Just FYI: This is an extra-long chapter. You try interrupting that conversation for a chapter break! :-)
Beneath
Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Five – Bounty
"I thought you might like this back," Odin said, holding his palm out to Frigga, the necklace resting atop it.
"I gave it to Loki," Frigga responded. "He should keep it."
And I gave it to Jane, so perhaps you shouldn't have taken it from her in the first place, Loki thought. Strictly speaking, of course, Jane had taken the necklace when he was too delirious to stop her, and he didn't even know if Odin had demanded it back or Jane had offered, though he preferred to believe the former.
"Loki?" Odin said, turning to his son. He hoped Loki would take it, and put it on, and see the glow that would prove that despite Loki's origins, despite the current circumstances, he loved his son. He also feared that Loki would take it, and the gem would glow less strongly, revealing what Odin did not wish to believe – what he did not believe. Better that he take it, he thought, moving closer to Loki; the fear was irrational. Odin knew what the truth was.
"No," Loki said; that wasn't something he wished to see, one way or the other. "It was mine only for a specific purpose. It should return to its true owner now."
"Very well," Odin said, in equal measure disappointed and relieved. He would have preferred to have done this before they had everyone's attention, to have paired the moment with a few words for Frigga's ears alone. When they returned to Asgard, Thor would remain with Loki, Odin would lead the warriors, and Frigga would attend meetings in his name, or rather in Thor's. Unless Loki did somehow manage to win the war in two days, it could be a while before he had another chance for such a moment. There was nothing to be done about it, though, so he stood before his wife and lifted the thin chain to slip it around her neck himself. She ducked her head, and he settled the necklace into place, its large red gem centered in front over her deep blue gown, framed by the sides of the red coat, and stepped back. "It still works," he said when the light began emanating from within the stone. But his smile faltered when the light remained dim.
"No, not as you expect it to. It's been changed. Its glow no longer depends on the giver's love. It signifies a binding of its power to the wearer. And its power has now been nearly drained. As I told Loki…," Frigga said, trailing off when she caught sight of the dazed look on Loki's face. Her gaze flickered to Jane then, and found her distracted. "As I told Loki in a secret message, it would only work once."
Jane stared vacantly downward. Everything had been so full of urgency and uncertainty and fear, and she had forgotten until now how that gem had glowed after she put it around her neck. How Loki had stared. How odd it had seemed that he'd taken that moment to develop a sudden fixation on her chest, until she followed his gaze downward and realized what he was looking at. Loki, though, it now seemed, had taken something entirely different from that moment. He'd understood it as a visible sign that he loved her. No wonder he'd stared. That Loki liked her – most of the time – that he cared about her safety, that wouldn't have been a surprise. Love was something else entirely. It had probably been strange and shocking and… But it didn't actually feel all that shocking, as she thought about it. And after all they'd been through, it wasn't so strange that feelings might develop. They'd grown close after all, and they'd shared some intense moments. Jane certainly cared strongly for Loki, and maybe it was something that could be called platonic love. Of course, there'd also been those couple of moments when she'd felt something that wasn't especially platonic, when her thoughts had drifted in unexpected directions they really shouldn't have, under the circumstances. Jane wondered again if Loki had ever had moments like that, too, with her. It wouldn't be so surprising if he had, really. Sexual attraction was a natural phenomenon, Jane thought, rotating her neck a bit to try to loosen a sudden bit of tension; it could sneak up on anybody in the most improbable places. Between the most improbable people.
Jane narrowed her eyes, wondering how she'd wound up thinking about sexual attraction. It had nothing to do with the necklace, not if the gem had glowed when Loki's mother gave it to him, she thought with a grimace. A glowing gem, originally, had meant love, not necessarily desire.
Loki, meanwhile, tried without fully succeeding to refocus on his mother's words, an explanation of how she'd changed the enchantment on the gem. So it meant nothing, he thought. It meant only that it had become Jane's to use. No connection whatsoever to attitudes. To feelings. He'd set this aside since he'd seen it, this unexpected glowing; it was a moment of clarity amidst murky memories, and one he hadn't wanted – or had time – to dwell on. But he'd thought it had meant something. Something about what Jane meant to him. And it had meant nothing. Perhaps his heart truly was too cold for it. His mother said his name then, breaking into his thoughts.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the change. I was afraid Odin wouldn't permit it, and I had no time left to explain to you in private. You must have worried about why it no longer glowed."
Loki took a moment to think back on it, this other aspect of the gem's behavior. He'd never identified an explanation for it, but his earlier doubts had nonetheless faded. "I assumed it was due to distance."
"I'd hoped you would come to that conclusion," Frigga said, relieved. "The last thing I wanted was to make things more difficult for you."
Loki gave a marginal nod, with a neutral expression meant to convey that he was untroubled by the gem's inactivity all this time. He would never tell her how he'd despaired over no longer having even the love of his supposed mother.
"And Odin, I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the gem and the tonic. We are both their parents, and we should be working together, not on our own, at crosspurposes. I didn't know that Loki would eventually assume his Jotun form, and you didn't know Loki had a way back to me in an emergency. If Loki had arrived outside our chambers instead of Jane, looking as he did then…the guards would have killed him without hesitation, and it would have been our fault. Nothing like that can ever happen again."
Odin drew in a slow breath. Something else he hadn't anticipated, and hadn't thought of before now. Loki was never meant to be able to leave Midgard, and was certainly never meant to be able to leave the current time, so he shouldn't have been able to turn up in the presence of Einherjar with the appearance of a Jotun. Odin had acted on his own, but there was nothing unusual about that – it was a simple consequence of being king. It was Frigga who had behaved differently. He remembered her outrage when he'd banished Thor and refused to back down. This time she'd simply taken matters into her own hands, and acted on her own. He supposed his earlier actions – and not taking the time to better explain his thinking – had in a sense pushed her toward her secretive behavior. "I should have discussed it with you more fully," he said, as much as he was willing to say in front of the others. They would have to speak further later.
Frigga nodded, holding Odin's gaze.
Loki started toward the door again. It was a sobering thought, imagining himself arriving just feet away from his mother but being slaughtered for his hideous blue skin before he could take more than a step. He wouldn't even be able to blame the Einherjar; in their place he would do exactly the same. But it wasn't worth wasting energy on, either that or Odin's and Frigga's ongoing struggles with candor, or even meaningless glowing gems. For a moment the revelation about the gem had unsettled him, but it was his decision how to respond to it, and he'd made his decision. He didn't need jewelry to tell him how to think or feel. And right now, he needed to accomplish two things – one very important, and one rather less so. Now was his chance. "I need to retrieve my belongings from the jamesway," he said to the door, turning as he reached it and looking back at the others with calculated nonchalance. "Would you mind assisting me, Jane?"
Jane perked up from her slouch. "Um, sure," she said with a little shrug, instinctively imitating Loki's casual attitude though her heart was suddenly racing. She got back to work on her ECW gear; Loki was already opening up the door.
"I'll help, too," Thor said.
Loki clenched his jaw so tight his teeth ached and he started to turn around, but Frigga spoke up first.
"Jane knows the space better, and there isn't much room to move around in there, if you recall. We'll wait outside."
"Yes, and in the meantime you can tell us whatever it was that Loki was referring to earlier, about who started this war."
Thor nodded and accompanied his parents following Loki and Jane, and watched as they continued on along the ice. He wanted more time with Jane, and he wanted more time with Loki, but he supposed that time with both of them together wasn't what he needed; the things he needed to say to Loki were between him and Loki, and the things he needed to say to Jane were between him and Jane.
"He wants to say goodbye to her, Thor," Frigga said once everyone was out of the Vehicle Maintenance Facility and Loki and Jane were far away. "Let him have this time."
He looked out into the distance, straining his eyes in the dark to see them. "Of course." He hadn't thought about it, but it made sense that Loki would want the chance to say goodbye to the one person here who'd known who he really was, perhaps the one friend he'd had, but he didn't see why he needed to abscond away with Jane to do that. Loki had actually not been particularly kind toward Jane when they'd all been in the jamesway; Thor had practically had to sit on his hands to not physically jump to Jane's defense. Yet now he wished to bid Jane farewell in private? But he had the impression from Jane that Loki had been more open with her than he had been with anyone else since the disaster on Jotunheim; perhaps he was simply unable to say anything that wasn't snide and arrogant in front of the rest of them and so for an actual friendly farewell he needed a moment with only Jane. It would have been Thor's preference, too, but he hadn't thought to ask for it.
"Loki said Svartalfheim did not initiate the war," Odin prompted.
"Yes," Thor said with a nod, turning his attention back on Odin. "He told me that the Chitauri themselves are unimportant. That they are clones, ruled not by a king but by a master, whose name is Thanos."
"Thanos…," Odin repeated, getting a feel for the word. He had never heard the name before. But he had read it. "A Thanos appears in the sealed records we discussed earlier, and which we shall not mention again. I told you that there were breaches of Yggdrasil from beyond the Nine. For most of them no one ever knew the source. But in a few, attackers were captured and confessed to being sent by one called Thanos, whom they greatly feared. Scholars of the time searched widely for reference to him, but found nothing. When I was given these records, I personally spent many hours scouring our holdings and also found nothing."
"But that was…thousands upon thousands of years ago. Surely it can't be the same person."
"The Midgardians would say the same of us, would they not?" Frigga asked. "Perhaps he is of a race whose lifespan makes ours appear short."
"Perhaps," Thor said with a frown. "Loki said he didn't know anything about Thanos's own people. He said he never saw anyone else who looked like Thanos."
"He met Thanos?" Odin asked, sporting his own frown now.
"Thanos gave him the scepter that Loki used both as an energy weapon and to enslave minds. They…Loki did not confirm it exactly, but I think he and Thanos were allied, and Loki was meant to deliver the Tesseract to him. Loki was defeated and unable to deliver it…and now the other realms demand the Tesseract and Loki's surrender to Jotunheim, when we know that Jotunheim did not itself ask for Loki before the Dark Elves began their rounds. I think the Dark Elves are in league with Thanos."
"It is much as you suspected earlier, only now we have a name for who Loki was working with on Midgard," Frigga noted.
"Working with, or working for," Odin said. "Midgard, I suspect, was an amenable target for Loki, but if this Thanos is as powerful as the records suggest, I doubt Loki met him from a position of strength, especially given his state of mind when he fell."
"You think he was coerced? Forced into attacking Midgard?" Frigga asked, the skin around her eyes tightening in trepidation. This was a possibility that had not been considered, and that Loki himself had never given any hint of.
"I didn't say that. If he had been coerced, he could have abandoned Thanos and his plans as soon as he arrived on Midgard, or any time thereafter. He could have pursued his own agenda, in his own way, which would probably have been more cunning than the wanton destruction of a Midgardian city. I only meant to say this may have been less a two-way alliance than a one-sided allegiance."
"Loki was not coerced," Thor put in. "He was not himself, not the Loki I once knew…but he was not coerced. He was angry…spiteful…and he wanted Midgard. He wanted to take it and humiliate me."
"If there is any chance he is still allied with or beholden to Thanos in any way, you must take great care, Thor. What else did he say?" Odin asked.
"Not much." Thor reflected on the conversation trying to recall any other details. They'd spent most of the time talking about Thor's oath regarding Jotunheim instead of Thanos. "He said there was no way to reach Thanos. But I'm not convinced. I believe Brokk has been in contact with him, and-" Remembering something Loki had just told Odin and him, Thor interrupted himself. "Loki said Brokk was a link in a chain. At the other end of that chain must be Thanos."
"If they've been communicating with each other, there must be a way to reach him; we only need discover the means," Frigga said eagerly. Loki would have been in great danger on Asgard, but it was to their detriment that he'd not been with them, part of the war effort from the beginning – assuming he would have been willing to assist from the beginning.
"Not only communication. Again, Loki did not confirm it, and perhaps he cannot confirm it with certainty, but he did not deny my theory, that Brokk obtained the gem that was found under Vigdis's bed from Thanos. I'm certain that it's true. If Thanos has given something to Brokk, much as he gave the scepter to Loki, then the two have been in physical contact, just as Thanos was with Loki. Brokk has one of those Svartalf talismans, but Maeva is confident it isn't powerful enough for travel beyond the Nine. There is another way to travel between Svartalfheim and wherever Thanos is. There has to be."
/
/
It had only been maybe twelve or fifteen hours since she'd last been in the jamesway – Jane had lost track of time with no watch, no computer, no time-and-weather updates on the screen in the galley – but already it seemed like ages ago. Another lifetime, one she'd shared with Loki and would no longer. She'd entered first, shucking off outer layers, and Loki now stepped up alongside her. She took a deep breath and turned to face him. "What's with all the pens, anyway? Do you have a collection or something?"
"It wasn't intentional. More of a habit. I tuck it away when I'm done with it…then grab another one the next time I need one. You can take them…replenish the office supplies."
"Okay. Though I haven't actually heard anyone complain. So how do you want to do this?"
Loki was caught off guard by Jane's matter-of-fact tone. Did she not care that he was leaving? "I…I thought…"
"Should I just start handing you things?"
"What?"
"Your stuff. From the magic closet. I assume you can open the doors again?"
Loki blinked, then glanced around at all of his things lying about everywhere. Most of it was useless, stored away for some reason that had probably made sense at the time, and long since forgotten. "I don't need any of these things. I only wanted a chance to talk to you." He'd thought she understood that.
Her shoulders relaxed. "Oh, thank God, because I really wanted a chance to talk to you, too," Jane said, not bothering to hide her relief. "But I thought…you don't have long, do you?"
"As I am the key player in this little bargain among Asgard's current and former kings, I believe I have as long as I like."
"Oh…well…in that case…so you're going to win a war, huh?"
"Mmm. So I hear," Loki answered, a sly smile growing.
"How?"
Loki flicked his hand in front of him, sealing off the jamesway from eavesdroppers named Heimdall. The smile grew, because the act barely required thought, much less effort; the physical gesture was not particularly necessary, but for Jane's benefit. "I have no idea," he responded, expression unchanged.
Jane stared, speechless. She hadn't expected Loki to lay out some annotated timeline, and she wouldn't have been surprised had he simply made some wisecrack and left it at that. "You have…no idea?" she eventually asked. "Seriously?"
"I have ideas, I suppose. I always have ideas. But lately," he continued with an arched eyebrow, "most of them have turned out to be bad, so…"
"Maybe not most of them. Some of them…okay, some of them were pretty bad. Pretty much the ones where you were setting out to hurt somebody. Including yourself."
"I have every confidence I will succeed, I simply don't know how yet. And war usually involves hurting somebody. Many somebodies, and hurting them badly."
"Yeah, well, war also involves defending somebody, right? So just focus on the defending somebody part."
"Of course," Loki said perfunctorily.
"You did a pretty good job getting the rest of the Polies out safely, didn't you? And figuring out how to repair the station, that was a good idea, right? And then making sure all the repairs were done correctly?"
Loki reflected on those things, the things he'd done here since being freed from the tightest of his shackles. Things he would never have imagined he would have done for these people, for any Midgardians, when he'd first come here. For anyone from any realm, probably, but certainly not for Midgardians. He imagined himself making some snide remark about how they'd just die a few years earlier than expected. He remembered Zeke growing flustered as he thanked him. He remembered wanting Jane to see him. He hadn't done any of it to be seen by her or anyone else, but when he'd realized she might be watching, it hadn't been a bad feeling. When he'd sought her out and found her watching Thor…that he hadn't liked much at all. "Standard caveats of bodily harm upon the breaking of this confidence…but I enjoyed that, Jane. Helping all these people."
"Yeah? That's good. Maybe it's something you can make a habit of."
"I doubt the circumstances arise terribly often," he said drily. "I suppose I could go around knocking buildings off their supports and helping their inhabitants escape afterward." Jane was shaking her head at him, smiling, but the jest left a sour taste in his mouth. Not so long ago, it hadn't been a jest. "You have wondered, I know, what I originally intended in following you here. There was no grand plan, no plan at all really. I needed…a tool, essentially. A weapon. The truth is, at first I didn't know exactly what use you could serve. I knew of course that you would be a means of getting to Thor, of forcing his cooperation, but I also knew something of what you were working on, after I read a few things about you when I was in Canada, and I made an educated guess that you wanted to use that knowledge to gain the power of the bifrost for yourself. And frankly…I was angry. I…I wanted to make you suffer, and through you to make Thor suffer. I blamed you for changing him. For making him…I suppose a little more like the person I'd always wanted him to be, and less like… He was becoming a better man, trying to, at least, and I was throwing myself head-first into an abyss and I think at some level I knew it. I just couldn't stop myself… Everything was happening so fast… So when I arrived here, and started to learn more about you, and your work…I was always thinking of how I could get myself out of this situation. Of the many scenarios that came to mind, I thought…Odin is obviously impressed by a good show of public heroism and self-sacrifice, so why don't I create my own disaster? Do you remember how Olivia lectured us on the dangers of fire here? I thought fire would be appropriate."
"You…you're saying you thought about setting fire to the station?" Jane asked, incredulous. She'd never had any inkling he'd had such destructive ideas; he had hidden that from her well. Fortunate, really, because had she known, it might have required a call to Tony and a violent end to Loki's stay at the South Pole.
"I considered it. Then I would reveal myself to Heimdall once I began rescuing the helpless little mortals and putting out their fire, perhaps get myself injured a bit in the process – Thor got himself killed after all – and word would get back to the All-Father and he would remove his curses."
"That's…ummm…a little bit twisted. Okay. But obviously you never did it. Why not?"
"I wasn't certain it would work. The idea never went beyond idle thought. I decided it would be best to bide my time and see if your work might provide a better escape. I tell you this because…you understand that I would never do such a thing now, don't you? I would never even consider it now. I came to respect you. But I thought you were an aberration. Exceptional among the mortals. I saw them as…flat. Uninteresting. Pointless. I see them as real people now, no less so than the Aesir or the Vanir or any of the others."
"No less than the Jotuns?"
Loki drew in a slow deep breath. He'd not explicitly excluded the Frost Giants, but it was of course implicitly understood, at least on Asgard, that yes, they were of course excluded. He didn't want to launch Jane onto some well-meaning but ridiculous impassioned defense of them, though. "They are different," he simply said.
"You were wrong about us. What if you're wrong about them? What if they're real people, real individuals, too?"
Three simple, fairly neutral words and apparently even those were too much. "Can we forget that they ever came up?"
"Listen to me, seriously," Jane said, ignoring Loki, unwilling to let Loki sweep this under the rug. "You are a real person. If you are, how can the rest of them not be?"
"I was raised among the Aesir," Loki said in clipped speech. This wasn't the moment he'd wanted to have with Jane.
"So what? Dino was a big white dog. He was raised among Midgardians, specifically my Uncle Van and Aunt Vivian and their kids. When he died at a ripe old age for a husky, you know what? He was still a dog. It didn't turn him into a Midgardian. A person."
"What do dogs have to do with anything?" Loki asked, voice rising in volume. "Where do you come up with these things that you say? And do you even notice the contradictions in them? You told me before that where I came from has nothing to do with who I am…that I left the dogs behind and became a person. And now you tell me that a dog can never be anything but a dog. That it's impossible to be anything else."
"That's not what I said!" Jane shouted back, then made a noise of frustration. "I'm sorry. You're leaving, and I…I don't want to argue with you. All I meant was that if they're a bunch of awful people, that doesn't make you awful. But whether they're awful or not…they're still people. And maybe they're not all as awful as you think. You have no way of knowing. All you have are your assumptions. Weren't you just laying into your father for his bad assumptions? Maybe you need to take a look in the mirror."
Loki relaxed into a smile and let Jane's words roll off him like in that drawing affixed to her desk. "I'm going to miss you, Jane. How very like you to apologize for arguing and then go right on doing it without even pausing for breath."
"How very like you to be so stubborn and unwilling to consider another view," Jane shot back.
"I consider other views. And then I reject them as inferior."
Jane looked aside with wide eyes, dumbfounded, at the same time nearly choking on a startled laugh. Loki's expression remained neutral, polite smile on his lips, but she knew he was joking despite the element of truth that was probably there as well. She wandered a little closer to the desk and started absently rifling through the stacked-up papers on it. Most contained notations that she couldn't understand, and she wasn't sure if it was some strange language or maybe a very different way of representing equations. Random bits and pieces of his life, she supposed. Her attention wasn't on the papers, though. She had to let the Frost Giant thing go. Loki wasn't really ready to listen, or to reconsider a thousand years of prejudice, and there was no sense bloodying her own forehead to try to force it. Maybe she'd planted a seed; maybe he'd think about it more later. In the meantime, there were lots of other things she wanted to ask him about before he left.
"So you and Thor had a whole conversation while I was asleep?"
"You do pick odd topics for farewells."
"It's just…I thought you went there to…you know. And instead you had a conversation? When I was right there?"
"I didn't set out to have a conversation. I did set out to 'you know.' But it was harder than I'd thought. And while I delayed and over-analyzed, he woke up. Hence a conversation."
"So…you didn't kill him because he woke up? If he hadn't woken up…"
"I wouldn't have done it. I think I'd already decided not to. It wasn't what I'd expected. How I'd expected. I'm not in the habit of killing people in their sleep." Unlike some, Loki thought. Laufey hadn't delayed or over-analyzed. Of course, Laufey hadn't grown up best friends with Odin, so the comparison wasn't quite right, but still, Laufey hadn't hesitated to kill a man who could not have been more helpless, lying in a deep magically-induced sleep.
"If he hadn't been asleep?"
"I don't know, Jane. What does it matter now? Are you worried for him? Would it help if I swear to you that I won't murder him the first moment his back is turned to me?"
"That's not what I mean. You said you were delaying. You mean putting it off? On purpose?"
Loki sighed and sat down on the bed. "I should have simply said 'farewell' and left."
Jane smiled at him. Because he could still do just that…and instead he'd sat down. "I think it was on purpose. I think you thought you wanted to kill him. I think you couldn't do it, because at the end of the day, biology aside, you know he's still your brother. And that's not surprising at all. The only surprising thing is that you didn't realize it yourself. You never told me about Thor's arm…which kind of made me mad when it first came up but now that I think about it maybe I'm glad you didn't because I would have been worried sick. Anyway, you saved his life then, Loki. Didn't that tell you anything?"
"Not really," Loki said. He was a little annoyed to hear this overly rosy and romanticized interpretation of Jane's; he was surprised he was only a little annoyed. It was Jane, and he was leaving, and he supposed that was tempering his reactions. "Not the message you obviously think it should have. Try to understand, I spent a thousand years fighting at his side. Some actions are simply instinct, in the absence of time for actual thought, and don't bear much import."
"I disagree. Your instinct was to save his life instead of letting him be killed. That has to mean something."
"I left regretting that I'd intervened and saved him, after I heard his assumption that the assassin was me. And my decision on your rooftop was not out of warm thoughts of brotherhood. It was because I realized that no matter how much I hate him, he's not ultimately the one to blame. His father made him who he is."
"Oh, give me a break. Maybe you had some weird version of buyer's remorse afterward and you regretted a decision. But that decision was a reflection of the truth, Loki, instinct if you want, but the truth is that he's your brother and you couldn't just stand there and let him be killed in front of you. And the rest is baloney too. You were willing to kill him if he was most to blame but not if he was second-most to blame? And to blame for what exactly?"
"Trying to put words to that might indeed take more time than I can spare. But he is not my brother, literally. And not in that ignorant sense so many of you here use the word in."
"Right. There you go. You know you can't win that argument so it's right back to insulting the ignorant mortals."
"You're such an easy target, you make it irresistible," Loki said with a smirk. "However," he said, sobering as he remembered something he'd wanted to make sure he said before he left, "I do apologize for the way I spoke about you. The way I spoke to you, in front of the others. I hope you understood that it was said for effect, and was not a reflection of…" My true feelings, he'd been about to say. "Of my actual attitudes," he settled on instead.
Jane shot him an artfully skeptical look. "You called me an insufferable nag of a travel companion."
"Well…you were."
Jane's eyebrows went up and her expression became less teasing.
"Jane, you were a terrible nag!" Loki exclaimed. "It's an objective fact. But it doesn't negate the fact that much of the time I enjoyed your company."
"Much of the time?"
"When you weren't nagging me, of course," he answered, soft laughter in his voice.
Jane laughed, too. She had been a bit of a nag. Not that that meant she liked hearing Loki say so in front of Thor and Frigga and Odin. "We did have some fun, though, didn't we."
"We did," Loki agreed. There was more to be said, more that should be said, but he found himself unable to say it, or really to know what it was he wanted to say, and so simply watched as Jane went back to flipping through the papers on the desk.
"I'm sorry you were…what do you call it? When you can't be king anymore?"
"Removed from the line of succession." He gave a little snort. "It doesn't actually matter. Don't tell them I said so, but I assumed I'd already been removed. Still, it's a fine 'thank you,' isn't it? 'You're welcome to save the realm, Loki, but not to sit on its throne.'"
Jane smiled ruefully. "Yeah. What exactly did your father do? Something about making sure you and Thor stick together."
"I don't know. That doesn't matter much, either. I can work around it. I could have fought harder against that condition, actually. I chose not to."
"You want to work with him to save Asgard?" Jane asked, eyes narrowed in skepticism but a bit of hope as well.
"Hardly," Loki responded scornfully.
"I don't understand."
Loki stood and looked around the tent, what he could see of its edges; the sound blanket was securely in place. He walked over to Jane, stopping right in front of her, mere inches between them. "Speak nothing of this, Jane."
"Um…okay," she said, hand frozen on a piece of thin leather with writing scratched into it as she looked up into the eyes boring into hers.
He cracked a giddily nervous smile. "I'm terrified I'll fail."
She blinked rapidly, for a few seconds unsure if he was joking. He wasn't. She would never have guessed from the way he'd acted – the key word being acted, she supposed – in the VMF, that he not only didn't know how he was going to save Asgard, but didn't know if he could save Asgard. "And if you fail," she said, suddenly realizing why he wasn't as angry about having to pair up with Thor as she'd expected, "you know Thor will defend you."
Loki inclined his head and stepped back. "'Know' may be going too far. But if he believes that I've sincerely tried…he might," he said, extending his hands up and out at his sides a bit, until he realized that the gesture was vaguely reminiscent of a universal sign for surrender. Surrender to Jane – at least in the metaphorical sense – did not concern him. Surrender to Thor – in any sense – was galling. But if the alternative was a one-way journey to Jotunheim, he would not be so foolish as to refuse Thor's help.
"He will. I know it. Loki, I'm sorry I…I didn't really get how serious the issues you have with your family are. But no matter how real the issues, no matter how much anger is there, Thor loves you."
"Yes, well, as I've said before, I don't doubt that. In a manner of speaking." "Thor loves a lie," he had once told her. Now, though, Thor had seen the truth beneath the lie with his own eyes, and his first instinct had been to grab his hammer. They would see how much he waxed on about love, especially considering Loki had made good on his threat to pay Jane a visit, once he wasn't so preoccupied with prizing secrets about Loki's former "allies" from him.
"Do you think you'll be able to…"
"To what?"
"Um…" Jane searched through the section of papers she'd again started idly flipping through, something to occupy her hands with. Something there had caught her eye; she could have sworn she'd seen something moving. And there it was again, something was moving. On paper. She pulled out the piece of paper – it was weirdly familiar. And moving. It wasn't just familiar, actually, she realized, it was hers. It was the sketch of Asgard's sky out beyond the bifrost that she'd been working on in the Science Lab. The one she'd stuck in her drawer and thought Wright must have taken. But it wasn't the way she'd left it. Each of her little dots, some with doodly flourishes beyond just dots, followed a slow path some variably short distance, then lazily returned to its starting point, paused, then started along its path again. Loki sidled up to her and watched with her. "What is this?" she asked, completely forgetting whatever it was they'd been talking about before. "I mean, I know what it is, but…what did you do to it?"
"I made a few corrections," Loki answered. He'd worked on it for some time, but then forgotten about it after the disaster on Alfheim.
"I make corrections to my work all the time. I usually just erase stuff, or else scratch it out and write above it. But this is…you made magic corrections?"
His shoulder twitched in a slight shrug. "I thought I would preserve your memories, as reflected in your original positioning of the stars and galaxies, and show the accurate positions as well. I wasn't finished. I thought I would…" He'd thought he would make it beautiful for her. He'd worked on it mostly in the middle of the night, alone with maudlin thoughts and admiration he somehow couldn't admit to for how hard Jane was working on their preparations for Alfheim. He'd thought he would give it not only motion, but color and light and texture. He'd studied folio animation and illumination half-seriously for several years and so had some knowledge of the craft, but he lacked the proper tools for it and, at the time, sufficient use of magic to actually do all that his middle-of-the-night brain ambitiously urged him to, not without spending years on the task. His eyebrows went up. Magic was no longer a problem. "I'll take it with me."
"No way," Jane said immediately, twisting away from Loki and holding the paper away from him.
"I can finish it."
"I thought you were going to be fighting a war. You're going to make the Asgardian version of animated GIFs on regular old printer paper in the middle of a war? I don't think so."
"I haven't even marked the correct positioning of everything yet."
She drew the paper closer and saw that it was true, not all of the dots were moving. "I don't care. I love it exactly the way it is. You…you did this for me," she said, almost to herself, watching the lazy movements of the penciled-in stars, amazed now not just at the movement, but at the time and effort Loki must have put into this, for no purpose other than that, apparently, he'd thought she would like it. She swallowed over a sudden lump in her throat. "Besides…I need to have something to remember you by."
Loki gave a short laugh. "I think you'll have more than enough reminders of me. But fine, keep it."
Jane set the drawing down; her eyes lingered on it for a moment before looking up at Loki, still standing right next to her. "I want to ask if you're coming back," she said quietly. "But I'm afraid of the answer."
"I don't know the answer. But I do not care for goodbyes. If all goes well, then I'm certain we'll meet again." He paused then, reconsidering his first interpretation of what she'd said, that she was afraid he would say no. Months ago, had she said the same thing, she would have meant she was afraid he would say yes. So much had changed since they first met. Since he was first aware of her existence, over a year before they met. "I…I once loathed you, you know."
"It was pretty much mutual, so don't feel too bad about that," Jane said with a smile.
"I had earned your loathing. You had done nothing to deserve mine. I…" Loki carefully maintained his countenance but inwardly he was cursing his inability to express himself. He thought perhaps he'd tried to cut himself off from all sentiment so well that now something as simple as telling Jane what she meant to him seemed an insurmountable challenge. He pictured that gem around her neck, glowing as it had, and what he'd thought it had meant at the time. Perhaps not so simple after all. Perhaps it was difficult because he himself did not fully know. Still, there were things that should be said, and Jane was looking up at him expectantly. "I am very glad to have met you. I am…grateful, that for some reason you chose to call me 'friend,' even when…when I could not accept it." He started to smile, but held back and instead called forth a look of annoyance. "I am even grateful for that idiotic birthday party you tricked me into, thereby forcing me into various subsequent activities as well. Admirably conniving of you."
Jane laughed. "That was just a fringe benefit, really."
"Were it not far too dangerous, I would be tempted to bring you with me. Your plans have worked out better than mine, lately."
"I don't know. Things are working out pretty well now, aren't they? Besides, what happened to that guy who said he wasn't so much an optimist as a guy who creates the conditions that turn optimism into realism?"
"That guy has been tested. And found wanting," Loki said with a doleful smile.
"He's been tested, definitely. And come out the other side. Better. Stronger. They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger."
Loki's smile grew. "Then my strength must be nearly infinite by now." He didn't feel that way, particularly, but it was something to keep in mind for what should be shown to others. He couldn't help thinking, either, that if that were true, then Jane, too, had to be even stronger now than when they'd first met, because she had survived him, somehow. "In any event, Jane, you have seen me at my worst. I shall have to see you again, to give you a chance to see me at my best."
"If that works for you as an incentive, great. But I think seeing you floating around on the air to rescue people from an unstable building about to collapse…I think that was seeing you pretty darn good."
"That was nothing," Loki said with a classic smirk. "There wasn't even anyone attacking us at the time. Trust me, I can do better." The next thing he knew Jane was launching herself at him. He started, but almost as quickly fell still again as her arms closed in tightly around him and her head pressed against his chest.
"I'm going to miss you so much," Jane said, the words muffled by the soft smooth cloth of his shirt. She hadn't been sure what she wanted to say, or how she wanted to say it; she hadn't known what you say to someone you'd been through so much with, someone who'd come to be such a central part of your life. And in the end, these words had just exploded from her, without any thought at all.
Loki stood there stiffly, awkwardly, looking down at the top of Jane's head. After a few seconds, he returned the embrace, if a little more loosely and gently than Jane's. Embraces were common on Asgard among friends and family, between men as well, something which seemed less common here on Midgard. But it had been quite a while since they were common for him, except from Thor, who never seemed to get the hint, and his mother, who continued to embrace him even following his disgraced return from Midgard when he had refused to return it. This was now his second hug in under two hours. And this was decidedly not his mother. He held his hands still against her back, uncertain what to do with them, uncertain what this meant or what his response might mean, even more so in light of his confusion over the gem. Still he tried to force his muscles to relax, for while his own thoughts were muddled, he did not want her to think that he didn't want her to hold him, that he preferred her to keep her distance. He did like her nearness, her trust in him to permit him so close, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her breath through the thin material of his tunic.
He was just beginning to truly relax when she pulled away, looking a little flustered, and he realized that he'd never said a word to her in response, so disconcerted he'd been by her sudden gesture. "I'm going to miss you, too, Jane. Terribly. I shall have to distract myself from it by throwing myself whole-heartedly into something grand. Winning a war, perhaps. A sufficiently grand distraction, don't you think?"
"Very grand," Jane said with a confident nod and a measure of relief. She'd been a little worried that maybe she'd stepped over a line with him, when Loki hadn't said anything despite the thoughts she could almost hear grinding away in his head. "Speaking of winning a war, are you sure you don't need any of this stuff?" She stepped away from the desk – away from Loki – and into the bit of open floor space between the desk and the bed where Loki had lain.
"The closet, as you call it, was getting cluttered. I didn't remember half of these things even being there," he said, casting an idle glance about the jamesway.
"You don't think some of it might be useful, though? For example…," she said, trailing off while she went over to the bed, bent down, and reached for the net she knew was under it. She gave it a tug but it was unexpectedly heavy; she gave up after getting it out just far enough for Loki to be able to see it. "What about the net? Think about it, you never know when a net might suddenly come in handy."
Loki inclined his head, smiling. "You make a good point. All right, I'll take the net." He joined Jane beside the bed and pulled on the net, finding it heavier than it should have been; something else was obviously resting on top of it. He pulled it out and was surprised to see an array of weapons and tools on it, some very old, some very new. If he'd bothered to wonder about each item, he would have probably remembered it was there, but as it was, he'd forgotten even the existence of most of these things.
Jane, too, looked over the items neatly assembled on the net. Some were clearly weapons, including the sword he'd come back from Asgard with that first time, a long pole with a blade kind of like an ax at one end, something that looked like a complicated version of a spear, and a long knife which she suspected wasn't supposed to be all twisted up. Some were just random things, such as a shovel, that didn't particularly look like weapons but with Loki – with Asgardians – who knew. And then there was an item that looked especially familiar. "You stole a fire ax from the station?"
His gaze focused on the ax, even as Jane bent over to pick it up. That one he wished he could forget.
"What did you do to it?" she asked, brushing her fingers over the woody plant-like material that was twined around the head.
Loki considered it, and decided he might as well tell her. There were no real secrets between them anymore. "I broke it. Trying to remove a mistletoe plant from a birch tree."
Jane's mouth fell open for a second, but no words made it out. "Oh," she finally said, kicking herself that nothing better, more sympathetic, came to mind. "I'm sorry."
He slowly shook his head. "It's all right," he said, though staring at the ax – the evidence of his desperation and repeated failure – brought about a kind of detached numbness in him. He had to be numb to it, he supposed; it was preferable to the alternative. "At least now I know why nothing worked. I thought…"
"What?" Jane asked, setting the ax down on the mattress when Loki couldn't seem to tear his eyes from it in her hands.
"I thought… It seems foolish now. Or excessively arrogant in an odd way. I thought perhaps I was stopping myself from saving him. A third me, from a third time, ensuring that the second me, this me, didn't prevent the first me from killing him. Out in the wood, at one point I had a sense that someone else was there – I heard a noise, really, it was nothing. But then when I left the stables, there was someone there besides the boy, the boy who saw me fashion the arrow. I only caught a glimpse, and he didn't look like me – he had auburn hair – but…" He had been about to explain when he realized explanation was no longer necessary. In an instant his own hair was auburn, thick and wavy. As soon as he saw Jane react to it, he changed it back to the wavy black hair he'd known as his all his life, only afterward realizing how quickly and easily he'd done so. He frowned at himself; it was no longer so "quickly and easily" done, actually. His own hair felt like an illusion now. "Change from the inside out," Odin had said. He closed his eyes, concentrated, and in a few seconds the proper weight and feel of his Aesir-form hair was back.
Jane waited silently, trying not to react to the glimpse of bald blue-tinged scalp she'd gotten, until Loki opened his eyes again looking as he always had. "That's terrible, Loki. I wish you'd told me about that. I could have told you it couldn't have been you."
"And your belief, no matter how strongly held or expressed, would not have convinced me. I thought it meant I was supposed to kill him. That I was a parasite little different from the mistletoe, feeding off a host until I killed it, just as nature and fate intended. Now I know that I have this…Novikov to blame."
"Well…the laws of physics, really."
"Then I suppose I can blame the laws of physics for breaking your ax, too. But since the laws of physics are unable to correct the matter…I'll obtain a new one to replace this one. Or…repair this one properly. Later. Perhaps," he further hedged. He would prefer never to see this one again. Or another Midgardian fire ax at all.
"Don't worry about it," Jane said, picking up on Loki's unease as he glanced toward the ax again. "We can get a new ax. So what about this other stuff? Maybe you'll need the sword? Or the…pole with the ax head on it?"
"It's called a poleax, shockingly enough. I haven't used it in ages. But yes, I suppose you're right. I'll take all these things," he said, gesturing to the net. "Except the shovel." He picked it up and handed it to Jane. "Never say I never gave you anything, Jane," he said with a grin that was only partly forced.
"Um, okay. Thanks? But I can actually think of a few other things you've given me that were…nicer than a shovel. Oh, wait! Is this a magic shovel?" she asked, suddenly getting excited.
"Just a shovel. Sturdier than the ones you have here I'm sure."
"Oh. That's great, but…you have noticed that we're sitting on a giant slab of really thick ice here, right? No dirt to shovel?"
"I stole it from Asgard."
"In that case," Jane said, promptly holding the shovel back out to Loki, who made no move to take it.
"I stole it from Asgard a thousand years ago."
"A thousand…oh. Okay. We can keep it here," she said, quickly placing the shovel next to the ax. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the net and everything else that was left on it winking out of visible existence.
"Wait a second," she said, trotting over to the table and hurrying back, holding one of the Paper Mates. "Never say I never gave you anything," she told him, laughter in her voice. "When's the last time you didn't have a pen you could just pull out of thin air? I'd hate for you to reach for one and find nothing."
"Thank you, Jane." It was just a pen, one of probably thousands just like it scattered throughout every office and outbuilding here, and yet this one, for some reason, tightened his chest uncomfortably. He took it and sent it to join the other items.
"I'll look for the ones your mother gave you. There's no telling where they are in all this stuff. Another incentive for you to come back," she said with a self-deprecating grin and a sudden slight undercurrent of fear. Loki was getting what he'd always wanted, from surely the first moment he'd arrived on Earth, and certainly from the first moment he'd stepped off the plane at the South Pole, into a permanently frozen landscape. He was leaving for bigger and better things. And maybe she wouldn't matter very much to him then. The feeling was familiar; she'd occasionally wondered the same thing about Thor, during his long absence after Puente Antiguo.
Loki gazed into Jane's eyes and saw the moment the frivolity and teasing gave way to seriousness and worry; his own expression turned serious as well. Everything that had come before, he knew then, was procrastination. This was it, the moment he'd openly admitted to her that he didn't want to have, the word he didn't want to say. He reached for her hand and took it in his; she glanced down, a bit startled, but not flinching at his touch. He brought it up, slowly, eyes fixed on hers, and pressed his lips gently to her knuckles, letting them linger there long enough for her to know this was no casual gesture. Letting the moment convey everything his words could not.
Jane's breath hitched in her chest, and every other thought but Loki fled her mind. She didn't think his magic quite worked that way, but it was as though he'd cast a spell to make himself the center of her universe – the whole of her universe. He was certainly looking at her like she was the whole of his. His lips moved against her skin and then he was lowering her hand again and she was trying to recover her senses.
"Thank you, Jane," he repeated.
"That was, uh, quite a thank you. For a pen. I should give you pens more often," Jane rambled.
"That wasn't for the pen," he said, never taking his eyes from hers. "I can think of many things you've given me that are infinitely better than a pen."
"Yeah?" she asked, the effects of the spell not quite worn off, not when he was still looking at her like that.
Loki nodded, took a deep breath, then purposefully turned from Jane to look casually about the jamesway one last time. "I must go. War," he said with an intentional gesture of surrender to circumstance. He cast her a quick look and headed for the partitioned entryway and the door behind it. He stopped, though, and looked down at himself, then back at Jane. "I apologize, by the way, on behalf of my mother and myself."
"For what?" Jane asked, head a little clearer now.
"For leaving here with clothing issued by the CDC. I suppose I can ask Mother to discard the items she's still wearing right before we depart. But as for me…it's all I have to wear, other than the Midgardian clothing up in my chambers here. I'll do my best to return it. Without the bloodstains," he said with a smirk.
Jane made a face. "You do that. I'll hold you to it. The CDC will hold you to it. They'll come after you. No matter which realm."
The idea of the Clothing Distribution Center pursuing him, after months of fearing Thanos coming after him in his dreams, and Tony Stark coming after him in the flesh, or rather in his metal suit, caused him to snicker. And then reminded him of something he'd meant to ask Jane about. "By the way, did you have a code for me?"
"Huh?" Jane asked, brow wrinkled in confusion.
"A danger code. Does 'pepper' sound the trumpet?"
Jane's jaw dropped. "You knew?"
Loki laughed, energy surging through him as it hadn't for some time. "Of course I knew. 'NACL equals good'? The chemical equation for salt? Salt is good, so pepper is bad? And all on the same page as your weekly contact schedule?"
"You read my notebook?" Jane asked, outrage if not exactly rage coming through her tone.
"I used to read every single one of your e-mails and the transcript of every single one of your VOIP calls. Of course I read your notebook, Dr. Foster," he said, grinning widely. He hesitated a moment, but decided it wouldn't spoil the moment too much to tell her the truth. "I only figured it out today, though. When Tony Stark asked you about things getting 'spicy.' Really, Jane, not the most impressive of codes."
"The code thing was his idea," she said with a shrug, deciding just to go with it.
"Obviously," he responded with overdone distaste.
They stood there, neither of them moving.
"I guess you should go," Jane said.
"I suppose so," Loki answered, turning to eye the door.
"Loki?"
"Yes?"
Jane put on the best smile she could manage. "Challenge their assumptions. About you."
Loki drew in a slow deep breath. He nodded. He held Jane's gaze a moment longer, then made a broad gesture with his hand, removing the sound blanket, and left.
He was immediately greeted by the sight of Odin, Frigga, and Thor all waiting for him, Frigga stopping in the middle of whatever she had been saying, Odin standing there stoically as Odin always did, and Thor fidgeting with Mjolnir.
Outside, for the first time in Loki's four months at the South Pole, it was snowing.
/
Keepin' it short due to crazy-long chapter. If you want to see some of what hanging out with Thanos was actually like for Loki in this "fic-verse," check out Titans Bearing Gifts (link on my profile page). It's listed as a Thor/Avengers crossover so isn't super easy to find. And within Beneath, this chapter has callbacks galore; if I had more time and space I'd list them for you.
Previews for 156: Loki announces his initial plans. Thor is not impressed. Writing Loki and Thor together at long last is FUN.
Excerpt:
"Very well, then, Loki, what do you wish to do instead, that is not a waste of your time?" Thor asked with a twinge of anger. Loki was trying his patience already, and they'd not been back for ten minutes. For Asgard, he reminded himself, then frowned. For Loki, too. For all of us.
Loki absently watched Heimdall for a moment, as though considering his options. "Principally, I wish to not waste time explaining myself to you at every turn."
Oh wait, dear readers! One time only...bonus excerpt!
Thor stared, jaw falling slowly open. "Is this…is this a game to you?"
Let the games begin!