A/N: Hi, guys. I don't think there's much to say here. Real Life's been screwing with me, and I basically lost my inspiration for this story, but here it is. Finally. There will be one more chapter and a short epilogue, both of which are already written and only need editing, so they should be up in a more reasonable amount of time. Sorry I left you waiting so long.

Summary: When it comes down to it, all of them cling to life and the ones that they love the most.

Chapter XIV–Light and Heat and Ice

Realisation (noun): an act of becoming fully aware of something as a fact.

They dodged an onslaught of Aether, reached the terrace, and finally, finally—

Except he didn't want to see Loki like this, lying on the ground while Fandral stood in front of him and parried blow after blow. And Loki... Loki...

Tony's vision literally went red. Instinctively, he covered his face with his arm. The Aether roared in his ears and ate away at his armour—fuck, the pain in his shin, was that a hole in his suit?

Before he could even attempt to take a look, something bright flashed above him. The air trembled, and then the boat exploded. Jane's shriek reached his ears, his repulsors kicked in, and he caught her and zoomed towards Loki. If he dropped Jane a bit too roughly, who could blame him?

Loki was on his back, his armour pierced in the middle of his abdomen. Tony couldn't see the wound, but he saw the blood, and his insides twisted. Breathing was hard.

So cold. So hot.

His heartbeat echoed in his ears.

"Loki..."

He sank onto his knees and reached for the god's face just as another flash of bright blue came right at him. He dodged in the last moment, breath caught in his throat. Then he finally noticed Loki's hand. Or the absence of it.

It hadn't been cut off... It simply wasn't there. Had to be some weird magic. Damn it. Perhaps that space between dimensions. Whatever it was, the blue light was coming from it. Tony knew that particular shade of blue, knew it very well, but it was so hard to give a fuck about anything. Loki was bleeding out, and Tony could press down on the wound all he wanted, he couldn't change a thing. He was too late.

Hlin dropped to her knees beside him. It all made sense now—the apple and Hlin's desperate attempt to defy her visions—yet it made no sense at all. How could Loki be the one to die first? Even if he survived... if... Tony had always thought he'd be the first to go, not Loki, who had survived so much worse...

How fragile lives were, how easy to take. Even Loki's, even...

He didn't want to say goodbye to Loki, one way or another.

Hlin tried to push his hands off Loki, but he didn't want to let go. If he did, Loki would slip through his grasp, and he would—

He swallowed. Looked to the side where Fandral was battling the last elf. Behind them stood Malekith, head titled to the side as if the scene before him was oh so entertaining, and Tony growled. He aimed his repulsor at the Elf and shot a blast. Another one. Another. Another anotheranother, but the Aether was always in the way.

He zoomed into the air, but the red came after him and locked him in place inside a cloud. No matter how the repulsors strained to bring him closer to Malekith, he wasn't fast enough, wasn't strong enough, and he was forced to watch as the Aether slowly ate away pieces of metal on his arm away until there was barely anything left and the repulsor sputtered and died.

Fuck it. He'd come too far to go down now.

Wait.

Go down.

He shut the remaining repulsors off and plummeted. The ground neared him with an alarming speed. Light shot out of his feet and he rolled over the stone. Not that the landing was graceful or pain free, but it was certainly better than hitting the ground headfirst (or buttfirst, for the matter).

He struggled onto his knees, then to one knee, and slowly, slowly onto his feet. Another streak of blue light whizzed past him. Malekith had come closer and stood there, watching, as the Aether swirled around him.

"You can't defeat me, mortal," he said. "Cease trying. Even your friend with the hammer failed. Your armour is no match for the Aether."

Tony clenched his fists. Malekith was right. His repulsors couldn't get through the Aether, and his armour couldn't protect him. The only thing powerful enough to give him a fighting chance was the Tesseract...

Possibilities flew through his mind. The arc reactor absorbed power...

He glanced over his shoulder, and found Jane and Fandral on the ground, Hlin still leaning over Loki, and Loki struggling to stay propped on his elbows. His heart skipped a bit. Loki was ali—

The Aether hit him in the stomach and sent him rolling towards the others. Damn. He needed to act now. From the corner of his eye, he saw blue light coming out of the magic hole. Hoping he was right, he threw himself in its way and extended the arm with the working repulsor towards Malekith.

Heat and pain coursed through him. He thought he screamed but couldn't be sure.

~*oO*o*Oo*~

The scream tore at his heart and ripped a strangled sound from his throat. His legs twitched as muscles in them contracted to sprint towards Tony, but his body was aching and slow, and refused to heed his command.

Hlin disappeared from his side just in time catch Tony's crumbling body.

Loki's fingertips dug into the stone underneath him. Slowly he pulled the other hand away from the Tesseract. His eyes followed Hlin as she carried Tony to Jane and Fandral and placed him on the ground. Tony's body jerked, and Loki's insides turned cold.

He was so cold-

He was the cold.

The Casket felt like an icy weight in his pocket of space. He'd walked away from it in the vault, but when he'd been about to leave, something had frozen his feet on the spot.

He was a jotun.

A prince. The heir to their throne.

He was Loki and he was a jotun, and the Casket was his birthright.

He might be a monster, but sometimes one monster was needed to defeat the other.

He might have been a puppet before, and he'd sworn he'd never dance like one again and tried to prove his resolve by taking control of the very strings he's been hung on.

But he'd failed.

His gaze slid over the little group on his right. Tony, his Tony, lying on the ground, shivering and whimpering. Thor's woman, Jane, sitting with one leg stretched in front and bleeding from her knee. Fandral, motionless on his side. Hlin, bending over him.

They couldn't win this fight. Tony's weapons were far away and Loki... He was too scared.

But...

Tony convulsed again, and Hlin tore her hands away from Fandral's chest to place them on Tony's. Loki's breath caught in his throat.

Movement made him turn his gaze elsewhere; the Aether was swirling, gathering to be unleashed again. There was no time. No other way.

Thud.

A breath passed through his lips.

Thud, thud.

Every heartbeat echoed through his body. His fingers closed around the Tesseract, and he screwed his eyes shut.

He'd sworn not to be a puppet again, but the puppeteer was dead and perhaps the way to win was not to fight against the strings but to admit he had them and use them as a weapon.

Tony's face was the last thing he saw before blue covered his consciousness.

~*oO*o*Oo*~

Jane's heart was beating too fast, she felt the beats echo through her body and throb in her knee. Blood was slowly leaking onto the stone.

There'd been times in the past where she'd jumped headfirst into danger and walked away unscathed, but this time would be the last—for her and for all of them.

Stark moaned beside her and she clutched his hand. His gaze was locked on the two figures fighting. Did he know he was crying?

Something fell on Stark's cheek, and Jane swiped at her eyes; her hand came away wet. Stark looked at her for a moment, bleary-eyed and feverish, and she wanted to tell him they'd all be all right, but Loki was on the ground again, bleeding, and she couldn't find her voice.

She closed her eyes. Where was Thor?

A strangled sound made her look up again. Stark—Tony—Tony was staring at Loki. The god was back on his feet, but something was different. His skin seemed lighter, more transparent, bluer, as if the Tesseract's light was shining through it from the inside. He turned then, looked at Tony—no, talked to Tony through that one look—and then his eyes started turning blue. The whites, the irises, everything glowed Tesseract blue. Light shone through his eyes, his mouth, fought the way through his wounds.

Was he going to die?

This was insane. The light was pulsing under his skin as if it was intent on escaping. If it tore him apart, they were all done for, she was sure. In fact, she was beginning to suspect all their hopes had been resting on Loki from the beginning. Why else would Thor not be here yet? Sure, he could help, but they'd all seen Mjolnir couldn't destroy the Aether, nor defeat it. Had Odin ordered his army to let Loki handle Malekith? Shouldn't there be somebody to help him then?

There must have been, she realised as her gaze landed on Fandral. It just hadn't been enough. This was out of their league, even Loki's. No wonder Hlin had been desperate.

She shifted and pain shot through her leg. It had been years since she'd been in Church if only to please her parents, and she'd never mustered the faith to believe in a higher power, but she thought, surrounded by Norse deities and powerful artefacts and filled with uncertainty, now might be a good time to start praying.

Malekith's words startled her out of her thoughts.

"You think this will help you?"

Her gaze slid to Elf's face, black and white and morphed into a frown. He raised his arm, and with it, the Aether.

Loki didn't reply. He probably couldn't. How had the Tesseract not torn him apart yet? His hair was a dark halo around his head, his arms slowly stretching out like some weapon.

And then there was blue. Jane covered her face, blinking past the brightness. Her body trembled—or was it the ground? A whirlwind of light raged where the two fighters should be, red and blue and white, until it stopped. A moment later, she saw them stagger backwards, away from each other. Loki's heel slipped into a hole in the ground, and Jane held her breath for a moment. Then he caught his balance and straightened, no longer the tired, bleeding man from before. This... This wasn't Loki. This was a weapon, lithe, and deadly, and proficient—Malekith was missing an arm and serious amounts of blood if the stains on the ground were anything to go by.

Let it all be his blood. Let it be over soon. Please. The very air was beginning to tremble, and she couldn't take this any longer.

Stark moaned at her side. She reached down to squeeze his shoulder, wishing he didn't have to watch this but knowing he would never look away.

Wherever Thor was, he should stay there. This... She swallowed and tried to blink away the pressure building up in her head. This was about to blow up.

Tears clouded her eyes, and then it did.

It was light and heat and ice all mixed into an inferno. Her hands flew up to protect her eyes, and still the brightness blinded her. White noise filled her ears. She was suspended in the moment, at the mercy of a force her body couldn't endure. There was no time to comprehend it, but she felt survival instincts screaming inside her. Another breath, and force would crush her. Yet it remained at bay, too close to cease causing her pain, but not close enough to obliterate her.

The sheer energy of such forces colliding should have wiped her out of existence, not leave her gasping on the ground. The taste of copper invaded her mouth. Pins and needles were all she could feel before she finally took in the smoothness beneath her palms, so cold it nearly burnt, and she forced herself to open her eyes.

Spots danced over her vision, orange, and chocolate brown, and so, so bright, then morphed into shapes. They came into sharpness surprisingly fast, and she lifted her gaze from her hands.

Everything was ice. The ground, the series of disproportionate spikes just high enough to hide her whole if she crouched, half of a dome rising over them all, thin, jagged, and already breaking. It stretched around the entire terrace, a makeshift wall in a crescent form, curling around Hlin and the prone forms of Fandral and Stark, who was cradled by ice shaped much like waves frozen in place.

In the middle of the crescent stood Loki. Ice had climbed up his legs and up to his ribs on the right side. His head hung low, his left arm limp. The right one was trapped in ice, fingers closed around a handle of a deep blue box.

She covered her mouth to cough, and her hand came away wet. Little red droplets stained her palm. Blood. God, she was alive. Blood was still coursing through her veins, breath pushing her lungs against her ribs.

Laughter bubbled on her lips and died as a dry sob. Then there were hands on her shoulders and blue eyes in front of her, and Thor cradled her to his chest.

"Thank the Norns," he murmured.

She closed her eyes.

~*oO*o*Oo*~

"Don't move."

Tony groaned. "I havn' 'ven op'n m' eyes ye'..." He coughed, trying to clear his throat. "I mean, I haven't even opened my eyes yet, how did you know?"

He forced his eyelids apart only to be greeted with a wide, far too innocent smile. "I'm a healer, Tony Stark."

He groaned again. "Then why do I feel like I've gotten deep fried?"

"Technically—" Hlin leaned forward and pressed her hand against his forehead "—that's not too far away from the truth. The Tesseract fried too many nerves in your body. It took us a whole night to heal you."

She didn't look all that tired, though, clean and dressed in white and lavender hues. He must have been asleep for some time, perhaps another day...

"I take it we won. A-and... A..." A lump formed in his throat.

"He's going to be all right." Hlin pointed to her right, and Tony followed her hand with his gaze. A breath caught in his throat, then broke free with too much force and turned into a strange mix between a sigh and a laugh. Loki was lying on a bed not more than a few steps away. Scratches criss-crossed over his pale skin, but his face was clean and his hair brushed away from his face. Still, he looked disturbingly fragile under the covers.

"And the others?"

Hlin nodded. "All alive and on the mend." Tony sighed with relief. "What happened? I remember Loki glowing all blue and some big explosions... How am I—how are we—?"

The smallest of frowns appeared on Hlin's brow. "Loki had the Casket. He made a...shield, of sorts. It was amazing, and I believe you're the reason he dared to reach for it." She paused. "It'll be all right if you encourage it."

"Have you Seen something?" She couldn't possibly know what would turn out peachy and what not otherwise. He and Loki weren't in the best place, no matter what improvements they'd made.

Hlin didn't answer, but the corners of her lips curled upwards, and that was an answer enough. Perhaps she'd Seen them somewhere in the future, spending time together or working up a sweat between the sheets—oh, no. No.

"Please tell me you've never had a vision of me and Loki having sex."

Her smile grew wider. "I'm quite sure Queen Frigga did."

Well. That was a whole new shade of awkward. Tony's body temperature increased by at least ten degrees, and he averted his gaze. His face was probably burning, but he was Tony done-worse Stark, and he wasn't going to hide just because of this.

"She seemed pleased with you," Hlin added and grinned. Tony pulled the covers over his head.

Time seemed to pass slowly for the rest of the day. Servants brought him food and a bowl and a washcloth, so he could clean himself. He ate some and drank a bit more. Most of the time, he spent half sitting, half lying in his bed, watching Loki breathe. Hlin brought him some strange concoction in the evening to help him sleep. It worked quickly. Just before his eyelids slid shut for the night, he saw a shadow—a silhouette of a person—by Loki's bed. Nobody was there when he woke up, but a chair was still by the god's bed where there had been none last night.

Loki awoke next afternoon. Tony was just making his first steps around the room (with Eir's permission), when he noticed motion from the corner of his eye, and turned to see Loki propped on his elbow.

"Lo!"

Tony dragged himself over as fast as he could and dropped himself into the chair.

A small smile greeted him, a sigh that couldn't be anything but relief.

"Tony. You're all right."

"Yeah." Something burnt behind his eyes. "You know, just deep-fried half my nerves, but, yeah. Yeah, I'm okay." He felt his face morph into a soppy grin.

Loki reached out and squeezed his hand. "We won, then."

"So I've been told. You were amazing. And terrifying. I'll have to be careful not to piss you off. Anyway. How are you feeling?"

Loki grimaced and propped his back against the headboard. "I miss our cats."

"Me too. We can go home now, right?"

Loki nodded. "Soon."

"Good."

Tony's gaze sank to their hands, Loki's in his, so different and such a perfect fit. "Listen." He swallowed and forced himself to look up again. "During the fight—"

"I'm sorry."

Tony's eyebrows shot up. "For what?"

"For not being willing to listen to you. When. When we talked about the apples..." Loki averted his gaze. "I want you to stay with me, but… During the fight, I did all right. I wished you were with me, that is true, but more than that, I was wondering where you were and hoping that you were safe. Even if it wasn't with me, I wanted you safe more than I wanted you by my side." A pause. "I could fight without a problem." Another pause, shorter, filled with a breath, and Loki's voice became quieter. "I used the Tesseract even though… When you were hit," Loki went on, his voice but a whisper, "I let the power in because defeating Malekith might have given somebody the opportunity to heal you. I would do the unspeakable for you, Tony, but I would do it even if you weren't there to encourage me."

Green eyes met Tony's again, a bit too wide, a bit too bright. "I got scared," Loki murmured, and Tony knew that fear, of loss, of death, "but if I could—the Tesseract… After what… I think—I think perhaps being scared is not a good reason to think something impossible."

Loki's grip on Tony's hand tightened. His lips parted, then closed again. "Losing you scares me," he said, and he sounded too careful, too breakable, and it made Tony want to wrap a blanket around them both, so he could hide them from the world. "But it wouldn't kill me. Even if it did—if it will—I would lose you to my fear much earlier than at your death, I think. Whatever you choose, I will spend the years we get with you. If you stay, stay because you want to, not because you would do me a favour. I could never repay you, and a life of debt is not what I'd wish for us."

Tony swallowed. His throat felt so dry it was a wonder his tongue didn't stick to it, but something was loosening in his chest. He exhaled long and soft.

"Listen. I've been thinking, too. When I saw you there, bleeding out… Hlin had taken us to Idun, Jane and me. She'd had a vision, so she flew us there to get an apple from Idun, and she told us enough to know it would either be you or me who'd be in mortal danger. The whole time, I wanted to get back to you, as if by being close I could keep you safe. Then I saw you, and I—" He sucked in a breath. "I always thought I'd be the one to bite the dust first, not you. After all, you've survived way worse than I did. And I always seem to think my presence can make everything better. It's weird. I know you can handle yourself, yet I still… My ego is a bit overgrown. The point is, though, that I realised I can and I have to trust you take care of yourself. Not that I'd ever be opposed to helping, but if I know you'll be okay even if I can't be there…

"I don't want to lose you. Not to anything. I want to stay by your side. Besides…"

He paused to wet his lips; they'd become suspiciously dry.

"The apples. They don't grant immortality, the regenerate cells, correct?"

Loki's eyebrows arched, his brow furrowing. "Yes. What of it?"

"I think we approached this topic wrong the last time. I didn't have enough information. I still don't. For example, are the apples the reason you live so long or do they merely... Well, would live for millennia anyway?"

"We'd live long without them. What does that have to do with it? You'd live longer than anyone on Earth, and you told me you can't do that."

Tony swallowed a sigh. He'd known this wasn't going to be easy. Hell, that was an understatement.

"It matters. Look, there's a difference between having a human lifespan or a few millennia as your only options and being able to choose anything in between. If the apples magically regenerate your cells... Theoretically, I could grow old. I'd grow old with people I know and love, and then eat enough of the apples to get younger again. If I can age, it means I can live a semblance of a human life."

Loki looked him in the eyes. "You would still have to say goodbye eventually."

"Maybe, but not every few years. People would die, and it would be hard, but I... We could build a home somewhere. We wouldn't have to be on the move all the time, right?"

Loki didn't answer right away. He frowned again. "It would be possible..."

"Great. I think... I think I could do that. With you."

Loki blinked. Did it again. His lips curled up just a little. "You... You'd want to?"

"Yeah." He'd had long hours to think things through, weighting Loki against Pepper and Earth and loss, until he pushed the thought aside because these things couldn't be weighted, so why had he been trying to attribute some numeric value to them? He wanted everything, and he was willing to compromise. Perhaps he'd get tired of being something more than a human, or perhaps after getting older a few times, he'd wish to spend his time with Loki instead. True, he was only one person, but Tony had never kept many true friends. Besides, Bruce and Steve were a bit of a special case, too, so perhaps he wouldn't lose everyone he knew…

"Yeah, I really would. You... Us. It's...something that will remain. Uh. I don't know how to put this into words, but... I want to keep the things mortality grants us. And I want to keep my friends for as long as they can stick around. Pepper, and Happy, even Rhodey—I'm really glad to call them my friends and I want to do so until they die, and if I ever fought with them and we didn't hear from each other for a while, I'd trust we'd fix it again. But you, I'd go after. With you, it wouldn't be enough to know you'd be there six months later to complain about the newest shit I pulled. I'd want you there to stop me or to help me do it in the first place." He grinned for a moment. "I guess what I'm saying is that I want you in my life, and I want to stay in yours."

He got a smile in return, not very wide but all the more genuine for it.

"What about... I don't want to be dependent on you. If you stay—I want you to stay, you have no idea how much I want you to—but I can't—"

Tony felt the grip on his hand tighten before it disappeared.

"How do I...deal with that? I've never been this attached to anyone."

Honestly, Tony probably wasn't the right person to give advice about healthy relationships to anyone, but then again, "healthy" meant something else for every relationship, so perhaps it didn't matter quite as much.

"One day at a time," he said. "Possibly with the help of those two meowing devils. And mostly following your gut... I think. I mean, in the time you decided to"—he couldn't bring himself to say the word ignore—"have some you time, you dabbled into your heritage. You tried to discover who you are. Though I think self-discovery should involve at least one pizza."

Loki smiled a bit, and this time, it brought a spark to his eyes as well. "I took the Casket from the vault, you know. I almost left it there. I kept telling myself I wasn't there for that, that it wasn't the time to deal with it, but something made me go back and take it anyway." He averted his gaze. His fingers curled around the sheets. "I hate being one of them. I hate it. But I am one of them. And during the…interrogation, I thought for the first time that being a Jotun might not make me a monster by default. I thought of... him and... Of what people can do, of what different individuals choose to do... Tony. I might... not be evil, right? I'm not a monster unless I choose to act like one?"

"Of course you're not evil! Or a monster!"

Didn't Loki know that? Hadn't Tony reassured him already? They'd talked about it once, he was sure—and he mentally slapped himself. Of course one talk wouldn't change integrated beliefs. But there had been so many other issues to work through...

"I know you don't see me as one, but I'm afraid you're a bit biased, Tony." Loki sighed. "They're monsters, you know. The monsters. If I'm a Jotun, it makes me a monster. Unless I'm the exception, and not one of them—but that couldn't be true. People are a lovely mirror, and I—I always saw a monster staring back. I was one, and didn't want to be one even as a part of me relished it—so I must have been one. To think any differently... You could have told me I wasn't a monster a thousand times, and I would feel better because of the effort you made and still not believe a word. But somehow..." Loki's hand, knuckles white from the force in his grip, released the sheets. "For the first time, I had a thought that was the opposite of what I was brought up with, and I believed it. I still do, at times. I... Tony, is that going to be enough?"

He thought he understood now. Some things, you had to realise in your own, never mind you might have been hearing them your whole life.

"It's enough for now," he said. "Great, actually. You'll get there."

"Thank you. Tony?"

"Yes?"

"I'd take that pizza now."

Tony's lips stretched into a smile.

A/N: Thank you for reading. Comments are appreciated.

~shades