25. Apparition

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Jane- torn between the mounting euphoria of the successful experiment, confusion about pretty much everything else, even more shock to add to her collection, and total exhaustion- just didn't have any chill left.

"What the hell are you saying to me right now?" she demanded, ready to scream if he tried to be coy.

Loki, the son of a bitch, actually laughed. It was a bitter, half-hearted laugh which caught in his throat, but it was the principle of the thing. "Do you know, you have the most patient impatience of any being I have ever encountered. So impetuous and you're still too reasonable. It's almost infuriating."

"I'm infuriating?" she repeated incredulously, so offended she could barely get the words out.

He smiled, but it had a terrible hollowness and he was developing a thousand yard stare which set off alarm bells in her head. She might have to bodily jump on him to stop him from doing something dumb or irrevocable or both any second now. "In the best possible way, Jane. I shall miss you. If missing is permitted to me."

"What! Loki, so help me, start making sense right now or I'll punch you until you feel it if I have to break every bone in my hand. Stop shutting me out and talking in riddles! God damn it, I've done everything humanly possible to show you that you can be straight with me and I'll listen and I'll be able to handle it. Pay me back! I've earned it."

He shook his head. "You think learning is the ultimate pursuit, that there can be no such thing as too much knowledge, but I tell you that there is much that it is better not to know. There is much I wish I had never learnt. It would have benefited me greatly to be less curious. It would also have benefited you."

"If this speech is leading up to you disappearing in a puff of smoke and never coming back because you've somehow convinced yourself that's for the best, I want you to know that I will find you and that is a promise. I will invent magic detecting radar. I'll build a fucking space ship. Loki, look at me, believe me when I say this: I will find you."

Looking at her as she'd asked, he seemed wistful. "Nothing so civilised as that, I'm afraid, but you'll see."

Jane crossed her arms to keep from wanting to shake him. "How is this goodbye, then? You said you didn't have any plans for this part! I'm real tired of being two steps behind and you being mysterious when I thought we were done with mysterious."

"I really do apologise," his voice had been wearing rough these past few days, but now it seemed to wrap her in a cocoon of velvety warmth as he let pretences drop and the careful distance evaporate from his manner. That forced edge of rasp he seemed to think he needed disappeared as he tried to comfort her, his tone ringing with the purity of sincerity. "I'm so sorry, Jane. I had some foolish notion that this inevitable moment could be avoided, at least for long enough for me to make good on some of what I'd meant to give you."

She felt her face contort bizarrely as she tried to figure out what her dominant emotion was. She never had managed to cleanly win one of these little verbal fencing matches, she only ever broke his guard by throwing her metaphorical épée at him in frustration. When he really decided he wasn't going to tell her something, he simply wouldn't and she was lucky if she even noticed. She didn't know whether to be proud of herself for recognising the plays or to be angry that she still couldn't effectively counter them.

She was thinking about what to say, how to balance acceptance and chastisement so she didn't make him clam up before she could find out what the hell he was about, when there was another portentous crack through the atmosphere, a cascade of writhing light, and a shower of sand. She threw up her hands to shield her eyes, far enough off to be only sprinkled with dirt as she was battered by an eddy of swirling air. Excitement warred with trepidation as she peeked between her fingers, but there had always been a disparity between the power of those two forces in her character. She was already making her way closer to the landing site before conscious choice entered the fray.

It was Thor. Dressed much as he had been when she'd last seen him what felt like decades ago, his armour glinting in the sun and his hammer gripped at his side in his right hand. He tossed his hair out of his face as the wind died down and immediately caught sight of her.

Jane lifted a finger in protest, suddenly thinking three hundred things at once and wishing she had learned her lesson about throwing herself headlong into these situations. Profound uncertainty slammed down like an avalanche on the heady victory of conquering interstellar travel, burying her in doubt and fear and awkwardness. How was Thor going to react to any one of the things he was about to be confronted with? She couldn't predict his behaviour at all, and her former confidence that it would all work out fine when it happened was revealed to be the empty rationalisation with which she'd wilfully blinded herself because she had to get that bridge open.

Thor's mouth spread into a broad grin as he recognised her, his eyes crinkling with an untroubled happiness that made Jane's heart clench. He took two steps in her direction before a glimmer of unease started to sneak over his expression as he noticed the look on her face. Glancing around questioningly, he seemed to spot something out of the corner of his eye. Before she could say anything, he turned to investigate and looked full at Loki.

Thor's skin drained of colour, the hammer slipping from his hold and dropping to the ground with a dull thud. Slack jawed, he shook his head slowly as if in denial of what he was seeing, his eyes wide with shock.

Loki waited with his arms at his sides, his back painfully straight and his chin lifted. He was biting the inside of his lip, his cheeks sucked hard against his teeth; with his prominent bone structure and his eyes shadowed by dark circles of fatigue, this taut and forced expression practically transformed his face into a death's head. He was clearly doing everything in his power to hold himself rigid, to keep from flipping his shit in one way or another. She could see the tremor in his fingers, the strain of unnatural stillness.

Jane was opening her mouth to intervene in the stand off when Thor went for his brother like a pouncing lion. Loki flinched involuntarily as he tracked the decision, recognised the coming advance the second before it started.

She suddenly understood exactly what he thought was about to happen and why he had stalled, refusing to tell her what he expected even though he seemed to be at his most honest, and the sheer weight of the knowledge dragged on her body, tried to suffocate her. He was so perceptive and so blind.

Loki leaned away, in danger of staggering backward as Thor bounded towards him in two huge strides, but he stood his ground and stared down his nose defiantly, pulling haughtiness around him like a cloak and leaving his hands pointedly loose at his sides.

She wanted to-

But Thor was there already. He clasped Loki's throat with one hand while his other arm swung around his brother's back and pressed him to his chest in a crushing, suffocating hug.

"W-what are you-?" Loki's teeth chattered as he forced the words out, caught between bafflement and outrage.

"Brother," Thor lifted his head, showing the tears gathering in his eyes, "I thought you lost." He thumped Loki's back, his grip only tightening, Loki's armour audibly shifting against itself under the pressure. "In the first days we thought perhaps there was a chance… but Heimdall could not see you."

"I know how to shroud his sight."

Thor's grasp on Loki's neck suddenly seemed a lot less benign and affectionate to Jane, his thumb moving to press hard up into Loki's jaw as he held him at arm's length and forced him to meet his eyes. "You hid?"

There was a flicker of something in Loki's face, then he laughed as dry as dust. "Of course I did. Don't dissemble, brother, it has never been one of your strengths. Ask me what questions you would, whatever you were told to if the chance arose, and then do what must be done. Be quick about it, my destiny has waited a long time past its due arrival."

Thor's brow creased in confusion, but he wore a forbidding frown that showed a hint of teeth. "You let me think you dead all this time, Loki, and for what? What destiny? Is this more madness? More petty vengeance?"

"Don't play the fool!" Loki said so harshly that it sounded painful, "I should have died shortly after I was born in the wretched wasteland where I was spawned, and you, O great prince of Asgard, are here to set things at last to right. Do it!"

Jane bit her knuckle to keep from interrupting, needing to see what they would say. Thor wouldn't really hurt his brother, she was sure. Completely sure. A little well of blood touched her tongue. She bit harder.

"Loki..." Thor whispered, obviously appalled. "Despite all that has passed between us, and my anger only slumbers, brother, you cannot expect that I would..."

"Did he not enlighten you, explain what he'd done? Did the All-father not tell you what I am?" just shy of screaming by the end of his sentence, Loki's eyes were bright with tears and something very like madness indeed.

Thor retreated by a fraction, his hands falling limp. "Naturally, he did. Naturally I would ask what had happened to my brother that..."

Loki seized on the advantage, shoving Thor back and following him as he stumbled, neatly reversing their earlier position. "I'm not your brother, I'm Laufey's son, a Frost Giant! Heir of Jotunheim!" He laughed hysterically at that last epithet, like it was the best joke he'd ever heard. "And you will hunt the monsters down and slay them all, won't you, Thor!" He pointed to the hammer where it stuck out of the sand. "There was nothing you ever liked better in your life than the feeling of their ugly, misshapen skulls shattering under the swing of your arm- you told me so yourself. I may wear the mask of a man, but you know in truth I am nothing of the kind, so live up to your name, Giant Slayer."

Panting, Loki grabbed Thor's forearm and guided his hand to the fallen hammer, forcing him to wrap his fingers around the handle and lift it up to tap Loki's temple with the edge of the weapon's head. "You know I can't do it myself. Monsters and cowards are not Worthy and my earlier attempt by lesser means was clearly inadequate. This is what Mjolnir was forged for."

"Loki!" Jane protested, unable to wait any more for Thor to put a stop to this, even if she lost her chance to gather essential information.

But Thor held out a silencing hand in response to her sobbed plea, his face grave and closed. He threw the hammer down again and grabbed Loki by the shoulders. "Brother, it is an ignominy I do not invoke lightly to doubt the word of our father, but I must ask you for myself. I must hear it from no lips but yours. Is it really true?"

Loki let out a demented chuckle. "You would trust my word before Odin's?"

Thor's radiant sea foam eyes seemed to hold infinite sadness, his rough features softened by a new patience. "Perhaps in this I would. You used to tell me that Father was a king before he was a man, and I never understood you until… Brother, please tell me-"

"It's true, idiot. Don't doubt it. I would prove it to you if I still had the Casket of Ancient Winters, but you may believe it without such a demonstration if all you need is my solemn word. A Jotun destroyed my armour with his burning touch while we were fighting that hopeless battle with which you tried to doom us. The effect of their magic was rather different on my flesh than on Volstagg's. I saw the colour of my blood that day on Jotunheim."

Thor's mouth turned down with fleeting but unmistakable distaste, his gaze dropping and his hands convulsing. Devastation pulled his shoulders into a slump.

Loki affected a sneer of grim triumph, though he was looking peaky again. "And now you have seen it also. The veil has been lifted that Odin used to keep his other little souvenir secret all these years. You know your duty now. Do it."

"I would not strike you down, Loki, not to your death, if generations of our ancestors rose from their graves to command it."

"Your ancestors, cretin, not mine!"

Thor's hand went back to Loki's throat, his grip immovable as Loki tried to shake it off. "You are my brother! You betrayed me, betrayed me twice over, Loki, lied to me! and I cared for you no less! What should blood matter when we shared a nursery, a training ground, and more debts than can be counted? I will never give you up. In my heart, the colour of your blood and mine is the same."

Loki stared at him, swallowing convulsively, his eyes still wild.

"I repent my arrogance. I should have listened to you more when you spoke of caution and discretion, I should have listened to you all our lives, but you must listen to me now. There's no honour in what we did. Either of us. You knew that once."

Squirming in the hold, Loki's frustration grew with every word Thor said and he sputtered, "What honour could there be in temperance when you speak of destroying monsters? Monsters, brother!"

Thor's thumbs were digging into Loki's cheeks now as he added the other hand, again forcing Loki to meet his gaze. "How can they be?" he asked, almost gently.

"Don't!" spittle flew as Loki screamed in his face. "Don't patronise me!"

"I don't!"

"You haven't changed so much! You still consider me your malleable lackey, only existing when convenient, you still think you can tell me how it is to be and so it is, you can tell me my place and I'll go back to it grateful you deign to let me beg at your heels and subsist on your scraps! I will never be the faithful second son again. That life is ended, there is no pretending or threatening the scales back into my eyes even if I could set foot long enough on Asgard for you to try. With no chance Odin will need to appease my… the dead king of a barbarous race, he won't permit you to keep your dangerous pet any longer!"

Thor roared in exasperation, shaking Loki so roughly that his teeth clacked together, "Do you hear nothing of what is said to you?"

Jane put her hands on Thor's arms, making him whirl to look at her and suddenly let go. She grimaced at his frazzled stare. "Hey. Long time no see. How about everyone takes some deep breaths and we all put on our grown up pants and have a conversation without any screaming and violence? I'll settle for just no violence if the screaming is really called for because yeah, I get it, but no more manhandling."

"Jane Foster." Thor nodded to her soberly, apparently remembering his manners now that he'd somewhat acclimatised to the idea that his dead brother was back from the grave, even if he was being just as hard to deal with as any ghost. He glanced around awkwardly, his fists clenching and unclenching as he tried to calm down and take in the situation. "Then you have completed your bridge?"

"Yeah, pretty much," she agreed neutrally. She grabbed Loki's wrist, sensing he was still on the edge of freaking out and wanting to keep tabs on him without taking her eyes off Thor. She pulled at him indicatively, adding, "This guy helped. I didn't know he was your brother until like a couple days ago."

Thor scowled at her hand holding Loki's arm and then at Loki himself, clearly unimpressed that he'd gone on with his deceitfulness spree after the big blow up between them and the whole not-telling-anyone-I'm-not-dead thing.

"He tried to pass himself off as human for a while." She forced a laugh, a bubble of hysteria rising up inside her that she only sort of had a handle on. "Not super convincing, I have to say."

Loki huffed half-heartedly. "It was a somewhat cursory effort on my part, Jane," he rasped, though she thought he was coming by it honestly at this point, his voice legitimately worn out from shouting.

"I one hundred percent believe you could do better." She squeezed his arm and almost called him kemosabe or honey or something equally ridiculous and she was losing it. He hadn't tried that hard to fool her effectively even though he was good at it because he was a suicidal train wreck who almost killed an immediate family member and she was comforting him. This was her life now. She must be certifiable, because she couldn't even regret it, not when it meant she knew how to punch a hole in space time.

Thor's scowl deepened. "How did you get here, Loki?"

"I fell. This is where I landed."

"More lies?"

Loki laughed weakly, but she could feel him give a tiny shiver. "Not this time. I expected to die."

Totally not believing this, Thor shook his head, anger and disappointment radiating from his stiff figure. "What do you want with this world? What do you want with Jane? Why wouldn't you let Heimdall see you! I grieved for you! Why would you tell me-"

"Don't be obtuse, Thor, I know better than to believe it of you." Loki noticed her hand drifting down his arm towards his fingers, her nervous desire to hold onto him more firmly, and delicately turned his wrist out of her grip. Their eyes met for a split second and he pressed his lips together and very subtly inclined his head. Jane thought she knew what he was saying, thought she saw an apology and an understanding, but it was a whole can of worms she couldn't open when a fight could break out at any wrong word.

"Explain!" Thor demanded, practically vibrating with irritation.

"He thinks he's under some kind of death sentence," Jane cut in before Loki got a chance to make things worse. He wasn't going to lay it out any clearer than he already had and Thor obviously couldn't imagine that he'd been serious, couldn't see the implicit claim about what would have happened to him if he'd stayed on Asgard. "He really thought you'd kill him."

Thor snorted contemptuously. "He knows-"

"I don't think he does, though!" Jane felt stupid having this argument with Loki standing there, but they'd get nowhere if she didn't moderate this craziness. There had been the niggle of doubt before whether Loki was telling the truth about what he thought Thor would do, that possibility that he was just trying to win her onto his side and get her to feel sorry for him. Keep the ball in his court. But she believed him now without reservation. She thought he was wrong, but she believed that he believed it. She saw his face when Thor was headed towards him.

"What is his business here? With you?"

"He helped me build the bridge, Thor. He offered to do whatever he could in exchange for being part of the project. It's all I've been doing all this time and he was pretty much always with me. He barely even lied to me. In fact..."

Loki's touch on her shoulder made her turn to look up at him, but his attention was on his brother. "Is this not precisely what you did when you thought you were trapped here? The only difference being that I had the benefit of knowing where to look for assistance and far more to contribute to Jane's cause. What do you imagine my purpose to be?"

Thor's eyes tracked down to where Loki's hand was resting on her shoulder and then back up to his face with deliberate, accusatory slowness, his expression hard and foreboding.

Loki's fingers clutched her reflexively, a flush of outrage staining the high arches of his cheekbones, his lips receding from his clenched teeth as he jutted his jaw forward and caught a heavy breath. He snatched his hand away from her and turned his back on them with a sound like a strangled retch. He walked three or four steps and vanished.

Jane gaped after him for a few seconds and then immediately threw herself into Thor's personal space, jerking a thumb behind her to indicate the general area where Loki had disappeared. "What the hell was that?"

Thor's almost palpable aura of threat melted away, but the set of his mouth was stern and his hooded eyes were still full of annoyance and almost impatience. Like Loki was embarrassing him as well as pissing him off. "I apologise, Jane Foster. My brother is very..."

Jane flapped her hand dismissively. "He's very a lot of things, okay, but he doesn't get that upset for no reason."

"I think you will find, Jane-" Thor began, nearly amused. He hadn't totally lost that arrogant playfulness she remembered about him, the sense that he didn't quite take things seriously. She wasn't in the mood for it.

"No, I won't. I won't find, because I'm right. He was full on trying to get you to murder him a few minutes ago, really thinking you would and that was fine with him, then this, and I'm telling you right now that he does not just give up when he thinks he's winning the argument. What could you possibly have implied just now that was the last straw?"

Looking deeply uncomfortable, Thor drew a breath and held it a moment.

She waited, but no words came.

"Forget it, I'll ask him." She had no idea where he'd gone or where to look for him if he wasn't in the lab, and the worry about what he might be doing was like rocks in her stomach, but she hadn't broken apart yet and she wasn't going to now.

"No, wait." Thor held out a hand, his voice soft. "Loki, he… he helped our enemies to breach our defences, to slip inside my father's vault, simply to-"

"The Jotuns, to interrupt your coronation and show everyone how rash he thought you could be. I know, he told me."

He looked startled. "He told you that?"

"Well, he didn't exactly spell that part out and connect all the dots, but I'm not an idiot, and he did tell me his whole side of the story. I asked him for it and he gave it to me."

Thor's face was creased with consternation, and he shook his head. "Did he speak of his appearance on Earth the night I was held captive by Coul's son? Did he speak of feeding me poisonous lies while I was in my despair? Telling me that my father was dead of heartbreak by my actions, that my mother blamed me for it and would see me no more, that I could never return home on pain of war? Those things were not so. He was striking at my heart."

Jane almost wanted to laugh; it burned in her throat. She wasn't surprised, she wasn't even a tiny bit surprised. The instant she heard him say it, she knew exactly how it had gone down. She even knew why.

"His words cannot be trusted, Jane Foster. He uses them to his own ends."

"I know! I know!" She felt her bubble of hysteria burst, her hands flying around in desperate gesticulations as she let words rush out, "You think I don't realise that? You think I don't know he manipulates and he misleads and even his honesty's a bit warped because he thinks everything is a million times worse than it is? I know him! I know how he lies and he lies ninety-nine percent by omission. Okay! He's paranoid, he thinks... He told you that shit because he thought he needed to keep you away from Asgard no matter what and he didn't want to fight you. He probably kind of believed it, but about him not you. He projects! I don't know your culture or your childhood or whatever, but there's a reason he hates himself so much. There's a reason he can't understand that not everything has strings attached."

Thor weathered this outburst with measuring attention, his attitude one of having a trump card up his sleeve. His gaze pinned her to the spot. "As we fought on the bifrost after my return, he threatened your life, Jane. He promised me he would visit you. He wished to anger me then, to goad me to fight, and had I been thinking clearly I would likely have dismissed it as empty words, but now I find that he is here and they seem more substantial than I reckoned even in my rage."

Cold twisted in her guts, but she shook her head. "Get in the van. We're going to find him. He better hope he's around to be found."

"What of your bridge? It will be unguarded."

"The power is fully depleted, no one can do anything with it. If SHIELD swoops in and tries to make off with it, I think we can probably convince them they shouldn't. Those assholes deserve to be scared."

.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.

She found him in her trailer. She opened the door more out of thoroughness than any expectation that he would actually be in there, but he was. Sitting awkwardly in her tiny dining area with his feet stacked one on top of the other on their outer edges and his long legs angled outward to fit under the table. His helmet was in front of him, facing him with its empty stare, and he toyed with the edge of the jaw guard.

"Hey," she said cautiously as she stepped inside and let the door fall shut behind her.

"Where is Thor?"

"He's doing a walk around the perimeter. Looking for you. I mean, I sent him, but he probably would have done it anyway." She was babbling, twisting the hem of her shirt with her fingers.

Loki pushed the helmet away and stood up more quickly than she would have imagined possible from that position in a booth seat. His cape trailed over the bench, his armour making him look way too big for the cramped space. He held out his hands towards her, his gaze resting somewhere to the left of her feet.

Jane decided he meant for her to come closer, so she stepped forward and was suddenly swept up in his arms, the hug so tight that she was lifted completely off the ground. His nose bumped her cheek as he pulled her close, supporting her weight with one hand while the other buried itself in her hair.

She felt the warmth of his breath against her neck as he whispered fervently into her shoulder, "I would have said anything, I would have said anything."

It was very like an apology, very like a denial and a bit like shame, and in the face of it there was so much that just didn't seem important any more. Maybe it had been about a lot of things when he first decided to get involved with her work. These were questions she'd asked him enough times, and she was starting to think she could be satisfied that he really didn't have any concrete answers. What Thor said couldn't make much difference, it wasn't anything she hadn't suspected. Lingering anger leached away, because she knew what he had been doing. She'd just watched him try it again.

"Why do you want to die?" She slid her hands over the spaulders covering his shoulders and under his cape where there was more exposed fabric, trying to ignore the way his high metal collar was digging into her chest.

With his face completely hidden from view, he was shockingly forthcoming. "I don't, quite. I don't... but I don't have any great investment in surviving. Not as I am, not this way. In every sense bar crude biological fact, I feel as though I am dead already. It is a tiresome sort of burden to wake and find myself still living. I have nothing to live for."

"You don't think maybe your real problem is facing all the things you have to live with?"

He squeezed her and she really wished he were wearing something with less hard edges, but she didn't pull away. She wrapped her legs around his waist so he couldn't put her down until she was ready to let him.

"As long as you're breathing," she said, thinking he was most upset because Thor's insinuation wasn't totally off base and he hated that he couldn't flatly deny it, couldn't claim to be above that, "it's not really more than you can handle."

"Have you never given up?" he muttered, a little petulantly.

"Absolutely I have, but it's never been permanent. Hopeless is a state of mind, Mr Power of the Will. Would it be so terrible if you just admitted to yourself that you feel guilty?"

A shudder went through his chest and he pressed even closer to her, so close that she felt his lips moving against the skin of her throat as he spoke, "Yes, it would. So much would be for naught, sheer pig-headed folly. So much irredeemable. If I could make my peace with that, I would not have let go and I would not be here. More's the pity for you that I cannot."

"I don't think it's a pity for me."

"Jane, don't be absurd. The device isn't worth it, you would have eventually advanced on your own sufficiently for even your mind to remain occupied."

"Don't tell me what to think. I don't think it's a pity, because I'm glad you're here. Not that I would have put you through this if it were up to me."

"You wouldn't be glad if you truly... I put myself 'through it'. It's all my fault."

"I dunno, it sounds significantly more spread out than that to me, and I kinda have my doubts about your dad's parenting strategy. Between lying to you your whole life and banishing Thor to another planet, I'm getting some red flags. No offence, sweetheart."

He finally lifted his head, shifting his hold on her so he could look her in the eyes. "Even now?"

"Even now I still consider you a person? Even now I think you're worth having around? Yeah. I came looking all ready to chew you out, but I understand you too well to even need to say it. You know what I was going to say and I know you feel like shit about it. You're going to make my lecture into something I don't want it to be if I put it into words because you see the world so grimly, but I don't need to say it because you know, so we'll just skip that. Everything's not hunky dory, maybe I'm going to have a second round of angry when the science high wears off, but that doesn't mean I'm okay with you ducking out on me. Things are different than they were when you first decided to come see me, a lot's changed. We're in this together."

Loki's eyebrows went up in the middle and his lips twitched into a subtle moue of uncertainty, the overall effect being a kind of lost puppy look that she wouldn't have anticipated ever seeing on his face. "What are we 'in'? The bridge is completed and proven operational. Thor has returned to you. What further use am I that you will continue to ignore your better sense and protect me for it?"

Jane sighed. "You know, for a next level super-genius, you can kind of be an idiot."

A loud, exuberant voice from outside interrupted before he could sputter out a heated retort, "Hey, dude! Look who it is! Is it just me or are you even huger than you were before? And still with the outfit and Mew-mew! So it worked out in space, I guess. Awesome. Where's Jane? I might need to kill her a little."

"It would seem Miss Lewis has arrived. And been reunited with my brother."