There is one reason and one reason only this chapter is making it out tonight (9/9) instead of probably tomorrow - YamiVixen. ;-)
Please note, I *may* be doing some traveling for a couple of weeks, starting in about a week. If so, I won't have much time to write this week as I prepare, but will hopefully have time while traveling, and then hopefully will still be able to post a new chapter or two, we'll see how it goes!
Meanwhile, hope you enjoy this installment!
/
Beneath
Chapter Twelve – Opening
"You okay?" Selby Higgins asked as he, Cyrus Wright, and Jane sat down to dinner in the galley, this one much smaller than McMurdo's. The screens hanging above the seating area announced it was -36 Fahrenheit outside.
Jane nodded. He'd noticed her shaking out her hands in between bites of beef stew. "My hands are tingly. If this is frostbite I'm in trouble," she said with a laugh. "And I've got a little headache." That was partly true, at least. It had started as a little headache.
"Diamox and dehydration," Wright said. "The tingling will go away once you stop the Diamox. It's a common side effect. The headache will go away once you knock back a couple of those," he added, pointing to her blue Nalgene water bottle.
"Oh, right, I remember them telling me that now, about the Diamox." The medication was supposed to help acclimatization to high altitude, and she'd taken the first pill the night before, with three more to go. 8,000 feet was considered high altitude and they were at 9,300 feet which felt like over 11,000 feet due to the thinner atmosphere and lower oxygen levels. "Bottoms up," she said, and gulped down the rest of her water.
"You should get a couple of liters in you before you go to bed. You'll be up all night but you won't have a headache," Wright said with a grin.
"Great," Jane said with a grimace, remembering how precarious getting out of bed in the middle of the night would be.
"I just got here two weeks ago; took about a week to feel normal," Selby offered. "I've started up on the treadmill now in the morning and I think in a few more days I'll go running outside."
Wright nodded. "You have to build up to it. I got here in November. I could run for miles out there now. If I wanted to."
Selby rolled his eyes, and they moved on to shop talk and professional interests, but Jane found herself hesitant to go into much detail about herself, preferring instead to listen and ask questions. These men were both about her age but had worked in mainstream science, had been part of major scientific endeavors including the South Pole Telescope project that brought them here, and she was pretty sure she recognized Wright's name from a recent publication on galaxy clusters. Jane's professional interests, spurred on and further shaped by The New Mexico Incidents and Thor, were perhaps not exactly things you brought up the first time you sat down to dinner with a couple of strangers. And nevertheless it did come up, sort of, when Selby asked about the Stark Institute for Scientific Innovation, her sponsor on this trip.
"It's a new research organization, established by Tony Stark," she said, after just a moment's hesitation, probably not long enough for people who didn't know her to notice.
"Stark? As in…?" Selby asked, trailing off. Wright just glanced between the two of them.
"That's the one," Jane confirmed, following it up with a bite of pineapple upside down cake.
"Tony Stark. Stark Industries," Selby said, looking at Wright, who still hadn't made the connection. "New York?"
Wright's eyes went up. "Ohhhh, that Stark. You know him?"
She shook her head. "Not really. I mean, not in person. We've spoken a few times," she said with a half-smile. He was enough to deal with over a video call; he must be exhausting in person. "But look, I don't want to make a big deal out of it. I don't really have anything to do with him; his institute is just sponsoring my research. I guess he's sponsoring Lucas, too, we haven't really talked about it."
And then somehow, mercifully, both men seemed to accept that and the conversation moved on. Tomorrow, when she got to go out to the Dark Sector Lab and check out their equipment and inspect her own – they'd confirmed it had arrived – she'd have to start talking more about her work, but for now she was content to leave it vague. While Erik and SHIELD's technology development wing may bandy about terms like "the Foster Theory," she was so far removed from the broader academic circles that she had no sense of how widely her adaptation of wormhole theory was even known, much less seriously considered in the scientific community at large. She was for once glad that her name was a common one. Anonymity would be hard to come by in this small and shrinking crowd.
Is that what you want, Jane, anonymity? Since when? she asked herself as they dropped off their trays and recycling on the way out of the galley and her tour of the elevated station began. For years she'd longed for acceptance of her work. Maybe there was nothing wrong with longing for a little acceptance of herself, too.
Selby and Wright were laughing about something she'd missed, so she joined in, pretending she'd heard the joke. They poked their heads in rooms all along the second level and then went down to the first level and did the same; Jane was impressed with all the after-work activity options here and hoped she'd manage to pull herself away from work enough to take advantage of it from time to time.
Near the end of the main corridor they stopped at the post office, which would soon close for the winter like the rest of the station. Wright told her a bit about the post office and showed her the little convenience store beside it, then launched into a theatrical tone. "We hope you've enjoyed your tour of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, and would like to thank you for your attention. And now for the grand finale…you've got mail!" He bent over and picked up one of several boxes lining the walls and handed it to her; Selby followed suit with what looked like a poster tube.
"Really?" Jane asked with wide eyes. And sure enough, her name was on both packages, with no return address.
"One more, actually." Wright held out a third, larger package, but her hands were full with two bottles of water and the other two packages. Leaning in toward it Jane could see this one had a return address in Tromso, Norway.
"Thanks, this is awesome. I can't believe I had mail before I even got here," Jane said, staring down at her packages and wondering who in the world could have sent the tube and the small package; the one from Tromso made her wonder if she'd simply left something behind.
The men helped Jane collect the rest of her luggage that had been unloaded from the plane and get it to her room, then the three parted ways, with Jane again declining an invitation to the Last Gasp dance party the last group of departing summer staff had planned for the evening.
She opened up one of her suitcases and grabbed a chocolate-peanut butter energy bar from her paltry snack stash and took that and one of the Nalgene water bottles back out into the corridor, leaving them at Lucas's door. She'd meant to bring something more than an energy bar, but beef stew and the rest of the galley's offerings didn't seem very amenable to sitting out in a hallway, possibly all night long. She exchanged a quick greeting with someone passing by, then returned to her room.
Jane pulled off her sneakers and set them against the wall, then wiggled her toes, which were tingling now along with her hands, as if they'd gone to sleep and were trying to wake up. It was annoying, but luckily she had packages to distract herself with. She grabbed a pen and punctured the tape on the largest box, the one from Tromso but no person's name on it, then slid it down as though it were a knife. With a little effort she got the box open and reached down inside, separating the packing materials until she came to another box. Her jaw dropped open. It was a digital SLR camera – a good one, with a pentaprism and condenser lens and…. Jane read through the camera's features on the box. She wasn't sure how much this particular model cost, but she figured it to be at least a thousand dollars.
On the bottom of the box was a card. She opened it and instantly recognized Peter Larson's handwriting. From all of us. Use it well and send us a photo from time to time.
Jane smiled. It was surprisingly nice of them; with the exception of Peter – and not even always with him – she had never felt particularly at ease with the SHIELD people in Tromso. She'd been brought there under false pretenses then told she couldn't leave, and physically prevented from leaving when she'd tried. Being essentially held prisoner, even if you were constantly being told "it's for your own good," didn't exactly make for warm fuzzy friendships.
Maybe they felt guilty, she thought.
False pretenses. She peered down at the box with the camera again, opened it and worked the camera out of the interior packaging and its own box. Maybe she should take it apart before using it, give it a little inspection, make sure nothing had been added since it was manufactured. But no, SHIELD knew she was good with hardware; if they'd modified the camera they would have done it in the software.
She put the camera back in the larger box, chiding herself through the headache that hadn't let up. She sat down at her desk and opened her bottle of water, taking several long gulps. You're being irrational, she told herself. Why would they send you some kind of bugged camera, what are you going to take pictures of, anyway? Snow? Auroras? Buildings? People? The exact same things everybody else here takes pictures of. What could possibly be in it for SHIELD?
And why would they send her an assistant just to spy on her, when she had readily agreed to share with them all her research findings and had never held anything back from them ever since those first few awkward days after Thor left and Phil made good on his word to return all her equipment?
She remembered questioning how Lucas had managed to pass his psych eval, and realized she'd been questioning the wrong person. There'd been a question on the written part about whether you thought people were following you. She'd marked no, because she knew it was the right answer.
Jane sighed and reached down for the smaller package and the poster tube, setting them on the desk. Erik was the only person she would feel comfortable opening up to about all this; no one knew her better and no one was better at making sure she didn't stray too far off the path of reason. But Erik had enough to deal with at the moment. Even had they been in the same room instead of continents apart she wouldn't have burdened him with this.
She pushed those thoughts aside and worked through the tape around the end of the poster tube until she could open it up and turn the tube on end. A tightly-rolled poster and an envelope slid out. She unfurled the poster carefully; it was long and narrow, a panoramic view over palm trees, bushes and flowers, and a rocky outcropping that quickly gave way to water over which the sunlight's reflection shone a diffuse column down the center. Jane thought she could detect the barest curvature of the earth where the water met the blue sky of the horizon, probably just an optical illusion. It was beautiful, and when she glanced up from her desk where she had rolled out the poster to the space between the desk's top shelf and the ceiling, she realized it was perfectly sized for that spot. She could lie in bed and feel like she was looking out to the ocean in a tropical paradise.
Curious, she let the poster roll back up and turned to the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of plain white paper with scribbled, barely legible writing. The view from my Malibu place. Mi casa, su casa, when you're ready to defrost and leave the ice to the penguins. PS, Pepper says I should tell you not to get the wrong idea. PPS, unless you like that idea. PPPS, Pepper just called me a bad name, and said you don't know me well enough to know I'm probably kidding. PPPPS, I added the "probably" after Pepper stopped reading over my shoulder. Jane laughed and shook her head. The "probably" was indeed inserted with a little arrow. Yeah, Tony Stark was enough to handle via video conference. Crisper handwriting followed. He's kidding. He hasn't been using the Malibu property very much lately, and he has plenty of others. It's yours whenever you want it and for however long. Pepper Potts. Jane wondered how Pepper – his assistant or manager or wrangler or whatever exactly she was – dealt with him on a daily basis. Probably with lots of spa time.
The small second box was full of pale yellow glow-in-the-dark stars of different sizes and a package of some kind of fancy double-sided tape, with a note from Pepper advising her to use the tape for the stars and the poster because it wouldn't damage the walls or ceiling when she took it off to leave. There was no note from Tony so she assumed the stars were Pepper's idea. And it was silly but completely perfect at the same time. Jane liked being able to sleep out under the stars once in a while, but that wasn't exactly going to happen at the South Pole. Now it would, sort of.
The poster was so long and curled up it was going to take a second set of hands to get it up on the wall, so for now Jane got to work creating constellations on her ceiling.
/
/
Loki woke the next morning to incessant high-pitched beeping. It took him a moment to localize the sound and remember it came from the watch he'd bought in Sydney; he'd never used its alarm function before. It was a rather disagreeable way to wake up, he decided, already considering ways he might modify the device's workings. The skin underneath the watch at his wrist itched, the last sign of its healing. He ignored it as he turned off the alarm.
He sat up, expanded his chest, rolled his neck around his shoulders. He had slept well, and far longer than he normally did; he hadn't expected to need to be woken by alarm. He had not dreamed, or if he had it had blessedly not been the sort of dream that disturbed his sleep. He felt good. Better than he had since…better than he had in a very long time.
Events from the day before came flooding back to him and he jerked his head around. The satchel hung where he had left it on the black metal post at the head of the bed frame. For a second he'd thought perhaps that had been a dream.
Learn, his mother had told him. He would indeed learn. He learned from everything, and there was much to learn here. But he suspected it would again not be what the All-Father intended him to learn.
Understanding and compassion. These he had no need of. Not for himself, and not for others, certainly not from or for Midgardians.
He pulled the thin tunic over his head and off. The chain was around his neck, but he had to pull the gem around to the front from where it had settled during the night. Save for the brilliance of its tiny cuts, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the unknown red gem. It wasn't glowing, and to Loki's knowledge had not glowed since he'd left Asgard. Perhaps it was too far away from the one who gave for it to work, or perhaps he'd simply not happened to be looking at it at the same times that his mother had thought of him. He never questioned that the love existed; if it had still been there after his failure on Earth then it would still be there now.
Loki jumped down from the bed with his tunic in hand. He changed quickly into the dockers and green Henley he'd worn in Sydney, one of the few things he'd purchased that appeared to be reasonably appropriate here, where everyone seemed to dress like laborers. He put away the rest of the items from his boomerang bag and when the room was entirely in order he removed the sound barrier he'd put up the night before. Even though he'd not dreamed, it had been a good decision; footsteps and the indistinct words of a conversation somewhere beyond his door immediately reached his ear.
He finished getting ready, grabbed his leather satchel, and opened the door. A bottle of water and a small plastic package were on the floor. He bent down, picked them up, inspected the plastic package closely, wrinkling his nose as he read the description. This is her idea of a meal? Little wonder these people lead such short lives. He took the items into his room and deposited them on his desk. A smile broke out on his face, and remained there as he left his room again and started down the corridor, staring at the closed door two rooms down.
/
/
Jane took a seat in the galley with cup of coffee, a bottle of water, and a bowl of oatmeal and raisins. She was one of the first arrivals, but Rodrigo from communications was already there and called her over to join him. Jane was happy for the familiar face but the smile was a bit of an effort.
"Rough first night?" he asked.
She grimaced. "I didn't sleep much."
"It's normal. It's the altitude."
"And my fingers and toes are tingly from the meds and I swear my lips are kind of numb." She took a bite of the oatmeal. "And this tastes weird."
"Could be the oatmeal, but probably just the Diamox. I skipped it this year. Doesn't hurt to go see the doc just in case."
Jane nodded. "Yeah, okay. So how about you? Are you feeling the altitude?"
Rodrigo shrugged, swallowed a bite of scrambled eggs. "Not too much. I slept pretty good, just not long enough. I've got to get on the TDRS satellite schedule. Very early mornings at the moment. This is brunch for me," he said, stabbing at another bite of eggs.
Satellite access meant internet access, so Jane took the opportunity to learn more about the two satellites the South Pole relied on for most of its communication with the outside world. Currently there was no connection in the late afternoon or evening, so early morning would be the best time for her to get online.
The galley was filling up, and Jane noticed Lucas taking a seat at one of the few remaining unoccupied tables, a small round one with four chairs. He hadn't touched the water and energy bar she'd left by his door, she'd noticed both times when she got up in the night to go to the bathroom and again when she got up in the morning. His back was to her now, but he had to have seen her as he entered the galley, and she and Rodrigo also had two empty chairs still at their table, not so far away. When she got the chance, she excused herself, explaining that she needed to talk to Lucas. She carried her tray around the corner to dispose of the remains of her breakfast, then turned back around to Lucas's table and dropped herself into a chair with no more than a good morning.
"Good morning," he said after swallowing a bite of buttered toast with jam.
"Did you sleep okay?"
"I did. And you?"
"Not so much. I think I've got that periodic breathing thing going on."
Lucas raised an eyebrow.
"You know, that thing you can get at altitude where you kind of skip some of your breaths when you sleep and it wakes you up. Didn't you take the online altitude class?"
"I suppose not. I'm sure I missed a number of things." He added some more jam to his toast, careful to hide his surprise at her words. Was she really in such fragile health that simply going up a little higher than normal made her unable to breathe normally? He wondered if only she had that problem or if all the mortals were so susceptible to heights.
"Hm. Well, we have some catching up to do," Jane said, folding her hands together over the top of the table.
"Do we?" He glanced up from his toast briefly, then turned his attention back to the plate.
Jane frowned. His words were dismissive but his tone simply disinterested. Part of her wanted to get angry, but she recognized what he was doing. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; the forces of two bodies on each other are always equal and are directed in opposite directions. Newton's third law of motion. More loosely put, he was dishing out to her exactly what she'd dished out to him.
"Yeah, we do. If you're going to be my assistant, I need to fill you in on what I plan to work on here."
"Since you've already very clearly informed me you don't need an assistant, I thought it would be best if I pursued something on my own."
"Oh, come on, Lucas," Jane said in exasperation. "Can you please just try to forget I ever said all that? It had nothing to do with you, I promise. It had nothing to do with whether I needed an assistant or not. What I didn't need" – she glanced around and lowered her voice before continuing – "was a SHIELD plant following me around. So if you aren't that-"
"I'm not," he said emphatically. "I thought we'd already established that."
"Then…" Jane paused, swallowed, suddenly realizing this felt a lot like begging and she wasn't especially fond of begging. "I'd love for you to be my assistant."
He swallowed the last of his toast, took a drink of water. "I don't know how we can work together if you don't trust me." She had his full attention now.
"I don't even know you," she said, struggling to keep her voice level. Newton's third law. One rejection of her for every rejection of him. She wondered if he'd kept count. But this couldn't go on indefinitely; Jane had come here to work, not to play games. "Do you trust me?"
Lucas narrowed his eyes at her. At last a question he didn't seem to have a prepared answer for. "Touché," he said after a moment. He returned his attention to his breakfast.
"Okay…so…maybe we should get to know each other, huh? One step at a time. We've still got" – she paused to glance up at the screen hanging from the ceiling – "about an hour before our meeting with the winter site manager. Let's get started."
"All right."
"So, uh…" Wow, this is awkward. What do you already know… "You're Canadian?"
"Mmm," he breathed, glancing up as a group of men in boisterous laughter walked past them, heading into the galley.
Jane waited a moment, but apparently "mmm" was all he had to say on the matter. It could have meant yes or it could have meant none of your business. "One summer when I was in college a couple of friends and I went on a road trip up to Vancouver. It's the only time I've ever gone to Canada. You ever been? To Vancouver?"
Not even an "mmm" this time. She was just starting to curse Newton's third law when he spoke.
"Why don't you tell me about your project here? That's the first step. Not geography."
Jane blinked heavily. Either he had a dry and rather odd sense of humor or he'd just insulted her. "Okaaaay. Well, this is going to sound crazy, but-"
"That's never a good way to begin a presentation."
Eyes widening and face flushing, Jane clenched her jaw as she held back a sharp retort that was bubbling up inside her – her patience had its limits and Lucas had pretty much just reached them.
But his dispassionate face eased into a smile that could almost pass for charming if Jane hadn't been so annoyed at him. "I apologize. I went too far."
Jane took a deep breath and let her anger dissipate with her exhale.
"But it's true, is it not?"
"Will you just let me do this? I have presented my work before, you know."
She expected something like okay, go ahead.
Instead, Lucas said, "And I noticed you didn't begin your dissertation with 'This is going to sound crazy.'"
Jane rubbed her brow, and when she took her hand away she fell into light laughter, unable to pinpoint when her irritation had morphed into amusement, when she had realized his comments were indeed intended as droll humor, or at least when she had decided to interpret them as such. She began to relax. "That would have been redundant. My whole committee already thought it was crazy."
"And yet you persevered."
She watched him watching her, his expression unchanged from when he'd first begun to smile. Her laughter faded. "I've had practice."
/
/
Loki waited expectantly, ready to hear all about the travails of poor Jane Foster. He already knew of them, most of them anyway, through Erik Selvig, and they evoked little sympathy in him. Her trials were insignificant, and typical of her people. She knew nothing of true suffering. Of true loss. She had lost people she loved who were destined to die in a few short more years anyway; she had lost the respect of colleagues in her profession. He had lost everything he'd ever held dear, everything he'd loved and everything he'd desired love from in return. He'd lost himself. In losing those things he'd gained others, but that did not matter at this moment. Not when he was prepared yet again to offer that compassion and understanding his mother spoke of – though she'd probably intended for it to be offered with a bit more sincerity. But again he did not have the opportunity.
Instead of travails and perseverance, Jane spun a tale that began with her unorthodox beliefs about wormholes and dark energy and exotic matter with negative mass and quickly led to the arrival outside the little New Mexico town she'd been living in of travelers from another world. She never mentioned his name, only the data she'd been able to gather through her makeshift equipment when he arrived, and how his arrival was physical proof that Einstein's and Rosen's early theory on tube-like curvatures through space, what later came to be known as wormholes, was essentially correct. To her question he acknowledged that, yes, he had heard something about those events in New Mexico but hadn't been sure what was true and what was not; she'd helpfully explained that SHIELD had initially tried to cover it up, but when monsters started pouring from a giant hole in the sky over Manhattan they'd given up trying to portray the Puente Antiguo stories as a hoax. To his question she confirmed that it was because of New Mexico that she'd gotten involved with SHIELD, though she did not offer any further details.
The story quickly turned back to the data from his appearance and SHIELD's data from the others' appearance – Loki wondered if among "the others" was included the Destroyer he'd sent to stop Thor; what an ironic little twist of fate that would be. She'd put all her time and effort since then into analyzing this data and whatever data she'd been able to obtain from other projects, including those at the South Pole, because proof of the reality of wormholes didn't mean she could precisely quantify how one was formed. A key component of her working theory on this, and apparently a number of her other theories, was that neutrinos had mass while the Standard Theory of particle physics assumed they did not, and that although they passed harmlessly through matter, they did interact with the unidentified subatomic particles that composed dark matter.
As she went on and grew more wrapped up in her story and less self-conscious in the telling of it, she spoke with such conviction and even passion that Loki couldn't help being drawn in, and not solely for selfish reasons. There was a single-minded purity in her zeal for knowledge that he found engaging, that even reminded him faintly of himself in times past. He saw this even more in the exclamation point to her story thus far, told with enthusiasm for the discovery rather than ego for having been right – recent data gathered at the South Pole had confirmed that neutrinos did have mass as Jane and others had come to believe, and led to approximations of that mass that were precisely in line with her predictions.
Jane had begun working to characterize those subatomic particles believed to make up dark matter, and hoped to find evidence to expand that work through the use of the world-class telescopes and sensors here and the specialized equipment she had designed herself and had shipped. The bridge from another realm – she was careful not to refer to it as the bifrost – had proven that stable wormholes through which people could safely travel were possible, and she was determined to figure out how.
Loki continued to listen with great interest although there were still large gaps in his mapping of her terms to his understanding. As he filed these terms away to look up at his first opportunity, he waited for mention of the tesseract, but it did not come. What arrived through the bifrost in New Mexico was infinitesimal compared to what arrived through the portal opened by the tesseract in New York, and the ratio of the availability of those "readings" she was so fond of was surely similar between the two locations. Of course, it was possible that he'd kept SHIELD too busy for readings. Or that the tesseract worked on entirely different principles than the bifrost. Loki had felt its power, its pull, had even drawn on that power through the scepter, but had never really controlled it. Erik Selvig, if he remembered anything from that time, would have a better technical understanding of it. And all Selvig had really done was find a Midgardian technological means to focus and sustain its energy, to turn it into a door that need only be nudged and held gently open from its own side instead of one that must be repeatedly splintered with a heavy fist from the other; Loki had not enjoyed being the knuckles of that fist.
The story appeared to have drawn to a close, and still there was no mention of travel via the tesseract, or of the other question that had occurred to him about halfway through her story. The tesseract he was best off not inquiring about even obliquely. Although he had muddied her memories of him, these types of surface-level manipulations were the extent of his abilities without the scepter; he couldn't be certain whether that manipulation would hold if she were to actively think and talk about him as his true self while looking at and talking to him as Lucas.
There was, however, no reason he couldn't ask the second question.
"Do you intend to build one?"
"One what?"
"An Einstein-Rosen bridge. A wormhole."
/
/
Jane coughed, choking on the water she'd been drinking and sputtering some out. She grabbed a napkin from his tray and wiped her mouth with it. "Uh, no, um…no. Build an Einstein-Rosen bridge? It's not something you can just build, I mean…maybe in- maybe in that place where those other people came from they can build things like that. But here… No. We don't have the technology for that. We don't understand the science for that yet."
"But you're close, aren't you? You've said as much. I'm surprised that you'd dismiss the idea outright. Isn't that what others have done to your ideas throughout your career? Dismissed them without properly considering them because they challenged assumptions about what could and couldn't be true? What could and couldn't be done?"
Jane let out a slow breath she'd been holding almost as soon as he'd begun to speak again. "But…" And then her mind was whirling with ideas. With possibilities. If she could identify and properly characterize all of the particles involved in the formation of a wormhole as well as their interactions, then she could formulate new equations. If she could formulate new equations, and she had sufficient power and computing capacity, and if she could jerry-rig her signal collector or maybe something more powerful…it was a lot of if's. But most importantly you had to understand something before you could program a machine to produce it. You had to know what it was. She was close to that…maybe.
Her eyes suddenly regained focus and fell on Lucas's face. His gaze was impassive and felt heavy, as though he were not just watching but assessing. "Are you trying to make fun of me?" she asked, frowning. If so, this was going to get ugly. For him.
"No. I'm challenging your assumptions."
She nodded, slowly. "Okay. That's good. I like that. But" – she glanced up at the screen hanging from the ceiling again – "I'm not here to try to build some kind of wormhole generator. Okay?"
Lucas inclined his head in silent agreement.
It was good enough for her. "You done? We need to get to our appointment."
/
Teasers for Chapter 13 (still unnamed, possibly "Theories") - Things on Asgard are getting complicated; Jane starts to feel a bit more comfortable around "Lucas"; Loki reminds us he's capable of a fair amount of mischief even without using magic.
And excerpt:
Loki looked at his left hand, turned it from side to side. Though he'd experienced that metamorphosis more fully later, when handling the ice casket, this hand and forearm in impossible unnatural horrifying creeping blue would always be his most visceral image of the other him, the him that lay beneath all the other layers and facades. He should thrive in this environment, the one of endless snow and ice and, eventually, perpetual darkness that lay just beyond these walls.
(Let me just add that it's all about context, and it's definitely lacking here. But I'll just say that he is most definitely *not* blue in this scene.)
