the last of his trump cards, the The Casket of Ancient Winters.

He opens it with a howling blast of cold, and an entire phalanx of charging Chitauri soldiers freezes in its tracks. Steve's shield was already winging its way towards them before Loki moved, and when the metal disc rebounds off the first statue it shatters like glass. Captain America turns towards him as his shield returns to his hand, a startled cry on his lips. "Loki? What's happening to you?" he exclaims.

Loki does not need to look at his hands to see the color creeping up his skin; he can see it when he shatters another statue with a single blow, then another. But there is no time in this battle for squeamishness. "I am fine. It is a thing of magic; do not worry about me." He shoots a lance of ice in Cap's direction that deflects off the convex shield, splitting precisely into two bolts and felling the enemies that are attempting to creep up on him. "Get that portal closed!"

Loki lets out another blast, clearing the way to the portal as far as he can, and then he must throw up a shield of shivering ice to block the incoming blasts of fire. "Go!" he shouts at the others, and thankfully, they move.

It takes all Loki's concentration to survive in the next few minutes, with the attention of the invaders focused upon him. All to the better; if he can keep their aggression on himself, his teammates will have a chance to get through.

"I can't hit it!" Hawkeye's voice exclaims in his ear, the archer's frustration clear. "It's protected by some kind of force-field. All my arrows are bouncing off."

"Let me try," Jan says breathlessly over the comm. "I'm smallest - maybe I can get through -" The next thing to come over the comms is a buzzing screech, and then a female cry of pain.

"Jan!" Hank exclaims, turning towards her.

"I'm fine!," she snaps, breathy with pain but unwavering. "Stay focused. We have to find a way to get through it."

"There's no entrance or seam that I can find," Steve says. "We need Loki over here - maybe he can teleport past the shield..."

"I am somewhat occupied at the moment," Loki says with a snarl, as two Chitauri leap at him from behind, wrapping their clinging limbs around him and trying to drag him down. He freezes them with his Jotun skin, jerking his arms angrily to shatter them into glass shards around him.

The Casket of Ancient Winters is a powerful weapon, the most powerful they have, yet Loki is coming to realize that these conditions are not the best for it. The Casket is a weapon like the creatures that built it; savage and elemental, short-ranged and brutal. It is not a tool of finesse or flexibility. The Chitauri themselves do not fear the cold; they are adapted to the empty coldness of space, and low temperatures alone will not kill them. Even when frozen by the Casket's power, it takes a brutal blow to finish them, or else they will only thaw again.

With some difficulty Loki can use the Casket to fire missiles of ice, long jagged blue spears that rip and impale, yet he can only target one enemy at a time like that. He can blast out a cone of intense cold which engulfs everything in its path, yet the range is short; there are far too many Chitauri already spread out much too far for him to get them all. And he must take care not to open the Casket too far, because to do so would slay his allies sooner than it would kill the enemy. He is killing them as fast as he can, yet it is not fast enough.

They have been fighting for hours, and already the Avengers are beginning to flag. The cold and icy winds are brutal on them; the heat of battle warms them, yet the sweat-soaked garments invite an icy chill that creeps and debilitates them. And there is no relief in sight. The portal inches further open with every second; already it gapes half a mile wide, and Chitauri warriors pour through it like an endless swarm of locusts. But the Chitauri are not mindless beasts; they share a purpose, moving in formations and coordinating their actions. And they are learning. Already the flyers know to give Goliath a wide berth, to fly above the range of Spider-Man's webbing, to duck and jag to avoid Hawkeye's incoming arrows. There are more of them than the Avengers can possibly engage, and too many of them peel off from the melee to stream away, to wreak some new mayhem beyond their reach.

Somewhere, off to the distant side, Loki sees a dark streak in the sky and hears the distant roar of a jet; the X-men have arrived, perhaps, or the Fantastic Four. Loki sent warnings to both, yet they did not heed them in time; they are late, and can only fight at the fringes while the main battle rages around the Avengers, cut off from reinforcements or aid.

"Guys," Hawkeye says over the comm; his voice is breathless and weary. "I'm almost out of ammo, here."

This has always been the biggest weakness of Hawkeye's style, and they all know it; he is not meant for such grinding, relentless combat. It is the reason archers are not favored among the warriors of Loki's people; the Aesir are immortals, and tend to fight with other immortals. Their battles tend to last for weeks, and unless they have a limitless supply of magical ammunition (such as Loki does) their ammunition will inevitably be exhausted.

"Get to lower ground, and pick up one of the enemy's weapons," Steve orders him. "I'll cover you while you figure out how to use it, it's pretty straightforward."

"Roger that," Hawkeye answers, and slings his bow over his chest with a practiced movement, turning to scramble down the stone outcrop.

Right at that moment - perhaps inspired by the sight of Hawkeye lowering his bow - one of the flyers swoops over his position, knocking Hawkeye off the lip of the stone and sweeping him along with them. Spider-Man scrambles over the ridge and fires a shot of webbing after them, trying to drag them back or at least hitch a ride; a few strands of webbing catch the very trailing edge of the flyer, but they are thin and brittle in the freezing air and shatter as soon as the flyer's engine roars.

"Hawkeye is taken!" Captain America crackles over the communicator. "Wasp, get in the air and get after him. Goliath, try to follow and rescue him ASAP. Loki -"

Each of the Avengers has, secretly woven into their uniforms, a number of Loki's runes. Some of them are for protection, turning flexible cloth into armor that will turn arrows and bullets, absorb energy blasts. Some of them are for stamina, and some for healing, at least as much as such minor magics can provide. But one of them is the same as the one he placed on Tony Stark's armor so long ago; runes that lead from their hearts to Loki's, six little candle-flames of warmth.

By the time Steve has finished giving orders, six has become five.

It seems the Chitauri do not need their blood sacrifices alive, only fresh.

"Hold, Avengers," Loki manages to force out. "Hold your positions. Closing the portals is... must be our first priority." He manages to fashion a lie, one that slips over his tongue more easily than the truth. "Once it's closed, the Chitauri will be trapped on this side. Hawkeye will be a valuable hostage to them then. We can retrieve him safely after the battle."

"We can't just leave him in the hands of those monsters!" Spider-Man exclaims.

"No, do as Loki says," Captain America orders reluctantly. "He's right, the portal is our first priority. Hawkeye's a fighter, he's tough. He can take care of himself until we get there."

Loki cuts his outgoing voice so that there is no chance of the others overhearing him, and for a moment he is overwhelmed by the grief. His Hawk. His best lieutenant, his strong right arm. His best friend. Their band has already lost a brother, and the others don't even know.

Enough of this.

Loki explodes into motion, turning the Casket to blast out a wave of ice at knee level, locking the advancing Chitauri drones into place. They screech in frustration, struggling to move their legs, and Loki ignores them as he darts between shadow and shadow, barely pausing to rip his knives through the necks of those he passes. He summons a swirl of ice and snow around him, diguising his movements and sending out a double to throw enemies off his track, and makes for the center of the maelstrom, the Tesseract.

A hulking cadre of guards surrounds it, but Loki tears viciously through them and skids to a halt before the barrier, breathing heavily. The wormhole machine is a twisted metal construct, dark and bulky, but at the center of it lies a violent glitter; a delicate metal casing that ingulfs a violent blue blaze.

It is the first time Loki has laid eyes on the Tesseract, after nearly ten years of chasing after it. He'd heard descriptions of it, of course, from old inventories of the Great Treasures of Asgard; but no dry description or clumsy chicken-scratch illustration could possibly capture the violent skelter of energy and potential twisted and bound into so tiny in space. Whole galaxies of light are crystallized inside its heart, shifting and fractal. He has seen echoes of it in the dark paths, in Yggdrasil's twisting boughs... and in the segmented body of Nithhogg himself.

It is... beautiful.

But this is no time to be mesmerized by the glorious cacophony pouring off the thing. He must shut down the machine, stop the sucking siphon that pours upwards to the portal above. And first he must get past the shield.

His hand makes no impression on the crackling force-field, nor do his knives. Even with all his strength behind it it does not even shift, nor is there any sign of give beneath it when he sends his magic into the ground below to undermine it. It is as unmovable as a stone pillar that extends to the core of the planet. Remembering Steve's suggestion from earlier, Loki tries to teleport inside, but that too fails.

With shaking hands, aware of each moment slipping through his fingers, Loki works a spell of kenning - a spell to seek the nature of what lies before him, that he might sense its weak points. What he finds in return makes him snarl in frustration; the Tesseract has been made to defend itself. It has tilted itself and this block of space surrounding it to a slight angle in this spatial plane; no thing of a mere three dimensions can pass into it. Effectively no longer fully exists in their reality; they can see it, but it might as well be on the far side of the moon for all they can reach it.

To get around that barrier, he needs something akin to the Tesseract itself, something that can move along the same paths. He tries to draw on the Casket to aid him, but it is futile; the Casket is an artifact of this world, the forces and elements and laws that move it, base and elementary. The Tesseract is something higher.

As he is searching his mind for some new way to attack the problem, shouts of alarm pull him out of his trance. A shadow falls over him, blocking out the sun, and he cranes his neck back stupidly to watch a wave of darkness pass overhead. Ah, he thinks inanely. So the portal has become wide enough for the leviathans to arrive.

"Avengers, we have a new threat," Steve's voice crackles tensely over the comm. "Taking this beast down is our top priority." The obviousness of it makes Loki want to snort, despite the imminent danger; no kidding?

The leviathan makes a beeline for Goliath, who braces his huge feet in the ice to meet it head-on. The beast strikes him in the chest with a screech that sounds like a massive kettle boiling, spikes undulating from each side as it bares a mouth lined with meters-long fangs.

For a moment Hank wrestles with it, growing even larger as his size-changing power struggles to its very limits. Then the leviathan twists and throws him sideways with an earth-shattering crash, whipping its long spiked tail around to send him sprawling with a vicious blow. Goliath stumbles to catch himself, struggles to find footing among the blood-slick ice, and the great beast darts forward with another slashing bite.

Then Loki is there, the Casket in his hands as he runs, filling in a path of frost and ice to carry him up to the leviathan's level. A lance of ice stabs upwards from the ground, piercing the leviathan's belly, and it roars again as it struggles free of the protrusion, turning away from the downed giant to face him instead.

Loki balances at the top of his self-made precipice of ice, waiting calmly as the leviathan rushes at him. Each of its teeth are taller than him, and if it pins him between its body and the ice he will be nothing more than a smear. Still he holds his ground, watching the enraged beast rush upon him with a steady gaze.

At the last moment before it hits him the leviathan opens its gaping maw, and Loki's hands snap up, the Casket between them. He unleashes the fury of a thousand winters into the beast's mouth, an ocean's worth of ice, an endless depth of cold. The leviathan's mouth starts to close, then locks in place as the great block of ice between its jaws prevents it. Its teeth scrape and dig themselves deeply into the ice, but can't close it, and the leviathan is pinned as a fish on a hook as the angry fist of winter blasts down its throat.

Loki feels the beast's howl more than he hears it, shuddering vibrations that travel up the path of ice to his hand. The leviathan's great body thrashes and convulses in an attempt to free itself from the deadly bait, but to no avail; Loki keeps the Casket open, focused, and the ice continues to spread through the leviathan's innards. The beast's soft innards are no match for the ice's razored edges, and even the monstrous chitin of its skeletons cannot resist the grinding pressure of expanding ice for long.

When at last the Leviathan falls to the ground, it resembles little so much as a hedgehog. ichor drips from coated spears of ice that have burst through its hide from the inside. The beast continues to thrash and twitch, the body not yet realizing that it is already dead. At last, Loki has a chance to look around him, to locate his shield-brothers.

He has slain the beast, but took too long. The battlefield is a shambles, the Avengers pushed back ever farther from their goal, each one besieged by enemies. The Chitauri have turned their attention to Goliath, and for all that he is twenty times their size, the numbers they are throwing at him are too much even for his colossal strength. Still dazed from the leviathan's blows earlier, Goliath staggers to the side as a sheer wave of bodies overwhelms him. A raft of flyers circle him from just out of his reach, concentrating their energy weapons on his head and neck, while an ocean of drones surge about his feet, pulling him down to the ground.

"Goliath is in trouble," Loki says urgently over the comm. "Fall back on him, now. " He suits actions to words, throwing himself into the melee and slaughtering all within reach - but for each one that falls, two more take its place, shoving him back. He calls on his magic, attempting to throw shields and force-fields around Goliath, but the sheer force of the assault burns through each of them in seconds. " Now! "

Out of the corner of his eye he sees a golden meteor approaching, the Wasp descending like a Valkyrie to her husband's side. It's already too late. The two largest flyers, humming platforms that carry a dozen Chitauri each aboard, have strung steel cables between them; while drones attack his hands and arms, keeping them weighed down and defenseless, the two flyers circle Goliath in a pattern that wraps a metal noose about his neck. Their aircraft claws at the air, engines whining, and for a moment it looks as though they might even lift him from his feet.

Another candleflame above Loki's heart stutters out.

"Hank!" Jan's voice tears across the communicator, and the sheer animal pain in her scream crushes Loki's heart like a fist. Goliath's body shudders, sways - and then falls.

The impact of his body shakes the ground.

When it clears Loki finds himself on his hands and knees, bent and blinking in the scuffed and bloodied snow. The Casket lies a few feet away, its glow muted from all the power that has been drained from it. Around him the Chitauri flow freely, their flyers blasting through the air and speeders skidding past him unimpeded. They don't even slow down for him any more.

And why should they? Goliath was their strength, their one great weapon aside from the Casket. With him down, they don't have the muscle left to pull this off. For all that these mortal heroes have courage, they have coordination and virtue and loyalty, they lack in power. They needed the unbounded strength of the berserker. They needed force, real and elemental. They needed Thor.

They need Thor, and he never came.

"Avengers, what's your status?" It's Fury's voice, gruff and tinny over the comm - it must have gotten knocked askew somehow.

"Three down, Sir," Steve's voice comes shakily. Three? Loki realizes with a sort of distant surprise that he cannot hear or see Spider-Man anywhere, and the boy's rune has gone dark on his chest. He didn't even notice. "Two more are not - looking good. No - no progress on disabling the portal."

Fury makes a distant, unhappy grunt. "The army is moving in now," he says.

That lights a spark in Loki, drives him to snatch up the microphone and fit the headset back into place. "Do not let them attack!" he hisses into the microphone. "Did you hear nothing I said? Have you learned nothing? That is exactly what they want! Your soldiers are no match for this foe. You are sending them all to their deaths, and our enemy will drain their blood for fuel!"

"Loki..." Perhaps Fury thinks he's being poetic; he's not. He's deadly serious. The six of them will not provide enough blood for the ritual, not even Goliath; but an army of hapless soldiers, being driven to their death, will. "It's not my call. These are the first response forces of half a dozen nations. I can't stop them."

Loki swears, then tears the microphone off his head entirely. He stands panting in the snow, his hands clenching and unclenching around the electronics crushed in his hand. Dark shadows fall over them again; another leviathan passes through the portal and knifes away through the air, then another in the opposite direction. New Chitauri drones stream over the battlefield, ignoring them as though they aren't even there; already, the first dark stones that make up the foundations of the tower are in place.

Steve is the only one still fighting; surrounded by a ring of Chitauri soldiers, closing in on him as he swings his weapon and shield in hopeless defiance. He calls out for assistance, support; doesn't the fool know that it's hopeless? They fought with all they had, Loki gave them every advantage he could think of, and it still wasn't enough. They lost. They failed; he failed them. This is the end.

It doesn't have to be.

Loki jerks into motion, one foot stumbling in front of another. "Loki, where are you going?" Steve's voice crackles in his ear. "Help me! Please!"

Loki yanks the headset from his head, crushes it under his heel, and doesn't turn back. "Loki!" He doesn't need the headset to hear this one; he can hear Steve's voice rising from behind him, full of betrayal and fury. "Loki, you coward!"

The word hits his back like a blow, and something inside Loki breaks; snaps like a twig and crumbles. He stumbles a step but doesn't stop, doesn't turn around. The mortal knows nothing. Doesn't Steve realize that he is the only chance they have left to save the world from Nithhogg's gaping maw? What is to be gained by standing his ground in fruitless courage when not one life will be bought by their sacrifice, when no one will be left behind to remember it?

There is a rift not too far from here; he can sense it, an opening into the Void. He can go there, fall into the void, turn time back to its beginning. He can start again, leave this all behind -

All?

His gaze falls on Jan, kneeling in the snow, surrounded by the blasted corpses of Chitauri. There are so many they form a barricade of bodies in the snow, but Jan pays them no heed. Her eyes are only on her husband. They are both back to their human size now; in death, his technology has fallen and reverted him to no more than a man. Jan is holding one of his hands between both of hers, and her face is iced over with tears.

"Jan," Loki says, low and breathless, standing over her. She looks up at him slowly and he holds out one hand. "Come with me."

She cringes back from him, eyes wide. "Loki?" she whispers. "Is that you?"

It takes Loki a moment to remember - curse this skin, he thinks, and with an effort he forces it back to its normal shade. "Come with me, Jan," he says again. "We can still win this. I never told you the truth, but I'm not from this time. I traveled back in time to come here, and I can do it again. And you can come with me, Jan, we'll make this right, I swear."

She just stares at him, too stunned and overwhelmed to respond.

"Come with me," he repeats for a third time, "and I promise you that you will see your husband alive again."

That gets through to her, and slowly she reaches out to take his hand. He pulls her to her feet and they're both off and running, stumbling clumsily through the scattered disarray of the battlefield. When her steps falter, his grip on her tightens and he very nearly drags her along.

He cannot save them, his brothers, his people; he cannot save this world, cannot save his home. But maybe, maybe, he can save just one person.

It's a limping, staggering run across the tundra to the place where he can sense the rift. Loki's magic is too drained to shapeshift into a form that can fly, and Jan seems too deep in shock to think of it. The battle is still going on behind them, the whine and roar of the Chitauri technology now joined by the stutter and bark of more conventional Midgardian weapons. Loki sees two dark streaks flash across the sky, sees the flash of two bright blue sparks as the mini-portals swallow them up.

They are almost to safety - almost - when the earth beneath them shakes violently, throwing them from their feet. As Loki struggles to gain his footing again, he hears Jan scream.

Glancing behind them, Loki catches a glimpse of what he already knew he would see; the brilliant, twisting, terrifying silhouette of Nithhogg's head rising from the earth, slowly turning to point towards them. He grabs Jan's shoulder and jerks her around to face away from it.

"Don't look at it, Jan," he pants, for mortal minds are not built to withstand such sights. "Just run!"

"What is that thing?" Jan says, and she's scared, so scared. Loki pulls her close, tucks her against his side as he nearly drags them both forward. It's not far. They can still make it.

"Oh, God," Jan whimpers, and Loki can feel her shudder and shake against him. "This - this really is the end, isn't it? The end of the world. We - we failed, and now everybody's going to pay..."

"No they won't, Jan, we can still undo it," Loki promises her fervently. "Next time we'll change things, we'll get it right, you and I. We'll have warning, we'll build defenses - we won't fail."

It will be different, going through the timeline with Jan by his side. It will be different. He won't be so alone, he won't have to hold in every word, terrified to let slip the wrong truth to anyone. Jan will remember as he does, will share in his memories in experience; he'll have someone who understands him, someone who believes him and will never doubt him. Perhaps with Jan vouching for his story, he will not have to conceal the truth of what he has seen -

The ground begins to shake again, and the two of them stagger like drunks across the slippery, unsteady ice. Suddenly the ice opens up before them, revealing a deep blue-green crack that extends miles downwards into darkness. An old scar, the tearing apart of two age-old glaciers that never healed right, a rip in space itself. Loki feels the cold breath of the Void on his face and knows they have found their escape.

"Jan, listen to me," Loki says, and he cups her face with both hands and forces her to meet his eyes. "We have to jump in here. It'll be dark, and you may be frightened, but there's nothing in there that can hurt you. It might be best if you keep your eyes closed, but don't let go of my hand, do you hear me? I will guide us both to safety. Whatever you do, just don't let go."

Jan gasps, and gives a tiny nod. Loki releases her face and takes her elbow, sliding his hand down to squeeze hers. "That's a brave girl," he whispers.

"Let's go," Jan says, her voice trembling but determined. "Let's get this son-of-a-bitch. I-in the past."

The quaking beneath their feet is increasing, and Loki can feel the hot breath of chaos on the back of his neck as Nithhogg nears. He gives Jan's hand one more squeeze, then pulls them both forward into the Void.

Loki falls, and he keeps Jan's hand caught tight in his own as he drags them both through the howling silent currents of nothingness. He no longer fears the Void, for he is its master, and he knows how to command it: he needs only concentrate on his destination, the place and the time, and he will be there. Here there are no secrets, no constrained maneuvers or compromises.

Here he is timeless. He is eternal. He is invincible.

He is God.

Loki sets them down on a beach outside Malibu, a place he knows thanks to its nearness to Tony's summer home. He figures the warmth will be welcome, after the rigors of Antarctica and the Void, and he and Jan will have a chance to rest and regroup.

He turns to see if his decision has pleased his companion, his lips parting for speech.

His gaze lands on nothing.

Slowly, he raises his clenched hand to his side, and forces his fingers to open. His hand is empty. Jan is gone.


~tbc...

Author's note: You may have noticed that the contents of this chapter have changed, that some things that were in this chapter are now in the previous one. I wanted to do some rearranging of the chapters I already had up, in order to make them a more even side and have the chapter breaks fall at more natural points. Sorry for the confusion.