(First part of today's double finale update)

22.

. . .

Asgard's seasons were unnatural things, kept to schedules and reliable predictions by hidden technology and the skyseers who tended the machines. Autumns meant long months for a good harvest's end before the typically mild winters, and many nights of storms to drive away the gathered heat of summer. But there were also softer evenings like this one in between the rains, where few clouds gathered to block the still-warm night and its ribbons of blue nebulae and the constellations that, to old scholars, marked the histories of the lost. Some of those histories were all but forgotten themselves, stars that once had names and stories and now often just twinkled, silent.

Some were newer, and from the private lounge where handmaidens had once laughed and did their daily work and rested comfortably, the prince and the hunter could see the star that marked Frigga's high place. They didn't speak of her now, though in a way she whispered along behind every word. Loki told Kara a few other stories instead, because the libraries he still cherished knew how to remember those old stars. He remembered the Valkyries who gave up their names and their lives to lock in the queen of Hel, whose stars gleamed green and bright to keep her caged. He remembered the one that marked Odin's own grandfather, who'd run off into a mystery that reignited a war.

Then there was the old warrior who wanted to die in battle and instead actually fell to a heart attack from a mouse startling him at night. Every warrior of Asgard that had known him promptly lied on his behalf and the wee mouse became, in a particularly over the top tale, some sort of alien rat-guard designed by ancient Kree to fell this particular old man for reasons that got muddied with every new retelling.

Reality had created stranger things, so the big lie passed thin muster and even now the warrior had his place in the sky - a brownish dwarf star deep in a constellation that no one at the funeral had the heart to point out was long ago known, of course, as the Mouse.

That tale got a laugh out of Kara, an honest one that rippled through the night like clear water across pebbles. Loki liked that sound, wishing he could have heard it often earlier in his life, but at least it was here now. He knew if he died tomorrow, there would be no star for him. Not even a small and forgettable one, lost in some mythologically appropriate cluster or behind the old sky-serpents. It didn't need saying, just acceptance.

It was too late for much else, so instead he watched her laugh, and lost himself for a while in wishing that things had been different, knowing that was a waste of his dwindling time.

After the stories, they were quiet again for a while, drinking the wine and thinking their own private thoughts. The nebulae bloomed stronger colors when the night was at its darkest, the heart of one of them revealing a thin but beautiful string of purple among the blue that might have been a new galaxy thriving among that sea of light.

Loki finally broke the quiet, no longer interested in lying tonight. "Why won't you hate me?"

Kara kept looking at the nebula. "I'm angry, prince. I get angry a lot, but I don't have time for hate. It's a powerful thing, that much emotion, and not something I'm going to give up for small reasons." She snorted and looked down into the last dregs of the wine in her goblet, a soft noise, not bitter. "I didn't hate the other girls, and they tried to break me, make me more like them for years. They resented that I always seemed just a little different, and yet still kept the Queen's favor. People smell the strange on you, even when your very career depends on trying to fit in. I've noticed that. It's harder to pretend sometimes than it is to fight. I'd rather fight, I suppose. Not everyone can."

She took a breath, her words not answering the heart of his question, answering it in a way he could hear anyway. "If they'd really known why I stood where I did, how many times I've put on my blades and watched men gurgle for their lives while gentler folk slept, watched a Queen at the darker and dirtier work of ruling, I don't think they would have been so envious. I can't hate them for being fools."

"Does that make me a fool, then?"

She glanced at him, one eyebrow arched in gentle mocking. "In the annals of loaded questions, there's a superweapon."

That pulled a roar of a laugh out of Loki, unexpected and real and joyful, tilting him near off the side of his chair. "I swear I hadn't intended that, but you're right, it is."

"I don't believe you," said Kara, and to his astonishment, she was still teasing. The air around her seemed made of light and behind her head ringed the bluest nebula, and while she smiled, he first righted himself on his chair. Then he leaned to kiss her, a soft brush of his lips only, waiting for her to pull away. She had every right to change her mind, to walk away, to leave him alone for his last night.

She didn't, and he moved to pull back instead, wanting to warn her off, tell her there was still time to consider hating him, and to leave. He realized there was a hand against his face, a trace of fingers across the high sweep of his cheekbone, and then the hand moved back into the fall of dark hair at the base of his neck. She kissed him back, firmly, and he tried to say something, his lips parting against hers. At the taste of her breath along his tongue, he forgot whatever that word might have been and leaned in to the sensation of that hand at his neck slipping further up to trace careful fingernails across his scalp.

His hands found her body and pulled her gently from her chair towards him, finding two belts wrapped tight around her waist, and all their cargo bumping underneath his own fingertips and that shook him loose from his entrancement for a moment. "How many godsdamned knives do you have?"

"Truthfully, sometimes turns out to be one less than I need." She laughed and looked down at the array of small weapons, not apologetic, but a little embarrassed and a lot amused. She toyed with one of the buckles, and by the motion of her fingers he realized it would be better to let her deal with them - there was some sort of additional mechanic to the clasp, no doubt meant to fend off someone in a fight who thought they had a clever idea.

He waited until the belts were loosened, and then he found a strip of skin under the hem of her tunic where it had pulled up. Not all the skin of her waist was soft, there were scars near the lift of her hip and along her back, and Loki let his fingers trace them, too, as he leaned in for another kiss. A brief one, because what he wanted to do, and then did, was run his lips along the soft line of her jaw, and find the curve of her throat. She leaned her head back at his nuzzle, exposing the softness there, and now both her hands were in his hair, stroking and pulling gently while he breathed in all of her.

He felt the rumble of her words in her throat before she said them, a pleasant vibration against his lips where they pressed against his bared teeth, trying to not bite in desire. Not yet. "Gods, you're warm. I didn't know you'd be that warm."

He held still a second, his thoughts swirling, suddenly struck with the reminder of what he actually was. There hadn't been any fear in what she said, or disgust, but he could add that all by himself. Kara's hands tightened in his hair, sensing his distress, and she pulled him back away from her neck to force her mouth against his again. More of that hungry pressure, hot and full. He felt the lick of her tongue against his, the taste of the fine red wine and the elderflowers that made it. "I don't care what you are. Forget that for right now."

"I can't," he said against her mouth, and her hand came back to his face, touching his brow, then the corner of his lip with featherlike grace. He grabbed at the wrist and brushed his lips and the tip of his tongue against the palm, pausing when she cupped it along his jaw, enjoying the sensation as it joined all the rest of the building heat along his nerves. She pressed in further to him, and now she caressed the length of his tense neck with her other hand, her mouth working its way up to the soft place behind his ear and his jaw, and the kiss there was long and suckling and not gentle.

Wanting was such a small word for what roared inside his chest. It had been a long time since someone touched Loki. Since he'd let someone touch him, since he admitted to himself he needed to be touched again, to feel like a person, if not a whole one. Wanting to be wanted, even if just for a few hours. It wasn't love, it couldn't be. They still didn't know each other, not really, and there was no time to be better friends. Here also he had no illusions. But still, that tiny word that contained an inferno. Wanting.

One night, in shadow, for the old memories that hadn't been made.

He couldn't forget what he was, but the nearness of her, the smell of leather and soft honey and some warm and dusty smell, like a sweetened old book rediscovered amidst ancient stacks, made his own horror scream elsewhere, quiet and small. He touched her again, looking to curl his arms around her waist and crush her close, but his hands knew what he truly wanted more than he, and his long fingers slid up under her tunic to find all the other curves of her. He reached higher than he thought, and that was how he realized she'd silently lifted herself from her chair, coming to sit astride his lap, the pressure of her breast now full in his hand.

Soft breathing, like music, as his hands continued to explore her. He wasn't sure how her tunic slipped all the way off, if he'd done it, if she had, he was too busy finding other scars, wondering what their stories were. There was one long slice down her side, just behind her left breast. It gleamed pale under the starlight, this one more than the others looking like it might still hurt when weather turned ill, and he kissed his way along the length of it, feeling that hurt for his own.

Her hand traced a gentle path down his spine as he did, his own shirt's ties pulled free an eternity ago and the fabric long gone. Air drifted cooler against his skin, and she was right, he didn't know he could still feel embers underneath the surface. Yet they burned at every touch, hottest along his thighs where they shifted under her when she lifted up and pressed the length of her body hard against his torso.

There was a narrow bed in this private lounge, more of a long chaise, but as she pulled his face back up to hers one more time, her teeth pulling gently at his lip, her breath filling his mouth like sacred smoke, he wondered if they'd bother making it there.

She pulled away a second later, her hands dropping with a brush across his bare chest, a touch of pressure across those thighs and then along all the rest of him, still in his trousers, and she tugged at the belt he still wore. They were going to make it to the bed, by Gods, because by the promise of her touch, that was where she was going to drag him if he didn't rise to his feet and move.

Kara didn't get out of his way, however, deliberately staying where she was, so as he rose he slid against her. Taller than she by far, his hips found the softness of her belly where she pressed taut against him and then moved, teasing what lay at the base of his thighs, the smile behind the kiss on his chest saying she knew full well what she was doing to him. "I thought you didn't torture," he said, hearing the pained gasp in his voice.

"I don't like causing unnecessary pain. You, however, have already been a pain in my arse for days, did you think I'd give in and make everything simple?" Fingers dug into his shoulders, and he craved more. He went to press against her again and suddenly she wasn't there.

Loki froze for a moment, frightened that now, at the height of his want, she would choose to leave him as wounded as possible. Then he saw the shadow of her between him and that nearby bed. Her hands pulled at him, still toying at his waist, and there were no tricks to his belt to stop her. He saw the glint of more of her knives as the rest of her clothes were set aside, and thought to ask if there might be something even more unpleasant hidden where he might want to find it the least, and then decided if that was how he was going to go, so be it.

They were bare now, and the night was crawling deeper black, swallowing the stars. If the air cooled further, they didn't know or care. She lay there, peaceful for a moment, and he realized that she was allowing him leverage. Using that, there was no point in only him suffering tease and torment. He held a wrist out of his way, gentle but implacable, and his mouth, open and full of heat, traveled his chosen path of her down until he found that place that felt hot enough to match.

Her hips lifted, and she made a soft noise, but his arm was long enough to hold that one of hers while he worked to make her feel the same agony that coursed through him. Her other arm, he allowed to stay free. She didn't try to push him away. Instead her fingers tangled thick in his hair, and by their tightness and the rise of a clenched thigh he knew she hurt just as deep for that same wanting. He paused at the right moment to cause her a moan of frustration, nuzzling there at the soft hair, and then the belly. He distracted himself with the soft curve along the buried bone of a hip just long enough for her arm to break free of his grip.

She slid down a little even as she now had both hands against his shoulders, tugging at him. She didn't want any more games. He could have toyed with them both for hours, but by the next groan she made at the bare and teasing lick of his tongue, he decided that would be more pain than either of them wanted.

He rose instead, her moving with him, and she guided, and thought left, and all those clever ideas, all of the broken past, all of him was instead lost to the sea of another stolen hour, under the garden that was a darkening sky and all its fading stars.

Once, he thought at one point, disjointed and broken and glad for it. They would have only this once.

In the wake of that pleasure they made for each other, he found he was wrong again, and the next time, not long after, she stayed atop him, in full control of what she wanted to where he simply obeyed, and the sounds they made would have called a guard, if Loki had not chosen so abandoned a place in the shadowed palace.

And the next, slower and not made of agony, but only the softness of all those promises that had never been made. They slept in between, more like a drift, a dreamless haze where the past lived for a few hours and they could pretend it had all been something more, and there would be no more to say until dawn threatened to break and take them apart, as it had the last time they had almost been friends.

. . .

Loki could see the first gleam of morning light along her outline, as she pulled her tunic back on. As much as he wanted to, he could not stop the sun from rising. He watched her instead of the window, not sure of what to say. If there was anything left to say. Then he remembered that, yes, there was.

He shifted on the long chaise, not wanting to move. He didn't want to speak, either, but it was going to be necessary. The silence between them right now was warm, and he liked it very much. The sound of a thin blanket shifting along his bare waist drew a look from her, though, and he knew it was time to break the moment. "Odin is alive."

Kara looked down at herself without a word and snapped her belts back into place.

"I left him on Midgard, like an exile, and not unlike what he did to Thor back when so much of this happened. He's been masked from most eyes, but that won't last much longer. Heimdall will soon find him once I'm gone. I'll tell you exactly where he is, if you still want, but before you win that from me, a word of counsel."

"What's that?" She was neutral again, but no thin whisper of controlled coldness trailed underneath her tone.

"Don't kill him, Kara." Loki watched her move to where her soft boots lay not far from his. "It's what he wants, and for my own anger, I wouldn't give it to him. I think that's why this terrible thing I did was so easy. He let me, I suspect. But I couldn't kill him." He paused, thinking. "Where I left him, they think he's nothing but a small old man, and that's what he thinks, too. All he can remember is that his children never visit and that his wife is dead. So the nurses meant to tend that old crow leave him be. A bitter story, a common one, and in its way, a true one, too."

"Where?"

"New York, it's…" Loki trailed off, looking at her, reading her face. She knew where and what the human city was, if vaguely. "It was my fault, and it was his fault, and you think it was your fault, too."

Kara abruptly turned away. He finally hurt her, and he hadn't wanted to. "I was supposed to be there," she whispered.

"You tried to be. With all my anger, even I must say he tried to save her. If I'd suspected what would be made, I wouldn't have said what I did. If is the cruelest damned word in the universe, and you can't kill a word, not with any of your knives. But killing Odin won't change what we feel, or what happened. It's a shit of an obvious lesson to pull out of this mess I made, but there it is. She's gone, and we're all still here. For a little longer, anyway."

She finished strapping her gear back into place, looking back at the sky as the first morning clouds blazed. Then she stepped a little closer and sat on the end of the bed, near where his bare feet poked out from the coverlet. With a small smile whose intent he couldn't read, she patted at the bottom of one of them. Her fingers were warm, and he wished she wouldn't leave, knowing she had to. "What are those books you've been reading?"

"Nothing. A poor idea. I don't know. They're about ways to travel that only the stupid and the mad would ever try. Admittedly, I'm pretty much both."

Her brow furrowed, seeming to let that detail go. "You only die today if you choose. I can't rescue you, but you can still try to save yourself."

"I don't know why I should. The woods close by are full of angry men that would be shocked to learn they agree with me on something."

"Loki." She trailed off into silence. Then she looked at him, sober. "She died believing you were still her son. She died hoping you could yet change. I know that."

I wasn't her son, he thought, but he couldn't say it. It wasn't the full truth, and it'd been the heart of the last awful thing he'd said to Frigga. Another regret, when he carried so many. "So what should I do?"

"Honestly?" She laughed. "Is that an actual question?"

"It's an actual question. From someone who should have been murdered probably forty times over in the last decade alone to a hired weapon, what do you think I should do?"

Her laugh faded as she regarded him again. "Do what you seem to be good at. Drop everything and run like hell is after you. For in all truth, it is." She squeezed his foot when it was his turn to look away. "If you regret, if you told me the truth at any point, there is nothing you can do about it if you die. Running now might be the last chance you can ever have to rewrite the book. It's not always cowardice, that choice. Sometimes it's the only way you're going to survive."

"Even if I run, I'm still me."

"So you are. I'm not going to absolve you, I can't. I know a fair amount of why your brother and the lords of the palace deserve to hunt you, that there will be few places safe beyond this realm. A little flip of the scenario, I just might have been with them, and not here right now." Kara sighed. "But I made my promise and kept to my contract. That's my advice, on behalf of someone who would not want you to die, even for all of what you've done. Not yet. Run, you idiot. For her sake."

Loki licked his lips. Then he gestured at the thin gold table, at the sealed letter still laying among the few things he'd brought. "That's yours. Didn't know how I'd get a copy to you. The official one is already where it belongs."

She frowned at him, then got up to go and flip the flat little letter over. Marked with the royal seal, even if under his mask it was just a piece of wax. It broke easily under her fingers, and she unfolded it to read the legalese. "Dear gods."

"Your House tried to haggle. I didn't bother fighting them, it simply needed to be done, and fast. Gods know, as pinching as the King can be, he can afford it. If he returns, he's going to be furious enough about the spaceport I commanded built, won't notice hardly anything else. Fourteen pieces of public work tied up for centuries, sorted out with a good pen and a fair amount of cranking at the lords. At least I managed something useful before I flamed out, though it will be small and forgettable." She stopped reading the letter and stared at him, shocked. "It's done. The contract is dissolved. If you tell me the Queen wouldn't wish to see me dead, I say she wouldn't want you chained to this mad old house watching over our wrecks for all time."

"Dissolved?" She was aghast. "You bought off my entire damned license!"

He shrugged, squinting unwillingly at the first lip of the sun against the horizon. "I did."

"For fuck's sake. You don't do anything by halves, do you?" She flipped the letter over, staring at the blank back of it as if the mystery of life might be written there.

"Go do something else. Or this, but on your terms. Get, and I mean this kindly and respectfully, a life. Staying in the palace for most of a millennia the way you have is a dreadful fate. Look at the terrible personal decisions it drives you to make." The obvious occurred to him as she flung a small chair pillow in the general direction of his head. He barely noticed that, dodging with a crane of his neck. "Oh, right, as a former handmaiden to the Queen, you can take a parcel of land and and a Lady's formal title if you should choose. Your contemporaries certainly ruddy did." He flicked a hand at her. "I think you ought probably wait until the firestorm here settles out, then plea claim to whoever sits their ass on the gold next. Might be a year or two, but that's a bit of reliable future to build on. Do with that what you will."

She went back to looking at him, sounding baffled. "I…"

"Do not thank me again, I'm not worth it." He sighed, feeling small and sad, looking at the dawn as it sped up, pouring golden across the far fields. It should have been a beautiful sight, any other morning but this last one. "And this time, it's up to me to say you need to go, while you can. Please go, Lady Kara."

Kara didn't move. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know yet. I have a little time to decide. Maybe an hour or two before I hear the movement in the halls, see the train of Thor's friends come up to the gates." He inhaled, soft through his nostrils, trying to keep the scent of wine and old books fresh. "I'm going to think about your advice. And terrible, last ditch ideas."

She didn't say anything. At last, there was nothing left to be said. With the letter still hung limp from her hand, she crossed to him and kissed his forehead, soft but warm, and he closed his eyes to enjoy the presence of her while he could.

When he opened them again, she was gone.

An hour later, Loki still lay in the chaise, naked and alone, watching the sun glint off the breastplate of a distant warrior with a blade in his hand. At last, he made his decision. In his way, it was the only one he could make.