Couple of quick warnings: (1) This chapter's around 1,500 words longer than average. I try to keep them in a similar range but this one had to be what it is to accommodate the specific things I wanted to happen in it. (2) This chapter also has just a bit of the darkness in it that I've mentioned to a few of you. Nothing too jarring at this point.

This chapter is also entirely Loki POV, which I didn't really intend for, I usually try to bounce back and forth, it just worked best that way. Have you predicted any breakthroughs?

(Reply to jaqueline: Thank you! Yes, I really, truly did; found an e-mail address on a blog and it snow-balled. And, I will check out your suggestion, thanks!)

/


Beneath

Chapter Twenty-One – Breakthrough

It was his own doing that Jane spent virtually every waking minute with him now and decided that walking back and forth to the station for meals was a waste of time, so Loki was in no position to complain when the opportunity to gain access to Jane's laptop did not immediately present itself.

Wednesday was split between examining new data – frustrating for Loki because he wasn't sure what he was supposed to be looking for, and Jane only said she'd know it when she saw it – and poring over SHIELD's extensive bifrost data amassed when Thor's friends had arrived. She never named them, never referred to them more specifically than "people who came through the bridge." She did once slip and use the word bifrost, after which she helpfully explained that that was what the people from Asgard called an Einstein-Rosen bridge, and that they also called it a "Rainbow Bridge," apparently different terms for the same thing. Loki had nodded thoughtfully then snickered silently as soon as his back was turned. He and Thor had called it the Rainbow Bridge when they were children, and a thousand years on Thor had yet to grow up.

The bifrost data brought with it its own distracting memories. In these numbers, lines, charts, graphs, blips, beeps, and images were written his downfall. The downfall. The only one that really mattered. He had told them from the throne itself in terms that could not have been clearer that Thor could not be brought back. Perhaps they'd thought him a usurper; they certainly didn't bother to hide their disdain for his authority. They'd never trusted him, especially Sif and Hogun. But Heimdall knew. He could not have failed to notice the peaceful transfer of power, or the plain fact that Loki had not expected it. He'd been suspicious of Loki's actions on Jotunheim, but had sworn his obedience to his new king.

And he'd permitted the Three and Sif to go after Thor anyway.

And that had forced Loki's hand, pushing him into doing things he'd never intended to do, never imagined he'd do. No matter what, he couldn't allow Thor back to Asgard. Not then. Not before his plans had time to come to fruition. Not before his father – when perhaps he could have still claimed him as father – had woken and seen what he'd accomplished.

And it hadn't even worked. Not only had it not worked, it had entirely backfired. Sending the Destroyer had resulted in an angry restored Thor returning instead of a powerless mortal Thor. Never had one of his plans gone so horribly wrong. Not since Baldur, anyway, and he'd been a mere 33 years old then.

Jane had caught him in one such moment of reflection, when he'd been staring blankly at the computer with who knows what expression on his face and his white-knuckled fists had gripped the edge of the desk. She'd put a hand on his shoulder and started to say something, but he jerked away and bit off the beginning of an angry shout. He'd mumbled an apology, said he had a headache. She'd told him to go take a break from the computer, but he'd responded out of suppressed irrational rage that he was fine. If he'd been thinking more clearly he would have thanked her for her concern and gone straight to her room.

Thursday morning brought house mouse duties again, but this time it was shoveling snow that was starting to build up in drifts around the DA, DZ, and emergency exit stairs. Given a choice he would have pointed a finger and redirected the snow, for princes much less kings did not perform manual labor and the only thing he'd ever shoveled was sand in a toy bucket as a child. But stuck out in full view of Jane, Selby, and Wright, he put his back into it and shoveled. He was rather surprised to find he actually enjoyed it. The exertion was minimal for him, compared to the mortals, just enough to make him forget the cold for a while and appreciate the use of his muscles. By the time he was nearing the completion of the task, he was humming the tune to some old song whose full lyrics he couldn't remember, about cold moonlit nights and shimmering fairies alighting in golden birch trees. He paused to look around him and realized the strange sensation he was experiencing was peace. It wouldn't last, he knew; it faded even as his eyes fell on his "teammates" working on the other staircases. But it had been pleasant enough while it lasted, and he still felt calmer than he had before. He wondered if this was why so many of the others here went to the gym and used those bicycles and running mats that went nowhere. It had seemed pointless to him at the time, but he was used to a more vigorous lifestyle than sitting in a chair all day, and he thought perhaps he should give it a try. If nothing else, perhaps it would help him with the increasingly onerous task of being Lucas day after day.

When they were done Jane was panting and stretching her back but eager to get out to the DSL, and loathe though Loki was to miss any time looking at that data himself, now was the perfect opportunity to make a few more modifications to her laptop.

He told Jane he wanted to go back to his room and change clothes and that she should go on without him. Selby and Wright went into the station with him; they spent most of their time in the station's lab while he and Jane worked almost exclusively from the DSL. Loki exchanged brief greetings with someone he passed in the berthing wing, doubling back to Jane's room once he was alone in the corridor.

Recalling the apprehension he'd felt when he did this at McMurdo, he put his right hand on the doorknob and gave a smooth twist to the right, pushing inward. And there he was. He hadn't been in her room since he'd helped her put her poster on the wall. Nothing he saw surprised him now. Piles of various objects he didn't look closely at covered the desk and its shelves, except for a cleared area next to the laptop where she probably took notes. The bed was expectedly unmade, some large device he hadn't seen before was on the floor next to the bed, and two drawers of her wardrobe were open. He took these things in with a quick glance, then walked over to her desk, pausing at the chair.

There was always a chance Jane would do something unpredictable and return, and since all she had to do was turn the knob there'd be little warning, but he'd planned for this in advance. If she walked in, she wouldn't find him typing into her keyboard. He'd changed forms three times now since being sent to Midgard – twice appearing as Mohsin Tarkani, for which he'd paid no price, and once as Jane, for which he had. As Mohsin he hadn't interacted with anyone; as Jane he had. So, he figured, so long as Jane did not walk in on him – and she almost certainly would not – he would not be punished. And if she did walk in, it would be worth the price.

A curse fell from Selby's mouth when it turned out he was wrong. He grabbed onto the back of the chair as the familiar pain shot up his leg. What is the difference?! I haven't been seen. I haven't been caught! He clenched his teeth to stop himself from shouting these words at the top of his lungs.

He glanced down at his shorter body. He appeared to be dressed as Selby was today, but his own black leather satchel still hung over his shoulder and under his right arm. It would be an immediate give-away if Jane walked in and she were at all observant. He hesitated only a moment before vanishing it from sight, refusing to behave as a child with a security blanket. And in the unlikely event he needed his mother's gift, it would take little additional time to retrieve the satchel from its invisible hiding spot.

He sat down and turned on the laptop, then opened his own e-mail where he'd already sent a message with the attachment he needed. He downloaded the attachment, a sneaky little file that would record voice traffic, convert it to text, and save it to an invisible folder within her e-mail; anything within that folder would be automatically sent to his e-mail account every time she logged into her e-mail account. Finally, he added one further protection that would be triggered by the use of his true name. His work done, he logged out of his account, deleted its presence in her internet browser history, and smirked at the computer. He would have to remember to send SHIELD and Barton personally a heartfelt thank-you note before he left this forsaken realm.

He stood and made his way to the door, pressing his ear to it to listen for sounds in the corridor.

You're only sorry you were caught.

Loki jerked upright as though the door had burned his ear.

That voice. Odin's, he realized a second later. But the words held the overpowering association of father. Of fear. Yet he couldn't place them. He closed his eyes, and when he concentrated, he could hear the words again. Wrapped in the authority of a stern king and an enraged father. Time slipped away and Loki knew exactly when and where he'd heard those words. Baldur was dead and Loki faced eighteen years of punishment, one for every year of his brother's life. His heart raced, his hands went to his forehead to push through his hair and pulled away in shock when they met bare scalp. He stared at his shaking hands in horror for they were not his hands at all.

Then he remembered. He allowed himself one shaky breath to force aside those memories and the accompanying momentary loss of sense of time and place, then put his ear carefully to the door again. This time there was silence both in the corridor and in his mind. He stepped out and slipped into his own room two doors down, where he returned to his own familiar form – his own long thin fingers and his own hairline and his own height. Memories of times he'd rather forget began to pull at him again. He set his jaw, retrieved his satchel, and went back out into the corridor, having given up some small degree of control over magic for no reason whatsoever in the end.

He'd stayed up all night with Jane's data again and hadn't checked her e-mail, so he decided to make a quick trip to the computer lab.

And there it was. It had to happen eventually. An outgoing e-mail to her Australian friend, and another to the woman she'd met at McMurdo, both mentioning an assistant named Lucas. To Young-Soo she wrote that he was "rich and spoiled and kind of strange but a fast learner," and to Morgan she wrote that he was "moody but okay to work with." He smiled faintly at the less-than-stellar reports. She would have been more effusive in her praise if she knew he'd never heard of a quark until a couple of weeks ago. More effusive still if she knew he could now hold out his palm and show her a quark.

It was decision time. Morgan was irrelevant. A random person unconnected to anyone else in Jane's life, unaware of her involvement in anything beyond typical scientific research. And she already knew Lucas existed. He sent the e-mail on its way. Young-Soo, however, was a friend, and a close enough one that Jane was doing favors for him here, running trials on two of his inventions. Loki wasn't certain, but based on other e-mails to or from him, he suspected Young-Soo may know more about Jane's other activities. It was even possible he had connections to SHIELD. It was a risk either way, but Loki decided the greater risk was in allowing Jane to tell this man about him. He deleted the three sentences that referenced him and approved the message.

A few minutes later he was rushing out to the DSL, but he wasn't particularly worried about Jane wondering why he'd been gone so long. She lost track of time so easily while working she probably wouldn't even realize how long it had been.

"Hey, what took you so long?" she asked as soon as he made it to the lab, her back to him, not looking up from her computer.

Loki blinked away his surprise.

"Never mind. Just come over here," she said without moving, saving him from coming up with an excuse that for once he'd not bothered to think of in advance. "Look at this." She pointed to a long series of dots and dashed vertical lines that she began slowly scrolling through once Loki was standing behind her, peering over her shoulder.

"Muons? From neutrino collisions?" he asked, recognizing the pattern.

"But look at the number of them."

Loki nodded. A lot of dots, a lot of lines, a lot of breaks in the lines – a lot of muons resulting from a lot of neutrino collisions. "We looked at this set of data yesterday." She had been intrigued by it then, given her particular interest in neutrinos.

"No, we didn't."

He narrowed his eyes, stared down at the top of her head as though he could peer inside. Is she working so hard she's losing her mind? he wondered. "Yes, Jane, we did."

She stood up and reached for his shoulder, pushing him downward. He let her do it, and would have laughed at her audacity had he not been concerned about her mental stability.

"No, Lucas, we didn't. Look at the hard drive," she said once they'd switched places.

He leaned over to see the label on the external drive. The number 2 was printed on it. He turned and looked up at her. "You've moved on to the third event."

She nodded triumphantly. "Look at the time scale."

He scrolled slowly down the screen, then up again. "This burst occurred at a similar time relative to event impact," he observed, easily slipping into the terminology he'd learned from her and from his readings.

"Not similar," she corrected. "Exact. The first and last muons detected are within nanoseconds of their parallels in the second event. That is not a coincidence."

Loki nodded. Neutrino collisions were rarely observed; more were seen through the South Pole's odd Ice Cube telescope looking down through the planet's core than had ever been seen before. Until now. "Have you checked the fourth event?"

"Not yet. Wanna make a bet on what we'll see?"

"I don't think it would be wise to bet against you, Dr. Foster," Loki said with a hint of a smile.

"Okay, well, go ahead, switch 'em out. You know," she continued as Loki disengaged the second drive and replaced it with the third, concealed under some file folders in the bottom drawer of her desk, "I'm never sure if you're making fun of me when you call me that."

"I assure you I mean it with only the utmost respect," he said, meeting her eyes with his most angelic face. Which he knew made him look anything but.

"Yeah. You also use it when you're annoyed at me."

"You wound me, Jane," he said with a pained expression before turning back to the computer. He pulled up the relevant data set and ran it through the program that would extract evidence of neutrino activity. It would take a while for the program to analyze all the data, but as it worked backward from impact, only a few minutes later it was already clear that the timing of the last muon lined up precisely with that of the second and third events, about two seconds prior to impact.

"Yes!" Jane exclaimed as soon as that muon appeared on the monitor.

"All right. So we have a pattern. Something that clearly isn't a coincidence. But what does it mean?" Loki asked.

"I have absolutely no idea," Jane said, sounding extremely happy for someone who'd just confessed to complete ignorance.

"Then…?"

"I don't know what it means, but I know what it is."

"All right," Loki said, steadying his voice to keep out growing frustration. She was reminding him now of one of his old teachers – one he'd liked, at the time. Times had changed. "What is it, then?"

"That," she answered, touching the tip of her index finger lightly to the screen where the evidence of a neutrino collision appeared, "is our very first breakthrough."

/


/

Breakthroughs aside, weeks passed without further progress.

Jane and Loki both were able to identify further correlations between the four events in the same time scale, but they were no closer to discovering what caused them, or what they meant. The additional correlations couldn't even be considered further breakthroughs, because they only pointed to the same thing: something was happening in a very specific, brief period of time shortly before the bifrost deposited its travelers on the ground.

The passage of time was marked by the sun as it bobbled around the sky sinking lower with each day, the corresponding steady drop in the already freezing temperatures, and the schedule of unavoidable rotating cleaning duties that every other week now included the "dishpit," which required Loki to plunge his arms into greasy, filthy water to scrub the muck off of pots and pans and other people's dishes, and in unobstructed view of others so magic provided no out.

Despite the moments of unpleasantness, Loki found himself lulled by the relative monotony of working with Jane day in and day out, even half-days on Sunday now, continuing his own studies, learning the gym equipment to use to relax in the middle of the night when he could usually be alone, and keeping close tabs on everything Jane did. Unsettling dreams – nightmares, really, though he refused to think of them as such, since nightmares only plagued children – occasionally disturbed him, so he permitted himself sleep only every third or fourth night.

They had gone through all of the data on the external drives, returning to it again and again to analyze it in different ways; SHIELD's data was remarkably good and drew on everything from telescopes on Earth to satellites orbiting far above it. Jane's own instruments continued to return data as well, including data that was intended to inform the very problems they were trying to solve. The cycle was neverending. Obtain new data. Examine new data. Re-examine old data. Obtain new data. Repeat.

Despite the lack of progress, Jane remained undeterred. Loki would pause to close his eyes and stop the numbers from swimming on the screen before him, and look to Jane and surprise himself with emerging admiration. She would chew on a pencil, pace the room and mutter to herself, massage her temple or her neck, and keep right on working. Her dedication he chose to take the credit for. But her relentless energy was all her own.

They interacted little with others, and good-natured pressure to attend social events had mostly died out as they gained the reputation for being loners. Now that he rarely saw him, Loki had largely forgotten about the bothersome Selby Higgins, along with the rest of the mortals here that were of no consequence to him. Jane, however, was still disturbed by Selby's supposed betrayal. One afternoon in mid-March, she apparently decided to test Selby as she'd tested "Lucas."

Loki heard them coming before Jane and strode quickly to her computer to disconnect the external drive. Startled out of intense concentration, she tried to bat his hand away before she, too, realized company was coming. He had the drive back in its drawer and was attentively examining an unknown data stream she'd activated when they entered the office.

Selby and Wright tried for some idle chatter as they always still did when they wound up working in the same space, but Jane out of the blue asked why Selby arrived at the station so much later than the other scientists.

"It wasn't supposed to be me," he explained, standing next to Wright. "But the guy who was originally going to be stuck out here with Wright all winter failed his psych eval. So they were scrambling to find someone to come out, and I was hoping to go next year, and, voila, they offered to bump it up a year. I said yes, as long as I could wait until after the wedding."

"I can almost tolerate Selby when I remind myself that I could've had some nutjob out here instead," Wright said.

"I hear it's the sane ones they fail and the claustrophobic paranoid freaks they pass," Selby said, smirking at Wright.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Jane asked, or rather demanded. If she'd been a cat her fur would have been standing straight on end, Loki imagined.

Selby stammered for a moment and Wright stared skeptically with raised eyebrows. "Nothing," Selby managed to get out. "It's just a joke. Rodrigo…"

High marks for entertainment value – he inflated the score because he was starved for entertainment – low marks for subtlety.

"Yeah, I'm gonna go get to work on…that thing," Wright said and left.

Selby muttered an awkward apology and followed him out toward the telescope.

"What time is it?" Jane asked.

Loki glanced down at the computer screen right in front of her. "2:48."

"Perfect. It's 7:48 yesterday evening on the East Coast. I'm going to the station to make a phone call." She stood up and turned to go without logging off her computer.

"Jane," he said, holding out his arm and partially blocking her exit. "Don't say something you'll regret." Don't say something I'll regret, he thought.

"I don't- I just want to talk to a friend right now, okay. Can I go now?"

From the look in her eyes, he knew if he didn't lower his arm she'd soon try to push through it. So he lowered it, and watched her back through narrowed eyes. She hated the fifteen minutes of wasted time it took to traverse the packed snow between the DSL and the station, thirty minutes for a round trip, plus the time required to add and remove layers of clothing. What did she need to say so badly to this friend that she couldn't say to him, when he was standing right there?

But with the amount of work before them now and the long hours they spent on it, they rarely spoke of anything other than that work. They were not friends, for all the time they spent together. In a moment of privacy after their first night of dishpit duty, she'd asked him just how many servants his family had. Many, he'd answered with a withering smile. She'd wanted to ask, he'd recognized the curiosity and urge to seek answers that he was so familiar with, but she hadn't. And he was ready with answers, but felt no need to volunteer anything unnecessary when no further manipulation was needed.

"Hey, uh, Lucas?"

Loki looked up into the corridor, startled. Selby stood there, peering into the office, presumably making sure Jane had really left. Loki walked over to the doorway, and Selby took a few more steps forward.

"What's up with Jane? Did you, uh…did you tell her about those rumors you mentioned to me?"

"No, of course not."

"Because I swear I don't see her that way. There's nothing going on."

"I understand. I didn't say anything."

"I've tried to keep my distance, you know, not give people any reason-"

The thick exterior door swung open, and Loki sincerely regretted that he couldn't take any credit whatsoever for this moment.

"Thanks, Lucas. I'll, uh, I'll let you know if we need any help," Selby said, tearing his gaze away from Jane standing in the door.

"Of course, Selby, I'd be glad to," Loki answered with sugary friendliness. Selby turned away, nodding at Jane as he passed her on the way back to the other side of the building.

"I forgot to log off the computer," Jane said once he disappeared down the hallway. "Figured I'd work from the station's lab the rest of the day." She squeezed past where Loki was still standing in the door to the office area and went over to her computer, not meeting his eyes. "What was that all about?" she asked, her back to him.

"Questions. He wanted to know if I'd told you that he was asking me about you. I told him you were just irritable because you've been working so hard."

"Irritable, huh?" she repeated, standing up from the computer. Then some of the tension drained from her posture and she sighed. "Have I been? Irritable?"

"Not unbearably so."

She nodded. "Sorry. I'll try to do better than 'bearably irritable.'"

"There's no need to apologize. You've every right to be bearably irritable."

She laughed at that. "Still. I'll do better. You want to stay out here?"

He thought it over briefly, and saw no reason to. They worked well as a team, and he was not too arrogant to admit – to himself, at least – that he had a deeper understanding of the data when they went through it together.

So nearly an hour later he met her back in the Science Lab, where he was going over particle emissions analysis from the South Pole data, searching for evidence of neutrino collisions and, as usual, finding none. She sat at her desk and stared at the computer, which she had not turned on. He shouldn't ask. He really shouldn't. He would find out before long anyway. But she was distracted. And so was he. Her need to confide in someone other than him, after all his efforts, bothered him more than he cared to acknowledge.

"Who did you call?" he asked softly. Austin and Carlo were not far away, although not close enough to hear if he kept his voice down.

"A friend of mine," she said, still staring at the computer.

Loki nodded once, waited another moment, then decided he could not appropriately ask further if she were unwilling to answer. He would read the text file during the next satellite window. He was just turning to go back to his work when she spoke again.

"I feel so ashamed."

Loki stared at her with rapt attention. He had never seen her like this before. He'd seen Jane happy, angry, excited, annoyed, betrayed. He wasn't sure what he was seeing now, but he knew it was somehow deeper. Something she rarely revealed, certainly not to him.

"Of what?" he finally asked, when seconds stretched well past a minute and he wondered if she even remembered she'd spoken aloud.

Her eyes darted over to him then back to the computer, and he could see the walls start to go up and she looked a little more like herself...but not entirely so. "My friend, Erik, he went through something terrible, and he's better now, I mean, he's fine, but…but he's not. He has trouble sleeping, he gets stressed out at work."

Loki frowned. This was dangerous territory. He knew exactly who she was talking about, of course. The scientist to whom he'd first been directed. The man whose mind he'd filled with his own will through a taste of the tesseract's power. The man who'd told him everything he needed to know about Jane – or almost everything, he thought, remembering the initial version of his plan. He couldn't imagine why Jane felt any shame concerning him. Especially not when he himself did not. He'd never hurt Erik Selvig. And he'd seen with his own eyes – while his mouth had been gagged and his wrists shackled as he awaited return to Asgard – how hearty and hale the man had been, no worse the wear for his time spent working for his sovereign. Selvig should consider himself lucky. No harm had come to him, and the tesseract had granted him knowledge he could have never otherwise gained. Others, including Loki himself, had certainly fared far worse.

He was just thinking back to the first time he'd seen Selvig, in Puente Antiguo, never imagining at the time how important the man would become to him, when Jane suddenly swiveled in her chair so that she was facing him.

"My problems are so trivial. And there I go running off to him like I'm fifteen years old again, so wrapped up in my own worries that I forget he's got his own. I mean, I didn't really tell him about it, not everything, I don't talk about that stuff on the phone, and he knows better than to bring it up. You know, he was right all along. He never trusted them from the start. He knew exactly what they were. I still don't understand why he locked himself away working for them after what he said about them."

She stopped to sigh, then knead the bridge of her nose. Loki wondered if she was more tired than she let on.

"I haven't been able to see him since before New York. And now we can't even do video calls. He deserves better than that from me. I owe him more than that."

"He must be very important to you."

"He is," she said with a nod. "He's the closest thing I've got to family. He was my guardian after my parents were killed."

"When you were…fifteen?" he asked, going by the number she'd used earlier, although it wasn't the same number Selvig had told him.

"No, fourteen. And it was supposed to be him and his wife, they were both good friends with my parents, but Mindy died a few years before them. So it was just me and Erik. And I…I've really got to stop letting him take care of me all the time. I need to figure out a way to take care of him."

"You should stop worrying about him. I'm sure he wouldn't want you to."

She frowned, glanced at her computer for a moment and turned it on. "Sometimes what we want isn't what's best for us," she said when she met his eyes again. Loki saw there something worrisome, a flickering doubt about something, and he hoped it was still about Erik and not about their project.

But then the computer whirred to life and she turned her attention to it, and it was as if the strange little interlude had never happened.

/


/

Loki went to bed – seeking sleep for the first time in four nights – thinking about Jane and the dire straits she imagined Erik Selvig to be in. Thus far he'd tried hard not to think about everything that had happened before on Midgard, except through the filter of a cold impersonal analysis of the decisions he'd made, and even that had been difficult and never fully completed. Because his decisions hadn't been entirely impersonal. And because every time his mind collided with the personal, anger and other things less easily identifiable flared and interfered with his ability to process simple cause and effect.

Erik hadn't been a mistake; that much was clear. Although he couldn't find much satisfaction in gaining followers through an enslaving touch to the chest – where was the accomplishment in that? – it was efficient, and more importantly effective. Selvig had done exactly what he needed him to do, and Loki hadn't even needed to tell him. The scepter forged a one-way conduit between Loki's and his target's mind, communicating Loki's will and imparting a pure desire to accomplish it.

He'd chosen his targets well. Could not have chosen better in fact…unless he'd chosen more. But he'd wanted to win Midgard, to truly win it. To convince its inhabitants to surrender and acknowledge him as king of the entire realm, and ultimately to confess their need for him. Not to turn them into a bunch of puppets submitting against their will. Still, he could have taken a few more. A few key others. And he had tried, in a fit of anger, once, after cracks had appeared in his plans. But he could have done more. He could have…

An image of Thor appearing inside the SHIELD aircraft suddenly crowded out everything else in his mind. He had been startled by the telltale storm; Thor's arrival was unexpected. But he was a prisoner only in the minds of his supposed captors. He could have called the scepter to his freed hands, just like Thor called Mjolnir. Or later. Instead of dropping Thor from that flying city, he could have separated him from his hammer. He could have –

And instantly the impersonal became overwhelmingly personal.

Some questions must not be asked, some thoughts not entertained. Loki could not allow those things simmering inside him to boil over. They would rip him apart and consume him.

He had to stay focused.

He rolled over from his side, pressing his face into the pillow. He'd been thinking about Erik. And Jane. Erik had spoken of her with such love and affection and pride. More than he could recall being shown by his own father, the man who'd called himself his father since infancy. Jane had been practically an adult when Selvig took on the role of father, and he had never called himself that. These thoughts, too, made something burn in the pit of his stomach, but this he recognized and had no trouble naming. Hatred had become a familiar friend, easier to control.

He tried to remember himself at age fourteen. Pinpointing one year among a thousand was no easy task, but this year was anchored by a significant event: his mother's announcement that she was pregnant. He remembered his shock and disbelief, then happiness at the thought that there would be a baby and he would be its older brother.

More troublesome thoughts. He considered and rejected getting up and going back to work. He needed to keep his mind sharp, and that meant sleep. He could feel it pressing against his eyelids, pushing them downward, and he let them close.

He remembered the days before the announcement. When Thor had gotten him drunk on purpose, for fun. So drunk in the end he'd been near death, after Thor had gotten bored and left. He remembered the haze of the next day. His mother's arms. Thor's palm stinging his face. His father's laughter.

He slipped into sleep slowly, part of him still resisting, and the memory fed into a dream bled dry of color.

He flinched, anticipating the blow though his eyes were closed and he was barely awake. Thor's open palm slammed into his left cheek. "Loki, wake up! Do you hear me? Open your eyes. You're going to eat this. If you don't I'm going to bash your head in. It's just bread, Loki, come on. You have to eat your own lunch for once." His voice was so loud Loki would have sworn it could be heard on Vanaheim.

Loki struggled to open his eyes. He was on his bed underneath piles of blankets and furs, leaning against the headboard. He was still dressed in his formal attire, more or less – a few random items had been shed the night before. Thor was on his knees in front of him; beyond his brother, near the footboard, his mother also sat on the bed, her legs tucked away underneath her gown. She looked upset. Thor's hand was coming up to hit him again.

"I'll eat…the bread," he rasped, his eyes narrowed in a glare. "Just shut up."

Thor turned away to look at Mother. When he turned back he was bringing a chunk of bread to Loki's mouth. It was dry, and his mouth was dry. It was difficult to chew. More difficult to swallow.

He had barely gotten it down when Thor was pressing another piece of bread to his lips. This time he hadn't yet managed to swallow when more bread came. He tried to see past Thor, tried to get Mother's attention. His mouth was full. More bread. He was choking. He couldn't breathe. He was drowning. No air. Thor grinned at him and shoved more bread in his mouth. Loki tried to shout for help, for Thor to stop, but no sound made it past the bread.

Father was laughing. Loki stood outside his parents' bedroom. He'd wanted to talk to them, to his father, but now he stood frozen in place. They were talking about him. "I was sixteen the first time I got drunk on mead."

"Just because you did something foolish and dangerous doesn't make it right. And Loki is fourteen." Mother was irate.

"That's-"

"And Loki is not-"

"I know what Loki is. And what he is not. He's not one of us. But he's fine. Let him blunder about in his folly of youth. You have to stop treating Loki like he's going to break."

Not one of us. Loki's heart hammered in his chest as he backed away slowly from the door he'd been eavesdropping behind. But he wasn't watching where he was going, and he backed into a low table, falling to the floor and sending items he never even saw crashing to the floor. The door flew open. Angry faces stared down at him.

His bare feet pounded the cold, hard marble stairs. He rounded a corner and found himself in the throne room. Father was there, angry, rising, Gungnir in his hand. He darted through an open doorway, past Thor whose arm was extended, patiently waiting for Mjolnir. Hugin and Munin flew past. He looked up at them, and when he looked down again the bifrost was beneath his feet, lighting his every step. Heavier footsteps followed. He glanced over his shoulder and saw his fully-grown brother closing the distance between them. Loki willed himself to grow as well but he did not, and his strides remained shorter than Thor's. He glanced behind him again. This time when his neck whipped back around the bifrost came to a sudden jagged stop immediately before him. He tried to dig his bare heels into the smooth dead surface as his momentum threatened to carry him over the edge.

"I know what you are."

Loki spun around, glancing back and forth between his brother and the perilous edge. Thor raised Mjolnir and had Loki's full attention. "We all know what you are."

"No! No, I'm not. I'm not one of them, Thor, I swear it! Let me prove it!"

"I'm looking at the proof, Loki Laufeyson."

Thor's stare, so full of disgust, burned into him. He looked down at his hands sticking out from the sleeves of his thin sleeping tunic. "No!" he screamed, clawing at the dark blue skin with his sharpened fingernails. He clawed harder when the blood that appeared was not the red of an Aesir. Incoherent words of denial and fear and pain fell from his lips.

"You aren't worthy of being Odin's son, or my brother, or even an Aesir. You never were."

Loki fell silent. Trembling hands, sliced to the bone, fell to his side.

Thor stepped closer. Mjolnir was gone. Loki stared up at him. "You don't belong here. You don't belong anywhere except with the rest of those monsters."

Loki's jaw fell open but still he could not speak. "I'm not a monster," he wanted to say, but it was a lie, and now, finally, lies deserted him.

It was a gentle touch, in the end, not at all a savage blow. Just a nudge to the shoulder. Thor pushed. Loki fell.

He could see them as he fell. Thor. Father standing beside him, his arm wrapped around his real son's shoulder. Mother standing to the side, watching coldly.

No-no-no. Mother disappeared. Father and Thor laughed. They shrank and merged and faded from view. He left them behind, turning mid-fall to meet his fate. The cold grew and Loki thought he must have turned into ice. Then came a gaping mouth and a blast of heat and he thought he would burn alive. He was in a tunnel, still falling but with no sense of motion.

He couldn't breathe. He was choking. There was bread stuffed in his mouth. He was freezing. It was completely dark. An opening appeared in the wall of the tunnel, letting in starlight. He tried to reach it. Through the opening he saw himself, his adult self, in familiar leather, armor, and green cloth. But that Loki was screaming. Screaming so loud he pressed his wounded hands to his ears to block out the horrific noise. He would have screamed with his grown self had he been able to breathe.

The tunnel sealed shut. The darkness was absolute.

Hands from an unseen body pressed against his shoulders. Cold metal followed by a puff of steaming air brushed his right ear.

"Did you not believe? Did you think we would not find you in this barren land?"

Loki's eyes shot open. Thin air rushed into his lungs. He threw back the covers, sat up, and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Agonizing minutes passed before he remembered his satchel. He stretched toward the metal post at the head of the bed and grabbed the bag, shoving a hand inside and struggling for far longer than it should have taken to get to the little crystal vial. He clutched it tightly in his fist for a moment before becoming truly aware of his surroundings. He was in his room at the South Pole on Midgard. In his bed. In his nightclothes. In his own body. Alone. He laughed. The sound was intended to drive away any lingering threat, but it came out nervous and weak, revealing every bit of the fear that remained within him.

He threw his hands up in front of his face, barely aware of the small object in his right hand. His own hands, the way they had always looked. Scratched up, with a couple of small smears of drying blood, but even the blood he took comfort in, because it was dark red, exactly the color it was supposed to be.

He had been dreaming, he realized. The memories weren't quite right. He knew that, but in the immediate aftermath of the dream he struggled to recall what was real and what wasn't. His mother staring down at him without emotion – that he knew was false. He'd rejected it even while still dreaming.

Suddenly the words he'd heard right before waking came back to him, and he knew why the potion his mother had given him was in his hand. That dream was not like any other he'd had. It was vivid. It sent a message. They'd found him.

He allowed that thought to send shivers down his spine for a while before he added to it. They'd found him, but they weren't here. He wasn't here. Loki was alone. Still safe. They'd come for him in what must be the only way they were able – through his dreams.

He took a deep breath, and calm – or something close enough to it – washed over him. He replaced the tiny glass bottle with its dark red contents deliberately if reluctantly, but kept the satchel by his side. He reviewed the dream, still quite clear in his mind, clearer than the memories it mimicked.

Thor making him eat bread. Yes. And no. They'd said he had to eat, and Thor made him eat the way Thor knew best, by force. But he hadn't choked him; that was years before any real animosity developed between them. His parents talking about him. Yes, he'd gone to talk to Odin, but something was off. He vaguely recalled being startled by what he heard, yes. But…"not one of us?" He would have been terrified had he heard that. He didn't remember tripping over a table, and he knew he hadn't been chased through the palace. The bifrost…almost everything about that was a blur. Falling. He would never forget falling. He wished he could forget it. The cold, the heat, the mouth of a tunnel, the lack of air. Pain that gripped him from the outside as brutally as the pain from the inside.

Suddenly his mind seized upon something. The mouth of a tunnel. He squeezed his eyes shut. He could picture it clearly, though only in short bursts before he pushed it away each time, instinctively defending himself from the memory. There was a blast of heat when he entered the tunnel. But he'd already been falling, pulled through the remnants of something left open by the bifrost observatory and collapsing around him. The tunnel, though, was unaffected, even after the mouth disappeared. He'd been in there for what felt like an eternity. No light, no sound, no air. Falling without motion. Because there was nowhere to fall to, and where he'd fallen from was gone. Like being sent flying through the bifrost but getting stuck midway through. He remembered wishing for air in his burning lungs so that he could laugh long and hard at the cruelty of his fate. He wasn't sure what he'd expected after Thor pushed him – when he let go, he remembered now; he hadn't exactly had time to think it through. But it hadn't been never-ending agony from the inability to breathe and sensory deprivation that would slowly drive him mad. In that moment he'd only wanted escape – escape from those faces that looked down at him. He'd just managed the greatest accomplishment of his life, and it was rejected. He was rejected.

Focus! he hissed at himself yet again. Letting his thoughts drift off into such sentiment was counterproductive. Because his erstwhile ally, in choosing to torment him through a dream, had also made him re-examine a memory in a new light. He thought he knew what that memory meant. He was confident he knew what it was: a breakthrough.

But he wasn't sure how he was going to explain Yggdrasil to Jane.


/

Reviews appreciated!

BTW: If you're curious about the "true" story about Loki getting drunk when he was 14, this is included in my other story, Magic & Mead, which you can find from my profile page. (added 1/13/13)

Teasers from Ch. 22 "Allies": Asgard grows ever more concerned and has growing reasons to do so; Vanaheim's Gullveig delivers an ultimatum even worse than feared; Lucas tried to explain his theory to a bleary-eyed Jane.

And the excerpt (Gullveig talking):

"You continue to speak as though you only hear my voice. I assure you, when I speak you are hearing the voice of seven realms. The dark elves neglected only Midgard in their journeys, for they are too ignorant of us to offer an opinion. If you don't believe me, ask the others. They'll speak to you now. But you'll hear no different. We make three simple, reasonable demands, Odin. If you refuse, we will join together and take what we demand, and upon your defeat we will divide up all the treasures in your weapons vault among us so that your safety and continued existence depend upon us, and not the other way around. You have two weeks."