18. Interlude, part 2

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He walked back to the laboratory half in the folds of shadows using will and entanglement, and half over the conventional landscape using one foot placed in front of the other. He tried to concentrate on nothing more than the movements of his muscles and the rhythm of his breath, tried to find the quietness of mind which so consistently eluded him. It was no surprise to him that he had even less success than usual.

'A warrior's patience is constant and easy,' Odin said, illustrating his point with a hand swept through the air in a long, steady curve at the level of Thor's eyes. 'Like a reflecting pool. Not only is the surface calm, there are no currents beneath. From true stillness, all actions are possible, like the ready stance from which your sword can parry a blow in any direction. You see, my son?'

Thor nodded solemnly, but even from his hiding place on the gallery above, Loki could see the boredom in his brother's eyes.

He stopped, not wanting to return to the mortal settlement while his thoughts were still drifting so easily out of his control. Everything he had left at stake was precarious, his position delicate and dependant upon his ability to keep his equilibrium. What would he do if Jane's good sense were to finally prevail over her fascination? What was there to do? Everything on this planet was so breakable, in more ways than one, and he felt as though he were living in a realm of blown glass.

He remembered the first time Jane had unthinkingly touched him and being gripped by the sudden horror of realising that he had no idea exactly how fragile Midgardians really were. How much strength was too much? Not just to avoid arousing suspicion, but even to avoid injury. The limits and abilities of the weaker races were not a subject of much interest on Asgard, and he had seldom touched anyone without his immediate family unless it was with intent to cause harm.

The thick vein of ignorance he had unexpectedly found in himself appalled him.

His thoughts threatened to turn again to a similar ignorance which pained and relieved him in equal measure. That ignorance of his biological race. It was perhaps something to be thankful for that he had not been taught much about the oldest realm, that he knew little indeed beyond history of battles fought and fireside stories.

He ducked behind a pillar as Odin turned in his direction. The throne room was so vast, it was unlikely that even the All-Father would spot one little boy amongst the petitioners, but Loki had rather not risk it. He waited a few moments before peeking out again and was becoming absorbed in the proceedings when a hand on his shoulder made him start.

It was Thor's quizzical face he saw when he turned to look behind him.

'What are you doing, brother?' Thor said.

'Watching Father.'

Thor glanced over at the throne, where Odin was listening intently to the complaint of one of the landed nobility from Vanaheim. His brow furrowed. 'Why?'

'To learn how to be king,' Loki said imperiously, as if that should be obvious.

'But Loki, you won't be king. I'm going to be king.' The way that Thor said this sort of thing, as if he were only telling you that the sky was blue and how amusing of you to have forgotten, made the sting both greater and less.

Loki pressed his lips together in annoyance. 'More harm comes from not knowing things than from knowing.'

How deeply he had been wrong in his youthful conceits. Not knowing was sometimes infinitely to be preferred.

All his years of filial piety, how they must have laughed. And he a creature with no father and no past. To whom could monsters hope to pray?

He looked down at his hands, balling into fists, and forced his fingers to relax. He had once been so proud of what he could do with these hands. His drawing, his sculptures, his magic: he was as deft and dexterous with his fingers as he was with his mind. Then he'd learned to fight and preened like the prize cock as he recognised his own physical grace, his precision, his marksmanship. Why had he ever thought it meant anything? Such talents, and all so worthless, so ill-used.

I did it for them. For my family, my people, my Realm.

Didn't I?

Round and round it goes. Wicked or mad or right, my very nature would have me unjustified no matter to what conclusion I cling. I am intrinsically wrong. How funny.

He saw Thor's face in his mind at the moment he'd let go of Gungnir. The dumbstruck shock, the dawning devastation in his brother's eyes. Thor's mouth was open in a scream, but Loki had heard nothing but the echo of Odin's dismissal (even the falls, thunderous before, were dumb to him). At the time he'd felt a flicker of satisfaction amidst the panic and shame and miserable desperation, a minuscule hint of gratification that his death still meant something to Thor. That he might be missed.

Now he doubled over, coughing on a sob which seemed intent to strangle him. He longed for home and brother and his old life with such sudden fierceness that it was like a blow to the belly.

'There's always a purpose to everything your father does.'

Bile rose in his throat, threatening to expel his last meal.

Mother, how could you. Even you.

His breath slowed as he clutched his temples with one hand and wrought the sand at his feet into glass with the other. The work of doing raw magic was soothing, draining the brittle edge from his emotions.

He walked again until he could see the spill of light from the town. The lab was close, the very last building before the little settlement gave way to emptiness and scrub. Loki sighed and reached out with probing tendrils of his consciousness, quickly discovering his customary audience in its customary places. The only change was a new listening device, its weak signal thrumming from beneath an abandoned car on the desert side of the laboratory. It was impertinently close to Jane's private chamber. Disapproving, Loki appeared next to it from a pocket of darkness and, the shroud of the still open pathway ensuring he was not observed, bent to lift the car up onto its side. The device was well hidden on a slope of the undercarriage, he would not have seen it if he had been checking for such things by crawling in the dirt as SHIELD would naturally assume he must. A touch of his fingertip overloaded the little circuit. The mortals would think it had failed on its own.

Putting the car down and slipping back the way he had come, he now allowed them to notice his approach and gently drew back his obscuring veil from the reconnaissance devices which were directed towards the laboratory. No one would be there but Loki himself. Jane was in her trailer doing something still and quiet, sleeping he should hope. She seemed to imagine stimulants removed the need for sleep, but he had observed her thinking suffer with increasing severity as she deprived herself of rest. Erik Selvig would be in his own quarters in the village. He was watched separately, but Loki did not concern himself with that; whatever Selvig's secrets were, he had learned never to discuss those he shared with Jane outside of her presence. The futile desire to keep Jane out of anything dangerous had more to do with it than good sense did, Loki was sure.

The watchers must be allowed an occasional unobstructed view or they would begin to suspect there was something to see, so he chose his moments to give them one. Loki supposed that SHEILD considered themselves utterly safe from discovery, masters of the clandestine. He smiled to himself. How the other humans did continuously underestimate Jane Foster. She had assumed they were watching from the beginning. Jane, perhaps naïvely, gave them the credit of believing they wouldn't interfere stupidly in her work. She was too optimistic, as per her wont, but Loki's careful censoring had deftly avoided several potentially catastrophic overreactions by those who would not have listened to reason.

His background as an earthling existed on one level for Jane and Erik's benefit- should they decide to go looking- and another for SHIELD's. They thought he was a plant from the less savoury portion of Selvig's background. They monitored him closely, but not half so closely as he imagined they would if they knew the truth. Even if the worst came to pass when the bridge was complete and the mortals attempted to capture him, he was- unlike Thor- in full possession of his strength and foresaw no great difficulty in extricating himself. They could do nothing to detain him if he decided to use force, though he didn't anticipate that becoming necessary. His cunning alone was far more than they could hope to cope with.

He paused as he entered the lab, listening to the radio chatter of the agents who were tracking him:

"Luke's back."

"Keep alert, he never sleeps through the night. Watch to see if he messes with the computers. Hennigan saw him do it once, but the camera couldn't see the screen. We've repositioned, so we should see now."

"The high ups think he's faking it? Scamming her?"

"Nope. Not unless he's got some kind of remote interference we've never seen before. Tech guys confirmed Dr. Foster's equipment was reporting accurately while they were all out in Vegas the other week. They're changing the rules in there."

Loki doubted either of them truly gripped the magnitude of what he and Jane were doing. So few people appreciated of what real power was made.

A learned sage knelt before him with his father's (not his father) spear of kingship, and in his fear he was a child again. He shrank from it and the very walls seemed to loom about him, suddenly threatening in their weight and magnificence. The spear stretched to hideous proportions in his sight, prodigious in the massive hands of the elder who held it, towering even on his knees. The world was vast and incomprehensible, full of terrible magics and monsters which Loki could not hope to control or understand.

He turned to his mother, as he ever had. His mother who was patient with his questions, who was compassionate about his fears and doubts. His father's patience was weighed and measured, his father's compassion was in merciful justice, because his father was a king. Since he was very little, Loki had sensed the reserve placed upon his father's love, the burden of expectation and duty. A king's robes were not to be clutched, a king's dignity was not to be impeached by a child's demands of succour for trivial hurts.

Loki's eyes had opened to his own place in the universe soon after they had opened to his father's. He was a prince of the Realm and a son of Odin, he must not ever be perceived as anything less. The weight of the crown was such that it was not carried merely by the king, but by all who shared his blood and intimacy. The first duty was to Asgard, and all else was second.

Thor did not understand this, he did not need to. Thor's princeliness was without effort or affectation, nothing he need be cautious to preserve or fearful of neglecting. He felt no hesitation or embarrassment in his love because he was so much his father's natural son that his childish needs and wants never seemed to offend their mutual royalty.

It was Loki's earliest conscious jealousy that he could feel no such ease, could only watch as the distance between himself and his father yawned wider. The love he bore for Odin throbbed painfully, unexpressed in his breast, and he swallowed it when it bubbled towards his mouth, he denied it when it tingled in his limbs, he banished it to the deepest parts of himself until it became a fathomless well of discontented loneliness. It tasted of bitterness and injustice. At times he hated his brother.

He had never hated his father, though Loki could see in that one, shrewd eye that his father knew and understood and yet offered no assistance. Odin could look through him with such horrible knowing. Every foible, every frailty. Odin had not needed to go to war in a generation because so many battles had been won with a glance and a conversation. Loki knew he'd been found wanting, his father picked out and dismissed his attempts at silver-tongued rhetoric as easily as he did a dropped guard on the exercise field.

But Mother cultivated him. She could touch him and coddle him and comfort him, her dignity was not injured by his pawing. When she had time and freedom, she taught him magic with her own hands and watched his sword katas with a keen critical gaze. Hers was the only critical gaze he could suffer. She did not dismiss his style as cowardly, she did not complain that he wasn't strong enough or bold enough. She taught him the sword cack-handed when the swordmaster would not, and she taught him to throw daggers when he asked her to, though it was considered a skill beneath a prince's notice.

His mother believed, somewhat heterodoxically, in being practical about violence. Loki went further. He believed it should be avoided for as long as was possible, that it was only reasonable not to risk death where it was not necessary. He told this to no one in so many words. He knew what they would say. What even Mother would say.

As he grew to the cusp of manhood, still Frigga reached up her hand and smoothed the curls from his hair. He had used to wonder if she hated its blackness, if she regretted his unfortunate appearance that so set him apart from his family. Now he wondered if she had always been thinking of the monstrous truth: that he was none of hers, he was the snake in the skin of the lion.

Even she. Even she who had doted on him could not tell him the truth. Even she had no compunction, no compassion for the misplaced monster. Even she cared more for Thor's banishment than for his world coming to an end. More fool he, who had thought she must specially prize him at least a little as her youngest and the child most after her own heart. The niggling voices which had reminded him that she did not defend him, she did not keep him with her, she must wish he were otherwise, had been speaking the truth all along.

The sadness and regret (what was there in his life which was not to be regretted?) weighed on his shoulders like ill-fitting armour. He barely paid attention to the SHIELD agents as they speculated on his movements and argued about whether they should attempt to follow him in future.

The reckoning was coming for Jane Foster, as it had come for him. The difference being that Jane would not crumple beneath it. She knew who she was, her cause was just, and she would give up when breath left her body- not before. She was strong and stubborn like an Asgardian, but she was as rational and pragmatic as any elf. It was a shame she seemed impervious to the ideals of diplomacy, but one could not have everything.

If they came for her before she was ready, he would protect her. Already he protected her, and it was so easy that he almost wished the humans could present a greater challenge. Perhaps he was learning from past mistakes by only almost wishing it, but he was more inclined to judge it the ugly head of his cowardice rearing again. His virtues were few and unlikely to increase; he saw himself too clearly now to believe otherwise.

Unprompted and unwilling, he thought of the desolate waste of Jotunheim and wondered how it had looked when the giants still possessed the Casket.

'You know not what your actions would unleash. I do.'

Whether it was the weight of aeons in the tone or the suggestion of wisdom where there must be none, the recollection of that now-silenced voice made him shiver.

He decided to conjure a bisected worm into the pack lunch of the SHIELD agent who always referred to Loki as 'the undertaker' and knew his mood would improve after he heard the inevitable scream. He amused himself with the suspicion that Jane, if she knew about it, would approve of the jest.