Title: Cover Up the Sun
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Violence.

Loki walked into Charles' office and stopped in his tracks, because someone else was already in there. Charles sat behind his desk, as usual, but in a chair in front of the desk was another person - one of the students, Bobby Drake, Loki remembered from the winter training trip.

Had he misjudged the time? But no, Charles had sent him a message earlier that day, specifically asking him to come at eight-thirty. Perhaps Charles was involved in another session of training or discipline and it had run long. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt," he said, his mouth automatically providing the pleasantry he didn't particularly feel.

"Not at all. You are right on time," Charles said. He waved a hand in front of his desk, and Loki saw to his confusion that a second chair had been pulled up beside Bobby's. "Go ahead and sit down."

Slowly Loki approached the chair, his mind racing over possibilities. Up until now it had always been just the two of them for their sessions; he wasn't sure what to make of this break in routine. Bobby was not in any of his classes, and he had had no notable interaction with the boy since their return from the ski trip. They were passing acquaintances, nothing more.

Once he was seated, Charles started speaking. "Loki, I know you and Bobby have met a few times before," he said. "As you are perhaps aware, his particular mutation has to do with ice and cold - the creation, manipulation and shaping of such forces according to his will."

"That's why they call me the Iceman," Bobby said with a little laugh.

"Now, while his skillset may not completely overlap with yours - insofar as we even know yet what you are capable of in your natural form - I believe you have enough common ground to do some good," Charles continued. "Bobby is also an auxiliary X-Men, meaning that he has used his powers in combat on occasions before and almost certainly will again."

" I see. You wish for me to teach Bobby how to better wield his ice in battle." Loki gritted his teeth against a rising surge of mortification. Was this how it was to be, then? That because of his unfortunate accident of birth, they could make use of him for any ice or snow-related matters? Did they just assume that because he was a Frost Giant, he would know such things?

He forced himself to lift his chin and say, cold and regal: "I am afraid to say that I will not be much help whatsoever. My 'natural form,' as you call it, is still an enigma to me - I have little to no control over its elemental abilities. From what I've seen, Mister Drake's control over ice far surpasses anything I would be able to teach him."

"Yes." Xavier's gaze bore into him, calm and steady. "Which is precisely why I want him to teach you."

Loki sat back slightly, barely managing to keep a smooth poker face over his initial reaction of shocked indignation. I, to be taught by a mortal child? I, a warrior of Asgard, a Prince of the Nine Realms, to be schooled by some human stripling? Did you truly expect me to submit myself to such a humiliation?

Charles shook his head. "It does not make you less to admit that you still have things yet to learn," he said. "The only embarrassment is to stop learning, whether out of misplaced pride or out of fear. By doing so we become smaller. Only by constantly pushing our boundaries can we hope to grow."

Bobby spoke up. "I'm really looking forward to working with you, Mr. Loki," he said. "I don't meet many people who have the same powers as me. I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of fun practicing with ice together, and see what new things we come up with."

The boy was so earnest. Loki looked at him with distaste, not so much for the child himself as for the shining eagerness that spilled off his face in every direction. Bobby tried a bright smile on Loki, and when he saw he had Loki's attention, he held out his hand with the palm up. The skin of his hand frosted over, turning hard-white and shining-blue, and a seed of ice began to grow in his palm.

The shard of ice sprouted upwards, splitting into even, symmetrical trunks and branches. With some surprise, Loki recognized the stylized diagram of Yggdrasil that he had given to the students of his cosmology class - someone must have passed along a copy to Bobby. And he had been interested enough to memorize the illustration, and learn how to create it out of his own medium.

The familiar sight of the Tree eased him past his initial snarl of defensiveness, of instinctive rejection. "I suppose," he allowed, "that a weapon I have not mastered is a weapon in the hands of my enemy. If I'm going to learn from anyone, I suppose you are not the worst teacher I could hope to have."

Bobby's smile widened despite the backhanded compliment, and Loki took a seat across from Bobby in front of the desk. To make beauty out of such a base and graceless thing... he has true talent, Loki mused privately. Mother would approve of such a thing, would want to teach it to me if she could. Even if she cannot see it, I can go on learning, in her name.

From his seat behind the desk, at the edge of the bubble of attention between the two students, Charles Xavier smiled.

Life at the school returned to normal, caught up in the endless hectic seven-day cycle. A thaw came, melting the remains of snow and ice, and the ground lay wet and bare for a few weeks before spring began to poke its first green sprigs out of tree branches and mudflats. A series of cold spring storms drove students and teachers huddling in raincoats across the campus from shelter to shelter; during one Thursday workshop Cecilia was heard to comment wistfully on when Ororo would be back in New York to bring some sunshine.

During the brief periods of fair weather, Loki and Kurt conspired to bring some excitement back to the restless campus. It became something of a game for them, at least taking turns if not necessarily in direct competition, seeing who could create the most or best disruption to the otherwise staid school. Kurt used his superior knowledge of computer and smart-phone technology to develop a clever program that would randomly hack into students' phones and cause them to make loud pig-snorting noises at inappropriate times, such as in dining halls or the lectures of particularly stern professors. Loki in turn managed to unsettle a great many of the faculty by causing several of the solemn marble busts and statues around campus to snore.

At other times, they worked together. Some discreet local inquiries to local business enabled them to procure a set of goats, which then displayed an astonishing (perhaps unnatural) capacity to climb walls and buildings and bleat loudly, which were then set loose on the campus green. There were four of them, and at Kurt's suggestion they were adorned with signs around their neck reading 1, 3, 4, and 5. The teachers searched for hours looking for number two. Loki was still snickering as he took to bed that night.

Although nothing was said aloud, it was almost certainly Kurt who managed to fill the entire men's bathroom outside the auditorium from floor to ceiling with quicksetting green jello. But any ire that was directed his way was quickly distracted when the main dining hall's roof spontaneously caught fire, and burned for an entire day without producing any heat or smoke or destroying its apparent source of fuel. After several hours of water and foam failed to make a dent in the fire, the students gave up and had their dinner normally under the merry conflagration. More than one teacher complained to Charles Xavier at that point, but he pointed out that no damage had actually been done, except perhaps to people's tempers.

The lighthearted pranks helped ease some deep itch within Loki that he hadn't even realized had gone unfulfilled, and despite the frequent torrents of rain, he found himself almost... relaxed at Xavier's school during the spring semester. The crushing burden of malaise and depression he'd felt during the winter was gone, and looking back on it he was almost shocked by his own behavior at the time, the twisting unreason of his thoughts. He had let himself be pulled into a self-defeating spiral of negativity, focusing obsessively on all the worst possibilities. The truth of the matter was that while Thor and Asgard still thought him dead, he was more free than he ever had been before; with a small effort of disguise he could travel anywhere in the Nine Realms that pleased him, even on Midgard. If he did not, if he lingered at Xavier's school as March passed into April and crept towards May, it was not because he was imprisoned here but because he... felt settled there.

And yet, still remained a lingering sense of discontentment. He enjoyed teaching, enjoyed being the center of the students' attention and imparting his knowledge to the uninformed. He enjoyed the little societies he had formed with Hank and Jean and the other teachers, with Kurt and Kitty and the other students. And he enjoyed the little pranks and games that he played when the restless itching crept up on him. Yet still, when he took a step back and looked at his surroundings, he was dissatisfied.

That restlessness frightened him on some level. Could he never truly be happy, anywhere, not even here? Was he truly destined to a life of destruction and mayhem, no matter what Xavier said - would he never be happy with anything else? Or was there something else out there for him, something that he had just never thought of or never tried, always hovering elusively beyond his reach? Did he linger here because he was happy, or because he was afraid to reach for more?

Who was he, Loki, when he was at home in himself? Not Loki of Asgard, not Loki of Jotunheim; but not Loki of Midgard either, not yet. Not a monster, yet not a hero; Xavier insisted there were other paths, other choices that he could make. Until he could clearly see his way to set foot upon those other paths, he was loath to leave what he had here. But he also knew he could not stand still much longer. He could not stand to be still much longer.

As the last week of April wound down, the school campus seemed oddly subdued. Most of the part-time student body had returned home for the weekend, leaving only the full-time residents, and even they were quieter than usual in a frenzy of last-minute studying for exams. Loki himself was faced with the perplexing problem of having to craft his first-ever 'final exam' to give to his students. He'd never taken a written 'exam' himself; while growing up his tutors had always drilled him remorselessly on his studies until he'd exhausted every scrap of his knowledge on the topic. (As the years had gone by and his store of knowledge had grown, the examinations had also grown in length and scope; the last one he'd had with his magic tutor had lasted thirty-six hours before the tutor had admitted defeat and thus graduated him.)

But with nearly fifty students per class, there was no way he was going to have time to do that kind of one-on-one evaluation with every student. He was going to have to create some sort of standardized test for the students to complete on their own, a prospect that irritated him immensely. Every student learned different things in different ways; how could one generic exam possibly hope to adequately plumb the depths of their knowledge?

For his introduction to cosmology class Loki had considered requiring each student to draw and label a map of the Tree and illustrate one major historical event for each Realm. Cecilia had objected on the grounds that not all students were talented at drawing. Loki pointed out that not all students were talented at writing, either, so why should an exam format cater to one type of student over another? Cecilia had not managed to come up with an answer for that one.

He would have asked his other friends for advice, but the faculty was almost as bare as the student body right now. All of the active X-Men had been called out to cover the unrest on the western coast. The only member of the X-Men that had been on campus for more than a few hours at a time was an uncouth wildman who called himself Logan, who had showed up one evening on the back of a motorcycle to visit Anne-Marie, gotten into an altercation with the campus parking enforcement officer, and left in a huff without his motorcycle the same day.

Xavier, too, had left the previous day on some business with Director Fury. Loki had no fond feelings towards the man at all, but he was hardly in a position to begrudge Xavier lending his aid, since without that professional relationship he himself would never have ended up here. Even reserve members such as Jean and Hank had been called out to other duties; from Loki's understanding, they had gone to Washington, D.C. to attend debates on pending anti-mutant legislation and argue against it. This left the canteen rather echoingly bare on Thursday nights, and Loki had taken to spending that evening reading quietly in his apartment instead, telling himself firmly that he was not sulking over it.

He heard it long before he consciously took notice of it, a sort of distant humming that came in through the partly-open window. It grew steadily louder until Loki's attention was pulled away from his book, and he looked up, frowning at the air as he tried to place the noise. Now that he bent his attention on it he could make the vibrating roar of one of Midgard's internal combustion engines, together with a rhythmic beating of air that he did not recognize. It did not sound quite like the X-Jet (whose comings and goings he had gradually gotten used to, over time) but there was the same whistle of rapidly moving air. If not a plane flying overhead, what could it be?

The roaring sound increased rapidly until it was almost deafening; a howl of wind passed directly overhead and off into the distance on the other side of the building. Loki cast his book aside with a scowl and got to his feet, quickly donning a coat and a pair of boots. He didn't know who would be flying so low or so loudly over the campus, but he meant to find out who it was and give them a piece of his mind. Possibly a few broken bones as well.

As soon as he emerged from his apartment, Loki realized that something was wrong. The roar of engines had stopped, but the silence left in their wake was not the usual quiet hush of the campus. It was a tense silence, a waiting silence, filled with tiny faint noises that were just beyond the threshold of understanding even for his exceptional hearing.

He began walking in the direction he'd heard the engines. Without thinking, his stance shifted into a hunter's walk, a near-silent gait that placed his steps precisely and without sound. His apartment lay on the eastern side of the campus; faintly he could hear the sound of engines again, not from the direction he was heading but from the south and the northwest.

Movement caught Loki's eye, and he zeroed in on a cluster of moving figures down a walkway to the left. Three men, wearing black textured clothing that covered their heads, part of their faces. Uniforms? Definitely armor. He didn't recognize any of them and, the closer he got, the more sure he was that they were not mutants. The group made a triangle formation about a smaller figure in the center; they were escorting... no, dragging a young man whom Loki very barely remembered seeing around the cafeteria at mealtimes.

They were not X-Men. They were not even mutants. They had no business being here, doing this. Loki's steps quickened, his hand flexed as he thought of the weapons he could call to his hand in an instant's thought. "Hey!" he called out, his voice carrying sharp and hard across the open courtyard. "Let him go! Now!"

The black-clad figure closest to him released his hold on the boy and spun around, but only so he could use both hands to raise and steady a long-barreled black weapon that Loki didn't recognize. The other three did not release their hold on the young mutant. Loki's hand twitched, thickening the air in front of him into a shield, and his muscles tensed as he prepared to charge -

A hissing noise from behind and to the side was his only warning, and Loki whirled around too late as he felt a sudden jarring impact on his side, below his ribs. There was a sharp pinching sensation in his stomach, and his hand flew to his side to discover a cluster of small, wicked darts standing out from his skin. A few of the darts had caught on his clothing and not penetrated, but nearly half a dozen of them had dug firmly into his flesh.

Loki snarled and turned to meet this new threat, but a sudden sickening wave of sensation overtook him, starting from the site of the wound but spreading outwards like fire catching in a sheet of paper. It was hot and cold and nausea all at once, and Loki stumbled and nearly went to his knees as the world skewed crazily around him. He was freezing and burning all at once, the air around him felt too hot but there was ice running through his veins -

A flash of blue caught the corner of his eye, and Loki turned his head and stared in horrified fascination as the skin of his hands seemed to writhe and undulate, pale pink washing out of them like pink dye and replaced by cerulean blue, broken by jagged lines. His true skin. His jotun skin.

It was not like Loki had not seen this before, he had taken on this form a dozen times or more since he had come to this school, often for no more a trivial reason than to emphasize a point or to blend in with those around him. But that was different, this was completely different, because always before now Loki had chosen to change. Not since the Frost Giant had grabbed his arm in the disastrous battle on Jotunheim had his skin shifted against his will, out of his control, but it did now. Someone had forced this change on him, unwanted, had taken mastery of his very flesh and bones away from him and twisted it to their liking.

And he could not change back, no matter how he tried. Not only could he not force his skin Aesir again, could not force the lines to smooth and disappear, but he could not shift into anything. In a growing panic he tried one form after another, practiced disguises and skins that he had worn hundreds of times over the years, but his flesh remained stubbornly unaltered. Someone, somehow had reached down inside him and robbed him of his most instinctive and natural powers.

They came prepared, the thought crossed his mind as he stared stupidly at his unchanging hands. They knew better than to attack this place without a weapon that could negate the unpredictable powers of their enemies. Now, with this weapon, they face no more than any other mortal children. And, carried in on the tail end of that thought, completely out of place for the gravity of the situation, Does that mean that it's true after all that my powers come from the same source as theirs? That it's true that I, too, am a mutant?

Time seemed to stretch out like cold honey, clear but viscous, but in reality it was probably only a few seconds that he stood there staring at his hands and panicking. That's what it was, as humiliating as it was to admit it, that he froze up like a green warrior on his first battlefield.

But then a dark figure was lunging at him, a short staff swinging towards his face with some kind of crackling electricity at the end of it. Loki's battle-hardened reflexes kicked in and his arm swept upwards, catching the downstroke on the meat of his forearm. A buzzing shock traveled through the cloth of his coat into his arm, but compared to some of the jolts of electricity Loki regularly collected just living in the same house as the God of Thunder, it hardly did more than tickle.

The blow did serve to jolt him out of his horrified preoccupation, snapping him back to the immediate reality of combat. More black-clad figures were starting to move towards him, drawing more of the batons that hummed and crackled with energy, and Loki nearly laughed aloud at their foolish - lethally foolish - mistake.

Three of them rushed him, two from one side and one from the other, and Loki turned to place himself between them. A roundhouse kick towards the lone one sent him flying through the air to crash against the wall of the nearest building, hundred pounds of armor and all. He grabbed the sword-arm of one of the others, momentarily immobilizing him, and almost negligently picked up the third man by the front of his armored jacket, arcing him over his head and face-down onto the concrete pavement with a bone-crunching smash. The second man tried to throw something in his face, some kind of gas or powder that Loki got a lungful before he could avoid it; but unlike the first round of darts, these seemed to have no effect on him, so he ignored it.

"Why won't you go down, freak!" screamed the soldier Loki was immobilizing, fear rendering his hoarse voice, and Loki grinned a death's-head smile. A quick, casual blow to his solar plexus knocked the wind out of him and left him gasping helplessly for air, diaphragm paralyzed. He dropped the man in a heap on the pavement and stepped forward.

After seeing his comrades go down, the mercenary dropped his dart gun and scrabbled at his holster for another short-barreled weapon - this one gleaming and deadly. Loki made a gesture with one hand in the air and suddenly there were three of him, all Jotun-skinned and sinisterly smiling, stepping and shifting positions as they advanced. The man hesitated, the tip of the barrel wavering from one target to another; he let off one desperate shot, but the missile passed through thin air as one of the reflections winked out.

Loki's smile widened, bloodthirsty and exultant, as he charged the remaining distance in a flash. His hand shot out to grip the barrel of the gun and crushed it in his hand, warping and deforming the metal with a screech. "Is that really all that you have?" he asked contemptuously, spitting the words in the man's face before he yanked the grip out of its owner's hand and cast it spinning to the concrete. "What kind of fight were you preparing for? Did you think you would be facing only children, vulnerable and weak?"

He slammed the man violently against the ground and stepped past him, ignoring the wet stain that spread across the pavement from under his former enemy's body. "Did you not expect that any of your foes would be able to stand against you?" Loki shouted, his volume increasing along with his momentum, striding forward and calling a bladed spear to his hand. "That was your last mistake; for you face a true warrior now, and I have within me no more mercy than you brought to this place with you!"

The last man dropped his gun and tried to scramble away, terrified, but Loki pursued him relentlessly. He slammed one boot on the ground on the man's leg, wringing a scream from his lips and trapping him in place like a bug on a pin. Loki drew back his weapon, preparing to send the man's head bouncing across the green, when a familiar voice in his head shouted "Loki, no!"

Loki rocketed to a halt, hand still upraised with the blade in his grasp. He knew that voice, it was intimately familiar to him after all these months on Midgard; and he knew it just as well when it spoke inside his head as without. But how could this be? "What? Xavier? What is this?" he answered back, confusion mixing with the anger that still pulsed through his veins. Charles Xavier was not here, he had traveled to the capital for the next few days; these scum would never have dared invade the school otherwise, not while they still had Xavier's power to contend with.

Charles couldn't have returned from Washington so soon, not with so little warning of the attack. He must be projecting his mind across the miles, then, to place his words in Loki's head. It was a chilling reminder of just how powerful a telepath he really was, of just what he could do when he put his mind to it. "Do not kill him, Loki," Charles' voice echoed urgently between his ears. "Do not kill any of them!"

"Why not?" Loki asked aloud, not bothering to cage his voice within the confines of his head. The mortal in front of him cringed a little further, at this apparent proof that Loki truly was crazy, talking to the air in front of him. "They attacked your school! They would harm your students! They knew what might become of them when they picked up a gun and stepped on a battlefield. They invited this fate down on their heads!"

"Even if they did, I cannot let you kill them," Charles replied, his voice heavy with sorrow and regret. "No matter how justified your actions, all the rest of the country would see is mutant supporters murdering American soldiers in cold blood. It would destroy everything we have tried to build here, it would kill the future we dream of, the future of peace. It would mean war between mutants and humans."

But a peaceful world between mutants and humans was not his dream; he already knew it for a fantasy, even if Charles did not. "You are already at war!" Loki shouted. "Why don't you realize it? They struck first! It has already come to pass, so what more do you fear?"

"It's not only the school I fear for, Loki. It's you!" Charles said urgently, and Loki froze in place as the deep feelings of concern washed over him. "You have come so far, you have nearly freed yourself from the trap of heroes and monsters. You made so much progress, and now you stand at the precipice where it could so easily all come undone.

"If you let them force you to kill now, they will never forgive you, and you will forever be a fugitive and a villain in the eyes of Earth," Charles continued, and there was fear in his 'voice,' but not fear of Loki - fear for Loki. It had been so many, many years since anyone had been afraid for Loki. "You will never be free again. I can't let them do that to you. I will not."

Loki snarled, fighting against the clinging threads of sentiment that threatened to wrap around him, hindering his limbs and weighing him down. "You expect me to just let them go?!" he demanded incredulously.

"Do what you must to stop them, Loki. But no killing," Charles importuned him. His voice was already fading, echoing in Loki's mind. "I believe that you can do this. I'm on my way, and I've already contacted help, but they'll never make it in time. You're the only one who's close enough to make a difference. Please, Loki. This is my boon, the one you promised to me. Protect my students, but take no lives!"

And then the voice, the phantasm, the presence of Charles Xavier was gone.

Loki threw his head back and screamed his rage, his frustrated bitterness to the sky. Hypocrites, all of them, righteous stinking hypocrites. It did not make one a monster, to kill one's enemies! They killed, all of them, Thor and Sif and Fandral and Iron Man and Captain America and all the rest, they killed. They killed aliens, they killed men, they killed their own kind without a moment's hesitation when the cause was right. What cause could be more just than this, than to raise one's sword in defense of children, against brigands who sought to abduct and despoil them? Why was he rebuked, where others were glorified? Why was only he made monster by it?

He brought his arm down and around, the blade whistling as it arced through the air towards the cringing mortal beneath him; at the last moment he changed the angle of the wrist so that he struck with the flat instead, slamming the long flat edge of the polearm across the man's upper thighs and breaking the long bones with a shattering crunch.

Not because the man deserved mercy - he didn't. Not because Loki was particularly inclined to give it - he wasn't. But Charles Xavier had asked this of him, and Loki would try with all his heart not to disappoint him.

Loki focused his will into the long bladed polearm, causing the metal to shift and flow and reform as a sturdy weighted staff instead of a pointed edge. It seemed he still had command of his magic, then; whatever vile venom they had used on him affected only his natural shapeshifting, not his innate strength or speed nor all the magic or martial training he had learned throughout his life. Good. That would make what was to come less somewhat easier.

To slay one's enemies was a feat worthy of renown - but to defeat one's enemies without killing them was much, much harder, if less glorious. It was made harder only because there were so many ways to kill someone without entirely meaning to: a wound that gushed too freely and bled them dry, a blow to the chest or gut that caused fatal bleeding within, a broken nose that drove fragments of bone up into the brain. Three times as hard with these mortals, as fragile as they were: Loki didn't even know the first pack of mortals he'd taken down would survive their wounds, although he had not even been trying for a killing blow then. This was going to be tricky.

Fortunately, he was known for his tricks.

He turned to the student he'd freed, a sandy-curled teenage boy who was ash-pale and shaking with reaction. Whether it was reaction to the kidnapping he'd experienced or the violence he'd witnessed Loki didn't know, but there was no time now to coddle his inexperienced youth. "You, boy," he said, not knowing the student's name and not bothering now to ask. "Which way did they come from - did you see? Which way were they going? Where is the vessel they used to come here?"

The student pointed a trembling hand off down the walkway to their left; it was vaguely in the direction that Loki remembered hearing the engines from, so it would have to do. Loki frowned, his mind racing. He could not take the boy into battle with him, not without whatever powers he might normally have had to protect him; nor could he just leave him wandering out on the sidewalk. The dormitories were not safe right now, all dwelling places would be like honey to black flies of the invaders seeking prizes. The auditorium, cafeteria and other gathering places were likewise risky, until enough defenders could gather to secure them.

"Go towards the dining hall, but go around the back - avoid the front doors. There's a storage shed near the corner that is chained shut, but the door slides open the other way," Loki instructed him rapidly. "Hide in there and watch the entrance until you see other students and teachers come there, and then join them in defending the hall."

"But... the soldiers are still out there," the boy cried, catching at Loki's sleeve. "What if they see me? I tried to turn invisible, but I can't, I just can't!"

Loki suppressed a frustrated growl; there was no time now for him to coddle one mortal child's insecurities. "I will give them something else to look at," he told the boy firmly, pulling his hand loose from Loki's sleeve and giving it a firm squeeze before dropping it. "Trust me."

And, incredibly, the boy did.

The quiet campus had turned into a battlefield, ringing with a cacophony of chaos. In every direction Loki could hear the high-pitched, distressed cries of his students, the barked commands of strange voices, and the thrum and whine of their machines. Even without the students' direction of the invaders' landing site, Loki's ears guided him right to it.

As he rounded the back of a building he saw it, perched on the grey asphalt surface of the courtyard like a black fly alight in a glass of wine. The flying vessel that the brigands had ridden in their attack on the school was an ugly thing: squat, bulging black metal, with none of the aquiline elegance and grace of Asgard's winged longboats. Above it, three long narrow blades beat the air in a steady staccato rhythm.

Black-clad men swarmed about the copter, like ants around a disturbed hill. Some of them were half-carrying, half-dragging injured comrades, to load aboard the vessel for transport; Loki was grimly pleased to see that not all of the injuries were his own handiwork. The other students were fighting back, then. Loki could do many things, but not even he could be everywhere on the campus at once.

Less pleasing were the two half-grown teenagers that were being dragged towards the black helicopter, struggling and scuffing against the ground. Loki hardly recognized Alison, Kitty's friend, without the subtle halo of light that normally surrounded her. Also being forced towards the helicopter was an older boy, long blond hair now streaming with blood from a cut on his scalp; Alison's boyfriend, Loki guessed. Likely they had been enjoying a pleasant spring day together among the green before being surprised by the attack.

One of the black-clad humans spotted him, and alerted the others with an urgent shout. In a moment a dozen metal barrels were pointed in his direction, and Loki let his mouth curve in a smile as he walked forward steadily, unhurriedly, even spreading his arms slightly to the side to make a wider target of himself. The bark and hiss of the muzzles filled the air, dozens of tiny metal darts and hard steel missiles flying towards him before being deflected by his shields.

Really, it never ceased to boggle Loki's mind how often humans could stubbornly keep firing their weapons even after it had become obvious that they were doing no good at all. Did they expect the results to magically change if they just kept shooting long enough?

He kept up his slow advance until the first guns began to click empty. In that moment, when the men began to panic but before they could decide on another course of action, he charged. They scattered in all directions, but not fast enough; he reached out and grabbed two of them, one by the neck and the other by the arm, and hurled the first across the empty lot to impact against the side of the building. The other, he took a moment to carefully dislocate the man's shoulder, then tossed him screaming to the ground and lunged for another.

It would have been all too easy to slaughter them, to slice their soft necks with a blade or puncture their chests to let out the air or incinerate them with a bolt of magic, but Loki could not do that. Instead he mostly concentrated on breaking bones, particularly arms or legs; shattering the ribs and collars would probably also keep them out of trouble, but there was always the risk of a splinter of bone cutting into the major arteries. The long bones of the upper arm or thigh were much safer, and they would pose little enough threat when they could neither walk nor wield a gun.

While Loki was diverted by this exercise, the steady thrum of the chopper's engines flared to a roar. The eddies of wind swirling about the courtyard increased to a hurricane, and Alison screamed "Arthur!" as the metal machine began to slowly separate from the ground. Loki whirled and leapt to catch hold of the side of the chopper, his weight yanking the vessel to the side and dragging it back down towards earth. But not for long; even unbalanced and weighted as it was, the chopper was slowly beginning to rise.

Loki braced one foot on the metal skid and grabbed hold of the edge of the doorway, pulling a little to test the give of the metal. Then in one quick movement he tore the metal door off its hinges and flung it to the ground, rocking the chopper and causing shouts of consternation from the men inside, forced to cling to straps and handrails so as not to fall out.

Now with a fair idea of the strength of the metal, Loki set about slowly tearing the vessel apart. The metal skin gave way easily enough, sending roaring drafts through the exposed interior of the chopper. The sturdy struts that made up the skeleton of the vehicle were made of tougher stuff, but a few blasts of balefire from his staff softened and deformed them until they too gave way.

After the first burst of hellish green fire, none of the soldiers inside the chopper made any attempts to approach. A few of them (the smarter few, Loki would give them that) even dived out the open doorway on the far side of the copter to the dubious safety of the ground below. The others, more stubborn, took a few shots at Loki from short, hand-held firearms whose bark was lost in the roar of the engines. The bullets bounced off Loki's shields, proving more a hazard to the ones who had fired them as they ricocheted off the interior of the small cabin. Loki ignored the shouts of rage and consternation that produced, and concentrated on steadily dismantling the copter.

He had the flying machine half-disassembled before he finally exposed the engines and pistons that powered the rotors. A few moments' study let Loki trace the flow of circuitry and hydraulics that made the machine fly, and from that he could gauge with fair certainty which ones were essential to its flight. He tore off a sagging piece of framework from above his head, and slammed it point-first into the howling motor.

With a near-deafening squeal of tortured metal burning slag, the helicopter lurched, jagged, and then spun out of control on the asphalt floor below. It shuddered a few more times before the engines gave out and the whole thing ground to a halt, a jagged pile of smoking wreckage.

As Loki turned away from the wreck of the helicopter and the field of downed enemies, he felt a warning tingle of familiar magic. A moment later, there was a soft bamf as Kurt appeared out of the air beside him; so forewarned, Loki did not strike out at him. His heart lifted to know that Kurt, at least, seemed to have escaped the power-suppressing poison their enemies were spreading.

"Loki!" Kurt blurted out. He was in a rumpled set of what appeared to be powder-blue pajamas, and his hair was wet, blue-black curls plastered down against his skull. He looked wild and hunted, the whites showing around the rims of his eyes as he darted his glance around the courtyard. "Thank God I have found you!"

"Are you injured?" Loki demanded. Kurt shook his head.

"No, I... I saw figures moving outside my window and then the glass broke, so I teleported away. I thought I should get help, but I could not just leave everyone else behind. I have been searching for a safe place, looking for help... they are everywhere!" Kurt looked out over the wreckage of the battlefield, expression awed and disbelieving, but the sight of it seemed to calm him somewhat. "Harry told me he saw you, that you had gone to intercept the helicopter... I did not quite expect this."

"It is good that you are here," Loki told him, and it was true for more than just practical reasons; even if his preferred style of combat was a solo one, it relaxed his heart to know that he was not alone. "We must mount a counterattack."

"We? You and I alone?" Kurt looked torn between wild hope and daunted fearfulness.

"There will be others," Loki said confidently. "But we must rally them. That is where you come in. I will do what I can, but I cannot defeat this invasion myself. You must be my eyes."

"What do you want me to do?" Kurt asked.

"Teleport everywhere on the campus - into all your hidden places - and bring me news. How many of them there are, where they are, what weaponry they carry," Loki ordered him. "Bring me news of the other students, teachers, and anyone else left on the campus. And whatever you do, do not engage! If they get you with the same poison as the others, you will change very quickly from being combatant to hostage." He reached out and clasped Kurt on the shoulder, looking him straight in the eye. "And I cannot afford to lose you, my eyes and ears, so stay out of sight."

Kurt took a deep breath. "Yes, Herr Lehrer," he said, and vanished with a crack.

~tbc...

Author's notes:

I'm scrambling the timeframes around again, and am not too sorry about it; this chapter combines the raid on the school from X-Men 2 (I think?) with the mutant-suppressing serum from X-Men 3.

As for why the mutant-suppressing serum worked on Loki: the short version is that in this 'verse, the X-Gene complex that gives mutants their special abilities is an unstable, incomplete version of the gene complexes that Aesir and Jotnar contain in their full form. In Loki's case, his intrinsic shapeshifting ability was similar enough to mutant powers that the serum suppressed it, but the rest of his latent and learned abilities - Aesir level strength and toughness, magic, and combat training - were left intact.