Again thank you for the reviews, I've been really enjoying them and I respond if the PM option is there. If you have questions I'll be happy to answer them, but I may be a bit cagey to avoid giving anything away!
Thanks to my Norwegian-speaking friend for the hotel name "Grevinden." She tells me it's the Danish spelling of the word, which makes it sound a bit old-fashioned and gives it a little extra oomph of class in Norwegian. It means "Countess" if you're interested.
In this chapter there's a little lightness and a little darkness...and Loki begins to test his boundaries.
Beneath
Chapter Three – Reacquaintance
"Thor? Thor!" Jane launched herself forward and wrapped her arms around his neck as he lifted her up from the ground, careful not to hold her too tightly. She pressed her face into his neck and he slowly lowered her down again.
"Jane, you know how to reach us," Larson said, then extended a hand to Thor, apparently eager to depart the scene. Thor shook the hand and thanked the men for bringing him here.
And then they were alone.
"Well, uh…come in!" Jane said, tugging at his arm.
He allowed her to pull him in, and his eyebrows rose. The room, far nicer than her temporary living situation in New Mexico but still far less than she deserved, was in a state of considerable disarray. "Is everything all right?"
"What? Oh, this," she said, looking around the room. She glanced back up at him, laughing nervously. "Oh, well, yes, it's just, I was packing. Sort of. I'm flying out of here tomorrow. On an airplane, I mean, not…you know." She turned around and made a face at herself and the way he could catch her off guard and so easily make her dissolve from Dr. Jane Foster into Jane Foster circa age 18.
"So I heard." He smiled as he watched her cross the room and haphazardly toss items from a small sofa onto the bed.
She sat down sideways on the green and beige striped couch, her back to the large window mostly covered with drawn green and beige striped curtains, and crossed her legs in front of her. He left his hammer near the door, then settled down beside her, took her hand, and kissed it.
"It's good to see you again, Jane," he said, breathing in her vaguely floral scent.
"You too," she said over light laughter. "I just wish you could give me a little more notice. I mean- oh, I must look terrible!" Her hand shot up to her hair.
Thor laughed. "You look lovely. Even more lovely than I remembered." Her hair, most of it anyway, was up in a loose ponytail, and she wore a simple white shirt and jeans, with white socks on her feet. The shirt she was now looking down at had a couple of orange stains on it.
"Spaghetti," she said with a smile and an embarrassed shrug as she pointed to her chest. "I shouldn't have been trying to read and eat at the same time. Bad habit."
They sat in silence for a moment. Thor wanted simply to look at her for a while, to put off coming to the reason for his visit.
"I'm sorry," Jane finally said, "I don't even know where to begin." She stared up into his riveting blue eyes and tried to convince herself that he was really here, just inches away from her, instead of in her dreams and imagination.
"Neither do I," Thor said with a smile. "Wait, yes I do. Jane…I apologize. I promised I would come back. But when I returned to Asgard…there was a battle."
"With your brother?"
"Yes. He was trying to do something terrible."
"I can't imagine," Jane interjected coldly. For her, too, the events of two weeks earlier were still an open wound, even though she'd been thousands of miles away. Loki had killed Phil Coulson – a foe who had quickly turned ally and friend – and one of her college roommates had died during the chaos of the Manhattan battle. And then there was what he'd done to Erik.
"I couldn't think of any other way to stop him. Perhaps if there had been more time…but there was not. I destroyed the Rainbow Bridge."
Jane breathed in deeply, nodded slowly. "We could see a spectacular atmospheric disturbance of some sort after you left, and we waited. But then it dissipated."
"Without the bifrost, without the bridge, travel between the realms is next to impossible. My father located a passageway and worked hard to master the magic to control it, but only once Heimdall – the guardian of Asgard – reported that he'd seen Loki arrive on Midgard through the tesseract. Opening it severely depleted Father's strength."
She nodded. "I understand. We only knew each other for three days, but I knew you well enough to know you keep your promises. I knew something must be preventing you from returning."
"You never doubted?"
"No," she answered immediately, then smiled and glanced away. "Well, maybe once or twice."
"I'm sorry I gave you cause to doubt me, Jane," he said, taking her hand again and squeezing it in his.
"You're here now," she said, letting herself fall into those beautiful bright eyes. He looked the same – beard a little fuller, blond hair a little longer, but the sheer physical presence of him took her breath away all over again. She felt herself unexpectedly growing a little shy and attempted to push all the loose strands of hair behind her ears. "You know, just wait here a minute," she said, springing up suddenly and taking a few short steps to the bed. "I've got to at least change shirts, this is awful." And with just a few minutes alone in the bathroom she could make her hair look more presentable, too. She rummaged through the clothing on the bed, grabbing and discarding several before Thor came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder.
"Jane…that's not important."
She froze, now with heightened awareness of the bed in front of her and Thor very – very – close behind her. She tried to quiet her breathing, which suddenly seemed incredibly loud. At first she had just been happy and relieved to see him. Now she wondered for the first time why he had shown up at her door out of the blue.
"There's something I need to talk to you about."
Talk. Okay.
"Something serious."
She let out a deep steadying breath, dropping the shirt she'd been holding. Her eyes drifted closed for a moment. She wasn't sure if she was relieved or disappointed. "Okay." She turned around. "I'm listening."
"Come. Sit down again," he said, his hand lightly on her arm.
She followed him back to the couch, her curiosity piqued.
"Loki is on Midgard."
Jane shot back up and stared down at Thor. "What?"
"Father has placed enchantments on him. He shouldn't be able to do any real harm to anyone, not with any kind of magic, anyway."
"How did he escape? I would think if anyone could hold him it would be-"
"He didn't escape," Thor interrupted. "The All-Father sent him here as punishment, with enchantments to protect the people of Midgard. Of Earth."
Jane was shaking her head. "Thor, I know we're talking about Odin here and all, your father, but…that just doesn't strike me as a smart thing to do. He tried to take over the entire planet, and didn't bat an eye at killing anything that dared tell him 'no.' It's a miracle you and the rest of the Avengers were able to stop him and get him out of here. And Odin's idea of punishment is sending him right back? Who exactly is he trying to punish here?"
"Don't speak of him like that, Jane. He is…well, he is my king. Not yours, I suppose. But I've told you, Father used magic to negate Loki's ability to do harm. He hopes, and I hope, that Loki will learn something useful here. Like I did."
Jane took a moment to process all this, sinking back down onto the couch. "So some unsuspecting person will run into Loki just like I ran into you."
"I suppose, eventually, yes. But I hope that person does not run into him with quite as much force as you did, when you ran into me." Thor watched Jane's face intently, but if she noticed his attempt at humor she didn't show it.
"Were you sent here as punishment?"
"Yes," he said in surprise, before remembering that he'd never had a chance to explain things to her, everything had happened so fast. "Father banished me. I was to have been made king that day, but I ignored his wise council and acted rashly, endangering all of Asgard. I understand now that he was right to do what he did. I fear I shall never match his wisdom," he said, his voice growing soft as he looked inside himself and grew more pensive. "Here I learned much, and not least I learned how much more I have to learn if I am to be anything close to the kind of king my father is."
"So…you think of being on Earth as a punishment?"
Thor looked at her in confusion as her question slowly penetrated the fog of his introspection. Introspection – something else he'd learned on Earth. "No, that's not what I think at all. But it is a place where one can…can learn to cope, or to…to look at oneself in a new way. Without being a prince, or an Aesir, without magic at your fingertips…a place where one can learn. Do Midgardians not also travel in order to learn?"
Jane looked at him stubbornly. 18-year-old Jane was long gone. "We do. But Loki isn't a tourist or a college student on a study abroad trip. Our psychopaths and mass murderers we send to maximum security prisons. Or we execute them."
Thor broke her pointed gaze for just a moment. "Yes, he could be executed. We are not easily killed, but we can be, we aren't entirely immortal as the people of your realm think us. He could also be put into an unwaking sleep for eternity, the most maximum of maximum security prisons. Other options were considered. And argued over passionately. But in none of these options does my brother have the chance to return. To again truly be my brother, and my friend."
"So after everything he did here, after he tried to kill you himself, you still think you can somehow turn him around? You still love him?"
"Yes," Thor answered with simple conviction.
Jane just shook her head, still struggling to integrate this new information with everything she had learned before, from Thor himself, and later from the steady stream of reports flowing out of SHIELD.
"You don't believe me," he said. "Then you and he have something in common," he continued before she could respond. He let his gaze wander past her and over to the sliver of a view through the window beyond.
Jane let the moment linger, none too eager to open her mouth and say the wrong thing at this point, something she didn't often worry about. She tried to think not about Loki, but about what it was like to have a brother. The problem was, she was an only child. As a girl even into her teens she'd sometimes wished for an idealized older brother, someone who played with her, protected her, and good-naturedly teased her, but no matter what, always loved her, always listened to her with a sympathetic ear and offered a shoulder to cry on. Thor was that idealized older brother, perhaps. At least for Loki.
"I'm sorry," she finally said. "I do believe you. Of course I believe you. But I think…I think that's not the issue. You want to give love, but Loki has to want to accept it. That's what I have a hard time believing. You want to be his brother, but I don't think Loki wants to be yours."
"Perhaps not. But I cannot give up hope. Nor can my parents. My mother's heart is broken and my father…I fear he grows weaker with each passing day."
"Why did he do all this? Has he always…" Been a psychopathic egomaniacal murderer? "Um, has he always done such terrible things?"
"No, of course not. He…he has always felt like he was in my shadow. I didn't realize it until recently, at least not the extent of it, how deeply he felt it and how much it gnawed at him. I was arrogant, too comfortable with the privilege of my position, and though I never meant to hurt him, I'm sure I made things worse. And then he found out things that, in his mind at least, confirmed for him what he'd already believed. Jane…it's a very long story and I don't want to bore you with details that are difficult to explain and wouldn't mean much to you anyway."
"You were arrogant, hm?" she shot back at him, surprising herself at how sharp her tone was. She regretted it instantly.
Thor looked chagrined, and she regretted her words even more.
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. I'm just…upset about Loki."
"No, you're right. I didn't mean to talk down to you. It's not that I don't want to tell you everything, more like I don't have the time. My father needs me. He only allowed me to come here so that I could warn you."
"Warn me? I thought there were…incantations?"
"Enchantments. Yes. But…he knows who you are, Jane. Who you are to me." Thor paused. He didn't want to worry her unnecessarily, but she deserved to know the truth. "When we fought in Asgard, he threatened to seek you out. He was only trying to provoke me into fighting him – and it worked – but it's possible he could try that now. Just before he was sent to Earth, he asked Father if he would send him to Norway. I think he knew you were here."
Jane frowned, but as she thought them through, she did not find these revelations terribly concerning. "He was already here, though, on Earth, Midgard. He could have sought me out then. He could have easily found me, l think. He was pretty good at finding whatever he wanted. And maybe he just wanted to go to Norway because Asgard has history there. Nick Fury assured me that only a handful of people knew about this location. Not that I was looking for assurances, by the way. I wanted to be there."
Thor smiled, feeling proud of her, the little mortal woman who did not back down before anything. Erik had told him how she'd stood up to a near army of SHIELD agents who'd taken her equipment and hadn't stopped until Erik physically pulled her away from them. She would have made a fine Aesir. "I know you did. But I'm glad you weren't."
"Well, what's done is done. I'm just glad to see you now. And, the more I think about it, really, don't worry about me." She jumped up from the couch again, crossing to the opposite side of the room and looking down at the papers spread over the desk. "Where did your father send him?"
"I don't know. He didn't want it known."
"Okay, well, when was he sent?
"Today. Right before I arrived in Tromso."
"Perfect. I'm on a 6AM flight tomorrow morning to Oslo, and a few more flights on from there I'll be far away from here conducting research in a remote area guaranteed to be nowhere on Loki's top-ten list of where to look for me, assuming he even tried. I'll be gone at least nine months."
"Nine months?" Thor stretched his legs out before him and relaxed into the sofa. "That's a long time." It was for Jane, at least, he thought. Not for him. Not for Loki either, he thought with a frown. "Maybe you should stay there."
Jane laughed. "I don't think so. Not permanently. But really, it's the chance of a lifetime. Something I've always dreamed of doing and never thought in a million years I'd have the chance. But now that my research is being taken seriously…" She held up a color printout of a graph showing a breakdown of multiple particle emissions; the researcher who had conducted that study had been guided by false assumptions and had missed so much. She looked past the paper to Thor again, watching her intently. It flattered her that he seemed to find her so intriguing. "I owe this all to you, you know. If you hadn't come through that Einstein-Rosen bridge, the Rainbow Bridge-"
"If you hadn't hit me with your car," he interjected with a teasing grin.
"You're never going to let me live that one down, are you? Anyway, Darcy was driving, she hit you."
"Not the second time."
Jane sighed, conceded the point. "Whatever. If you hadn't shown up when you did, I'd still be sitting in Puente Antiguo or some other small town with a big sky trying desperately to find some sign of evidence for my theories and being laughed out of conferences and rejected from journals. I owe you a lot."
Thor merely smiled in return. He knew he owed her more. "I'm sorry for what followed."
"Yeah…it's not your fault. You're not responsible for your brother's actions. That was him behind that…that thing, right?"
"Right."
"You have nothing to apologize for. You did everything you could to protect the people of that town. You laid down your life for them."
Quiet settled between them for a few moments, while Thor wondered if he really had done everything he could, and Jane watched him, wishing she knew the words to say to convince him that he had. "How many died?" he asked softly.
Jane exhaled. "One. A woman was crushed in a collapsed building. And a SHIELD agent was killed outside town when it attacked them. But for all the damage that metal thing did, it could have been much, much worse."
Thor got up and went over to the windows. He pulled the curtains open and gazed out onto a street lined with trees, a slight breeze rustling the leaves. Cars plied back and forth, lighting up each other and tiny pedestrians who were going about their business. They shouldn't have to worry about conflicts from other realms; maybe with the tesseract gone they wouldn't have to. He would certainly do his best to make sure it never happened again.
"So," Jane said, coming up beside him and slipping an arm around his lower back. "How long can you stay?"
"Mmm, an hour, perhaps two, no more. My father will need to rest, possibly for a long time, and he is waiting for me."
"All right. Let's put that time to good use then. No more talking about anything to do with your brother. How about…how about this? I will introduce you to Earth's desserts. You never had dessert in New Mexico, right?"
A smile spread across Thor's face. He would let Jane make him forget. She had an uncanny ability in fact to expel sadness with the light of her smile. "Sweets? I had Pop-Tarts, remember?"
"Pop-Tarts? Pop-Tarts?" she asked with deliberately exaggerated features. "Okay those are sweets I guess, but that's not dessert. More like…fast food for breakfast."
"Fast food? Ah, yes, and the slow food was what we had at Isabella's, and what you cooked the next day. We have food like that on Asgard, the slow food."
Jane just laughed and pulled him toward the door. She would get him something much better than Pop-Tarts and her scrambled eggs and toast.
"Oh, wait. Just one second." She let go of his arm and darted back to the bed to grab her burgundy sweater. Holding out a finger to him as she scurried past, she ducked into the bathroom and closed the door. It was far from perfect, but in two frantic minutes spaghetti stains and fly-away ponytail hair were a memory.
Loki walked.
He had been walking for hours. Trudging through packed snow into which he occasionally sank up to his knees, cursing his father's – his Not-Father's – name. With every step of his right foot he was reminded of that wretched firegrub and its curse. What a snigger Odin must have had over that whole thing. He wondered if Thor had known the whole time. Probably. What's wrong, brother? Feeling a little cursed, are you?
He had appeared in the middle of a white landscape devoid of signs of human life, with clusters of tall fir trees here and there around him, their limbs sagging from the weight of snow and blocking the low sun. The air was sharp and dry and cold – almost Jotunheim cold. He had promptly made use of the long black fur-lined leather coat in his satchel. Of all the ornamentation and trimmings of metal and dark green cloth that had been on this coat, only a few bands of gold around the wrists remained. He left the hood down so it would not obscure his vision.
He had no idea which direction to go, though over time he had applied what he knew of this realm and of nature and determined that the direction he'd chosen to set off in was easterly. So, wherever he was going, it was to the east. Loki could survive for a long time without food or drink or other comforts, but he had no idea how long it would take him to reach "east," and what he would find when he got there. He heard a sound and stopped walking for a moment to look up; a few brave birds had taken off from somewhere nearby and were flying overhead. "Is this what you mean to teach me, Father?" he called skyward, knowing Heimdall may be watching. "Shall I learn to hunt for my own food? Use tree branches to construct my own dwelling?"
The birds disappeared from view. Headed to warmer climes, if they had any sense at all.
Maybe this wasn't even Midgard, Loki wondered, resuming his easterly course. Odin could have played a trick and set him down in one of the other realms. It was possible he thought, but not likely. This place, although he was certain he had never been in this part of it, felt like Midgard. Perhaps he had even caught a stroke of luck and Odin had ignored Thor and granted his request to be sent to Norway. He craned his head around back over his shoulder searching for the birds, but there was no sight of them. He was envious of them, for their superior view of the land.
And then he halted. Thinking clearly was not easy. He was angry and his foot screamed for relief from the boot constricting it mercilessly and from his own weight upon it. The birds, however, reminded him of his father's words. Magic was not forbidden to him, only magic that caused harm. No, magic that caused mischief. Loki laughed drily, the sound small and hollow amid these giant endless trees. Mischief. Wasn't that in the eye of the beholder? How was he to know what his father considered mischief? Was it mischief to manipulate the particles around him to get him more quickly to something resembling civilization? Surely it was not. He only wanted to be able to get off his feet for a while, perhaps to have a meal. To find out where he was. Nothing more.
He looked up again to the clear skies and the sun sinking lower in the sky behind him. No answers came, only a clear memory of his father repeating in his question-and-answer-time-is-over voice, You have heard the enchantments. What would Odin have said had he requested a reference manual? He wished he'd thought of it at the time. He gave a little laugh, then his face went blank. Decision made.
He passed his right hand over the particles around his feet, felt them growing excited, and in a second he was rising up from the ground. He lifted himself over the desolate snowy landscape, high enough to clear the tallest treetops, and failed to feel any ill effects from it. His father had said there would be pain. The pain he felt in his foot while he was walking and the persistent minor ache when he wasn't, or some additional pain to sound the magical alarm of a broken rule? Loki shouted up curses to Odin and his rules again, then grew silent and still. He had a goal and he needed to focus on it. In the distance he saw a dark, unnaturally straight line, the only thing around not completely covered in snow and ice. A road. Roads led to places with people. With chairs to recline in where one could remove one's boots. With warm beds and warm meals. With information. Continuously manipulating the energy around him Loki followed the road, gliding silently over the treetops alongside.
"So, what do you do for fun on Asgard?" Jane asked, setting down her coffee cup. They sat almost alone in the Grevinden's ground floor restaurant.
"For fun?"
"Yeah, games, entertainment, stuff to relax and enjoy yourself."
Thor laughed. "I know what fun is. We aren't so different from you, in a lot of ways." He drank the last of his coffee and set the cup back on its saucer.
"You do remember the proper way to ask for more here, right?" she asked with raised eyebrows.
"I toss the mug right about there, I believe," he said, pointing to a place on the floor near her feet.
"Haha, well, just checking."
"They appreciate my improved manners on Asgard as well."
"I'll bet. A lot fewer expenses and a lot fewer messes to clean up. So, what do you do for fun?"
"My friends and I, we play a lot of games. Challenges we have to conquer sometimes together, sometimes against each other. There's teasing, jesting, playing pranks on each other. We go for long rides on horseback, we climb mountains, we ford raging rivers, we spar with each other to practice our battle skills. We relax afterward with mead and gaming and dancing and poetry. All sorts of things."
He'd spoken with a smile, but it had gone from radiant to sad in the space of those few sentences. She'd managed to keep the conversation light and full of laughter thus far, with updates on Darcy and Erik and Sif and the Warriors Three. But as the mood sobered, she realized it was inevitable they would circle back to the things that were foremost on Thor's mind. "You don't seem very happy when you talk about having fun."
"I don't?"
Jane shook her head. A waitress approached and asked if they wanted more coffee. Jane said no, but gave a half-laugh at Thor's "Yes, please." The air of superiority and entitlement he'd carried with him when he'd first shown up on Earth was nowhere in sight. He was a quick learner, and the restoration of his status in Asgard hadn't made him forget.
His coffee replenished, Thor breathed in the aroma deeply and took a long drink. "There isn't much fun to be had on Asgard lately, not for me at least. I miss all those things."
"Because of Loki."
"Yes."
As the silence lingered, Jane looked down at her empty plate, scraping her fork over the crumbs that remained from the cheesecake. Thor had not cared for it, not at first. By the third slice he'd decided it was delicious.
"Why didn't you tell me about all of this?" she finally asked. She lifted her gaze from her plate and found his penetrating blue eyes there waiting for her.
"About Loki?"
"About who you really are. About him. About you. About your father. About your life up there," she said sharply, angling her neck upward. "Or wherever Asgard is. I mean, I guess at first I thought you were just a regular run-of-the-mill weird guy who somehow showed up in the middle of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. And then I saw that book about Norse mythology, and then…"
"You're annoyed with me," Thor said, his eyes still boring into hers.
Jane let out a sigh and sagged a bit in her chair. "No. I'm annoyed that I know more about you and your family from SHIELD reports than I do from you."
"Ask me anything. I have no secrets from you. The only limit on what I can tell you is time."
"No small limit," Jane said with a wry smile.
"Ask," Thor prompted again. He would tell her anything, no matter how personal or painful, and somehow he knew she would understand and he would feel better for it.
"Okay. You and Loki, were you close growing up?"
His face broke into a smile, if not that dazzling grin that lit up his whole face. "As close as brothers can be. We were about the same age, I was just a little older. We were attached to each other with invisible thread, Mother used to say. Learning, stumbling, helping each other up, fighting with each other, but back to back as soon as anyone else tried to hurt one of us. I knew him as well as I knew myself. We were different, though. Very different. But my strengths were his weaknesses and my weaknesses were his strengths. There was no one I would rather have by my side."
Jane nodded but remained silent, waiting for him to continue.
"Loki was a brilliant strategist and a tenacious and clever fighter. But I was coming into my full strength, as a grown man, and it was becoming clear that Loki's strength was no match. Under some conditions he could still occasionally best me, but in hand-to-hand combat I could defeat him every time. Once when we were sparring, he realized I was holding back. In truth I'd already been holding back for some time, but he only then figured it out. He was furious with me. He said I was dishonoring him and demanded that I respect him by fighting him with all I had. So I did. I would knock him down and he would get back up. I would tell him to stay down and he wouldn't. Before long I was pleading with him to stay down. And eventually he fell to the ground unconscious. When he didn't get up that time, I was afraid I'd killed him. He wasn't dead, of course, but I'd given him eight broken bones and a nasty head injury. He couldn't walk for almost a week. My father punished me, and after the punishment was over I was afraid to go see Loki. So he came limping to see me. I cried and begged for his forgiveness but he laughed at my behavior. He thanked me for fighting him as though he were an actual opponent, and said he'd learned greatly from the experience. And in a few minutes we were laughing about the whole thing. But that night after dinner, the first we'd been to together since I'd sent him to the Healing Room, I had a moment alone with him out on the balcony. I told him that if he'd died, I would have jumped onto the pyre with him."
"One of my friends in high school had a twin brother, and I remember her saying the same thing about him – well, basically the same thing – even though they fought like crazy."
"We were very much like twins. And I always thought he felt the same as I did." He paused. "No, I know he felt the same. But something…something happened along the way. I don't know what, or how. He became very skilled in magic, just as I became even more skilled in fighting. Sometimes he went too far…sometimes I did too. But Loki…both of us, sometimes we were playing games that were funny to us and not so funny to those around us. And Loki deeply offended some. One day he did something truly awful, beyond all boundaries and against every law."
"He killed your other brother?"
Thor's eyebrows went up, startled. "How do you know that?"
"It's recorded in Norse mythology."
"That's amazing," Thor said, wondering how such a story had even made it to Midgard. He'd hadn't known of any contact between Midgard and Asgard in those days of his youth. "But yes, he did kill Baldur. We, my parents and I, were distraught. Father punished Loki severely, and it took him a long time to return to himself again. With time and other losses along the way, the pain of Baldur's death faded and Loki's role in it became a distant almost forgotten memory. We haven't spoken of it for centuries."
"So what changed, then?" Jane asked, trying not to let her thoughts linger on the "centuries" reference and all the questions it prompted in her. "Things were fine as far as you could tell, and then…and then he was doing whatever awful things he was doing in Asgard and trying to take over the entire planet here?"
Thor shook his head. "I must have missed something. I must have… The truth is I don't know. All I know is what he told me. Before we lost him from Asgard, he told me that he didn't want to be Asgard's king, but he didn't want to see me on the throne either, he thought I would make a terrible king. In a way he was right; it's true I wasn't ready. Then later, when I first confronted him here, that's when he told me he'd always felt like he was in my shadow. Those aren't the same thing. I can't put them together. I don't know if only one is true, or both, or neither one. Loki is an enigma to me now. All I know is he's my brother, and I love him no less than I ever did. There is…I don't know quite how to explain it, but I feel his absence physically, as if some vital piece of me has been removed and I'm not fully alive without it. Even when I was fighting the Chitauri in New York, part of me was expecting to see the glint of a knife fly past me and into my opponent, and to turn and see that Loki had thrown it. I don't know if it's possible for things to ever be the way they were…but I have to keep trying."
"I'm guessing no one's ever called you a quitter," Jane said with a smile.
"You guess correctly," Thor said with a hearty laugh, pushing away the gloomy thoughts and frustrating questions that had been tumbling around in his mind for so long now with no greater understanding to show for it. "This is my brother's chance to think about what he's done, the choices he's made, the family who love him, and who he really is. And to come to admire a people he tried to enslave. I hope all these things will happen and he will return to us. And if not…there will be time to cross that bridge. But Jane, there's one thing I almost forgot to tell you."
"What?"
"My father gave me permission to come here and warn you. But he doesn't want anyone else to know, especially those SHIELD people or the Avengers. Loki can't do them any harm. But they could do him harm. I don't think it would help him much to be locked in a prison cell and interrogated every day by people who may rather see him dead for what he did here." What are you prepared to do? Director Fury had asked him when they knew there was information Loki had and SHIELD needed.
Jane nodded. "All right. I understand. As long as there's no sign of him out there trying to hurt people, I won't say anything."
"Father's enchantments should ensure that doesn't happen." He reached over took her hand. "If I thought you would be in danger I would never have argued for him to be sent here."
"I know." She watched as a frown spread over his face and gave his hand a squeeze, knowing she wouldn't be able to hold onto it much longer. "I guess I should ask for the check."
Don't worry, Thor/Jane fans, the night's not quite over. And as for Loki, he's finally about to catch a break, at least he hopes that's what it is.
