The list of things I do not own is infinite.

Loki breathed in the scent of smoke and gore with relish. This was where he belonged. He flexed the fingers buried inside the Mad Titan's chest, digging his nails into the soft tissues swaddling his mortal enemy's most vital organ. He felt the other Loki's subtle tendrils of magic unfurling out of his hand to seek out the true center of the titan's power.

"Ow," Thanos said offhandedly, then smiled. "What do you think you're doing, little Frost Giant? Are you so eager to return to me, to place yourself under my knife again for my eternal amusement, that you would willingly walk into my hand?"

Loki didn't answer right away. After all, the Prince needed time to do this right, without Thanos realizing his aims too soon. Loki studied his enemy. Though a giant in any sense of the word, the Mad Titan didn't seem as large as the fiend that had haunted his memories and nightmares, despite his confident stance. Perhaps it had something to do with the sooty blemishes on his armor, or the ugly hole in a shoulder plate, or the fact that the titan's skull-hugging helmet was now missing, leaving his ugly, bald, and peeling purple scalp bare to the wind. Perhaps it had something to do with the feeling of vulnerable organs quivering at Loki's fingertips. Loki rolled his free hand deftly across the sharp edges of his enemy's armor and along the nearer part of the heavy executioner's blade loosely held to their side. Utterly at ease, he deliberately cut his fingers open on the sword, sawing deep, then lifted his hand and allowed the blood to drip down between them, probably onto Thor's face. He smirked inwardly. He had promised not to kill Thor, but that didn't mean he couldn't do his best to disturb the oaf. It had worked so well on Frigga, after all. Such was the weakness of pretending to care; it wrought wrenching false guilt for true sins.

Finally, he met Thanos' waiting eyes. "Do I really look like I care even the tiniest bit about your threats?"

"HAH! You wound me to the quick. Feign composure all you like, I see through it. Even you couldn't fully lock away the memories of our special times together. Still, perhaps you need to be reminded of what you face? You shouldn't be so long without all the wondrous types of misery I taught you. I even dreamed up some new options you may try, while you were away. I thought it might be intriguing, for instance, to dissect your living nerves out intact, then slowly shave them back. To prolong and intensify the experience, you see. Burning, shooting pain combined with complete paralysis! We could do that another way too, dose you up on the right venom, run some current through you, and cover you with coals...again. The options are endless. I'll induce some hallucinations at the same time, make the sensation more vivid and disturbing. Which would you prefer, my pet?" His voice assumed the crooning quality he often used in his torture chambers. "I have such plans for you: I will make your living, breathing, sentient body into a fountain to adorn my hall and let your starved but deathless heart pump only clear, barren water. Truly, the mere memory of your screams and livid oaths has been inspiring in your absence, but now... We could be great, me the toiling artist, you the groaning and crying medium of my labors, senseless to anything but the agony I grant you."

Loki interrupted, "Fascinating as those options sound, even shall I say, delightfully sickening, might I again demonstrate my current and eternal incuriosity for you and your activities?" He strangled the villain's heart just a little harder. Because he enjoyed it.

Thanos jerked, then chuckled. "I know you far too well, my Trickster. I have torn your secrets from your twisted and unwilling tongue with metal and magic. I know when you're lying to me. You will never make me believe you no longer fear me. You might have run from me once, but I still own your mind."

"You think so? My mind is a slippery thing."

"Enough. You are impeding my purpose here. I am done playing and intend to end Asgard's interminably long dominion today. Within the hour, in fact. You know I can. Now, step away, slave, and you may thank me for my mercy later when you lie broken on my machines in the deepest of the Death Pits - your true home."

Loki felt a glimmer of triumph filtering in from the Prince's consciousness. He grinned widely. "Poor choice of words, credulous idiot. I never feared you. I hated you." He released his grip on the heart and stepped back. His hand emerged from Thanos' body with a delicious, slurping sound, covered in dark blood. More importantly, a writhing knot of blackest black followed, suspended over his palm.

The titan blanched at the sight. "How..."

"There are two of us!" Loki cackled. "Well, more precisely, an as yet to be determined number, but at least five. Two active participants currently."

Thanos did not bother trying to comprehend that statement. He growled and lumbered forward, stomping on Thor's head and swiping at the shadowy globe floating tantalizingly before him.

Loki nimbly danced away. "I don't think I'll give it back," he taunted. "Do you think I would make a good god of thieves as well as lies?"

"Impudent infant! You shall suffer an eternity for this - this - presumption! You will beg for such delight as the pain and fear you have hitherto known!"

"I doubt it," Loki said, suddenly serious again. "At least, not in the way you mean." The dark orb sank into his palm. The skin of his hand turned black as ink, and just as smooth.

Thanos pulled up short, the indignation in his eyes rapidly giving way to a far more satisfying humiliation, and shocked, angry, graceless defeat. "You don't want to do that," he said slowly, cautiously.

Loki watched Thor quietly roll to his feet and retrieve his hammer, glaring daggers at the back of Thanos' head. The Thunder God was almost trembling in his thirst for the kill. "No, I don't. But I'm going to. Because I hate you more than I fear you, and even more than I fear this."

The darkness spread up his arm and faded into a dull sheen. Then more rivulets of dusky magic crept out of the air around him, wriggling into his hand. They were coming from all over the battlefield. He had wrested away Thanos' whole connection to the Void and thus to his soldiers - the titan had only a fraction of his neglected native magic left. Prince was now soaking up as much of the latent Void energy lurking in the bodies of Thanos' troops as he could. It wouldn't kill the invaders immediately, but it would make the job markedly easier. The power prickled, but LOJ couldn't quite feel the pain he knew Prince must already endure from the contact. This was much more power than he had ever taken in before, even when he was falling through endless space, even when he was healing himself from an impact with a celestial body. Combined with the taint already permeating his system, this was too much power for one body to hold. It was leaking out of him in spent heat and shimmering aether that quickly vanished in the sun, useless to anyone.

He nodded to Thor. "Goodbye, Thanos. Give Hela my love. I doubt she'll go easy on you." Thor swung. The titan's head burst into crimson jelly, spattering all over Loki. The headless corpse toppled unceremoniously into the gray water they were standing in, quickly staining it a bright red. Loki grinned. "Nicely done. A magnificent rage. I'm glad you've never gone berserk; that would be truly terrifying. Now, I need a storm. And where's Odin?"

Thor blinked at him. "Father was injured and is still up there," he said, gesturing to the side of the pit closer to the city. "What kind of storm do you need?"

"A big one. It needs to stretch across all the rifts. Together, we should be able to take out a lot of the larger, more vexing intruders, making the rest easy pickings. So get up there. You'll probably want a high vantage point. I'll see to father."

"Very well." Thor started up the slope, then turned halfway and smiled broadly and warmly. "I'm glad you could make it, Brother. It's been too long since we've fought side by side. I've missed you so." He loped away.

Loki's grin turned malicious as he followed after Thor's quickly dwindling figure. "Too long indeed, brother. And now to our father."

LOJ did not waste time getting out of the pit, but he didn't sprint either. He allowed himself to savor appreciatively the exquisite spell his Princely fellow was working, diverting excess destructive magic into Thor's clouds to strike down giants and demons miles away. He snickered as the Prince even touched off a couple of the explosive runes their impious compatriot had placed almost a week ago in a show of defiance. Then he caught sight of Odin's prostrate form, and nothing else mattered any more.

Ignoring distant screams, distant thunder, and distant explosions, Loki walked slowly up to the Allfather, still lying in his blood on the baked and broken ground. His wounds no longer bled, and he breathed easily. His eye opened. Loki knelt reverently. He was high on the euphoria of Thanos' bloody and inglorious end. Now that a second, longer-coming vengeance was also in his grasp, he felt... calm. A feeling of sublime anticipation. Pity he had so little time to relish it.

"Loki?" Odin murmured.

"Shh..." Loki pressed a finger to the king's lips. He was elated to see that the raw power filling his body instantly started burning his so-called father's skin. He clamped his hand down over Odin's mouth to muffle any sound his victim might make. He felt jubilation rising within him, felt the muscles of his face tighten as the corners of his mouth stretched wide, found himself laughing voicelessly.

"Here," he gasped around his own laughter. "Let me help you with your hurts, your majesty!" He dug a burning finger into the bloody hole marring the king's neck. Odin tried to push him off. Quick as a cat, Loki scrambled atop him to pin him down more effectively. The strength of a dozen Asgardians could not hold him back in this moment. Odin burned everywhere Loki's body touched. Loki laughed all the harder, though still silently. At least, it felt like laughter. He could be sobbing in relief, or these could be the heaves of fear-sickness held so long at bay. Whatever the feeling and the wild underlying emotion, it was not to be tamed down and fitted with a name. He lifted his hand from the king's face and paused to admire the charred remains of lips, cheeks, and gums. Odin sputtered but failed to shriek; his burned tongue was too swollen. Even the teeth and bone were blackened and cracking. But the wound was not lethal to such as him. Painful and disgusting as it was, given a chance to heal, even that damage would vanish without so much as a scar. Loki's gaze shifted. Eyes wouldn't. Eyes were different, for some reason. Eyes mattered. No healer in the Nine Realms could replace them.

"Become you truly Twice-Blind, Allfather," he whispered, then plunged his finger into Odin's remaining eye. Odin thrashed beneath him, and Loki bore down on him. He hoped he burned straight through his nemesis' skull and boiled his brains. He let go of Odin's straining arm to latch a burning hand around his throat, heedless of the old fool's violent struggling. He had regretted his limited time, but now, he decided this wondrous instant gratification was better. He could practically feel the life oozing out of Asgard's king in the thick, sour-smelling smoke that rose around his deadly fingers. At long last, it would be over... He would be free of this ageless persecutor...

He felt a tug on his awareness and knew his time was almost up. He panicked. He withdrew his hand from the Allfather's gaping eye-socket and joined it to the other on the wretch's traitorous neck. He squeezed. Another consciousness tried to wrest his fingers open and he screamed in fury, any laughter forgotten. He squeezed. He would finish this. By all the blood he had sacrificed to this beast he would squeeze and burn through flesh and bone until he burned the damn head clean OFF!

The scream of rage became a scream of anguish and then a sob. Loki's hands sprang open. He lurched to the side, desperate to bring an end to the scorching assault. With trembling fingers, he tried to pour some healing magic onto the hideous, blackened mess that used to be his father. The normal green of his magic was but a verdant iridescence lingering on a mass of wrathful shadow that did nothing but smolder. He focused all his mind on it, welcoming the immediate mental bite as just punishment for what he had allowed his other self to do. The rebellious darkness resisted and ate at him, but slowly, flesh began to rebuild itself on Odin's broken body. He was careful to keep the dark taint away from his sense of the faint but pure starlight that was Odin's own magical core. At the first hint of returning breath, he stopped. His father would live. That was all he could hope to do at the moment. Any more, and he ran the risk of saddling Odin with his own Void-curse without him ever traversing the dead spaces. Odin's peculiar healing gift that had sustained him beyond a normal lifetime for his race would see him through this now.

He sat back on his heels and stared bleakly into space. It was more horrible than he had anticipated, this feeling of guilt, and pain, and traitorous disappointment that his father... his father still... He refused to complete that perfidious thought. He opened his mind fully to the magic and embraced the mental agony with a vengeance, savagely punishing his own weak will and ignobility. And oh, did it hurt. Sublimely. Overwhelmingly. With nothing better to do with the power suddenly roaring in his ears, he channeled it to the insignificant cut on his left hand he had dealt himself, confronting Thanos. The cut sealed itself instantly, and real flames erupted on his skin but failed to burn him properly... He choked on a hysterical giggle. He was being foolish, doing this. He had won, and paid the requisite price. He accepted it. And he would presumably bear the consequences forever, unless another gifted but naive evil genius showed up and managed to do to him what he had done to the Mad Titan. With a shuddering breath, he released the magic again. The all-consuming agony faded to something akin to the milder throb of a fresh amputation.

"Loki!"

Thor. Couldn't he have waited? The war was still on-going, after all. They hadn't gotten every invader at every rift; they were too scattered.

"Loki?" His brother crested a pile of rubble and caught sight of them. His mouth fell open in horror. "Father!" Thor recognized the armor, not the person, Loki thought irrelevantly. The elder prince sprinted down and dropped to his knees at Odin's side, reaching out but hesitating to touch the fragile flesh. He looked up at Loki in bewilderment. "What did you do?" He climbed back to his feet and strode towards Loki, Mjolnir forgotten behind him.

"No, stay away, Thor! I'll burn you..." He scrambled to his feet, eyes wide.

"Like you burned our father? Why now? This whole war was for you. Our father fought Thanos for you!"

"I mean it! Stay away! I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"

"You're sorry? I know you're still sick in the head, but this..."

Loki tried to respond, tried to explain what had happened, that he had done what he could to heal the damage already, but he couldn't. It was all too much. His ashen tongue tripped and stuttered, and his knees felt weak, and his heart thundered panic in his ears and called him to flee. It was all he could do to dodge Thor's attempts to lay hold of him. He refused to burn his brother as well. He stepped backwards into a deep puddle which hissed into steam at his touch. Thor stopped as a plume of hot mist billowed into his face.

"Oh. You mean you'll burn anything, not just me."

"Yes."

"Sorry."

"Don't be. LOJ, the one that attacked you and Huginn back on Midgard, is the one that hurt Father." He started to cry, except the tears evaporated as soon as they escaped his eyes.

"Oh." Thor looked a little at a loss.

"I think he will live, but he'll never see again, except through the ravens. I think he's in Odinsleep now," Loki supplied.

Thor brightened a little.

"Go," Loki said. "Fetch Lady Eir. Finish up this accursed war. You're needed."

"What about you? You could... just go around burning things, I guess. It shouldn't take too long. Half of the enemy, the ones that are still alive, are already on the retreat now that Thanos is dead and his hold is gone. They do not seem to have much loyalty to his subordinates. We'll get Eir now and figure out how to deal with, um, what the other one did later. So, ah, come with me?"

"No."

..."You're leaving."

"Yes. I'm spent, Thor. Whether I want to or not, I cannot keep this up. I've been holding them all back, and see what happened when I gave in and gave LOJ his head. I didn't want to. I had to, or he and the others would have delayed me too long and let Thanos kill you both. Kill you all. It's safer for everyone if I go."

"We can help you," he said uncertainly. "I want to help you." I want to fix you. That, Loki was sure, was unvarnished truth. And Loki dearly wanted to be fixed. But it was moot.

"Not now, Thor. I don't think you can do anything, and I refuse to hurt you all any further."

"Will you come back?"

"I don't know."

"Where will you go? Midgard?"

Loki smiled slightly. "I don't know. I'll let one of the others decide, just not LOJ. I miss being the passenger in this boat."

Thor reached out to him, and Loki flinched away, unsure if it was because of concern regarding his searing flesh, the old conditioned fear, or just habit.

"Farewell, Brother." He took a step backwards, and let the waiting Cimmerian fire take him.

Author's note: as a fun fact, the last three chapter titles together are a reference to a rather unusual fanfiction, to say the least. Every year, the fantasy website Suvudu runs a "fantasy cagematch" in March to go along with March Madness, pitting various fantasy characters against each other in a fight to the death (or not, depending on who writes the match). Fans vote for the winners and hash it out in the comments (my other series, Unlikely Contests, is actually taken from my comments over there in the past several years), but each match in every round of the tournament comes with an official, sometimes professionally written, blow-by-blow narrative of the encounter.

Several years ago, there was a matchup between the ice-bear Iorek Byrnison and Napoleon on a Dragon. Even better, the writer decided to go meta, and narrated the match from the POV of the two most instantly recognizable nature documentarians in the world: David Attenborough and Werner Herzog. Attenborough got most of the match, but at the close:

"a tall, funereal man with a gloomy aspect, and a camera crew of his own, emerged from the shadows. It was Werner Herzog. He had also been filming the proceedings, and when he offered his own commentary, it was in a sinister German accent. Every so often, the sound of the bear's jaws crushing Napoleon's bones could be heard. 'Napoleon has learned the same lesson as did Timothy Treadwell,' Herzog said. 'The common character of Nature is not Harmony…' Crunch. 'It is Chaos.' Crunch. 'Hostility.' Crunch. 'And Murder.' Crunch."

Go. Google. It's great.

And now for the denouement. I have a great many threads to tie off, questions to answer, characters to call to the curtain. I hope you continue to enjoy, and might I venture, I'd be interested in y'all's thoughts. I don't think any of us (me included, me especially) expected to end up here upon finishing Chapter 1... This is what happens when you start writing a story with zero plot outlined at the beginning.