The Hangman's Hands
Chapter 25: Sweet as Pain
Loki slept for a long time. Mortal sleep plagued him with dreams of an unfamiliar intensity. He dreamed of endless hallways and passages where he wandered until he collapsed from exhaustion. All the doors were closed; he dared not open them, not even to find the way out. The dreams went on and on, imbued with such reality that he forgot he slept.
When he swam up to consciousness at last, it took some moments for him to realize he was awake. He heard a sound and opened his eyes to slits.
Jane sat cross-legged on the floor by the basin, studying the stars. She hadn't noticed him wake. He watched from under his lashes as she stretched out her hand. Her fingers hovered over the surface of the water, tracing mysterious patterns. The observatory couldn't, of course, be operated without magic, but that seemed to make no difference to her.
Trust Jane to be distracted by stars in any situation. Even half-dead in Jotunheim he'd practically been able to see her cataloguing them in her mind. She was probably doing the same thing right now.
She got up and went to one of the windows. Its filigree inlay framed her head as she fumbled with the fastening for a moment before opening it. She leaned out, her heels rising; the ledge was too high for her. The wind stirred her hair. She craned her neck to look at the late afternoon sky.
"Is the end of the world over?" he asked idly. "Are we moving on to the more pressing task of sightseeing?"
She jumped and spun, looking faintly guilty. "Oh good, you're awake. I was waiting."
He rose from where he'd fallen asleep with his back against the wall and joined her. Despite his troubled sleep, he felt rested and calmer, as if he'd left some of the frantic energy of his thoughts in the dream-maze. "Do you see anything?"
"It's empty. Where are all the people? Has Thanos... killed them all?"
"No. He has them locked away. But he'll kill them eventually if we can't stop him."
They stood side by side, gazing out over the city. He stole a glance at her from the corner of his eye. She looked very serious. It wasn't the city she was watching, but the sky. With her dark eyes raised she had the air of the visionary, seeing what others could not. Yet at the same time she seemed... lost.
There was a raw spot inside him. The sensation of an invisible hook lying within him returned. Jane's lashes fluttered and her teeth pressed into her bottom lip in unconscious thought; and the hook tugged, tugged and smarted. It hurt him, but it would hurt more to pull away. His fingertips remembered the heat of her skin.
"You have planets orbiting you," she said. Her voice had a rough edge. "And a sun. How is that possible?" She turned quizzical eyes on him. The tilt of her head exposed the bare line of her neck.
"Sunna? It was captured from Jotunheim long ago." By Odin and his brothers, the sons of Bor, when they built Asgard. How they would weep to see their city now.
"What? You guys just... took their sun?"
"Well, it's not like they wanted it. Jotuns hate sunlight."
"At least I finally know why they don't have one. And the planets? Were those captured, too?"
"They were created to fortify the city. I suppose they haven't been very effective."
Jane shook her head. "An Einstein-Rosen bridge, all right, I already believed they existed. Super-strength, well, you're aliens. Magic is just science we don't understand yet. But this? This is incredible. Your people built their own solar system. I can't even imagine how you would do that. The amount of power involved must've been immense. Incalculable."
"Evidently not immense enough," he said, looking out over the deserted city.
She was frowning. "I've been wanting to see Asgard for so long. And now it's all turning out so differently from how I hoped." Her fingers tightened on the window-ledge. "I used to imagine Thor coming back to whisk me away to this amazing place. All the strange people I'd meet. All the technology I'd get to take apart there."
Instead she was seeing it with Loki. "I'm sure my brother will be overjoyed to give you a full tour if any of us survive this."
"That's not funny."
"Desperate times call for desperate wit."
She drew herself up, losing some of her distracted manner. "We're wasting time. Better get started."
She went to the table which, he saw, was laden not only with scrying bowls but with pieces of Earth machines and a pack to wear on one's back. "I brought you some food," she said, nodding to one of them. "Didn't know how you were doing up here, but you won't be much use if you're passing out from hunger halfway through the plan."
"Thank you," he said, following her. He hadn't even thought of eating; he'd simply sat down and fallen asleep after she left. Now he was ravenous after only a day. Being a mortal was getting tedious.
"Secondly, I talked to Erik. He's going to help me modify his machine. Unfortunately, due to certain mind control experiences, his memories of building it are hazy. It might take some time."
"Pierced by my own darts," Loki said sadly. "I'm chastened. Convey my deepest regrets to Selvig."
Jane shot him a glare, but it had little force. "Thirdly, no one likes the plan. Really no one likes the plan."
"What's wrong with it?" he asked, rummaging through the bag. "Don't your friends have faith in your inventive abilities?" There was a box of milk inside. He found the human habit of putting liquids in boxes bizarre.
"Sure they do. It's you they're worried about, of course. They're afraid you might double-cross us with Thanos." She was taking more objects out of bags and arraying them on the black, splintered surface of the table: a silver circular frame, long rods like the spokes of a wheel, bars and hexagons, two big gleaming cylinders. The debris of his last, failed plan.
"Well, you'll simply have to keep Midgard happy. There's nothing they can do about it, is there? You're the only one who can travel between worlds."
"They could take away my teleporter. Stop me from coming here and give up on Asgard. Erik would think it was for my own good." She grimaced.
Blood on the polished gold of the courtyard. Silent halls full of ghosts. To be alone here as Thanos devoured Asgard from the inside. Waiting his turn... "That would be idiocy. They would leave Asgard to a power like Thanos? They would abandon Thor?"
"We've only got your word that Thor is still alive at all," she said.
"He is," Loki said fiercely. "He is, and unless he does something truly stupid, he'll stay alive long enough for this to work."
"He'd better," Jane said under her breath. "My point is, we have to work fast before somebody loses patience. I'm going to need your help."
"What exactly do you want me to do?"
"You know about the Tesseract. We have some data back on Earth, but anything could be useful. And I want to know if any of this stuff," she waved at the old instruments scattered around the observatory, "might help."
"Our tools? They won't respond to a mortal will. They all require at least the magic innate in the soul of a god."
"Isn't that true of the Tesseract, too? Erik still managed to tap into it. Magic, science, same thing, you said so yourself."
It couldn't hurt to give her what she wanted. She was already busy, her hands flying over the intricate innards of what would become her machine. "If I said it, it must be so. What do you need?"
"Two main things: a way to detect the Tesseract's particular energy thumbprint at a distance and a way to send it instructions. Since this is an observatory, I thought there might be detection equipment here. Do you have something like a magic spectrometer?"
Midgardian names always had so many syllables. "One can only hope not. What an ungainly-sounding thing. What does it do?"
"It reads part of the electromagnetic spectrum and tells you stuff about it. Like polarization, wavelengths, intensities. You can identify a particular light source by its unique properties."
"Magic doesn't have a spectrum. It's something you do – bend the world around you to your will."
"I thought you said it was innate to being a god?"
"It is."
"What, you guys bend reality just by existing?"
"Yes, exactly." He'd thought she'd understood that, after all the time she'd spent with him and Thor.
She took a patient breath. "Someday I'm going to make all this make sense. But right now, I need something that can detect the Tesseract bending reality to Thanos' will." She began to pick a way through the room, opening cabinets and leaning down to examine instruments that waited on the floor for stargazers who had stopped coming. Some of them might not have been touched since he'd last been here himself.
"There's no dust," Jane said. "I though this place was supposed to be old."
"Dust doesn't fall here the way it does in other Realms."
"Why am I not surprised? What's this one?" She pulled a long staff with a point that gleamed painfully bright out of a frame on the wall.
It had been so long since he'd visited the observatory that the tools looked only half-familiar. More than that, it was dangerous for him to stay here. If Thanos summoned him – if Thanos appeared here seeking Loki as he had in the vault, he would discover Jane. That thought made the panic he'd managed to keep at bay seethe and roil in his gut. He should spend as little time with Jane as possible. He should leave now.
He didn't. Asgard's emptiness accused him. To spend hours surrounded by its silence, its halls once filled with gods now crawling with Chitauri... Better to stay. Here with Jane, he could, though not without difficulty, blot out the memory of what he'd done and the dread of what he must do. Even if only for a short time. He knew it was a foolish decision. Sentiment. It was dangerous and craven. Still he lacked the will to go.
No wonder the Tesseract had never respected him.
"That's a darkbane," he said. "It finds unknown stars and adds them to the mirror."
"And this?" Her hand trailed over a cabinet and picked up a set of silver finger caps connected by nearly invisible chains.
"It's called a farslayer. It allows you to see parts of the sky more closely."
"This is the zoom button?" she said with a wry smile and put it back down.
Loki had caught her spirit of inquiry. He surveyed the room. A weirdlight. A scorpion. Some decrepit old patterning chalices probably obtained from the Dwarves. His eye lighted on something more promising.
"Try this," he said, disentangling a wheel from where it lay entwined with a set of time rods. It was part of a larger device; after a moment's searching he found the other pieces. "An Eye of Nótt." When he'd reassembled the parts, they formed a collection of interlocking wheels that could be arranged at any angle to each other. Holes of varying sizes pierced the edges of each wheel in a unique pattern.
"What is it?" Jane said, tracing the geometric engraving along one of the wheels.
"Starlight has magical properties. Light from different stars has different uses. The Eye of Nótt tells you what you can use a particular star for."
"That's definitely in the right neighborhood," she said, taking the resurrected instrument back to the big table. "How does it work?"
He explained the principle of the matter, and she explained the principles of her own device. The minutes became hours. The talk fell into familiar contours: she asked questions, he answered. She asked more questions and theorized aloud about the answers and he listened intently to every word, pretending he did no such thing. Yet beneath the well-trod paths of their conversation, everything was different. Once they had worked like a machine at cross purposes, every gear grinding against every other. Now the machine hummed with well-oiled smoothness.
He watched the motion of her hands, their slender lines, the pale half-moons of fingernails slightly chewed. Her hair, which she always wore loose, fell tawny and careless over her face. Under his gaze her movements grew hesitant.
"You know this stuff pretty well," she said. "Did you used to come here? Were you an astronomer?"
"A stargazer. For a time. It was a sort of boyhood infatuation I dabbled in six hundred years ago or so."
She snorted. "I guess with a lifespan like yours you've got time to try every hobby under the sun. Why did you stop?"
"Stop stargazing? Well, it had little practical use. Heimdall's sight could tell us more than most of these instruments, and with the Bifrost we could simply go wherever we chose to explore. The observatory became old-fashioned." Which had been the last thing he'd wanted. Back then he'd been in sore need of impressive feats to keep up with Thor's growing fame. Spending time on the esoteric, obsolete art of stargazing would only have given him a reputation of one who avoided both company and battle. It had seemed important, then, not to be such a person.
"Old-fashioned," Jane sighed. "The things I could do if I had the time to really look at some of this equipment. It would probably revolutionize our whole understanding of science."
She was ever eager to reduce things to their constituent parts, their hidden interrelations. Even, he thought with a not unpleasant shiver, him. "Why do you do it? With the kind of tools you have, you could hardly hope to learn much. Why dedicate your life to looking at little points of light you'll never visit?"
"What, you want my personal statement now?" she smirked, mystifyingly. "All right. We're not as ignorant as you think, you know. We know that we're only a speck of dust in a big universe. When I look at the stars, I don't just see little points of light, I see the whole rest of existence that isn't Earth. It's like a window out into the world, right above our heads. And I always believed there were other people looking out their own windows at the little point of light that's the Sun. How could I not be interested in that? And besides, as the first human to visit not just one but two alien worlds, I think I turned out pretty successful."
"Thanks to Thor's banishment." Which, in a way, had been Loki's doing, though he hadn't exactly planned it. "You have a jotun's own luck, Jane Foster."
She looked at him and the charge between them he'd felt ever since the gardens intensified until he could almost hear the air hum. Her brow creased as if she felt it, too. The silence grew awkward, brimming with confusion.
"I'd better go," she said quickly. "Back to Midgard. I mean, Earth. I've got some calculations to do and more equipment to pick up."
"Don't linger," he said. At the very mention of her departure the walls seemed to crowd in.
"I know. No time to waste. I've got to figure this out before Thanos starts killing people."
At last, the gears ground, the purposes crossed. Underneath the apparent harmony they each believed they were working towards a different goal. This bright afternoon and its imitation of trust were as false as he was.
"No," he said, "at all costs we can't permit that to happen."
After Jane had gone, he sat among the entrails of their day's work and ate the food she'd left him. He tarried longer than he ought to, cowering in what he knew was the deceptive safety of this hidden cranny.
When he'd finished, he went to his chambers.
They were untouched. Everyone had mourned him, Thor had said. For the first time, he half-believed it. In these quiet rooms where he'd grown up, the very air was infused with who he had been, and none of it had been changed. He saw his mother's orders in the neatness of the bed with its great curved sides, in the summer curtains and the smell of fresh air. All his books were here, his wardrobe, his favorite weapons. The fountain on the balcony still ran, just as if they'd expected him to come back.
And now he had.
The solitude weighed on him. He toiled under it as he walked around the room, touching familiar fixtures. Books still sat on the table before the cold hearth. The Saga of Bor and Tyr's Warcraft – volumes he'd wanted people to think he was reading. The books he'd truly been interested in must still be concealed in the secret shelf behind the wall. He spoke the password to it, but it didn't open; there was no magic in his voice. The colored glass of the windows stained the sunlight as it passed through. The fountain, shaped like a tangle of knots with a wolf's head spouting water into a basin, sang its merry song. He'd fallen asleep to its notes every night since he'd become a young man and left the children's quarters.
He wished for a fierce, aching moment that he could step back into this skin he had discarded so violently, that he could turn back the hours until this Loki, the disgraced prince, the lackey of Thanos, ensnared in a web of his own making, had never existed. If he could only do it all again, grow up all over again and take another path and become some other man.
It was no use. The past clung to him like a cold sweat. He could not brush it off no matter how he wished it.
He went to the basin and began to wash. His Midgardian clothing was rumpled and stank, no doubt, of fear. He cast it off and, after he'd washed, went to the wardrobe. He chose the finest garments he'd had when he had lived in this room and been a prince of Asgard. Green and black and gold, leather and linen and metal, trousers and long tunic and a light broad-shouldered overcoat despite the summer weather. The ornamental greaves he slipped on were green and embroidered with a pattern of gold scales, and he placed a gold torque about his neck. Without magic to cast an illusion around himself, he must resort to simpler subterfuge.
When he left, he was every inch the royal, and he took with him one of the ceremonial spears that adorned the wall above the bed. It was far too ornate to have ever been taken into real battle, but at least he was not entirely weaponless.
The hours until Thanos summoned him again were a torment, but so too was the summons itself. He was given no warning. One moment he was walking the streets of the city under the newly emerging stars, hoping vainly that if he was difficult to find, the slaughter might be delayed. The next he was in the execution courtyard, where Thanos brooded on his stolen throne and Thor languished in chains, looking far worse for wear than Loki.
"You seem eager, trickster," Thanos said. Malevolent eyes twinkled from beneath the caverns of his brows. "Have you been dreaming of blood? I have been dreaming of how best to spill it and whose it shall be. This one does not wish to dream with me, but he will be part of my dream all the same."
Thor was – by his standards – haggard, which meant that he still had more of an air of kingship about him than either Loki in his finery or Thanos on his throne. His red-rimmed eyes followed Loki as he drifted closer. The chains about his neck and wrists that anchored him to the ground had chafed the skin beneath. An image flashed through Loki's mind of Thor in a fury, hurling himself against his restraints again and again. Stupid, stupid.
"We are all part of your dream," Loki said with a grudging incline of his head. "Thanos is supreme. Don't you agree, brother?"
Thor glowered in response to his smile. "You look dressed for a festival, Loki. I cannot fathom how black your heart must be to caper and crimp at the murder of those who were once your friends."
Had Thor forgotten the message Loki had sent him last time? Or was he, too, simply playing his part? They ought to behave as if they were enemies. It was impossible to tell if they really were enemies.
"Once is the operative word there, Thor. I have other friends now."
"No, Loki. You of all people are truly friendless."
He found himself without a reply, so he turned to Thanos. "It's my pleasure to assist you in getting rid of these former friends of mine. I do hope you'll keep their deaths slow. With such long lives, haven't they earned long deaths? Surely your mistress has."
"I would not be worthy of her if I offered only stingy tribute. They shall taste eternity in their final moments!"
"If you are so worthy, why don't you go find my hammer and bring it here?" Thor sneered in a way Loki remembered from their boyhood and had not heard in a long time.
"Silence!" Thanos snapped. "Thanos has no need for your toys. The Cosmic Cube outstrips all other sorcery."
Thor stared at him in defiance and more than a little contempt. Words had passed between them, Loki realized. Thanos had spoken to Thor since the last time Loki had seen them. Thanos must have come to whatever dungeon he was keeping Thor in and talked about – about what, he could only imagine, and could hardly ask. It discomfited him to be so in the dark, with stealthy goings-on proceeding behind his back. He could only hope Thor knew what he was doing. Thanos was more smooth-spoken than he looked; as Loki had experienced himself in circumstances not without their similarities to the present.
"We begin!" Thanos roared. "Lady Death, attend me! Witness as I, Thanos, put an end to the blasphemy of life! Even gods realize that they are but quivering flesh in the face of our glory. We are the king and queen of all eternity!"
The words echoed. The Tesseract pulsed. A fourth figure appeared to join them, standing before the throne as one condemned.
It was Sif. Thor surged against his chains with a wordless roar that blended all too harmoniously with Thanos' laughter. Mortality and imprisonment had not been kind to Sif. She was unkempt and wild and thinner than Loki remembered. Yet despite her uncouth appearance, she did not spring at Thanos or run or so much as tremble.
"You live," she called to Thor. "I hadn't dared hope I might lay eyes on you again."
"Sif!" Thor's mouth worked; her name was all he spoke. What more could he say?
Sif addressed Thanos. "You have done me a favor, usurper."
"Then you must return it," Thanos rasped in reply.
"Sif," Thor cried again. And then: "Loki!" His voice had a pleading note.
"Look not to the betrayer!" Sif said. "I'll take no help from him." Disdain was stamped on every inch of her. Haughty Sif, she had always looked down on him. Her sneer carried a sting even now. She had always loved Thor and tolerated Loki with only the most cursory attempt at civility.
Still, the sting was distant. He was too numb to feel more than a shadow of it and too sick of death to take any pleasure in hers. He made a mask of his face and hid far behind it the nausea that had been growing him since Jane left and the weight of guilt he could not show to anyone. It was the mask of Loki that slunk to Thanos' side and whispered in his ear.
"She styled herself goddess of war, once upon a time," he murmured, letting poison sour the words. "An arrogant girl who thought herself not just a warrior, but the very embodiment of war. Let her fight your army and see how great a warrior she is now."
So Thanos grinned with malice and called his Chitauri in a hoarse bellow that made the city shiver. They came in great numbers at his call and gathered around her, division upon division, a horde, a swarm. Their eyes buried among the insect ridges of their faces glowed blue. Thanos could have commanded them without the Tesseract, but through it his control was absolute: it was his hand that would strike down Sif, he who would take the credit for her death.
She stood alone in the noise of the hive: the engine cough of the fliers, the whisper of antenna that linked mind to mind. They arrayed themselves around her on the ground and in the air; she waited in an arena made of the bodies of her executioners. They may as well have been insects in truth. She had eyes for none but Thor.
There it was: the blood of Asgard, noble to its core, never faltering, never defeated. The air scoured Loki's throat when he took a breath.
"I wish you glorious battle, Sif!" he called. He hesitated for a moment, calculated, and then gambled, reckless. He threw her his spear. "A long death it shall be! The halls will surely ring with songs of you for years to come."
She took it as the mockery it sounded like. With a spear in her hand she looked more her old self, stronger and more dignified, and behind his mask, Loki was glad.
Spear or not, she had only a fraction of her former power; but the Chitauri, too, were mortal and no stronger than a human. She fought long and slew many. The many more that remained made slow work of their own killing. Thanos was well pleased.
When she was dead, Thanos had him condemn another and then another, summoning them with the Tesseract like dishes at a banquet. Magni. Fulla. Vitharr. Hoenir. Every one of them looked at him with hatred shining in their eyes before they died. They cursed him and jeered him with their last breaths, far above Thanos, who had only conquered and not betrayed them.
Most had never looked at him with love in the first place, of course. Yet the ruin he meted out to them brought him no joy. Their hatred and curses touched nothing in him; but each death seemed to weigh on an invisible scale, each stilled heart inscribed a black mark on his own that he knew he might scrub at until he bled without fading it. He lurked at the side of his monster and watched its handiwork and felt every act of Thanos to be his own.
All the rage he had nursed against Asgard for slighting him, all the bitter detritus of centuries of wounded pride burned away beneath the stars, made obsolete by death. He felt as if the roots of some twisted tree had grown around him and through him for so long and so slowly that he had not noticed how it happened, and their merciless grip had strangled and warped him so that he became a malformed thing. Now they crumbled to ash in the heat of the Tesseract's pitiless light and he was bereft of his old companions of anger and spite. He was empty and bare, gray and quiet inside as the forest after a fire; but he could see, and breathe, as he never had before.
Contains: minor character death