In which the author talks out of her ass about how the Tesseract actually works.
For a while, Loki almost gives in to despair.
In the end, though, he rouses himself from the blind hopelessness that had clouded his thoughts, picks himself up and dusts himself off. He is too restless to do anything else. Lying in a stupor and waiting listlessly for the end of the universe, he finds, is boring.
Well.
So what? So what if the Avengers die? So what if any of them die? He can always bring them back again. Death is no obstacle, not when Loki has the power to reset time. He has but to step into the void, and they'll all be alive again.
He will succeed. This time he will succeed. And if he fails, what of it? He can reset the board and try again. He can try as many times as he needs to get it right; he has infinite chances.
There is no possible way that he can fail. None.
None at all.
The first thing he does when he returns to Earth is to search for her. He is a little anxious that her hand slipped from his grasp without his noticing. Although he knows - intellectually - that the timeline has reset exactly the way it was before he changed it, that she has simply returned to her place like any other object he picked up and moved around, still - he wants to be sure.
Except he can't find her.
The Avengers mansion - the Van Dyne mansion - is occupied by strangers. There's no sign of Jan there, no sign she ever lived there, no sign of her at the other Van Dyne residence in New York. He searches for her in an ever-widening spiral, worry rising to something like desperation - at all her favorite restaurants, her clubs, her favorite stores. Cloaked from human view he searches the crowds, his eyes open for the flash of her red-brown hair, his ear tilted for the sound of her laughter. But there is none.
He goes back to the university where she and Hank first met, and there, at least, he does find a face he knows: Hank Pym, a graduate student in the particle physics department. He's working his way through his doctorate, writing purely theoretical papers that few people will ever read, paying his expenses on the meager wage earned by teaching entomology classes on the side. He's currently single.
Loki breaks off the search before he can track it back to Jan's family home, telling himself that he has not the time to waste in pointless pursuits such as these. The fate of the world hangs in the balance; why waste time fretting over the fate of one mortal girl?
He needs this not - this, this sentiment, this sensation as of hooks dragging their way along under his skin. What are the mortal 'heroes' to him but a distraction and a liability? No longer will Loki burden himself with their care. He has learned his lesson; he should have learned it long ago. They are useless, pitiful, fragile things; they have nothing to offer him, and they die far too easily.
Nor will he commit the folly of appealing to the obstinate, uncaring king of Asgard. He knows full well that they will not act, that he need not humiliate himself by asking (again) only to be left standing, hands and face upturned for a beneficence that never comes. He doesn't need them, he never did. Midgard cannot aid him, and Asgard will not aid him; he is Loki, and to be Loki is to be alone.
No matter; he understands his mistake now. It was folly to wait for the Chitauri to strike first, to allow them to arrange the battlefield to the strengths of their own armies and the disarray of all others. If Loki wishes defeat him, he must take control: he will bring the fight to the Chitauri's own territory. He who strikes first is victorious; he learned that lesson at the All-Father's knee.
But first he must get there, and the way is closed to him. He can only use the Void to travel to places he has been before, and he has seen the Chitauri's homeworld only in hazy glimpses through the portal. And he must consider how to level the devastation he intends. The Casket of Winters (though returned to its full power as he passed through the Void) will not be enough for such a strike, not even if he opens it to its full potential without concern for the fragile mortal bodies around him. No, he needs something more.
He needs transportation, and he needs power. Fortunately, he knows where to get both in one.
The Tesseract.
The prospect of stealing it from the humans lends him no remorse whatsoever. It is blatantly obvious by this point that Fury and his minions are utterly incapable of either using it properly nor keeping it safe. They are not fit guardians for such a relic of power. Such an artifact belongs in the hands of the gods. But SHIELD has hidden the Tesseract away, and he has never been able to find it in all his years of searching. He had been constrained, of course, in maintaining his facade of heroism; that had blocked him from the more direct methods of gathering information. But he is constrained no more.
He still does not know where the Tesseract is. But he knows who will know.
He uses the Void to reset time again, then steps out into the deserts of New Mexico at the Bifrost site a mere five minutes after his fall. He swiftly cloaks his presence from eyes both magical and mortal; he does not wish for the attentions of either.
His brother's conjured storm is just now dying down, the unnaturally thick black clouds slowly peeling back from blue sky. A group of mortals is still clustered about the Bifrost site; the interminable Agent Coulson, a gaggle of black-suited footsoldiers, and a pair of mortal women, their long dark hair whipped by the wind.
He recognizes Jane Foster, Thor's mortal, from the glimpses he'd once had of her from the Bifrost. In another time he might have found it in him to be jealous of her, but now such concerns seem small and far away.
The mortal he seeks is not standing with the others, so Loki turns away to head back to the tiny mortal village to seek him. As he turns away he hears soft words coming from behind him: "He's not coming back," Jane says, her voice quiet and desolate. "Is he."
Loki pauses for a moment, then he scoffs to himself and turns away. Now you see what your precious golden prince's word is worth, Jane Foster, he thinks viciously. Welcome to my world.
He follows the trail of destruction - half Thor's, half the Destroyer's - back into town, and begins to cast about for his quarry. At last he finds him: Erik Selvig, the mortal sorcerer who aided Foster in her craft. He's being loaded onto a stretcher by a pair of solicitous young men in white uniforms, a white mask fitted over his face, although Loki cannot see or sense anything wrong with him: shock, perhaps. The man is not young.
The ambulance doors slam, and Loki trades his invisibility for a set of feathered wings, flying up in the form of a crow to perch at the edge of the van. No point in exhausting himself in flight, after all, when he can simply hitch a ride.
Loki's strategy is simple. In every loop so far, Loki has been unable to find where SHIELD had the Tesseract hidden. Yet Selvig has each time been murdered while working for SHIELD on the Tesseract project, which means that sometime between now and then, SHIELD must have recruited him to puzzle over their mystery. All Loki needs to do is follow him, and Selvig will lead him right to the Tesseract.
It is not the swiftest or most streamlined of plans. But if there is one thing Loki has in abundance, it is time.
The healers keep Selvig overnight in the hospital, then release him; they diagnose him with no more than a nasty shock. He retires to a bland room in a local inn with stern admonitions to rest. Loki, still in the form of a bird, perches like a stone above the door lintel, waiting. So long as he makes no menacing move towards the mortals, Odin should not interfere; in this timeline Odin does not even know he lives. (Or care, or care.)
Days pass quietly; Selvig continues to mind his own business, only occasionally going out for food, otherwise reading or watching television. Jane Foster disappears in a flurry of black SHIELD helicopters to continue her research under their eye. It is her ambition to somehow recreate the Bifrost, or another world-gate like it; ambitious, for a mortal, but Loki knows by now not to underestimate mortal magic. She might even succeed some day, who knows - but since she doesn't succeed before the Chitauri invasion comes, it is of no use to Loki.
The scorching days and cold nights offer Loki plenty of time to brood, more than he would like. He devises a ward to place on Selvig that will link the mortal to him; partly the protective ward he used with Tony and the other Avengers, partly a bindrune similar to the one that Odin placed on him to bind his magic. The spell is invisible, intangible, but it creates a channel between them: he can sense the mortal's thoughts no matter how much space separates them, and even gives him a degree of influence.
He is careful, in doing so, not to damage the human's mind; he needs the connections Selvig will provide, but Thor has ever been possessive about his toys, and he would take it ill to find Loki in close proximity to one of 'his' mortal pets. He likely would assume Loki was acting purely to spite him, ignoring all the other priceless opportunities that Selvig offers on his own merits. No doubt Thor, as always, would assume everything to be about him, him, him.
With the binding in place Loki is more free to move about, although he remains veiled and hidden from sight. Too many times, in the past, he has found himself stymied by a lack of knowledge of where things are on Earth, or how things work. He flies from point to point and watches, and listens, and explores with his magic, and there is much he learns.
The break he is seeking comes two months after what would have been his fall from the Bifrost, two months after his third return to Earth. Selvig has been packing his belongings, having scheduled a return flight to Iceland the following morning. As the sun creeps down in the desert sky, a long black chariot snakes its way through the rebuilt town and stops in front of the inn where Selvig has been staying. Loki doesn't know if SHIELD had planned to make a move on Selvig all this time, or were waiting for him to reach out to them; either way, they wait no longer.
Selvig accepts their proffered invitation with a mix of curiosity and reluctance, and the caravan leads him to the nearby small airport, where a small jet plane waits for them to board. There is no way that Loki can fly as fast as the plane and no room onboard for him to hide, so he slips into his reflection and slides into the glass-and-and-metal side of the airplane.
It's well after dark when the jet lands, on an anonymous airfield somewhere in the mountains. Selvig is escorted by his guard off the plane and through a large hangar into an underground tunnel delving deep back into the rock. Nervousness is definitely outweighing curiosity, by this time; but there is no going back now, so he marches sturdily forwards. Loki glides along in his reflection, silent.
A dark shape steps out of the corridor ahead. It is Fury, hands clasped behind his back and feet apart, a looming bulky figure in his dark leather clothes. From a nearby darkened window out of Fury's line of sight, Loki can't help but scoff at the intimidating picture he presents. He knows well by now that Fury is not nearly so capable as he tries to pretend, else he would not have lost the Tesseract to the Chitauri three times running.
"Dr. Selvig," Fury calls out. Selvig turns with a start.
"So you're the man behind all this!" Selvig says with forced cheerfulness, trying to cover over his anxiety. "It's quite a labyrinth. For a while I thought you were taking me down here to kill me, hahaha!"
It is a poor joke and Fury does not smile at it, instead getting right down to business. "I've been hearing about the New Mexico situation. Your work has impressed a lot of people who are much smarter than I am."
Not a terribly difficult bar to pass, Loki thinks spitefully.
"I had a lot to work with," Selvig says nervously. "The Foster theory - a gateway to another dimension... It's unprecedented."
It's not; and from the look on Fury's face, he knows it too. Selvig reads his face, pauses uncertainly. "Isn't it?"
"Legend tells us one thing; history another," Fury says, turning and striding back towards a small table set up behind him, a metal case small enough to fit in a man's two hands. Yet large enough to encompass worlds. "But every now and then, we find something that belongs to both."
He unlatches the case, swings it open. Blue light blazes forth from within, bathing the barren concrete corridor walls in the radiance of galaxies. Miniature, fractal, endless.
The Tesseract.
Loki is drawn forward, but Selvig hangs back, and Loki can sense the fear in the mortal's mind. "What is it?" he asks quietly.
"Power, Doctor," Fury says. "If we can figure out how to tap it... maybe unlimited power."
The secrets of the universe at his fingertips, a boundless fount of knowledge far beyond mortal or even Asgardian ken - unbounded space rolling away beneath his feet, just a small step to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. Used properly, within a few years this entire realm could rival the glory of Asgard, and yet all the little mortal can think to do with it is make weapons. What a forsaken waste this little planet is.
Selvig is hesitating. I'm too old for this, Loki can feel the mortal thinking. I'm just an ordinary man, I can't deal with this kind of mess: monsters and gods and nothing I was ever trained for. I don't know if I'll survive another battle like the last one.
This timidity won't do, it won't do at all. It is all Loki can do to remain hidden, not to surge forward and seize the Tesseract at once, knock the mortals aside and flee with it. But that is sure to draw the ire of Asgard; he must wait for an unguarded moment. And until then, he must keep Selvig in close proximity to the Tesseract - there's no time now to recreate his bond with another mortal.
Loki steps closer in the mirror; none but Selvig can see or hear him. He gives the mortal a mental push. "Well, I guess that's worth a look," Loki purrs, eyes on the Tesseract.
That's enough to tip Selvig over into decision; he gives Fury a broad smile, folding his face into ancient wrinkles. "Well, I guess that's worth a look!" he says, and Fury smiles.
With his objective so close at hand, it's easier for Loki to be patient. He takes the time to follow Fury and Selvig back to their concealed headquarters, to learn the layout of the underground labs and the surrounding area. One never knows when such knowledge might come in handy. He studies the security surrounding the Tesseract, the pattern of guards and sentries and the capabilities of their armaments.
And one week later when the Tesseract is being transported by convoy from one location to the next Loki emerges from the shadows and launches his attack, seizing the metal case with the Tesseract and killing all the guards.
He feels a faint twinge of guilt about those deaths, and its very mildness almost surprises him - nothing like the physical sickness he felt the first time, when he was forced to SHIELD agents in order to escape their custody and flee Nithhogg's devastation. But these deaths are necessary; he cannot leave anyone behind as a witness, to report his face to those who might get in his way. And in the end, what are a handful of mortal lives compared to all of the Nine Realms? If anything, he is sparing them the horror of Nithhogg's coming.
With the Tesseract cupped safely in his hands, held behind a protective force-field, Loki seeks out a hidden refuge and begins to study his new prize. He cannot learn or exercise all the powers of the Tesseract, of course - an army of Asgardian mages and scholars would need millennia to even approach such an understanding - but he can learn a great deal more of it than the mortals could ever hope to.
Almost the first thing any sorcerer learns in his study of the mysteries of the universe is that matter and energy are one. What is perceived as 'solid mass' is only energy bound up so tightly together that it coalesces from potential into truth. Indeed, a sufficiently powerful mage can with enough effort learn to shave off atoms here and there, using the freed energy to power their greater spells. The practice is frowned upon, though; those who live forever have more time in which to contemplate the consequences of carelessly destroying the gifts that the universe gave to them. There is only so much matter in the universe after all, and making more is prohibitively difficult; what if they run out? Such conversions tend to be messy besides, with unintended consequences and poisoned fate spilling over onto the caster and all those around him.
The Tesseract, however, seems to have no such limitations - the power it generates is truly unbounded. The glittering, hard-edged cube that Loki can see is but one facet of the Tesseract; its true shape is a vastly complex geode that extends crystal structures in five dimensions. From their flattened, occluded three-dimensional perspective, one facet of the Tesseract appears as a cube, and one edge appears as a corridor. Turn the Tesseract and the edges shift too, bridging the way between one point in space and another.
Asgardian sages say that the universe is but a delicate film of space and time, the skin of a bubble crumpled and bent in dimensions beyond our limited perceptions. And it is not the only such; they theorize that there are countless other universes stacked side by side, each one but a hair's-breadth away in some impossible direction. The Tesseract seems proof that this is so, because it exists simultaneously in their plane and yet in another, connecting their realm of matter-and-energy to a plane of unbounded energy which never collapsed into mass. It is not a generator but a siphon, allowing them to draw on that unfettered elemental power without end.
The power is heady, intoxicating; he is dizzy with the world of possibilities open to him. For a while he is almost tempted to take the power of the Cube and turn it against Nithhogg himself - surely destroying such an abomination could only be a boon to the universe?
The more he studies the Tesseract's structure, however, the more the idea makes him uneasy, and in the end he concludes that he had better not. The Tesseract is a gateway, a siphon. The Unmaker, according to the best understanding of the scholars of Asgard, is one too - but in the opposite direction.
Trapped beyond the event horizon, Nithhogg feeds upon the blood of dead stars; within his fearsome jaws, the bonds of matter are rent apart, and the very atoms are immolated in a burst of energy. But only a tiny fraction of the energy is actually expressed, the source of the fearsome light that pulses along Nithhogg's body as he feeds. The rest is funneled out of their plane entirely, very likely into the same universe of unbound energy that the Tesseract itself draws from.
Attempting to set the two against each other could set up a feedback loop that could rip the very fabric of reality - tear the entire universe apart, let alone the Nine Realms. No, it is not worth the risk, not even for the prospect of eternal freedom from the threat of the Destroyer. He is far too primal a force of nature; it would be hubris even to try.
Perhaps the most prudent course of action, then, is to do... nothing? Would this be enough? He has the Tesseract; he can protect it far better than the mortals ever could. Cloaked and hidden inside his pocket dimension, the Chitauri will never be able to sense it, let alone steal it. And without the Tesseract to open the door between this planet and theirs, the Chitauri cannot bring their army across. The Realms will be safe.
Won't they?
No. No, it is not enough only to close off one door and think themselves safe; of all people in the Nine Realms, Loki Skywalker above all others knows that there is always another door. There is always another door and if you cannot find one, you can make one. No one knows for certain why the Mad Titan seeks the destruction of the Nine Realms, but it would be folly itself to assume that he would simply abandon his ambitions that easily.
If Loki wishes to make the Nine Realms safe forever, there is only one way: Thanos must end.
He will need a vessel for the Tesseract; as unimaginably powerful as it can be, the Tesseract is merely a font of power, not a weapon. No matter how bright the flame, one cannot merely hope to wave it at the monsters to drive them away: it must be channeled, shaped, and contained. All the power in the universe is no use to him without some way to direct it, and despite his myriad talents, Loki is no craftsman, no forgesmith.
Fortunately, he already has a container that will be more than suitable. After several days of careful study of the two parts, Loki opens the Casket of Ancient Winters - without unleashing the Fimbulwinter upon Midgard, thank you - and places the Tesseract inside. It slots into the Casket with a click that is so satisfyingly right that Loki almost finds it suspicious. Was the Casket built for the Tesseract, or the Tesseract for the Casket? Or - even more disturbing yet - does the Tesseract change to fit the Casket?
Whatever the reason, the combination of the two creates a terrifyingly potent weapon. With the power of the Tesseract behind it the Casket's powers no longer obey their old limits; he spends a few days practicing with it in the cold wastes of Midgard before he is satisfied with his control over it.
All that remains is to travel to the Chitauri's homeworld, and that will be no obstacle at all. He could not travel there by way of the Void, as it a place he has never yet seen; but he does not need to. The Tesseract has already laid down a path between the folds of space, and he needs only to step onto it. Attuned with the Tesseract, he can feel it shifting under his skin - a pathway, a door. A bridge across an unfathomable gap, and on the other side... darkness. It calls to him, the blue energy humming and whispering seductively in his veins, like a man standing at the edge of a precipice and hearing the sweet whisper: jump.
But there is one more thing he must do before that.
Invisible and silent he goes to New York City, wending his way through the crowded streets and between dirty buildings to the gleaming glass-and-chrome towers at their center. It is night and Stark Tower is lit up like a beacon, drawing him inexorably forward. How strange it is. He lived in Asgard for hundreds of years. He's lived on Earth in many different places - Avengers Mansion, his studio apartment, the cells at SHIELD. And yet this tower, this arrogant monument to heaven is still what he thinks of when someone says 'home.' Here, Stark Tower, is where it all began for him. And where it all began to end.
Too many times in the past timelines Loki has seen Tony torn away from him, one way or another. Killed before his eyes, killed far out of his sight, turning his back with a bitter sneer upon his lips - Loki must see him once more, to know that he is alive alive alive and to remind himself of what he fights for. He takes flight and skims up the surface of the building, counting the floors as he goes; it is night, so anyone who even looks out of the window will see only a dim silhouette of a man.
He finds Tony Stark in his workshop on the twenty-fifth floor, the room lit by the glow of a dozen workbench lamps. Tony is dressed in a pair of grey sweatpants and a tight black t-shirt; his hair is unkempt and stiff with dried sweat, and black grease stains his hands, smears of it on his forehead or on the glass clutched in his hand. It is well past midnight, but Tony shows no sign of rest; Loki recognizes all the signs of a sleepless night for him. He knows them well.
Even unwashed and unslept he is magnificent, pacing around and around the workroom like a caged tiger, brimming over with a frustrated and restless energy of the mind that he cannot find an outlet for. He is handsome, brilliant and glorious... and Loki, watching him from the window, cannot remember what it was like to be in love with him.
He knows that he was deliriously in love with Tony Stark, he knows that he was once breathtakingly happy here - but it's dim and remote, as though seen through thick tinted glass. There have been too many years, too much pain and too much acrimony between him and those emotions; he can't remember how they felt. He can even put words to the qualities he admired about Tony, can name each and every one of his moods, the way he moves, the way he kissed... but he can't associate them with any emotions any more.
How strange.
It's deeply troubling, but Loki isn't quite sure what to do about it. He had deliberately loosed himself from the chains of sentimentality; why miss them now? Would he rather be passionately in love with someone who doesn't even know him?
A year ago, that prospect might have filled Loki with despair - now, it hardly troubles him. Even the pain he'd felt when Tony denounced him, denied him - even the horrible crush of betrayal and despair seems to have gone, leaving only a faint ache in its place. Everything, good and bad alike, seems trapped under a thick sheet of silencing glass.
When he comes back, Loki decides, he will have Tony again. He will have Tony and then he will remember what it felt like to be in love, to be happy. It will be his reward to himself, his prize for victory in the battle he must now fight. Tony might not like it, but he will accept it. He won't have a choice.
By then, Loki thinks, he will have earned it.
And with this promise to himself made, Loki steps out of the mirrorpane onto the roof of Stark Tower. It's a beautiful view, the night spreading out below him lit with a thousand stars. Loki raises the Casket and the Tesseract together and closes his eyes so he won't have to see the blue spread over his skin.
But it doesn't stop at his skin, not this time. The whisper of the Tesseract's power washes out from around him in a blow of cold, frost tracing in endless Mandelbrot fractals over the walls and floor and glass planes of the Tower doors.
The portal roars to life before him, a seething chaotic gap in space braced open by an archway of ice. It won't last long, Loki knows; but then, it doesn't need to. Through the portal he sees jagged dark stone, black sky, an endless field of seething stars. He should feel afraid, but instead he feels only a calm serenity. Perhaps this is a warrior's courage; perhaps this is what his brother feels when he goes into battle. It seems he can be a warrior, after all, and it only took the end of the world to arrange it.
Somewhere in the building below him, an alarm is going off; Loki ignores it as he steps into the portal.
~tbc...
Author's Notes: Sorry for the slightly shorter chapter than usual, but because of the way the action is laid out in Loop 4, this was the best place to put a chapter break. Apologies.
The dialogue for Selvig and Fury's scene is taken directly from the post-credits stinger scene from Thor I.