Beneath

Chapter One Hundred Forty-Six – Storm-Trees

"Jane?" Frigga called, stepping inside the jamesway Thor had pointed out. She'd taken some time for herself out under the clear sky with its gentle green waves, reflecting on what Loki had said. Her heart ached in particular with the thought that he distrusted not only his position in their family and in Asgard, but that doubt had cast a pall over his happy childhood and all the adventures and accomplishments that followed. His discovery had ripped away not just the lies they'd constructed around his birth, but had taken his whole life with it. She should have realized it, but she hadn't; she'd focused so much on trying to reassure him that the circumstances of his birth did not make him any less their son that she hadn't seen that it went far beyond that for him. She wished she knew what to say to ease his pain, but she thought that the fact that he was talking about it now, that he was able to express some of that pain, that was progress. She hoped Odin would see it, too. She hoped Loki would let him see it. Both of them had so much pride.

"Here," Jane called, standing from the bare mattress she'd been sitting on. There were no chairs in this jamesway, so she'd pushed aside the drab brown curtain in front of one of the little bedrooms and sat crosslegged on the bed, mind virtually numb for the first few minutes. She remembered her first glimpses of Loki's family dynamics – Loki's and not Lucas's – when she'd thought Loki just didn't get along with Odin, and there was a little bit of sibling rivalry between Loki and Thor. Loki's relationship with Thor now filled her imagination. Thor was better at the things "that mattered" on Asgard, the things that their father cared more about, she assumed. Loki had felt second-best, and then he found out, just like Thor said, something he thought confirmed it. Adopted from his people's traditional enemies. He hated who he was, and with whatever resentment he already felt toward Thor, it must have been easy to twist that into hatred. Hatred strong enough to make him want to kill him, she thought, remembering with a shudder what Loki had told her about slipping into the past that night she and Thor slept under the stars. But he didn't do it. In the end he didn't do it…

Jane let those thoughts fall away as she left the bedroom to meet Frigga. She stood alone at the front of the jamesway, unzipping Loki's jacket. "You might want to leave that on. There's no heat in here."

"Ah," Frigga said, quickly realizing for herself the truth of what Jane said. "Let me guess. Out of all these buildings in the 'summer camp,' only the one you and Loki have been using is heated."

"Right, they aren't used in the winter," Jane said with a small smile. "So how is he?"

Frigga considered it. "How is he" was what she most wanted to know as well – it was not her responsibility to determine whether the cosmos was safe from his destructive impulses of the last couple of years – but there were no simple answers to that question. "He's deeply troubled."

Jane nodded. She'd known that for almost as long as she'd known Loki. Now she finally understood the extent of it, and how difficult it would be to repair the damage done.

"But he's talking. In several weeks with us on Asgard, do you know he said precisely one word to me, until the day Odin sent him here? He called me 'Mother.' I chose to hear 'I love you.' He wouldn't acknowledge Odin or Thor as his family, but he used one word to tell me he still acknowledged me."

"Do you want to have a seat?" Jane asked when Frigga fell silent. "There's only the beds."

Frigga nodded and followed Jane through the curtained doorway into a bedchamber even smaller than the ones Jane and Loki used, with a canvas roof that sloped down toward the wall, making the space feel rather claustrophobic. Jane took a seat on the bed nearer the wall, where Frigga thought she wouldn't have been able to sit up straight. At first she sat properly, feet together and flat on the floor, but after watching Jane draw her legs up onto the mattress and cross her legs in front of her, Frigga decided to do the same. There was something girlish in it; for a moment she could imagine she was on a youthful adventure the likes of which she hadn't experienced in a few thousand years. "Loki has related more easily to me than to Odin, since his youth. It's easier for him to talk to me. I'm afraid he won't open up with him the way he did with me. I'm afraid he'll sabotage himself out of stubbornness. Odin wants him to come home. He wants to forgive him. But Loki has to give some sign that he can be trusted." She paused, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. "And there is at the moment a mutual lack of trust."

Jane watched Frigga, who wasn't even particularly looking at her as she spoke. She looked like she just needed to get something off her chest, and Jane supposed it was a sign that Frigga trusted her, though she wasn't sure why. Jane hadn't really done anything to earn their trust, either; they barely knew her, and their previous meeting, still unexplained for Frigga, involved a knife and two babies. "He told me," she blurted out.

"That he doesn't trust us?" Frigga asked, turning more fully to Jane with a wince.

"That he's a Frost Giant."

Frigga fell still, conscious even of her heart suddenly hammering in her chest.

"Actually, I figured it out. I told you, he talked about them. Ranted about them would be more accurate. One of the things he said, that they freeze whatever they touch…it clicked after I saw him unintentionally freeze a bottle of water. So much about Loki has been this giant enigma…" Jane paused to give a short laugh. "No pun intended. And everything fits now. I can't blame him for having trust issues."

"No, neither can I," Frigga agreed. "It's been a poison in him."

"Why didn't you…"

"What?" Jane was avoiding her eyes, toying with the laces on her boots. "Speak your mind, Jane. After dealing with both of my boys when they were not at their best – not an easy thing, I know from experience – you've earned that. And I would like to know what their friend has to say."

"Okay," Jane said, taking another few seconds to work up the nerve. "Why didn't you make it less poisonous? I mean…I guess you had your reasons for not telling him he was adopted. But why did you let him grow up hating the Frost Giants? Why did you let your whole planet feel that way? Loki told me the only thing he even knew about them was where to stab them with a sword." I know you love him, so how could you do that to him? she thought, but held back on saying aloud.

Frigga took a moment to collect her thoughts. "Why didn't you make it less poisonous?" Jane made something sound very simple that was anything but. Not the times of Loki's childhood and youth and beyond. Not even her own feelings. She'd told Loki that she loved him no matter his birth. Despite his birth, she could imagine him thinking now. And there was, at least in the beginning, she allowed herself to admit in the privacy of her own mind, perhaps a tiny grain of truth in it. Frigga did not hate Frost Giants. Through Loki if nothing else, she'd learned not to hate them. They were a people, different in culture and society and appearance, but in essence surely like any other. She had no love for them, either. But Loki, her Loki, she'd loved him from almost the first moment she'd seen him. Now he hated what she loved. "The Frost Giants had been our enemies for a long time," she finally said. "And we had just fought a brutal, bloody war against them. Children lost their fathers, wives their husbands, mothers their sons…our people only felt what was natural in the wake of all that. It wasn't something we had control over."

"Not control in the sense of an on-off switch, no. But you're the king and queen. Surely that comes with a lot of influence. A bully pulpit, we call it. You can stand up and admonish your people, and they listen, right?"

"The king should stand up and say that the people should think positively about those who killed their loved ones? Who tried to destroy this world, make all of it look like the South Pole? Jane, I understand what you're saying, and why, but I think you underestimate the difficulty in it."

Jane listened, considered what Frigga was saying…and couldn't accept it. "Your Majesty, I'm sorry…but that sounds like an excuse. You brought Loki to a realm where without his disguise he'd be a hated enemy, where he only ever heard the worst about the people he was born to, and you didn't try to do anything to change that?"

"We couldn't tell the Asgardians that the Jotuns weren't their enemy. It wouldn't be true. They were, and are, our enemy. All that time, since the Ice War, we've never had true peace with them, merely a cessation of active hostilities. But we did try to do some things, small things, what we felt we could. We tried to insulate our home from the hatred. We were careful with what books the boys were given, what stories they were told. We were careful with their tutors and clear in what we expected from them in teaching about any of the peoples of the other realms, including the Jotuns. I personally read and approved every book they were required to read throughout their basic education. But other families were not so concerned, and as soon as they were old enough to play with other children and explore more independently, they were exposed to things outside our control. We tried to correct them or at least distract them…you couldn't stop boys from having mock battles, reenacting the Ice War. They were emulating their fathers and all the other men they looked up to. Surely this is not so different on your realm. You used to fight many wars."

"Still do, I guess. And sometimes there are grudges that last a long time." Jane sighed, picturing Asgard's boys and their mock battles, and remembering the games of her own childhood. "Kids here, in my home country I mean, they play a game called 'Cowboys and Indians.' Maybe that's not fair to the Indians. I never thought about it before. But it's not really the same. Nobody hates either cowboys or Indians these days, not that I know of. I understand that the Ice War was fresh on everybody's minds then and there would be hard feelings, but what about later? I mean, after all that time, you and Loki have both told me that everyone still hates the Frost Giants."

"That's true. But remember that 'all that time' on Asgard is a fraction of one person's life. Our memories are longer than yours by the very fact of our lifespan. Even so, Asgardian attitudes toward Frost Giants are nothing like they once were, in the immediate aftermath of the war. War is an ugly thing," she said, thoughts drifting forward for a moment to Asgard's current circumstances, before turning back again to that turbulent early post-war period. "Once it ends, some find it difficult to leave the ugliness behind."

Loki was giving the cutest little smiles as she bounced him on her knee, his eyes locked on hers and hers on his. He was just shy of two months old, going by the birth date they'd given him, and though Eir told her it was early she was certain he was going to start laughing any day now, perhaps any minute. "There's my little Loki. That's my sweet little boy," she said to him quietly, over and over in varying iterations.

The feast itself had just ended, the entertainment in the form of a band of five musicians and a singer growing louder and beginning to mingle among the guests as they drifted from their tables. She sat next to Odin, more interested in playing with Loki than with social responsibilities; she'd had enough of responsibilities while Odin was away and had enjoyed the month off before Loki's Welcoming. This was only the third feast she'd attended since Odin returned with Loki, and anyone expecting her to indulge the guests would just have to understand that she had the two most adorable little boys in the entire Nine Realms and they would have to wait.

Frigga pulled Loki in for a hug over her shoulder and took the opportunity to look over at Thor; he was sleeping soundly on his father's lap. Just past his first birthday – the last feast Frigga had attended – he was almost entirely weaned now and had been fed a meal of his own at the table. Loki would be getting hungry soon, but at the moment he seemed as happy as could be. And his grip is as tight as ever, Frigga thought as she winced and glanced over to one of the boys' nursemaids, who hurried forward and helped her disentangle Loki's fist from her hair. "There's my sweet little Loki, my sweet strong boy," she said, laughter in her voice, as she started bouncing him again.

The music grew louder as the musicians approached Tyr and Bragi, who were talking near the table. The tune was familiar and catchy, and Frigga was soon bouncing Loki to its rhythm.

"Now the bloodworm thrusts upward into the empty stone of the breast, now it parts bone-roof from bone-house."

Frigga made a face at the poem's words – not the usual ones sung to this tune but tunes were reused just as poems were reinvented – a funny little face for Loki's benefit. It earned her another big smile. "You know you want to laugh, my sweet one, come on, you can do it."

"Now the bone-roof is kept near the foot of brave storm-trees, oh destroyers of blood swans' hunger, for between the songs of swords 'tis boredom that slays such brave storm-trees."

Bloodworms and blood swans – swords and carrion-eating bluewings – did not normally feature in the songs she sang her sons, and Frigga grew distracted by the song even as she continued the bouncing that Loki loved.

"Now the victory heaps, they are left to the blood swans, for the breaker of trees will carry the scent. Gorge yourselves, oh blood swans – the weather of weapons now brings you ice-wrapped parcels. Do not fear, oh carrion-cleavers, the flame of the clear sky now melts your gifts – they will swell your food bowls and nourish your young."

Ice-wrapped parcels… Frigga's arms fell still as she realized what she was hearing. The kennings and the imagery they created were not themselves particularly unusual. Poems about battle abounded, and death was a part of battle. But this poem seemed to delight in the imagery of birds devouring Frost Giant flesh.

Loki wiggled on her knee. He wanted her to keep bouncing him. She looked from the musicians down to her baby boy. Her Frost Giant baby boy. Her "ice-wrapped parcel." "Solveig!" she called. Solveig was there in an instant, arms out to take Loki as soon as Frigga's arms went out to hand him over. She was out of her seat and running toward the kitchens as soon as Loki was secure in the other woman's arms. She had just made it through the outer door into the serving preparation area when she could hold it back no longer and vomited right onto the floor.

"We worried more about it in those days, that first year or two after the war, because the hatred was so virulent and because at that time we didn't intend for Loki's place of birth to remain a secret. There were poems that were vile, that depicted Jotuns as little more than animals, that gloried in their mutilation and desecration. But there was no simple means of stopping such things. I don't know what laws your world has, Jane, but on Asgard, with a few specific areas of exception, citizens can speak as they wish, and write and weave and create as they wish. We cannot tell them which words and images they may and may not use, whether we like them or abhor them." After the incident in the Feasting Hall, Frigga had tried to argue for just that, but Odin and later First Magistrate and Law Advisor Finnulfur had convinced her it was impossible without radical changes to Asgard's system of laws, changes Frigga in the end had agreed were not in Asgard's best interest. "Odin issued decrees on what was not acceptable at feasts and generally within the palace, as it is under the direct purview of the king to set requirements for entry. We hoped it would not only tamp down on excesses in the palace itself, but that it would send a message and set a standard that would be followed elsewhere, too. Odin was and is highly regarded on Asgard, and his disapproval of something carries weight."

Jane nodded, but it still didn't sit right with her. It sounded incredibly passive for a system that sounded like it was pretty close to an absolute monarchy. It was true you couldn't just order people what to think, but she pictured press conferences and after-school specials and media campaigns. Maybe Asgard doesn't have any of those things, she thought. But they have something. Frigga had said that they "hoped" that Odin's decrees would send a message. It sounded like they hadn't done much more than "hope."

Frigga, meanwhile, was also thinking over what she'd just said. It sounded incredibly weak to her own ears. "We should have found a way to do more. I know that now. Believe me, I do. But we did what we thought was right at the time. Wisdom is no achievement when one finds it only upon looking to the past."

"Hindsight is twenty-twenty?"

"What?"

"Nothing. Just…it means the same thing."

"Ah. You'll have to explain it to me later. Twenty-twenty, yes. Those were hectic times. I had ruled in Odin's absence but with his return and Loki's arrival I relinquished the throne and spent the next month in the traditional period of seclusion with my family. There were upheavals across our realm as our Einherjar returned to their duties on Asgard and the men who'd replaced them returned to their normal work and the men and women who'd replaced them returned to their normal work. I think…much of the time we were living day to day, and not giving enough thought to the future. And once we agreed to let the secret keep…we grew too lax about it." Frigga's eyes grew distant. She hadn't really thought much about this before, not since the boys were very small. It was an uncomfortable thought. Loki and his well-being had always been so central in her thinking, in her actions and decisions, and yet in this, she had failed him. In a sense, she and Odin both had failed all of Asgard in this, and it was Loki who was paying the biggest price for it.

"I'm sorry," Jane suddenly said. Frigga had been nothing but kind and gracious to her, and when Loki was trying to convince himself there wasn't a person in the whole universe he didn't hate it was Frigga he'd never been able to convince himself about. "I wasn't there. I don't mean to judge. I understand that you tried to do what you thought was best."

"Yes," Frigga said with a languorous nod. "We tried. Sometimes we failed. And don't apologize. I asked you to say what you were thinking, and your words reflect how much you care about Loki. I can't tell you how much that warms my heart, how greatful I am for it, knowing how much he's needed a friend amidst his struggles."

Jane smiled weakly, a little embarrassed by the effusiveness of Frigga's words. "Loki told me that when he was a kid, he thought Frost Giants snuck into your bedroom and ate you if you were naughty."

Frigga nodded. "Stories like that were commonly shared among children – I suppose they still are. They didn't learn such things from us. We tried to dispel those ideas when they brought them home. Obviously we did not always succeed."

They. Of course, Jane thought. It wasn't only Loki who grew up with those ideas and carried the effects of them into adulthood. "So Thor hates Frost Giants as much as Loki does?"

"He did. He wants to do better now. For himself, and for Asgard. And for Loki."

"Thor knows? Of course he knows," Jane answered herself. "He found out things about himself that he thought confirmed his belief that he was in my shadow." Thor had told her something like that. He'd been speaking intentionally vaguely, Jane understood now. She hadn't cared or even noticed at the time, because she hadn't cared about Loki or Loki's beliefs or feelings. Loki was nothing more to her than a cruel murderer at that time. So much had changed since then. So much had changed in the last hour or so. Everything Loki said and did had to be revisited in light of the revelation of his origins. "Who else knows?"

"His father and I, of course. Eir. Heimdall, our watcher and gatekeeper. Thor found out only after Loki did. After Loki fell from the bifrost into the remains of an open bridge, when we thought he was dead."

He didn't fall. Loki had told her that much, too. He wanted to destroy Jotunheim, but Thor stopped him, and Loki let go. He was committing suicide, whether he was willing to fully acknowledge it or not. He never expected to survive it. But Thanos found him, wherever he was… "He decided I was worth keeping." And then he made the proverbial deal with the devil to take Earth, all to spite Thor. Jane tried to clear her head of all that. "He's called himself a monster," she said, after some hesitation. She didn't want to betray Loki's confidence, but somehow she didn't think Loki saw that as a secret.

"On Asgard, the Jotuns are often referred to as monsters. Or beasts, or creatures. For a long time our interactions with them have been minimal and almost exclusively violent. Many therefore believe that it is all they are capable of." Said aloud, it sounded sickening, and yet Loki would have heard much, much worse about them than the measured, dispassionate words she spoke.

Loki thinks it's all he is capable of, Jane thought. Maybe she'd reached him. Maybe he would at least consider that it might not be true. "I know he's not a monster. I used to think he was. I thought he was callous and cruel and cold. He can be all of those things. But that's not his heart."

"His heart is kind and warm and gentle. But it was under a strain already, more than I knew at the time, and it was broken by what he found out. And I think those other things are what he's tried to fill the cracks with."

Jane found herself nodding in agreement. Remembering times when he'd started to open up to her, to share painful memories, only to suddenly become that callous, cruel, cold man she'd first thought him to be. Pushing her away. Filling in cracks.

The mood was becoming too dour when Frigga preferred to stay positive and focus on the hope that Loki had turned a corner here on Midgard; the past was already written in the history books and could not be unwritten. Jane was naturally curious about Asgard, Loki's and Thor's home…but Frigga was also intensely curious about Jane. So she changed the subject. "Are you truly mortal, Jane?"

It took a few seconds for that out-of-the-blue and frankly bizarre question to sink in. "Uh…yes. As far as I know. Pretty sure my parents didn't find me on another planet."

"When Odin found Loki on Jotunheim…that was just a few days before I remember you being in our chambers. No mortal lives that long. Not even an Aesir would look completely unchanged with the passage of over a thousand years. How could you have been there? Were you really there? No, I know you were. You left your knife behind. But how?"

"I…" Jane squirmed a little, shifting her position on the bed and tugging at the collar of her jacket. "I'm sorry, but I can't talk about it."

"You threatened my children," Frigga promptly responded, not harshly, really, but with an air of authority she had not previously taken with Jane. Now that things had calmed, she wanted answers, and she was unaccustomed to not getting them.

Jane shook her head. "I told you I wasn't there to hurt them, and that was the truth. I know what it looked like…but I swear to you it wasn't what it looked like. And that's all I can say. I'm sorry."

The silence dragged on, and it was clear enough that Jane really wasn't going to say anything else. "You arranged a birthday party for Loki," she said after a few long minutes had passed.

Jane's eyes darted to Frigga's. She suspected a trap of some sort, but the older woman's warm smile was back, as if the whole confrontation by the cradle incident had never been mentioned. "Yeah."

"It wasn't his birthday."

A smile pulled at Jane's lips again then, too. "No."

"Did he tell you his birth- What is that?" she asked over distorted muffled voices coming from the vicinity of Jane's hip.

"No, I could never get him to," Jane said, reaching for her radio under her jacket and pulling it out. "I just know it's the same day as Victory Day, but he never…"

"What are seismic waves?" Frigga asked, trying to follow the voice coming from the device in Jane's hand.

"Um, it's…," Jane began, but quickly decided not to bother trying to explain it. "It's data coming in from SPRESSO, the… It means we're about to have another earthquake. But we shouldn't be…unless… We should get outside," she said, glancing upward. There wasn't much in here that could fall and injure, but there was even less outside. And she was worried about the elevated station. Olivia's voice was still coming over the radio, calm if audibly strained, ordering everyone to grab their ECW gear for an immediate evacuation.

/

/

Loki twisted to his left, looking toward the door he couldn't see behind the little divider wall. Odin was making his way carefully there with Gungnir; Loki ignored him.

He hadn't been here for…two of the last three quakes, he thought it was. The last one he had only the patchiest of memories of, here in the jamesway, bleeding to death and sucking for air he couldn't get enough of.

He was here now, and he was recovered well enough. If he wasn't, he wouldn't let that stop him. He looked down at his chest, ridiculously covered by nothing more than the black Carhartts, and touched the cracking leather of his pants.

He ran his hand up his legs and across his chest with an entirely unnecessary but satisfying flourish, and now he wore familiar green and gold and black. For his feet, it was quicker just to shove them back into his boots – he winced at the familiar yet unexpected pain in his right foot and glanced over toward Odin who was disappearing around the corner, at the door. Something else to deal with later. He didn't bother with tightening the boots – they were well-fitted even without that – and ran for the door, pushing past Odin, who'd just stepped outside.

Their jamesway was in the second row, the first row obscuring his view of the elevated station. To his left, he caught a glimpse of red just before it disappeared between two jamesways, running toward the station. Jane, he thought. Running toward danger. Wonderful. A taller figure in red and black, his mother, lingered for just a second before running after Jane. He took off at a run himself, then, taking care with his steps over the ice, passing Odin and paralleling then passing Jane and his mother. The station came into view, and at the limits of his vision he could just make out a red-caped figure partially concealed underneath it. He could more clearly see that the angle of the building in line with its support columns wasn't right.

Thor, ever reliant on and trusting in his strength, was under the building, half-hidden by snowdrift, bracing one of the corner columns. Loki was fairly certain it was pointless. What difference would it make if the column stood and the building shook right off of it, and onto Thor? The building required many more than one column to remain in place.

Loki quickly sifted around for any way he – or Thor, or any of them – could stop the shaking or prevent it from affecting the building, and while he thought it might be possible to counteract the vibration with finely tuned frequencies of energy waves he could once again freely create…there was no time for any such fine tuning. The problem itself was underground, with no way to get to it, and even if he could, Loki's understanding of how earthquakes were caused was pitifully insufficient for such a task. Worse, these were not even "normal" earthquakes, he'd been told, not created by the scraping of tectonic plates against each other.

The tremors were bad. Loki had never felt anything like it. The last one, he'd been flat on his back, delirious from blood loss and lack of air, not fully aware of what was going on.

He'd paused before the building to think, but he couldn't say it was the most quality thinking he'd ever done in his life. The structure was visibly moving, metal groaning and shrieking, shifting on too many weakened steel columns. He'd felt the structure of that steel, perhaps he could strengthen the columns now, but he didn't think he could do that for enough of them, and quickly enough, to make any difference at all. He couldn't come up with a better plan, though, and had taken just two steps closer when the Destination Zulu door to the station's second level flew open. His head snapped upward; someone emerged, stepping outside with care and holding the door open, attention focused inside the station. Someone else appeared then; the person outside was holding out a hand which the second person took before stepping outside. Loki narrowed his eyes. No one in there, except Selby he supposed, should be so weak or unsteady he or she needed a hand held to step outside the building, even with the shaking. He scanned the area more carefully, then, and saw that the stairs were no longer attached to the building at the second floor.

"Thor!" he called, running to the stairs. Those, he thought, could be steadied for what was a likely evacuation of the building. He reached for the metal, then remembered what had happened the last time he'd held onto it and with a quick little wisp of magic further thinned out the material of his tunic to extend down over his hands. It wasn't much protection, but it would be enough.

He was just wrapping his hands around one corner of the staircase's support structure when Thor emerged from behind the snow drift. He saw the eyes go wide and the jaw fall open. "Stop gaping, you fool! Get over here and brace the stairs if you actually care about these people. They're evacuating."

Thor looked up just as a figure in red and black carefully rounded the last turn in the shaking stairs and started for the bottom. Another was just emerging through the door. He didn't need any further instruction. He ran to the opposite corner of the staircase and braced it as Loki was – Loki who once more looked like the Loki he'd always known. There was no time to dwell on that surprise, though, for two more people had appeared, starting down the stairs.

"Holy…is that Thor?" the man at the bottom of the stairs said. "And…Lucas?" Loki recognized the voice, combined with the height; it was Drew, the science support manager.

"Where are all these people coming from?" Nathan asked.

Loki ignored the Polies and glanced behind him to see Jane approaching, with Odin and Frigga close behind her, side by side.

"What are you standing here for? Get away from the building!" Ken said, reaching the bottom of the stairs and finding Drew and Nathan standing there. "Toward Summer Camp, come on!"

"Come on, watch your step!"

Loki looked up; that was Gary's voice. It was Gary standing at the door helping the others out.

The door on the first level opened then and another red-jacketed Polie emerged; Loki could picture what was happening inside now. They'd been ordered to evacuate, but they could not evacuate as they were – they had to first run to their rooms or wherever they'd left their ECW gear and get on as much as they could before leaving for the frigid outdoors. Some he thought, might exit via the beercan stairs, others via the emergency stairs at the end of the berthing wing to his right, but those, he thought, might be difficult to navigate due to snowdrift that no one had bothered to clear for today's house mouse. Olivia will be furious with us, he thought, a split second before remembering he was no longer a part of the "us".

Frigga and Odin reached the staircase, each taking one of the remaining corners, and Loki looked around him and thought it was the strangest thing he'd ever seen, as though they were the most harmonious of families, Asgard's ostensible House of Odin working together for the good of a small band of isolated endangered Midgardians. Thor was glancing between him and the doors, and Odin, who had planted Gungnir in the ice beside him and like Thor had wrapped his hands in the edges of his cape before grasping the staircase, was eyeing the doors and looking angry. Frigga was staring up at the building, probably worrying for those making their way out. Just beyond them, Jane was talking to a couple of the other Polies.

The groaning of the metal grew louder, and suddenly the building shifted, significantly widening the gap between it and the stairs. Chaos followed, and not of the type Loki found any pleasure in.

Someone who'd just been stepping out on the second floor missed the step and fell through the gap with a shout. That person fell onto someone stepping out from the first floor, and the both of them were grappling for a hold on something but neither fully managed it and then both were falling to a crescendo of screams and shouts from various directions. Loki let go of the stairs and instinctively reached for his net but found only an empty storage space. In the half-second it took to realize he no longer had a net, Thor had run forward and caught the two who fell. Loki let out a heavy exhale in relief, and could not even be bothered to work up much anger that it was Thor who had caught them.

Loki looked up at the building. The gap was now some four feet wide, and balaclava-covered faces were peering out from both floors. He looked down at Thor and his arms full of red and black. He'd caught the two easily, if awkwardly. "Everyone get away from the stairs! Just wait a moment!" he called up, then looked back to find Jane, and, when he did, motioned with his arm that she and the others who'd stopped where they were or even come closer, watching in fear as their friends' lives hung in the balance, should back off. Jane, to her credit, did as he said.

"Loki?" Thor asked, adjusting the mortals in his arms until he could set them down on the ground. One of them was unable to put full weight on his leg, but he gasped out a "thanks" as his friend helped him hobble away.

"It's safer this way," Loki said.

Thor nodded his understanding. "Stand back," he said to his family, who either also understood what Loki was saying, or simply trusted that he did, because they immediately started backing away, Odin moving back to Frigga's side while Loki only took a few steps further away. Thor wasn't worried; Loki could take care of himself.

Loki was relieved to see that Thor wasted no time, quickly settling down to doing what Thor did best. Earthquakes had nothing on Thor Odinson. In seconds the first corner had been wrenched free of the giant bolts still anchoring it into the ice. The rest were pulled free even quicker.

"Stop it! What are you doing!" Loki heard when it became clear that Thor wasn't moving the stairs closer to the building. Instead, they went flying off to the side, over Loki's head, then bouncing and skidding across the ice.

"Ladder?" Thor asked, already swinging Mjolnir.

Loki nodded and Thor launched himself upward. Loki followed in his slower and more limited lift, by altering the air pressure beneath his feat. He looked over at Odin and Frigga on the way up, saw them exchange a glance and run back toward them. He sought out Jane and found her, but to his disappointment her eyes were on Thor.

"It's all right. I've got you," Thor said, carefully controlling Mjolnir in one hand while reaching a hand around the waist of a man who was clearly hesitant.

"I…uh…," the man stammered, but before he could get anything coherent out Thor was setting him down next to his father who could steady the rattled Midgardians, before speeding Mjolnir to lift him up higher again.

Loki did the same from the first level, where the Polies were probably a little less frightened of the distance to the ground but a lot more frightened of the one providing the means to reach it. He'd set just two beside his mother when the shaking came to a halt. He paused, hovering at the first level. He heard heavy breathing from inside, where he saw eight more people were waiting to get out.

"We still have to evacuate," one of them said. Loki recognized the voice but automatically checked the jacket label anyway: Ken Ryan, the station support supervisor. The building itself punctuated the statement with another groan.

"Right," he said, then looked down to Thor, who'd similarly paused. "Keep going."

Thor nodded and shot past him.

Show-off, Loki thought, putting Elliot over his shoulder in what the mortals called a fireman's carry and adjusting the air to let the extra weight sink him back to the ground.

"I want him to take me," the next person he tried to take said, stepping away from him. Mari.

Loki stared at her for a moment. They were probably all thinking the same thing. Mari just felt strongly enough about it to say it out loud. "Trade with me," he said when he felt the shift of air beside him signaling Thor's descent. Loki pushed himself higher. It was harder here, probably because of the thinner air rather than any lingering deficiency in his use of magic, but he managed.

This was his floor, and four of the five remaining people here were from his wing.

"Lucas?" Ronny, his neighbor on one side said.

"At your service," Loki said with a forced smile. It was better before, when the tremors were still underway, when the people he carried down were too scared to pay much attention to him after their initial shock. Now they were calmer, less anxious.

"You can fly?"

"Not really. We should-"

"But you're out there. And the guy in the red cape ripped the stairs off."

"All right, yes, I can fly. Can we go now?" Loki had once tried to insist to Thor that he could in fact fly; Thor had slapped a hand on his back, laughed heartily, spun Mjolnir, and proceeded to demonstrate what "real flying" was. Months of arguing and fighting had followed until Loki was eventually forced to concede the point. If Ronny wanted to take Loki's side in a very old argument, he was welcome to, especially if it would get him and the others down and away from the building more quickly.

Ronny shrugged; Loki went for his knees and put him over his shoulder.

"Thanks, man," Hector said when Loki put him down.

"That's, uh, not exactly CDC issue," Tristan said. "Aren't you cold?"

"Yes, but only a little. It's all actually made of Carhartts."

Tristan stared at him in confusion when Loki set him down.

"Hey, Lucas. Ah…Loki," Carlo said.

"Hello," Loki said back awkwardly with a stiff nod, wishing they didn't all feel the need to talk to him. Carlo, too, thanked him on the ground.

Gary was the last one, the one who'd been holding the door for the others and helping them across the gap.

"Loki?" Thor called from below.

"No," Loki called back. "Ready?" he asked. "Is everyone else out?"

"Yeah. Olivia just called in on the radio. They got Selby out on a stretcher through the beer can. Everybody's accounted for. Well…except for you. As usual. Do you ever carry your radio?"

Loki smiled despite himself. "Not if I can help it. Actually, mine's broken at the moment."

"Uh-oh. Better see Rodrigo about it. They'll dock your salary for that."

Loki's smile grew and something of a laugh escaped, and in the next instant he could feel tears trying to form. That was unacceptable on so many levels, from the idiocy and humiliation of it to the definite unpleasantness of the moisture freezing his eyelids together. He blinked hard and quickly pulled himself together. "Ready?"

"Let's do it."

Loki picked him up and put him over his shoulder like the others.

"You know, at first I thought for sure you were going to make us all jump. Got a confession to make. I really don't like heights."

"The second floor is such a great height?"

"More like the third floor, in practice. And did you miss the part where your brother ripped the stairs away like they were attached with Elmer's glue?"

"It was hard to miss," Loki said, setting Gary on the ground next to his mother. "This is the last of them. Ah…Gary Shoals. Gary is our machinst for the winter…our mechanic and general master of repairs. Gary, this is…my mother. Queen Frigga of Asgard."

"We've met," Frigga said. She'd seen him in the Healing Room, and later in the feasting hall with Jane. "It's good to see you again, Gary, despite the continued less than ideal circumstances."

"Likewise, ma'am. Your Majesty. And speaking of the circumstances, I was wondering, since you all can fly…maybe there's something you can do to repair the station?" Gary turned to look back at the building behind him; Loki's eyes followed. "Because we can't risk living in there anymore now."

"We can't all fly, unfortunately – Loki and Thor each have special talents in that regard. And…we have builders who could fix it, but they're working around the clock to try to preserve as much of our remaining defenses as possible. We can't spare even one of them right now. We'll do whatever we can, though. There may be some way we can help."

Loki continued looking at the building, sizing up its worsened condition. Several buckled columns, and the structure that rested on them clearly out of line with their original positions, receiving little if any actual support on the B-pod side.

"If we drop the connector, the A-pod might still be stable enough," Gary said.

Loki turned to him, to ask how feasible it really was for them to live without half of the station, when the building gave another groan. The groan faded, but behind it was another sound, a strange one that was different from the noise of screeching, straining metal. The quality of it was odd – familiar and yet he could not identify it, or even exactly where it was coming from at first.

It was the light that gave it away. A reddish orange, in the sky, still far away. But approaching rapidly.

Loki drew himself up, squared his shoulders, and turned to face it.

/

I am on a ship right now, with very limited internet access. You won't hear from me much over the next couple of weeks. But I will be writing. :-) (I hope I didn't miss any section breaks. Had to do that stuff very very quickly!)

So, yes, I had Fun With Kennings. It was an interesting experience. Most of these kennings (Old Norse play on words using figurative language) I found in online searches; a few of them I made up myself or tweaked from what I found online. In case you are curious (and that poem/song Frigga heard way-back-when was meant to be tough to follow for the non-Asgardian audience), below are the meanings of the kennings I used:

Bloodworm = sword

Stone of the breast = heart

Bone-roof = head

Bone-house = body

*Storm-tree = warrior (this is an Old Norse one, I liked it for the imagery of being strong and sturdy amidst adversity…or while causing adversity for others! – also the chapter title)

Blood swans = carrion-eating birds (here "bluewings," which are a bird I made up for Asgard)

Destroyers of blood swans' hunger = warriors

Song of swords = battle

Victory heaps = corpses

Breaker of trees = wind

Weather of weapons = battle

Ice-wrapped parcels = Frost Giants (here, their dead bodies)

Carrion-cleavers = carrion-eating birds (bluewings)

Flame of the clear sky = sun

Food bowl = stomach

As for previews, sorry, I couldn't find one that wouldn't be spoilery in ways I don't want it to be. I could say…there's tea? Maybe? 'Til next time…