Rachel's stomach dropped; she screamed; she grabbed out, latching onto Loki.

They were falling straight, with no wind resistance, down a tunnel apparently made of rainbow light and mirrors.

Then they weren't. There was no impact, not even a thump or recoil. It was like falling in a dream and waking sitting up, safe in bed.

Loki's mangled cry pulled Rachel from the shock. Her desperate, clutching fingers had buried himself in his burned skin, and she yanked them back, horrified that she'd done further damage to his tortured body. Indeed, the imprints of her fingers were there, deep and oozing clear pus. Christ.

They were in another cave, but this one was lit by clean, pale blue light, unlike the smoky red of the Hall of Silent Screams. The light came from a shimmering wall to the right, about thirty feet away. It only took Rachel a second to figure out they were behind a waterfall.

Loki had, perhaps mercifully, really passed out this time. The use of his power, plus Rachel's invasive grabbing at his wounds, had finally made him pass out. He was curled on his side in fetal position. Rachel took a minute to gather her wits, then laid Loki gently on his stomach. He was too easy too manipulate. Too light. After a moment's hesitation, she removed her pajama pants, folded them, and placed them beneath his head as a pillow. He wouldn't get a glimpse of anything he hadn't seen before.

A quick touch revealed that the waterfall was thin, flowing slowly and gently. Rachel could safely drink from it – god, she was thirsty – and even stick her head out the other side, where she could see the landscape.

She quickly yanked herself back.

A shining, golden city, arranged like a winged pipe organ. Floating walls, impossibly high cliffs, and a river of the brightest, clearest water she'd ever seen. An artificial, solid rainbow stretching behind the city. Clockwork sculptures on a scale unknown to humanity. The hint of supernovas and galaxies hanging far too close in the dark patch of sky near the horizon.

Asgard. She was in Asgard. Jesus.

It was a lot to swallow, but after the initial shock, Rachel had a surprisingly easy time accepting the information. She'd already had a lot to absorb in the last year. Taking in a mysterious, abandoned man. Realizing he had magic powers. Sleeping with him, falling in love with him. Enduring the trauma of the attack that ended their relationship. Learning he was a god. Losing him. Seeing him again on the news, decked out in armor and horns, flying an alien speeder bike as he destroyed her home and the person closest to her. And the Leviathans…

This, Asgard, was only another layer on the cake.

She couldn't really contemplate it anyway. Loki needed help. Real medical attention.

Squatting next to him, Rachel examined his wounds closely and winced. It was hard to decide what was worse – the melting burns on his back and head or the mutilation of his face. The back would hurt more now, but eventually the scars could be covered. The holes in his face wouldn't close. They were stretched, not torn, like the holes left by ear gauges. Twelve in all – six above his lips, six below.

He'd been so beautiful. How many times had she kissed this face? How would he speak now, stand tall and proud in his armor, with this face? How would he ever recover from this kind of deformity? She knew him to be sensitive and, yes, vain. Looking like this would wreck him.

She shook herself out of that line of thought.

Fluids. He needed fluids.

The waterfall was thirty feet away, and Rachel had no cup, no means of carrying water other than her hands. So her hands were what she used.

The first attempt, she barely made it five steps before spilling her double cupped handful of water in streams over her feet.

Having read so much mythology in the last year, her first thought was of the daughters of Danaus, who were forced to spend eternity carrying water in sieves. They could be freed when they had filled a distant vessel with the water they carried, but of course they never completed the trip to the vessel, having to go back for water again and again.

This situation had a mythological flavor to it, and Rachel resolved immediately that she was going to be smart about this.

After thinking a moment, she pressed her lips to the waterfall and let her mouth fill with the sweet, sharp water, then filled her hands again.

The walk back was ridiculously slow, and she lost half the payload in her hands, but once she reached Loki, she was able to spread some of the cool water on the back of his head.

She had intended to somehow spit the water into his mouth, but that was just too much, so she spit the water into her cupped hands instead, and angled some of it into his mouth. Most seeped out through the holes in his lips, but she imagined he swallowed at least a little.

She made another trip, and another. On the third, she noticed a change that made her practically collapse with relief. Where she had poured water, the burns were healing. The red expanse of damaged flesh was now painted with waxy strips of pale peach. Healthy skin.

Rachel poured water on the newest snakebite, still angry and swollen near to bursting. She was immediately rewarded. Yellow, puss-glossy venom began to flow out of the puncture wounds. Not a lot, and it stopped as soon as the water stopped, but it was a good sign.

The water was magic.

Well, of course it was. What had she expected?

This time, Rachel did – gently – spit her mouthful of water into Loki's mouth, angling his head to make sure he swallowed it. He needed this water inside him, to clean him out, make him whole.

Loki awoke at that, spluttering at first, then hissing in pain. His eyes, hooded, with dark hollows beneath them, widened at the sight of Rachel in only her pajama top and underwear, but he recovered quickly.

"The waterfall," he choked.

"Yeah, I know," she said. "I've been bringing you water, but it's only a few drops at a time, it's not enough. You've got to walk to it."

She saw him automatically try to smirk; saw his lips twist and his forehead contort with the pain of the effort. "Not today," he said at last. "You must carry me."

He really couldn't move, Rachel discovered over the next hour. His exhaustion was total. He couldn't so much as rise to an elbow. And the damage to his skin was so extreme he could hardly be touched anywhere. She couldn't drag him by his wrists, they were nothing but open wounds. Couldn't drag him by the ankles without scraping the raw, wet burns off his entire back.

Eventually she found a silly, humiliating way to drag him. Face to face, her arms hooked around his lower back, his face hanging over her shoulder, she was able to scramble backwards, scooting on her butt, a foot or so at a time.

By the time they reached the waterfall, Rachel needed a shower almost as badly as Loki did.

His eyes were closed again as she roughly rolled him beside the water. Another quarter-turn brought just his shoulders and back beneath the cool stream.

She didn't let him lean past the first thin sheet of water. Partly because she was afraid of him falling off the low cliff below their cave, but mostly because she feared discovery. They were both, she had realized, fugitives in this world. Someone might be watching on the other side of the fall.

Rachel splashed water on her face, fighting exhaustion, and watched Loki heal.

It was wonderful. God, how she would like to live in this world, where recovery from half-body first-degree burns and months of hardship was as easy as sitting in the gentle, cool flow of a river.

The red skin turned pink, then white. His hair did not regrow on the back of his scalp, but Rachel had a feeling it would in time.

She splashed water in large, sloppy handfuls over his wrists. A human would have needed his hands amputated, but within ten minutes, Loki's skin had pulled together and was tightening.

After twenty minutes, though, Rachel realized there would be scars. Both Loki's wrists were circled by a single line of raised flesh, perhaps a millimeter thick. His back, too, hadn't turned out as perfectly as Rachel would have liked. Some strips of flesh were totally healed, but some, again, were slightly raised, and tough. They were faded, old-looking scars, but scars they were.

Some of the puncture wounds had vanished; some had not. Probably, Rachel mused, there was some rhyme slash reason to it. The river healed, but not a hundred percent. Enough to make you whole, but not enough to make you forget the wound had ever happened.

What about his face?

Rachel was spared the trouble of trying to pull his head into the waterfall without drowning him. Loki awoke himself, this time with a sigh and a groan, and rolled to his knees on his own.

Without looking at her, he bent his back reverently, pressing his upturned face toward the water.

He held that position perhaps five minutes, while Rachel watched in silence.

The image was beautiful: Loki, barefoot and shirtless, folded in half on his knees, face raised. He was lit by falling webs of blue waterlight. The length of his limbs and torso were incredible. Rachel wanted to stroke his thin flank; it seemed to stretch forever, marked only by the tiger stripes of his ribs, ending in a sharp but beautiful jut of hip that disappeared beneath his black trousers.

Except for his thinness, this was the body she remembered. Lithe and flexible, ivory-pale, stretched to almost inhuman proportions.

And when he at last pulled his face back, and pushed his sopping hair backwards to hide the bare patch at the back of his scalp, Rachel saw that his face was – almost – healed.

The wretched deformed holes were gone, thank god. But above and below Loki's flat lips were six pinched spots, the remains of Thor's clumsy needlework.

Rachel knew instinctively that Loki would bear the marks forever.

He inclined his face to her at last, still on his knees, facing the waterfall like a pilgrim at a shrine. Some of the insanity was gone from his eyes. There were still circles beneath them, but not black hollows, not pits of pain.

He blinked twice, his pupils slowly dilated, and he said in that familiar, clipped, classy voice of his, "Well. In trouble again, aren't you, Rachel?"

In his travels, Loki had all but forgotten the girl. There had been no occasion to think of her, and absence had not created longing. If anything, as his power grew, as he approached true kingship and godhood, the idea that he had once been in a mortal chit's thrall grew disgusting to him.

He was surprised to find he remembered her name. Remembered, even, that it was the first word he had spoken to her, plucked from her open, unguarded mind.

He also remembered enough to tell that she had changed in the time since they had been together. Decades for him, perhaps a year for her, he knew, but she had aged more than a year.

She wore only panties and a pajama top, and the flannel absolutely swamped her. He had noted the expression on her face as she counted his ribs, and wondered if she knew that she was almost as thin as he.

Although… in the past few minutes, a change had come over her. She looked better than she had in the Hall.

The water. Cold and fresh, from the Lyfjaberg river, sourced by the unending spring of Eir. Help. Healing. The river had repaired collagen in her face, added luster to her hair, reddened her cheeks, woken her up thoroughly. Probably added a year to her life. Assuming she ever made it back to her life in Midgard.

He could not read her mind. Not here. This cave, even moreso than the rest of Asgard, radiated magic. Some was even within the girl now, being filtered through her organs as the water permeated her body. The cascade of ancient, humming, sentient magic drowned any thoughts that might be quietly pinging from a mortal head.

She had used the coin. The one he had so foolishly given her, along with a promise to return.

He was rather embarrassed at how well the coin had worked. The magic had been so powerful that when he could not go to the girl, the coin had actually pulled her to him. Through the width and breadth of the nine realms, through hundreds of feet of solid rock and protective wards, all in an instant.

That kind of power… He must have felt very strongly back when he made the coin. The promise to return. The man he was today would never give a human, or anyone, that degree of control over him.

Thank the Nine Realms he had, though. Already the horror of the months in the Hall of Silent Screams was beginning to fade from his mind. His psyche was protecting itself from trauma. But his body was fresh with the aftereffects of pain, of the terror of the snake… He could find it in himself to be, if not exactly grateful to the human girl, at least not inclined to shove her aside.

"What exactly do you want?" he said at last.

The girl was all eyes and legs and red, open mouth. "Me?" she asked stupidly.

"You wanted a favor. Or did you call on me for a chat?"

After tedious seconds of fishmouthing, the girl managed, "Oh, you mean what did I want when I called you? Nothing. I mean… nothing anymore."

Her body language said it all.

"Too late, then? Who was it?"

"My brother."

"Tragic."

He hardly knew why the word was so venom-laced. It didn't matter that he'd failed the girl, anymore than it mattered that a few slow, flabby humans had fallen to the Chitauri. None of it mattered. Not when considered in the proper perspective.

It was in him, though, to be stirred by the word brother. He did wish it had been someone else. A father, a sister, a friend.

"You okay?" the girl asked. She was scrambling to pull her bottoms back on. "You haven't eaten in weeks – "

Try months.

"- and you were so exhausted, in so much pain. You must need rest, food, real sleep. Not on the floor. Is there anywhere we can take you?"

This, Loki found, he remembered as well. The mortal girl's overestimation of her own importance when it came to him.

"We cannot take me anywhere," he said. He began to rise from his kneeling position, placing weight on one foot for the first time in months –

– and rubbery weakness shot up his leg, which promptly collapsed beneath him.

He granted himself a rueful smile when the girl promptly wrapped herself around him, all worried questions, hands gliding across his sides, searching for wounds she had to know were beyond her ability to heal.

"I'll get us to civilization tomorrow," he said, curling to one side on the ground. "A day of rest, that's all, that's all I need."

His weakness was bleeding through to his voice. Gods, he was tired. So tired, he didn't comment when the girl pressed herself against his back and crooked her arm beneath his head in a sad attempt to give him a pillow, make him comfortable.

Even without reading her mind, this close, Loki could sense the girl's loneliness. Her hunger for touch. A gnawing, frightful emptiness inside her. She was desperate for something. Not sex, not exactly. Connection.

He remembered the day of their parting. A memory he'd not revisited in so long, it surprised him to learn it was still carried inside him.

That day, it had been her broken body cradled in his arms. He'd pressed her to his chest, terrified for her, but thrilling in her heartbeat, in the fact that she was alive and with him. In that moment, he could have crawled inside her skin, so desperate had he been to wrap his soul around her own. To comfort her, protect her.

She'd been in pain then, and she still was, though it had faded.

He hated knowing it. Hated sensing it.

He wished she were not with him. He didn't need any guilt over a mortal, and she didn't need any worry, or a hopeless infatuation, to further darken her once-bright spirit.

Loki dreamed he was back in the Hall. Hanging, helpless, unable to relieve the burn of the snake venom or the ache of his wrists and back. Unable to move, to scream, even to moan, confined by the muzzle and his chains. Totally alone.

He awoke gasping.

His terror was so acute, the hallucination so powerful, that in his disorientation he didn't notice he was no longer in the hidden cave behind the waterfall of Eir.

Instead, he was in his own bedchamber, the giant room in the palace of Asgard which had been his since he reached adulthood. He lay in the center of an enormous featherbed, surrounded by white silken sheets and supported by wide, soft pillows.

A girl lay in his arms, blinking sleepily up at him, smiling. Mortal. Beautiful. Her hair spread behind her like a cloud; her clear skin glowed; her limbs were delicate works of art.

Loki was not himself in that moment. His memories were a swirling haze. He could not remember his own name, much less the girl's. All he knew was the potent combination of fear and relief, and the need to be absolutely certain he was no longer abandoned in hell.

The girl's breath was clean; Loki found himself kissing her desperately. Without kindness or restraint, heedless of her comparative weakness. He crushed himself to her, making her cry out against his lips, but after a few panicked seconds, she was kissing him back.

Her skin smelled of violets and fresh air. It tasted like pristine water. He couldn't get enough of it. Groaning, he licked his way down her body, tonguing her breasts, her navel, the hollows of her hipbones.

Distantly, he heard her cry out again – this time in pleasure – as he sucked at her cleft, buried his tongue in her, mercilessly made love to her with his mouth, drank her orgasm like a man dying of thirst.

Then he was on top of her. Inside her wet heat, thrusting, his face buried in her shoulder. It was all the girl could do to hold on. She clutched at his back, flattened her breasts against his chest, and as he drove her into the bed, all but breaking her, she whispered in his ear:

"It's okay. It's okay, I'm here. I'm here, baby. You're not alone. You're free. Shhh, you're safe. I promise."

A piece of the girl's soul was missing, as a piece of his was. Loki imagined the empty spaces inside them locking up, matching, forming a whole from two halves, and the need for that completion consumed him.

Forehead to forehead with the girl, he pressed the lengths of their bodies together, crushed her, sealed her mouth with his, dug his fingers into her sides, ground her pelvis as he came, white-hot, and she screamed into his throat.

Still not knowing his own name, Loki fell unconscious again.