Author's Note: so the original author's note got deleted somehow, but...anyway. I hope you enjoy this chapter. I worked hard on it. I'm trying to update regularly, but life interferes. Often. Sigh. Anywho, enjoy!

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Chapter Four
Ultimatum

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You are the Sleeper. The black wolf watches you now.

Alex sat stretched out atop the black knit coverlet on her bed, absently stretching her bad leg to keep it limber as she considered the strange words the Cube had shown her two nights before. The Swedish writing on the shimmering, shifting surface of the Cube had disappeared within seconds of the twenty-three-year-old reading it. Had the cameras picked it up? So far no one had said anything to her about it, or about her late-night visit to the containment cell in her pajamas. If nothing else, her dad should've come to inquire gently—he tried to keep all of his questions about her activities gentle, unless he just grew too exasperated—why she'd been up so late. He worried about how much sleep she got. He worried about everything.

Forcing the uncomfortable thought away—she didn't like making him worry, but she couldn't seem to stop doing things that upset him—Alex focused on the words. What did that mean, "You are the Sleeper?" Was the Cube talking to her, specifically? Or were its words just another spat of gibberish in a long string of mumbo-jumbo? Who was the black wolf? She still hadn't figured that one out; if she could, she had the thought that she could probably figure out who the Sleeper was, too. After all, people didn't just sit around and watch people. If it was someone in the underground compound, Alex was pretty sure she could single out the Sleeper by process of elimination.

She didn't want to consider the idea that she, herself, could be the Sleeper. Didn't want to consider it, because if she was, she needed to know why. The only thing Alex could think of was her coma…but how could the Cube know about that? And if it knew about that, what else did it know about? How long would her secrets remain secret, if this glowy blue box could read her past as easily as Coulson read the funny papers?

Which was the reason she hadn't said anything to her father. She didn't want his thoughts following the train of hers, because if her whacked-out theory was right—if she was the Sleeper—she didn't want her dad finding out anything the Cube might tell him about her. It could—no doubt would—destroy him. She kept her journal entries passworded for a reason.

Thigh and hip muscles aching, her hip-joint throbbing sharply in time with her heart, Alex flopped back on her bed, the pillows cushioning her body. The mattress bounced, jostling her body; her bad leg jiggled limply like so much useless meat. She flexed the toes of her right foot. Ha, she could still do that. Wonderful. Now if only she could rotate her ankle, bend her knee, or walk without the stupid crutch. If only she could still dance…

I will not have a pity party right now, Alex told herself sharply as tears stung her eyes. There are plenty of people who have had worse breaks in life than I have. Like Steven. I will not whine about this. She sat up and swung her good foot over the edge of the mattress, shoving with both hands to move her right leg alongside her left. She managed to get to her feet without the crutch, balancing awkwardly on one foot. Though it hurt like heck, she hopped on her left foot to her computer and booted it up. She wasn't going to mope about what she'd lost when she had information to analyze. When depressed, find something useful to do. Tony Stark had been the one to give her that little piece of advice.

When life gives you lemons, kid, don't make lemonade. Lemonade has tons of sugar and will make you fat. Find someone you don't like and squeeze lemon juice in their eyes instead. Then use the lemons to build some kind of alternate-nuclear device that powers hybrid cars and bouncy castles and make a crap-ton of money. Then use the money to buy Girl Scout cookies. They'll make you fat, too, but it's for a good cause.

Alex smiled, thinking back to Tony's first-ever visit with her. It had been entirely against her father's wishes, but the super-genius had had a bone to pick with S.H.I.E.L.D.'s director and didn't have any compunction about following him into a private hospital (which of course the multi-billionaire owned) and through mazes of bland, white-tiled hallways stinking of latex and disinfectant. Nick had been ready to throw Tony out of Alex's seventh-story hospital room window when he'd followed Nick inside the private room, but Tony had completely ignored the imposing S.H.I.E.L.D. director the moment he'd seen Alex. His entire demeanor had changed. The first thing Tony Stark had done after introducing himself to a painfully thin, still-recovering Alex was to make a disdainful comment about hospital food and order her a handmade pepperoni and extra-cheese gourmet monstrosity from Brooklyn's Pizza. For Alex, it had been love at first bite. Tony was still her favorite person outside of her S.H.I.E.L.D. family. To this day, she associated the smells of gooey cheese and cooking pizza meat with Iron Man.

"Computer," Alex said, the mere sound of her voice in the emptiness of her room enough to wake up the voice-recognition program, "listen to me. Access Microsoft Word document 'Cube translations—Swedish.'" The document of Cube translations, formatted as a table-chart for easy reading, popped up on her screen. "Select Home Menu, option-Find. Type the following: quote-wolf-end-quote. Initiate Find-task." It took the search aspect of the Word program less than a minute to find the first instance of the word "wolf" in the translations.

Wolf and bear come…Wolf run from winter blood. Wolf lost to thorns. Black wolf need sleeper. Frowning, Alex ripped open a bag of Skittles and popped a handful into her mouth. Synthetic fruity sweetness exploded in her mouth when her teeth crunched down on the thin candy shells. Chewing contemplatively, she studied the translations. Were the "black bear" and the "black wolf" the same being? Apparently both were having issues with "thorns." And according to the first set of translations, the Sleeper needed the black bear and the black wolf needed the Sleeper.

"Computer, record the following," Alex commanded. "'Notation on Chart A—probability of black bear and black wolf being same individual? High. Question: Who is Red Death? Possibly Johann Schmidt, codename Red Skull? Possible. Probability? Unknown."

She scanned the first set of translations again when something nagged at her, a wisp of memory. The nagging sensation increased when her eyes focused on Block One-Two. Alex's gaze landed on a phrase that seemed to practically jump out at her. Need son of the hearth. What did that mean, "son of the hearth?" Popping another palm-full of Skittles, absently reminding herself that she'd need to brush her teeth after she was done chewing on multicolored cavities (as Tony called them), she sat back in her chair. The pain in her left hip—her so-called "good" hip—tried to distract her, but Alex had a nagging clue to follow now, and she wouldn't back off until it was over. Curiosity was what killed the cat, according to the old saying, but what most people forgot was that the proverb ended with "and satisfaction brought it back." She wasn't giving up this new trail of inquiry until she either passed out from exhaustion or came to the end of it.

"Computer, open web browser, find search engine." When a Google window appeared on her screen, Alex settled more comfortably in her computer chair and stretched out her twisted right leg, flexing her toes. Flexing the stiff fingers of her right hand, she added, "Type the following: quote-son of the hearth-end-quote."

Scads of hyperlinks appeared on the search page. Alex bit back a sigh. On second thought, maybe she'd convince her dad to assign a troll to do the tedious work on this project. Otherwise, this might take forever.

Whatever, she thought. I signed up for this, so I'm going to do it. Let's get started. The best place to go first, of course, was Wikipedia. Basic info would give her a place to start looking.

She'd just clicked on the hyperlink that read "Vesta—Wikipedia: the Online Encyclopedia" when someone knocked on her door.

"Come in," Alex tossed back over her shoulder. It was probably one of the trolls—Natasha's name for the rookie grunts who rotated out every six months—bringing Alex her lunch. She could eat later. She was busy now.

But it wasn't a troll. It was Coulson. He flashed her a tight smile and said, "Hey, kiddo. You busy?"

For some reason the words sent a frisson of unease shivering down Alexandra's spine. She eyed the man she'd called Uncle since toddlerhood and wondered if she ought to lie and say she was. There was a strained quality to Coulson's smile and a tightness around his eyes that gave her the idea that it wouldn't matter if she was busy or not. Someone wanted her for something, something that apparently couldn't wait. So she gave him a small smile, saved her data, and shut down her computer. By the time she'd turned around to get up, Coulson was already there with her crutch held out.

Ignoring the prickles of irritation heating the back of her neck and something that curdled in her stomach like shame, Alex slipped her hand into the arm-brace part of the crutch and let Coulson tighten the three metal bands that clamped around her wrist, forearm, and elbow. Without those clamps, she couldn't guarantee always being able to hold onto the crutch. The nerves and a few of the smaller bones in her right hand had been damaged in the crash that had also ruined her right leg. This way, she didn't have to focus on keeping her sometimes-spasmodic fingers curled around the crutch handle. She just had to lean her weight on the rubber grip, trusting to the clamps to keep the crutch from falling to the ground—and taking Alex with it.

"Thank you," Alex mumbled to Coulson. Being helped usually made her angry—she could do things for herself; slowly, but she could do them!—but not this time. Coulson knew better than to try helping her with something as routine as getting crutched-up; he'd only do it if they were in a hurry or something important was going on. So why were they in a hurry? What important thing could possibly involve her? Unless S.H.I.E.L.D. Underground was under attack. But the claxons would've been shrieking and he would've told her…

Forcing back a flash of panic, trying to keep her heart steady so she didn't get a blood-pressure migraine, Alex followed Coulson out of the Reverse-Tower. When she passed through the shadows beneath one of the metal arches supporting the low concave ceiling, a shiver ran through her and for a split second, she thought she saw the white puff of her breath misting past her lips.

Then the air warmed again. Alex shook her head. Nerves. It was just nerves. She was thinking too much about "long sleep in winter" and "winter blood." Whatever.

Just nerves.

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Loki gritted his teeth as he followed the Midgardian girl and her…Loki could not help but think of him as her protector. The girl had been in the midst of following of line of inquiry that particularly intrigued the pseudo- Æsir. Son of the hearth. In olden times, that title had been applied to many immortals. One of the Olympians known as Vesta, for example. And Frigg.

The Frost Giant's lips parted as a short, sharp pain pierced his chest, and for a moment he stood as frozen as if the Cask of Ancient Winters had blasted him into enchanted wintry stasis. In his mind's eye he saw the tumble of lustrous hair like dark honey and eyes the color of well-aged brandy, full lips that had never hesitated to kiss away the pain of childhood hurts. Slender, elegant hands as deft with comb and wet child-locks as with spindle and woolen thread or slender Asgardian sword. You are our son, Loki, and we your family. Frigg. His moth-

Loki's teeth came together with a cutting swiftness that flooded his mouth with the coppery sting of blood from his bitten cheek. No. He had no time for such soft sentiments now. He had a mission—to find a way to return to Asgard as proud prince, Thor's equal, son of Odin. Until then, he couldn't afford to think on Frigg's words to him while the All-Father lay in the Odinsleep.

And the girl was getting away.

He followed her because whatever was happening seemed out of the ordinary, and anything out of the ordinary interested him. So long as the mortal girl was responsible for cataloguing the various snippets of prophecy or what-have-you that the tesseract was spitting out, Loki would keep a sharp eye on her welfare. She was a useful tool, dedicated to unearthing the secrets of the tesseract's garbled messages. If something attempted to interfere with her fulfilling that goal, the immortal prince would step in and see to it that she was left unmolested. He wanted the messages deciphered, and it seemed as if S.H.I.E.L.D. was leaving the girl to the task. Well enough. If S.H.I.E.L.D. brought in someone new at this point, it would lay waste to all the effort Loki had spent in learning about the girl and her investigative methods.

Mild irritation scrabbled beneath Loki's skin like insect legs as he was forced to match his own long stride to the crippled girl's stilted, incredibly awkward limping. She moved so gods-cursed slowly! Her gait was a ponderous affair: she would balance on her left foot, swipe the crutch perhaps half a pace in front of her, lean heavily on the crutch, swing her shortened right leg around and forward to lurch toward the metal device, and then take an ungainly, hopping sort of step with her left foot before repeating the entire process. Pain flashed across the girl's face with every step. Loki thought she must've been trying to hide it—or the girl's protector was singularly unobservant, even for a Midgardian—but he noted the telltale signs: the way the lines around her eyes deepened both when she put weight on her left leg and swung out with her right; how the air seemed to wheeze out of her lungs with every lurch forward, yet smoothed out whenever she was given a moment to rest against the smooth metal wall; the fierce grip she held on the crutch handle, so that her fingertips flooded purple with blood but her joints blazed white as bare knucklebones beneath the sun.

Loki wondered suddenly why the mortal simply didn't use a wheeled chair to get around. Surely it would be less taxing—and less humiliating—to rely on the support of such a contraption instead of forcing such pain on herself. Was it pride, then? His lips twisted into a sneer. Only a Midgardian would allow pride to make themselves look even more foolish than they typically did. His ingrained curiosity had him narrowing his eyes in speculation. Why did she use a crutch? If only he could read the energy signature of the girl's thoughts…

But in that, he knew himself to be forever thwarted. Just as many individuals possessed a degree of tolerance or even immunity to certain drugs or diseases, so too did some possess a tolerance for seiðr and its uses. This girl had only one such gift—her thoughts were quite a muddle to attempt to read. Using seiðr to thought-sense wasn't difficult, but every time Loki tried to catch a glimpse of the girl's thoughts they came through smeared, like a child's drawing left out to melt away in the rain. The same was true of the mortal currently escorting the girl down the corridor. Both of them possessed some sort of block.

Finding out what caused such a gift, and whether it had anything to do with blood or training or something else altogether, was another of Loki's goals while spying on the human girl. So far, he'd had no luck identifying anything of the sort. The little skadedjur hardly ever left her rooms unless summoned. The fair-skinned mortal soldier was no kin of hers, and her parents possessed no mental block.

The puzzle of it was maddening.

Finally, after what felt like several small eternities, the mortal soldier brought the girl to a door. Passing a small white square the thickness of the sole of a lady's slipper across a red circle of light, which flashed green, the human male gestured for the girl to precede him once the door slid open. Loki slipped into the room behind the girl, close enough to catch a whiff of whatever floral scent she bathed with. On the edge of that he caught the aroma of sweet fruit from her breath. She'd been eating those odd, multicolored little beans again.

The girl froze when she saw the dark-skinned human warrior—her father—seated behind a massive metal desk, empty of anything but a computer and two manila folders stuffed with papers. The girl's name was written in place of labels on the folders' protruding tabs. Aurora Alexandra Fury. So that was the source of her desire to be known as "Alex." Loki saw, somewhat to his surprise, that "Alex" had gone nearly gray with shock and…was that fear? She started to step back and nearly lost her balance. Only her "protector" catching her weight kept her from tumbling to the floor.

"Have a seat, Aurora," the girl's father said gently. Loki raised an eyebrow. His tone certainly didn't match the girl's reaction; yet the mortal didn't seem surprised by that reaction, either. Intrigued, Loki leaned back against the wall and folded his arms across his chest. He rather thought it would be interesting to watch this little drama play out. For one thing, it might negatively affect his plans.

With some difficulty, "Alex" sat down. Though her voice shook—the pseudo-Æsir could not imagine why—she managed to say, "I'm over eighteen. You don't have the right to look at those."

"As your father, you're right—I don't. As your employer, considering the agency you currently work for, I do." The human warrior leaned forward, folding his hands atop his desk. He seemed to be trying to appear harmless, yet his daughter shrank back from him. "You have to pass a psych-eval to remain in SHIELD Underground, Aurora. Remember? Living underground can have unhealthy side-effects on the human psyche." When the girl looked as if she might protest, he held up a hand. "I haven't looked at them…yet. But I'm giving you a warning. Do you know when the last time you left your room was?"

"Couple days ago," she said sharply. "Why?"

"And before that?"

After a moment's silence, she murmured, "Six days."

"Before that?"

A longer stretch of silence, this one tinged with embarrassment and an emotional undercurrent Loki recognized as…panic. "Five weeks…I think. I don't…I don't remember," the girl confessed softly, bowing her head. Loki raised an eyebrow. The girl must have been something of a recluse if she she'd only left her room three times in nearly two months.

Nick drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly. He fixed his single eye on his daughter, taking in the hunched shoulders and ashen face hiding behind the curtain of curly dark hair. Still gentle, he asked, "Aurora…when was the last time you went outside?" The girl began to shake. The swirls of panic in the room grew thicker. Loki's skin twitched as if insects were crawling up and down his spine. Alex said nothing. She merely hunched down further. The mutilated fingers of her right hand flexed and spasmed. "I can tell you," her father said softly. "You haven't left S.H.I.E.L.D. Underground, haven't seen sunshine or breathed fresh air, in over sixteen months. Rory, you can't keep doing this."

"I'm fine," the girl protested. Ignoring her feeble words, Loki narrowed his eyes and studied her from an altered perspective. He'd assumed the girl was so wan and thin, so unhealthy, because of her twisted leg and whatever gave her the frequent crippling headaches that laid her out in bed for hours at a time. Perhaps he'd been wrong. Was it her seclusion that made the Midgardian so sickly? "Dad, I-"

"You've got two choices," Nick Fury said, cutting her off. A spark of defiance flashed in the girl's blue eyes, only to be snuffed out quickly under her father's implacable expression. Loki barely refrained from rolling his eyes. Mortals were so weak-willed. The human soldier added, "You're not gonna like either one of them, but that's the way things are, and there's nothing you can do about it. You can either start going outside for an hour or two every day or so…or you're leaving SHIELD and we're sending you back to Thornwood Home."

The girl's face drained completely of color. Loki couldn't suppress a momentary flare of alarm. What, by Surtur's blade, was Thornwood Home? If it could make the girl blanch like that, what could it be? He would have to look into that. Unknown variables could be problematic. And if it somehow interfered with the girl's ability to translate the Cube messages…

Irritation and disgust knotted in his belly, flooding his mouth with a sour taste like bile. Because of the mortal girl's frailty, her emotional weakness, the progress he'd made regarding the Cube's attempts to communicate was now in jeopardy. Wretched Midgardians. And of course, as usual, Loki would have to remedy the problem with his wit and cunning and (no doubt) his famed silver tongue. Because the moment Nick Fury had told the girl she must go outside - where she was clearly loath to be - a plan had unfurled in an eye-blink in the disguised Frost Giant's mind. If the girl needed to be persuaded to set foot out of doors, and the excursion needed to be made pleasurable to her, he would make it happen.

"No!" Alex was struggling to her feet, her fingers - stiff from both damage and panic - scrabbling at the slick surface of her father's desk for some purchase, but her crippled leg refused to hold her weight. She would have fallen, but the pale mortal warrior was there, catching her before she could hit the ground. Feebly she beat at his chest with her fists, shaking her head vehemently as she continued to keen, "No! Nononononono!"

"Aurora," Nick said sharply, but the commanding whiplash of his tone didn't cut through her panic. "Aurora! It's all right! It's okay!"

"Alex," the other warrior murmured gently, cradling her, rocking her, "it's okay. I'm going to be with you. We're not just gonna shove you out there. It'll be okay. We'll start off small, okay? Just half an hour. You can do it. It'll be okay."

The girl was gasping now through her tears. Pain twisted her features. "I can't," she whispered. "I can't, I can't…"

Utterly fed up, Loki stepped forward. Still shrouded in shadows, unseen to the human eye, he swooped down beside the trembling Midgardian and laid a chill hand on the back of her neck. He leaned into her and blew a whisper of chill into her ear, a cool comfort that froze the edges of panic into brittle ice. A flick of power shattered it, smoothing out the shards of fear until the girl was breathing fairly normally.

Then, exerting the subtlest push on her mind, Loki breathed, "Thirty minutes is not so hard. Not really."

Drawing a shuddering breath, Alex curled the fingers of her left hand in the pale warrior's and whispered, "Okay. Okay. Thirty minutes…thirty minutes isn't so hard. Not really. I can…I can do that. I can try."

Loki smiled. Tomorrow he would be waiting for her. And perhaps, just perhaps, he could use that time to nudge her in the proper direction regarding the Cube.

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Author's Note: reviews are love!