Beneath
Chapter Eighty – Inevitability
The arbitrary South Pole morning took forever to come on Monday, yet when it did, Loki wasn't ready for it. Today was his day; Jane wouldn't be expecting him to work with her, and thanks to the Three D's neither of them had house mouse duties today. He needed to maintain his progress, and he knew what his next test needed to be: Asgard. He would keep it simple, going somewhere in the not-too-distant past, even though he now suspected there was actually nothing simpler or more difficult about visiting yesterday or the last century. And once he'd confirmed he could travel to the past in Asgard, the next step would be to test travel to the future.
Asgard.
He wasn't ready for it.
He wasn't ready for anything, he realized, as he thought about it further. Not getting breakfast, not even getting out of bed to get dressed.
Hiding. You are hiding, he told himself, and with that he threw back the covers and got out of bed. No more hiding. You do not hide.
Dressed and groomed, he stood in his bedchamber facing the door. He wasn't hiding. He wasn't avoiding. He was without a plan. He'd been so busy not thinking about anything all night long that he'd also neglected to think about what he actually should have been: where and when on Asgard. It should be something familiar to him, so that he could confirm that Yggdrasil had sent him where he'd meant to go. But there was nothing there that he wished to see again. Asgard's past was his past, and his past had already been erased by lies and mutual rejection. Asgard's future would be considerablymore interesting.
He was still standing there, thinking of all the things he did not want to see on Asgard, when a knock came at his door. These days there was a slight chance it could be someone else, but no, it was of course Jane.
"So you are still here," Jane said, surprised. She'd really expected him to be out doing whatever he was doing with Einstein and Yggdrasil. "Did you already go down for breakfast?"
"I wasn't planning on getting anything this morning," Loki answered. It was only partly true; he'd had a banana from his private stash.
Jane narrowed her eyes, glanced down the hallway from her position just outside Loki's room, and saw she was not alone. "Do the Aesir not need to eat or something? Because you skip a lot of meals," she said quietly.
"Do the mortals not need to eat? Because you skip a lot of meals."
She shook her head. Forehead, meet brick wall. "If I skip a couple of meals I get tired and short-tempered. And I only skip them because I forget sometimes. It's not healthy. And if I did it for a few days in a row, I'd wind up in the hospital. Because yes, the mortals need to eat. Your turn."
Loki didn't feel like engaging in any of these discussions that delighted and intrigued Jane, but as he thought of and rejected various responses, he knew he didn't feel like arguing with her either. He could answer succinctly, or he could shut the door in her face. He answered. "You ask the most inane questions, Jane. The Aesir," he began, trying not to dwell on the fact that the term did not apply to him, "need to eat and drink for energy, just as you do. We simply use it much more efficiently than you do. A few days without food wouldn't send us to the hospital. Or the Healing Room. But with the passage of enough time it would severely weaken us."
"Weaken, but not…not kill? You wouldn't starve?"
"I wouldn't know. I've never heard of anyone starving. I once went for years essentially without food, and I survived. Though I can't say I enjoyed it."
"Years?" Jane echoed. Her stomach ached with the thought, and she'd just had a breakfast burrito and a glass of reconstituted orange juice. She put a hand across her middle and grimaced.
Loki noticed, and wondered if she were ill or just reacting to the idea of extreme hunger. Regardless, he was ready for this conversation to end. "Did you need something, Jane?"
"Oh, uh, no, not really. I just peeked in the ladies' room and there's a bunch of guys hard at work in there. It was a pretty awesome sight and I just wanted to thank you again for winning us the week off."
"You're welcome," Loki said politely but coolly.
"Okay…good." "Good?" Jane grimaced, wondering why things felt so awkward this morning. Maybe because he didn't invite me in and we're having this conversation with me still in the hall. So why didn't he invite me in?
"I'll see you later, then," Loki prompted.
"Yeah, sure. Oh! I have a great mythology story to tell you. I came across it in the book yesterday. Maybe tonight?"
"Maybe," he answered, and wondered if she'd come across the book he'd bought for her. She had to have; it wasn't like it she wouldn't have noticed it there in her desk. Asking her about it without raising the suspicion she'd already shown signs of wouldn't be easy, though.
Jane nodded, her smile faltering when he didn't continue. "Okay. See you later," she said and turned to go.
"Jane?" Loki said.
She turned back.
"Does it involve an ox?" he asked with a faint smile.
Her smile returned. "No ox. But a couple of goats make an interesting appearance."
"Ah. Well, we do at least have those."
This time when she left, he let her go. She stumbled a little over her own two Bunny-booted feet when she turned. Steady hands, yes, but a bit clumsy on her feet. On Asgard that would have been trained out of her. He watched her as she walked away, passing her own chambers and continuing out into the main corridor. Since she was in her gear, she must be on her way out to the DSL.
He thought of the many times he'd seen her stumble or slip outside on the walk out to the Dark Sector and suddenly wondered what exactly the symptoms of the disease Jane had mentioned were. She hadn't told him anything about it, he hadn't asked, and he'd certainly never heard of such a thing before. Whatever the symptoms were, she said she probably wouldn't have any until she grew old.
It should be easy enough to find out. It was morning, and the satellite window was open. A little internet research would make a good, brief distraction before he refocused on how exactly he would test traveling to the past on Asgard.
The Computer Room got little use, since Loki was perhaps the only one here without some electronic device of his own, and when he got there the only other person present was Tristan, wiping off the desktops, part of house mouse chores. Loki gave him a perfunctory "good morning" and went to one of the computers where the desk had already been cleaned. He typed the word Jane had told him into the search engine, and as he read the information on the first webpage in the results, his mild curiosity quickly morphed into horror. Jerky uncoordinated movements and lack of coordination, progressing to writhing motions and in general poor muscle control – could she already have signs of this? Problems with cognition and abstract thinking. Mental problems, often including depression, blunted emotions, egocentrism, aggression, and compulsive behavior. This was the future Jane's mortal body was forcing her inevitably toward.
Loki read on, and could hardly believe the words before his eyes. There was nothing like this in Asgard. How do they live with such things? He finished the article on Huntington's without understanding everything he read, then searched more broadly on human diseases. "Over 10,000 human diseases have been identified as monogenic, caused by a single error in a single gene in human DNA…"
It was almost unfathomable, really. He knew Midgard's inhabitants were prone to illness, that they were, simply put, frail, compared to the inhabitants of the other realms. But their life span had nearly doubled since he'd studied Midgard as a boy, and he would never have imagined that they remained so susceptible to so many things, that they could be felled by such tiny errors in their genetic makeup. Loki still remembered the first time he'd noticed an unwell Midgardian. He'd been in a small town on Norway's coast, in his early twenties, accompanying Baldur on a field trip.
He spotted him at the edge of the market on the side of the dirt road, and nudged Dusi – one of Baldur's tutors and formerly his and Thor's – to look in that direction. The two men held back and let Baldur gain more ground on them; Jolgeir was nearby, so they weren't worried about his safety. "Dusi, what is that man doing? Is there a fee to visit the market?" Loki asked, watching the man on the dried grass mat who spoke to each person who passed, some of whom then gave him a coin or two.
"No. Look more closely at his face. See the yellow pallor? That man is very ill. He has to feed himself, perhaps a family, too. He can't work, so he's begging."
"Can their healers not help him?" Loki asked.
"Their healers know very little of their own bodies. They're more apt to blame an evil spirit or the alignment of their stars for their sickness than the lack of clean drinking water and their own poor hygiene or whatever the actual problem is."
Loki nodded, then looked worriedly up at Baldur, who'd stopped to admire a carving of an animal from some sort of white material, bone or tusk, perhaps. "Perhaps we shouldn't linger here around so many of them." He understood the transmission of germs, and while he, Dusi, and Jolgeir were immune from virtually everything, Baldur was still susceptible.
"Don't worry, my prince," Dusi said with a laugh. "There's nothing here that would give our healers any trouble, and Baldur may be young but he's still Aesir. I doubt these mortals' many illnesses would affect him at all."
A moment later a small hand was tugging at his. "Loki, can I get it? Please?" the blond seven-year-old asked, trying to pull him forward.
Loki let the memory wash over him and fade away. He found himself staring at his left hand. The one the Frost Giant had made turn blue. The one that Baldur had held that day…perhaps. It was a long time ago, and he didn't really remember, not that it mattered. He'd quickly forgotten about that man on the mat, and traded his full-length leather coat lined with thick black fur at the neck and cuffs to a stunned mortal for a carved white fox, and an owl thrown in for free, all for the little boy who was never actually his brother. Every last bit of it was a lie; another piece of the past that was not truly his.
The beggar had occupied only a few minutes of his thoughts, but he – or rather Dusi's words about him – had made an impression that had stuck with him. A foolish one, it now seemed, but only because he'd never given it further thought, and thus never questioned it. Most human illnesses were simple things, easily avoided with basic sanitation, and easily treated by healers who applied actual medical knowledge instead of superstition. What a vast oversimplification that had been. It now seemed that virtually every cell in the human body was vulnerable to illness of some sort or other, and to skim this list of diseases made Loki think it a wonder that any humans reached adulthood at all.
The disease Jane had could certainly strike the young. Had she carried a worse form of it, she could already be facing loss of motor control or cognitive acuity, and with either of those, Pathfinder would not exist. If time travel would allow him to bend the cosmos to his will…he owed that to Jane, and to the vagaries of how severe or mild her hereditary illness happened to be.
Thoughts of Pathfinder and Yggdrasil and controlling time reminded him that this was only supposed to be a momentary distraction, a satisfaction of curiosity, and a glance at the time on the computer told him that it had become a three-and-a-half hour preoccupation. And he was no nearer a decision on when to attempt to visit Asgard.
He went back to his chambers, greeting a few of the other winterovers along the way, and yet again stood there letting his shoulders slump, mind frustratingly empty of ideas. His eyes flickered around the little room, so devoid of signs that anyone actually lived here, other than the bed coverings. How strange, he thought, that this should be his refuge, and yet in many ways it had become just that. His desk was still as devoid of items on display as Jane had once noted it to be, and on some instinct that he gave no conscious thought to at all he decided to remove the three books from the drawer he'd kept them in and stack them on the top shelf of the desk. With Understanding the Physics of the Universe, The Art of War, and the Tennyson collection resting there, the room appeared less anonymous. There was nothing wrong with that, he told himself. After all, he'd only put the two from the South Pole's library in the drawer because he'd first done so with the astrophysics text, and he'd only done that because he'd been hiding his ignorance from Jane. That was no longer necessary, of course, and there was no particular reason to hide the other two, except for the fact that he hadn't bothered to return them. Though Jane might get the wrong idea if she sees The Art of War. Loki grimaced. Or she might get too much of the right idea, he amended, remembering the passage that had convinced him that his best means out of this was to force Thor to act on his behalf by taking Jane hostage and proving he was serious. But no, most likely she would not. He had interpreted Sun Tzu's words in a way the old general had perhaps not intended, and if Jane read that book, she would read it through different eyes.
He wondered again if Thor had ever really read it. The book was short, and not a difficult read, but a challenging one for Asgardians in that it emphasized cunning and deceit over strength. And more's the pity, Loki thought somewhat sarcastically, for it was cunning and deceit Asgard needed right now if it stood any hope of defeating all the realms allied against it at Thanos's hidden behest. Loki's eyes fell on the thin spine of The Art of War again, and suddenly he had his plan.
/
/
It was now May 17; Loki chose April 11. The date was considerably more random than those he'd chosen previously, though it had required much more thought than the others. It was April 4 when he'd first seen Vigdis meeting Brokk in secret, and that same day when he'd told Jolgeir her name for some spur-of-the-moment reason probably related to a resurgence of unwanted sentiment. If he attempted his plan before he'd mentioned Vigdis, it would probably go unnoticed. If he did it right after, it might look suspicious. If he waited too late, then Vigdis's potential usefulness would diminish and Brokk would grow too suspicious of her due to her absence. He also had to take the servants into account. Thor's chambers were cursorily cleaned daily, in the mornings after he left. They were more thoroughly cleaned once per week, and Loki still remembered the schedule. Thor's chambers were cleaned on April 10, so Loki chose the 11. Thor would have an entire week to notice that something was out of place.
Determining the where also required planning and thought. Jane had made her own foolhardy journey to Asgard on April 6, and he'd thoughtlessly left her on the bridge in all her gear and taken advantage of the unexpected return visit to try to get more information from Jolgeir, only to find out they now believed him to be behind the war. The trap on the bridge would have gone up on the sixth, or very soon thereafter. He could not allow Yggdrasil to direct him to the default point on Asgard; instead he would have to rely on the mathematical formula he'd applied to the few points on Asgard he had precise coordinates for through Pathfinder's recorded data – three different places along the full length of the bridge and one not far away, where the false Tesseract trap had been laid. He would also have to rely on guesswork, for while he knew every inch of the city, he did not know the mathematically precise distances and angles needed. He would have preferred to arrive on Thor's balcony, or perhaps his own for a little additional caution, but while the balconies were long they were relatively narrow and left little room for error.
He settled, in the end, on the garden, the one used only by the family. I don't belong here anymore, do I? I never did. I was always an interloper, he thought upon his arrival there atop a table. His right leg gave out, and he fell to a knee. He'd made himself invisible, masked his sound, and hidden the flash of his arrival, and the pain was immense. He looked around, allowing some time for his leg to recover. This large garden was a family refuge, a place where any of them could go to enjoy the outdoors while still enjoying complete privacy. It was always superbly tended by a single expert gardener, with Frigga often contributing design input, sometimes doing some of the work herself, too. Loki remembered playing here, sitting quietly here, having a peach-picking contest once with Thor when they'd had a peach tree, and his aspirations to become a gardener dying a quick death when he'd trimmed a bush down almost to the stem in a futile effort to shape it into a rabbit's head. As the years wore on he'd come here much less often, as the privacy he sought became privacy from, rather than with, his supposed family.
Though it had been a long time, Loki easily spotted the signs that all was not well. The grass was taller than it should be, a few weeds were visible in planting beds, and the topiary bushes, currently pruned to read "Family" – someone's idea of a jest? – were outgrowing their shapes.
The garden was at the back of the palace, and was entered directly from the ground floor of the private wing. Loki jumped down from the table and made his way to the door. It was not normally secured; it did not even actually exist. The garden itself was secured instead. But these were not normal times, and here was the first of several uncertainties to come. Loki took a steadying breath and stepped forward. The door dissolved around him and reappeared behind him as it always had. He breathed a sigh of relief. They had strengthened security around the perimeter, but not around every single door within it.
He'd come at midday, the better to ensure Thor was not in his chambers, and the palace was abnormally quiet for the time of day, when servants, guests, and residents of the lower levels might be found moving about. This again worked in his favor. He'd worried about traveling through it invisible in a crowd, but once he reached the upper levels, there were precious few the Einherjar would allow to pass, and none whom Loki could risk disguising himself as.
Just before he reached the stairs, he felt a ripple in the energy that hid his appearance and froze. His right leg, he realized, had become partially visible. He cursed Odin's "enchantment," then focused and stretched the magic around himself again, sealing it more tightly this time. He was almost to the first set of Einherjar, and he could not afford mistakes here. Had he been almost anyone else, he thought as he passed the first pair on his way up, he would have been petrified. But Loki had grown up making games of sneaking past these Einherjar as they made their patrols, and he simply concentrated on ensuring the magic held and made his way steadily up the many flights of stairs.
Eventually he reached the floor that had once been his, given to him to do with as he pleased when Thor turned twenty and was given the floor above, the floor they'd previously shared. He hadn't thought of it as a demotion at the time, but now it was clear that with this, too, he was being shown his place.
He continued up and approached Thor's landing with caution. The protective magic here felt no different than it had at his own floor, which gave him hope. If they had not changed the enchantments, then he would able to enter just as he always had. He stepped onto the landing with one foot, paused, then with the second. Something was different, but it was not here, it was on the floor above – Odin's and Frigga's. It was so strong he could feel it here, and if he'd been living on this floor the constant buzz of it would have driven him mad. Thor was probably oblivious to it and slept like a baby.
Now he simply had to go to Thor's door and wait. Eventually, as Loki knew he would, the single Einherjar posted to the floor left his position not far from Thor's front door and began a slow inspection walk to the other end of the corridor. Loki listened long enough to learn the pattern of the guard's looks to his left and right, then slipped silently into Thor's chambers. He'd done so many times before, but never under quite these circumstances.
He stopped here in the first room, Thor's antechamber, a large open space with a fireplace on the wall to Loki's right, thick-framed leather seating for hosting all his friends, and on the left wall a couple of storage cabinets and display cases made of matching wood with burnt-in etchings. Sidestepping the rugs lest his feet leave impressions, Loki went over to the display case where Thor had always kept a few books that held personal value to him. There on a shelf at waist height was The Art of War, whose spine Loki easily recognized since he'd had the cover and binding made to exacting standards. It was right next to Warrior Women of Vanaheim, a jest of a book with more pictures than words, given to him by Fandral on some birthday, his seven hundredth, Loki thought. Well, why not, Thor? Advice on how to fight a war, buxom women ineffectively harvesting grain with swords and inviting smiles. All the same, really.
Loki pulled out the book, ran a finger over the lettering of the cover, opened it up to the beautiful Chinese characters, each one itself a work of art. The original characters were backgrounded and faint, above them a translation written in black strokes meant to imitate the style of the Chinese. Loki smiled at his work, pleased with the result even after all these years. Thor had liked this gift Loki had given him for his one hundredth birthday, or at least he'd seemed to, but Loki didn't think he'd ever noticed all the little details, all the effort Loki himself had put into it. Afterward there'd been a grand feast, and after that he'd gone with Thor and Thor's friends to a tavern to celebrate. Other than the book, Loki's only specific memory from the day was of letting Volstagg pull him up onto a long heavy wood table to sing with Thor and his friends and everyone else there that night. It felt like another life, as though he were hearing someone else speak of it, watching someone else do it, rather than him having experienced it himself.
"Come on, Brother, get up here! The Odinsons will sing together tonight!" Thor shouted to wild cheers. He could have read the menu and received wild cheers, such was the infectious nature of Thor's natural exuberance.
"Loki, stop fooling around and get up here. Don't let your brother down!" Volstagg said, reaching down and sticking out a hand.
Loki sighed an overly dramatic, world-weary sigh and let himself be hoisted up. Thor promptly grabbed him, threw an arm over his shoulders, and asked the tavern's patrons for requests.
Closing the book, Loki headed back to Thor's study to look for a pen. Unavoidable, he thought, remembering Volstagg's words. It could never have been any other way. Pen in hand, Loki opened the book again, found the passage about double agents, and carefully underlined it. Then he went through Thor's desk drawers, careful not to disturb anything, until he found a strip of tan leather suitable for a bookmark, and stuck it in the book at the proper page. Back in the antechamber, he selected a new location for the book, at eye level, moving Songs of the Ice War – another gift he'd given Thor – down to the spot where The Art of War had been, and adjusting the spacing since The Art of War was thinner. The spines of the other books were all perfectly lined up, about two inches back from the front edge of the shelf. The Art of War he pulled out to come right to the edge. He stepped back into the center of the room, and tried to imagine he was just walking in. He went back to the display shelves and pulled it out further, so that it hung almost an inch over the edge of the shelf. Too far? he wondered. He wanted Thor to notice it, but he didn't want to be too obvious about it. He certainly didn't want Thor suspecting he'd been here – that would be the quickest route to ensuring his suggestion was ignored, coming from a traitor as it was. Thor was not him, though, he reminded himself. If Loki walked into his chambers and saw a single item so clearly out of place, he wouldn't trust it – he would be immediately suspicious. Thor was more apt to just shrug his shoulders, less apt to question.
Loki then frowned at himself and at his presence in these chambers where he so clearly did not belong, in more ways than one. He questioned why he'd ever thought this was a good idea; his hastily-made decisions rarely were. What were the odds Thor would notice it in the first place? What were the odds, if he happened to notice it, that he would give it a second look, much less pick it up and open it to the bookmark? What were the odds he would read it? What were the odds he would pay attention to the underlined passage? What were the odds that the idea that Vigdis could be turned for Asgard's use instead of Brokk's would penetrate that thick, hammer-happy skull of his, instead of him tossing it aside with no more than a dismissive laugh at Sun Tzu's book and the untrustworthy Jotun who'd given it to him?
But he was here, and having come this far, it was no time for doubts. Trust the training, Loki told himself. An out-of-place book was a small thing, but like him, Thor had been trained to pay attention to his surroundings and to notice when things were not quite as they should be. Training, of course could still be disregarded. Loki knew this from unpleasant experience, walking around Asgard and Svartalfheim consumed with his own problems and oblivious to the signs of a nascent war.
If that happened here, there was nothing Loki could do about it.
Time will tell, he thought with a hard laugh. He started making his way deeper into Thor's chambers, and somewhere along the way he realized he'd made an error. How am I supposed to know if it worked? After all, it was supposed to be a test, not a sightseeing trip. I'll have to come back. Even then, he didn't know how he could be certain of the results. He would have to think it through, but not here.
He reached Thor's bedchamber without seeing anything unexpected, and continued out toward his balcony, pausing just at the edge of it with some sudden irrational trepidation that Thor would be there. This was where Loki had found him the night before he was to have been made king.
"There you are. I've been looking everywhere for you. What are you doing hiding out here?" Loki said, standing under the tall arch leading to the balcony. Thor was just standing there, hands resting loosely on the stone railing, hair and cape gently ruffled in the early evening air.
"I'm hardly hiding, Loki. I'm just enjoying the breeze for a while before going out tonight. Who invited you in, anyway?" Thor said without turning.
"I did sound the chime. Either you didn't hear it, or I suppose you chose to ignore it. Because you were hiding."
Thor turned to him then and grinned. "I didn't hear it. So, Brother, have you changed your mind?"
"About what?" Loki asked, swallowing hard but taking care to show no change in his expression.
"Coming out with us tonight. What else?"
Of course that's what he meant. What else indeed does he think about? "No, I'm afraid not. Someone has to take this whole thing seriously."
"I take it seriously," Thor said with a frown.
"Oh, you do? Don't forget that I'm the one who knows you were bribing the Einherjar to call you away from the lessons Father arranged. Can you even name the five Principle Treaties between Asgard and Vanaheim?" Loki asked, stepping out onto the balcony.
Thor narrowed his eyes for a moment, then turned back to face Asgard, leaving Loki staring at his back again.
"I'll take that as a no."
"I don't need to memorize laws, Loki. If for some reason I'm required to quote the Principle Treaties, I'll ask Bragi or Finnulfur. I'll retain all of Father's advisors. And I can add more if I want to. I can have a separate advisor for all five individual treaties if I want. Or I can just ask my brother, who no doubt knows the five Principle Treaties word-for-word."
"I wasn't bribing the Einherjar."
Thor turned again, and crossed the short distance to where Loki stood. Loki saw the hand coming, and made a conscious effort not to pull away from it; it found its way around the back of Loki's neck and squeezed. "Then I suppose we should all be grateful that I convinced Father that you should have to sit through all those lessons, too."
"That's one way to look at it."
Thor's grin reappeared; the hand started making its way slowly upward, into Loki's hair to muss it up.
"Don't even think about it," Loki said, a little more sharply than he meant to.
Thor dropped the hand, and Loki's hair remained relatively unmarred. "You're no fun."
"Well, if you'd rather I entertained you…" He unfurled his right hand at his side, and suddenly a chicken was tenaciously trying to roost in Thor's hair. Thor ducked and waved his hands around wildly over his head; the chicken faded from view.
"You win. I take it back," he said, running his fingers through his hair.
Loki sighed. "Thor, you aren't ten years old anymore."
"Frost Giant calling the Fire Giant tall," Thor said with a scowl that Loki didn't think was entirely serious.
I couldn't do that when I was ten, you idiot. "I mean you aren't just gaining a title. You're becoming king, Thor, do you not understand what that means?"
"Yes, Loki, I understand what it means. I'm the one it's happening to. I understand what it means."
Thor turned partially away, and Loki watched his profile carefully. He looked pensive – not a look Loki often saw on Thor's face. Give me a reason. Just give me a reason, Thor, and I won't do this.
"It means some things will change. It means I'll have to be a little more careful how I behave in public. All the more reason for merriment tonight. And it means you'll finally have to do what I tell you to."
And there it was. Out in the open as it should be. It was an old joke between them, simply because Thor was older, but it had stopped feeling like a joke to Loki a long time ago and Thor had stopped treating it like a joke a long time ago, and now, after over a thousand years, it wouldn't be a joke at all anymore. It was the truth. And Thor was grinning and on the verge of laughter and if tomorrow were any other day Loki might have yet again pushed his feelings aside and let himself laugh with his brother. But tomorrow was not any other day. And Thor was clueless. About everything.
"Well. Don't let me keep you from your merriment. Just try to show up on time tomorrow, all right? The ceremony would be rather dull without you." And the timing of it would be rather important.
Loki turned to go and was several steps back into Thor's bedchambers when Thor called his name.
"Yes?"
"The Treaty Establishing Peace Between the Kingdoms of Asgard and Vanaheim. The Treaty Explicating the Sovereign Status and Mutual Respect of Asgard and Vanaheim. The Treaty Providing for Mutual Defense of Asgard and Vanaheim. The Treaty Providing for the Acceptance, Protection, and Representation of the Peoples of Vanaheim on Asgard and the Peoples of Asgard on Vanaheim. The Treaty Extending Privileged Mutual Trade Status to Asgard and Vanaheim." Thor took Mjolnir from where it hung at his side, tossed it into the air where it flipped once before he caught it and fastened it back to his belt. He grinned in smug satisfaction.
"Mmmm. Is that a feather in your hair?" He watched as Thor's hands flew back to his head, then continued on his way. Not enough, Thor, not hardly enough. Every Asgardian child memorizes the names of the five Principle Treaties.
"Loki, you'd better not be late tomorrow, either," Thor called from the balcony. "It's the most important day of my life."
"I wouldn't dream of it, Brother," Loki said as he continued on his way out of Thor's chambers and to the secret passageway to Jotunheim. Thor could start reciting the texts of the individual treaties with all their codices and it wouldn't be enough to turn him back now.
Loki stepped apprehensively onto the balcony, looking carefully to his left and right. There was, of course, no one there. The balcony that had been his was lower and to the left with some overlap; Odin's and Frigga's higher and to the right. Before him lay Asgard, shining and beautiful and convinced of its perfection. At this moment and from this height, there was little evidence of war. Spires rose up from the ground, though none so tall as the palace, numerous gardens provided splashes of brilliant color, and waterfalls and fountains gave everything a sense of motion and vitality. All this had been his, once, and he'd utterly taken it for granted. He felt emotion rising in him and knew he had to leave. He reached inside his satchel, toggled the RF switch, closed his eyes, and waited for Pathfinder to take him away.
/
Suggested re-reading: Ch. 59 "Trickery"
A few quick notes -
(1) Second gold star awarded to "MrsSwords", who wrote in her review of Ch. 78 "Encounters" (website Ch. 79): "I'd love to see [the next chapter] include a book conveniently pulled a little over the edge of a shelf..." LOL. If any of you do go back and reread this behemoth at some point, I'd love to hear if you now find all these little things exceedingly obvious.
(2) On the last chapter I meant to thank "MacMhuirich" for the inspiration for the last chapter. Basically, in her review on Ch. 73 "Reminders," she said Loki's going to want revenge. And I'm thinking, yeah, he wants it, but he can't have it. And then I realized...in fact he can. It took some figuring to make sure it would work within the plot and development and the time travel theory I'm following, but I quickly added the section in Ch. 74 "Regrets" (after I'd finished it but while working on the next chapter, before it was released) in which Tony calls Jane, and added this time journey to my list. Originally, Loki was going to buy that book for Jane after wandering Christchurch a bit, though I still wanted him to go to New York later. I liked this much better. This is the first time a reader has directly influenced the story...and in a pretty big way! So thanks, MacMhuirich!
(3) THANK YOU guest "Dogeatdog." "Endurance" is really quite the word for all this, and I really, truly appreciate what you said on this. It has not always been easy. But I'm still having fun and can't wait to deliver the ending. And really, thank you to all guest reviewers, along with registered reviewers, and everyone who's reading! Thank you all for helping it stay fun! You're such an awesome group of folks; surely this is the best fandom out there!
(4) Thank you also to "Isabel M-Ameban" for a fact check on animals around in Norway when Loki joined Baldur on a little visit there. I needed a second animal and I chose the great grey owl from the ones she noted.
And now some previews from Ch. 81: Loki has an admirer who notices something a little different about him; Jane tells Loki a mythology story and he recognizes it, but in an unexpected way; Jane has a request Loki doesn't want to fill; Jane finds out some things she really didn't expect to.
And the excerpt:
"Are you giving up, then? How unlike you, Dr. Foster." Loki had watched her carefully, how she'd looked a little nervous for a moment, but he wasn't offended in the slightest. She was probably the only person in the entire Nine Realms who could say that to him without offending him. She'd said worse to him and he'd said worse to her and they were still…"friends" came to mind, but that was hardly the case. They tolerated each other, because neither had a choice. And Jane "cared," whatever exactly that meant, but that was before she'd seen that video. He preferred not to concern himself with it. Whatever she thought of him now, things were comfortable between them again, and that was sufficient. Besides, there was something he needed to ask her. Unfortunately, she spoke before he could.