Beneath
Chapter Twenty-Eight – Yggdrasil
"Look at this gravitational field!" Jane exclaimed, pointing to a series of graphs.
They had been huddled in the jamesway for well over an hour, side-by-side, wading through data returned from the probe Jane had designed back in New Mexico with the assistance of SHIELD's engineers, materials, and technology, as she'd explained to Loki. She seemed to be experiencing a wave of guilt over using it for a purpose other than what she'd told SHIELD. Loki felt no such thing. It gladdened him to think SHIELD was funding his new ascendancy.
And though he would be quite happy to never set eyes on Midgard again after this, once he was established elsewhere it might be nice to come back and gloat for a while, right before eliminating all of SHIELD's leadership and every one of Thor's little friends. Bruce Banner would be first. Natasha Romanov would be last, immediately after Barton, whose death in her presence would be slow and creative. Not exactly what he'd promised her before, but new circumstances demanded new consequences. Banner's would be swift, he thought, preferring in this iteration of his musings to avoid unnecessary risk, but still the most satisfying by far.
"This is incredible. It's doing our job for us," she said, interrupting a familiar chain of thought.
He spent less time fantasizing about those deaths than he used to – he'd been busy after all – and felt slightly uneasy about such thoughts now, sitting this close to Jane. He shrugged it off. It wasn't as though she could read his mind.
"What do you mean?"
"Watch." She made a few taps of her fingers on the mousepad and split the screen into three horizontal panels. "Here's where all the projections show the probe's momentum should be dropping off," she said, pointing at a change in the power output on the graph crawling slowly across the top of the screen. "But look at its momentum and trajectory," she said, pointing now to the other crawling graphs.
"Momentum is…it's increasing. Trajectory is unchanged," Loki said. The momentum should not have been increasing; it should have been decreasing due to Earth's gravity. The trajectory should have probably begun to drift a bit, no longer controlled by the precisely directed energy burst from Pathfinder. But a gravitational field had developed as the probe approached, and the small spherical object was hurtling even faster straight toward the center of the branch.
Jane had stumbled across this only some ten minutes earlier – they'd started with the particle emissions readouts, Jane's main interest. She'd barely been able to speak since. Loki was beginning to see why. If he understood what he was seeing, and he was growing more and more confident that he did, then several of the obstacles Jane insisted on continually reminding him about had just been eliminated. It wasn't nearly as much of a surprise to Loki as it was to Jane. On Asgard Yggdrasil was spoken of as something mystical and metaphorical but nonetheless real, interconnecting a distant family of nine. It hadn't occurred to him there that it so literally connected the Nine Realms, but once his nightmare led him in that direction, it seemed only logical that the ancient tree would be highly efficient in its task.
She was shaking her head. "This is…this is just…this is…"
"Shall I supply you with some adjectives to choose from?"
He'd expected her to laugh, or to roll her eyes at him, or to make some attempt at a witty retort. She didn't. Her face fell.
"But it means I've been…all this time…all the work I've done, all the instruments I burnt and cut myself over, all the reams and reams of data, all the late nights trying to figure out the quantum stability issue, and define exotic matter, and…" She fell silent.
It shouldn't bother him. He didn't care about her research for its own sake. He didn't care what she did when she left here, if she got a job in her country's best university or if she went back to living in some dust speck of a town and being ignored. But she looked like she'd been kicked in the gut.
His breaths sped up slightly as he struggled to decide how to react.
She was emotional and vulnerable; he could hurt her badly, throw out a calculated jest to watch her reaction to and offer a heartfelt apology for afterward. You are not cruel, came a voice from somewhere deep inside him, a voice he had learned to ignore quite successfully. He remembered plunging an imaging machine into an eye socket. His gaze drifted downward. You are not needlessly cruel, he amended. He had needed a precise three-dimensional scan of that eyeball, and it wasn't as though he'd killed the man it belonged to. It wasn't as though he'd thrown him off a bifrost into the jaws of the cosmos or tied him up under a venomous snake for years on end. The man would have gone to one of his people's healers and—
A rustle of clothing distracted him. Jane had shifted her position, pushed back a little into her chair. Her eyes were active, and he had no need to take the risk of skimming the surface to know what thoughts were behind those eyes. She was on the verge of tears.
Jane had been a puzzle to him once. He'd always enjoyed the challenge of a puzzle. More than enough pieces were now in place that he no longer saw her as that. She wanted freedom to pursue her theories, she wanted friends, she wanted to enjoy life. She longed for professional acceptance, perhaps more than anything else, and she now feared the effort she'd put toward that goal had been a waste of time. He could easily amplify that sense of pointlessness, of uselessness. He understood that reaction. He had over a thousand years of experience with being useless.
Or he could nudge her in a different direction. Toward a purpose. Toward his purpose, which he had convinced her to adopt and which remained unchanged. He still needed her. He could express sympathy and encouragement. If he chose to offer comfort, it didn't have to be out of kindness. He had resisted showing her any real kindness. She was beneath him. She was loved by the former brother he hated. She was…
She was alone here. No one in all the cosmos knew how devastated she was by what she'd just learned. No one except for him. Perhaps he could offer some true kindness. No one else was around to do it. No one was around to see him do it. And while he could, and would, use her as much as he needed to, he had no desire to hurt her. Or even to see her be hurt, he realized. Midgardian ant though she was, she wasn't a bad person. She was admirable, even, in a certain way, dedicated and intelligent. He couldn't even blame her for her infatuation with Thor; she was hardly alone in that, and she won points for not babbling on about it like some love-struck youth or even mentioning him by name.
Perhaps, then…
At the last moment, before he could say something he would surely regret, he remembered something he never should have forgotten. It didn't matter what he wanted or did not want. He was playing a part. She wanted friends – needed them, she'd said – but Loki could not be friends with this woman. He wasn't an expert on friendship, never having had many friends himself, but there was nothing besides falsehood in his interactions with Jane and while falsehoods could make for highly useful relationships, they were hardly the best basis for actual friendship. But maybe Lucas could. He could try, anyway. It would be a difficult change; ever since arriving at McMurdo he'd cultivated a more distant, professional relationship with her. It had relaxed into something surprisingly comfortable, but it couldn't be called a friendship, he didn't think. Jane didn't seem to think it was. Yesterday she'd said that she needed friends, not that she needed more friends.
"That's not true," he finally said, tentatively. "If it weren't for all your prior work, we would never have found the pre-existing wormhole in the first place. That work is what led us here."
She had let her head fall back and was staring up at the curved ceiling. "But…it was…I was all wrong. I was going about everything in the wrong way. It was here all along. For who knows how long. Maybe since the beginning of the universe."
"Jane…your research is still perfectly valid. Wormhole theory hasn't gone away. It's just…it's something different, probably. This is a…a revolutionary discovery, but can't there be more than one kind of wormhole? If this isn't an Einstein-Rosen Bridge, that doesn't mean that Einstein-Rosen Bridges don't exist, correct? If you search for an orange but find an apple, it doesn't mean the orange isn't there, too."
Loki could tell she was listening – her eyes had drifted a bit in his direction instead of straight up – but no response was forthcoming. He thought further about what he might say if he were Midgardian, what Lucas might say.
"If you were living in primitive times and you came across a microwave to heat your food in, wouldn't you still want to know how to create fire?"
Jane lifted her head back into a normal position and stared at him like he had lost his faculties. He reviewed his analogy, was certain it was accurate. He'd become well acquainted with microwaves at the South Pole. "What?" he asked, as she continued to stare.
"Yeah, I'd definitely still want to know how to create fire. Especially if I didn't also come across an electrical outlet and a functioning power grid in those 'primitive times.' But great, yeah, I got it. You're comparing my life's work to striking a flint against a piece of dry wood. Thanks, I feel much better now."
He frowned. Such sarcasm didn't suit her. Not when she was supposed to be grateful for how nice he was trying to be. "No, I'm comparing your life's work to the foundations of human discovery and civilization," he said, then fought to keep his expression neutral. He'd laid it on a little thick with that one.
Jane, apparently, agreed, for after a moment she looked away and broke into light laughter. "Uh-huh," she said after a moment, but she smiled as she said it.
"This affects my work too, you know. I never expected something like this. I wanted to achieve something grand. Something never done before. I wanted to work with you to learn how wormholes function and how to artificially create them. But now it looks like we don't have to do that. We can still achieve something grand with what we've found here. Some kind of wormhole already exists. And it reacts. Precisely as though it were intended for travel."
"It reacts…selectively," Jane said, her eyes drifting back down to the graphs still slowly progressing on the computer screen.
Loki looked back at it himself, but didn't understand what she was seeing. "What do you mean?"
After a moment she looked back at him, and her expression had completely transformed. Loki knew this look; she was fitting pieces of her own scientific puzzle into place. "It's generating gravitational force, pulling the probe toward it, right? But look now. It's stopped. And the probe's momentum is finally slowing. It doesn't pull in just anything. If it did, we'd have satellites and space shuttles getting pulled out of orbit and even going missing. This…this interstellar highway, this bridge, whatever it is, it somehow detects objects moving directly toward its center, its focus, like the probe, and then it…it…." She stopped and rubbed her eyes with her thumb and fingers. "I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore."
"It was designed for travel." He thought that was what she was getting at, anyway. No matter he'd already said it.
She was nodding. "And it's here, above Earth. And we know it leads to Asgard because this is exactly where the failed fifth event terminated, and that event was initiated on Asgard."
She was right, Loki thought, although she was missing a few key facts. The "failed fifth event" was directed from Asgard to Jotunheim, not Midgard. He suspected that so much energy had been coursing through the bifrost as he attempted to destroy Jotunheim that some of it had slipped through the other branches and would have been visible in all the other realms, not just Midgard.
"It connects…wait," Jane said, suddenly sitting up ramrod straight. "Wait, wait. Oh, my…I know this. I know what this is. I think I…hold on." She reached down for the small brown backpack she'd taken to carrying now that they were regularly going back and forth between two and sometimes three worksites. From inside she withdrew the thick bound notebook she usually had with her; Loki had seen her consulting it or taking notes in it enough times, and had once paged through it when he had a few minutes alone with it – schematics for her various devices, random isolated notes, strange symbols in mathematical equations he still had difficulty deciphering, drawings and doodles, and at least one grocery list. He hadn't given it any thought since.
She thumbed through its pages, finding the one she was looking for quickly enough that Loki could tell she had gone to that spot often. "Look at this."
He looked. Across the two pages were crude drawings of nine planets, each with a thick surrounding ring, some with moons. Lines marked paths between them. He'd seen this page before. It had caught his attention because of the number of planets, but none were particularly reminiscent of the actual Nine Realms, except possibly Vanaheim, which did have a thin asteroid belt. He'd then taken it for meaningless doodles, perhaps meant to signify the nine planets ascribed to Midgard's own little solar system…at least until recently when someone had apparently decided to demote one of them.
Loki looked back up at Jane impatiently, wondering if he was supposed to glean some startling revelation from these sketches that reminded him of pointless little drawings he would have made as a child.
"The man who came from Asgard, the first one who came, he added these lines. Like the branches of a tree. He said the tree was called Yggdrasil, and its branches linked together…the 'nine realms of the cosmos.' Midgard – that means Earth – Alfheim, Vanaheim, Jotunheim, and Asgard."
Turning back to the book again, Loki continued to look at Jane through lowered eyelids. His fingers slowly tightened into fists at his side. "I only count five." He wondered if Thor had forgotten the names of the other four. Jane wouldn't have. He didn't really think that, though, anyway. He and Thor both could name them in their sleep before they'd even started any formal study of the cosmos. And they'd been to all of them…all except Helheim, of course.
"Well…he only told me five. I was…I guess I was kind of distracted."
She wore some mixture of guilt and wistfulness that Loki found nauseating. If she didn't stop this he would be forced to take back those points he'd awarded.
"Oh! He told me another one later: Svartalfheim."
"Really."
"It doesn't matter. The names, I mean. What matters is…we found Yggdrasil. It really exists. And we found it. And it connects us to Asgard. Not just Asgard, but Alfheim, Vanaheim, and Jotunheim."
"And Svartalfheim," he said, and something burned brightly inside him to be able to speak the word aloud.
"And Svartalfheim," she echoed. "Oh! I just wish I'd listened better. Well, listened differently. More to his words and less to his voice. I wish I'd asked better questions. I wish I'd asked any questions." She stood up and started pacing, taking the journal with her and staring down at the drawing Thor had apparently contributed to.
You did the best you could, Jane. He didn't understand what he was telling you, and he couldn't have answered your questions. And then he found himself going easy on Thor yet again, admitting that he hadn't known the true nature of Yggdrasil himself either. He would have explained it better, though, he was certain. At the very least he wouldn't have told her there were nine realms and then proceed to name only five of them and later throw in a random sixth for good measure.
As Loki watched her, his eyes kept being drawn to the journal as well. It felt strange to be so far from Asgard, to have so thoroughly left it behind, and to know that Thor's hands had touched that paper. Thor couldn't let him go, it seemed. No matter where he went, no matter what he did. But Thor lived in the past. Thor was the past.
"You can't change that now, so don't berate yourself over it. The question now is, what is our next step?" Loki watched Jane carefully as she brought her pacing to a halt and her eyes focused on nothing identifiable. He had pushed so much already that he needed to be careful, let her come to her own conclusions. The right ones, hopefully.
"Well…," she began after a long pause. "We have a lot of new data to go through. Not to mention everything else that's still coming in from my other instruments. We've kind of neglected that over the last week or so."
Loki kept a tight rein on his reaction. Those were not the right conclusions. Perhaps for her, with her desire to publish her analysis of these mountains of data and expound upon them endlessly at meetings of fellow scientists, but not for him. He had more immediate goals.
"But…this is too…I thought we'd have to figure out how to link up with the wormhole. With Yggdrasil. Now…now we know Yggdrasil will do that, on its own. So…I can't believe I'm saying this, but…I think we're going to be able to try sending a probe through soon." She looked up at him at the last.
"I'm now waiting for the real Jane Foster to appear and give the imposter before me a lecture on the scientific method. What is your hypothesis, Doctor?"
"My hypothesis is…you are such a bad influence," Jane said in exasperation. "There's no way to know what will happen. There's no way to know where the probe will end up. If this is really Yggdrasil, and if Yggdrasil connects these nine worlds, and if we manage to send a probe into it and out the other side…in theory it could wind up near any of the other worlds. Realms. But wormholes are tunnels through spacetime. They're only supposed to have two ends. So…either Yggdrasil is something really different from what's been conceived of on Earth, or…maybe there are multiple wormholes? Eight distinct tunnels leading to and from Earth, one to each of the other realms. In that case, we know this tunnel goes to Asgard."
"We know at the very least that it can go to Asgard," Loki said, assuming she would be more likely to push forward if she thought the branch they'd located led there. For his part, knowing the relative locations of the realms and conceiving of Midgard as near the bottom and Asgard as at the very top, he strongly suspected that if something entered the branch here it would by default go directly through to Asgard, while journey to the other realms would require a diversion. Good for Jane, less good for him. How was he supposed to determine which diversion led to Svartalfheim, or even where the diversions within Yggdrasil were located anyway? There was no time to waste. "Let's find out. We can send a probe through Yggdrasil right now."
Jane had been nodding slowly, mulling things over in her head, but now she stopped short and stared.
"Oh, why do I get the feeling you're about to say something mind-numbingly familiar?" Loki muttered, sitting back and looking away.
"Maybe because you just did. But I'll say it anyway since apparently you need to hear it anyway. We can't just send a probe through right now. Not if we want to actually find out what happens to it after it enters the wormhole. Not if we want to be able to retrieve the data it gathers from the other side. I have no idea if the recall function works from within Earth's orbit, much less from across the galaxy through a wormhole. There are still some other things we have to accomplish first."
"Fine, if it must be tested, we send one of these little balls through Yggdrasil and we test it."
"'These little balls' aren't tennis balls and they don't grow on trees. I only have three more, and I don't have SHIELD's software engineers or Tony Stark's robotics or even the necessary materials to make more here. This is it." She paused and took a deep breath, her eyes now locked stubbornly on his. "We're going to have to think this through and do some planning."
/
/
Jane sat in her room after a late dinner that night, staring at her closed laptop. She'd missed the satellite window entirely today so hadn't checked her e-mail, but now she was really wishing she could look up "Yggdrasil" online. She'd done so once before, actually, a few days after Thor mentioned it; due to its unexpected spelling she hadn't been able to find it until she first looked up the other realms he'd named. But what she'd found had seemed so fantastical – more like a complex cultural myth than either science or magic – that she'd dismissed it as a beautiful story, or least beautiful when told by Thor, but not particularly helpful. She supposed she couldn't be completely certain about Asgard, but she was pretty sure Earth wasn't dangling off the boughs of a giant ash tree like some oversized blue Christmas ornament.
Then again…metaphorically speaking…
It was unquestionably bizarre. But she was living at the South Pole with a landscape of ice, ice, and more ice in temperatures that were already by far the lowest she'd ever experienced and the sun had just barely set, where nothing lived except for fifty hardy Polies. And then there was Acting King Thor dropping out of the sky over New Zealand making her drop her car keys. Bizarre was becoming the new normal.
Jane looked down at the bottom right drawer of her desk as it occurred to her she did have a potential source of information on Yggdrasil, even without the internet. With a sigh of resignation she opened the drawer and fished around for the book Darcy sent, which had wound up at the bottom again. She moved the laptop to the side and set The Complete Guide to Norse Mythology down on the desk in front of her, opening to the table of contents. The book was divided into two sections, the first an overview of prominent people and concepts – and yes, there was Yggdrasil, and there was Thor and Loki, and Sif and Baldur. She didn't see a reference to "the Warriors Three," but then she hadn't gotten their actual names either, so maybe they were in there and she just didn't recognize them. The second section provided summaries and excerpts of key texts from the written record of the mythology.
Jane turned to the page listed for Yggdrasil, but she stuck a scrap piece of paper in to mark the table of contents. Afterward, she could read what it said about Thor. Enough time had passed since the initial shock of what Darcy had told her. She could take it now. It wasn't true anyway. Unless…maybe there was a metaphorical serpent wrapped around Earth that called Thor "uncle." Jane laughed at the absurdity. She could read about Loki, find out more than that he was a trickster who'd killed Thor's other brother, supposedly with mistletoe. That little detail stood out in her memories of what she read in the children's book from the library because it was so strange. On TV people somehow always wound up standing under it at Christmas and kissing, while Loki had put it to an entirely different use. She could read about Sif. It could prove useful for science, you never know, she thought as she tried to assure herself she was not at all jealous. And there is no way he's married. Not possible. He didn't seem like the deceitful type, not even when he might have fared better with a little more deceit. It was one of the things she loved about him.
Love? She stumbled over the thought. Figure of speech, the rational side of her supplied. Dangerous thoughts. Distracting at the very least. She hadn't even looked at the page she'd opened to yet.
Yggdrasil. She forced herself to read the single page carefully, with its foreign words so unlike the Greek and Latin she was used to in scientific literature, and its speculative analysis on the history and significance and mystical nature of the tree. She followed the cross references to mentions of Yggdrasil in the second section, and was excited to read in an excerpt from the Prose Edda that Yggdrasil's branches reached out over the sky, and its three roots led to the Aesir of Asgard, the frost jotnar, and Niflheim. It didn't match exactly – and Thor had definitely put Asgard at the "top," if that actually meant anything – but the concept of Yggdrasil connecting the worlds was clearly there. Even more exciting was a line about the gods riding daily to some well in Yggdrasil's roots via the bifrost bridge, as well as a line about a squirrel that ran up and down the tree carrying messages – both suggested to her a connection between Yggdrasil and travel, even bifrost travel.
Jane read about eagles and hawks and stags and serpents and three people called "norns." But if any of it was somehow relevant to the scientific study of Yggdrasil or wormholes in general, Jane was at a loss. This was simply not her field.
She frowned and sat back. What did you really expect? This isn't the Asgardian…Aesir take on Yggdrasil, it's the medieval Viking take on a concept they had no ability to comprehend, embellished along the way to turn it all into a good story.
She decided to let squirrels and stags percolate, and flipped back to the front of the book, then to the page where Sif's story was told. "That's not right," she said aloud right away, when the first sentence said Sif was a blond. "Oh." Loki had cut off her hair. "Ouch." But he'd replaced it with some kind of magical blond wig after Thor threatened to break every bone in his body. Jane hadn't paid much attention given the circumstances, but Sif's hair had looked natural to her, and it certainly wasn't blond. The image of Sif in the book looked nothing like the woman she'd met. The phrase "wife of the god of thunder, Thor," in the second sentence, didn't seem quite so potent then. Or the one about them having a child together.
She turned to a cross-reference in the second section, to a story in which Thor's father tells him Sif has a lover. Then there was another one in which Loki says he's had an affair with Sif. She wondered if it could be true, and if so…maybe it meant Sif was actually Thor's ex? No, surely not.
And Loki…it fit with what Darcy had told her. It seemed almost like there were two Lokis. Cutting off someone's hair sounded like a mean prank – it wasn't exactly on par with trying to destroy or subjugate entire planets. Sleeping with your brother's wife – if it were true – that was what you might call stepping it up a notch.
She tried to picture Loki cutting off Sif's hair – because no way was she going to try to picture the other story – and found she could not. It was simply too far from what she knew of him, she supposed. It was also giving her a headache.
Although she'd meant to look up Thor and Loki too, she decided she'd reached her limit of Ripley's-Believe-It-Or-Not Norse mythology for the day and she would treat herself to some greenhouse time. The humidity there was a heavenly 60%, there was a relatively comfy couch, and there might be someone to chat with other than Lucas.
They'd really started to grate on each other's nerves by the time they stopped working, falling into yet another predictable argument. This time it was over the fact that, whether Lucas liked it or not, SISI – and in reality SHIELD – had paid for them to be here, and they couldn't just abandon the research they were supposed to be carrying out. She needed to send weekly updates and data dumps to SISI, and even if Yggdrasil allowed them to leapfrog over half the things she'd expected to have figure out before reaching the point they were at now, she still wanted that data herself. As Lucas had correctly pointed out, she'd said in order to assuage his temper (it hadn't worked), that research was still perfectly valid and ultimately she still wanted to solve the mysteries of the classic Einstein-Rosen Bridge.
When Jane had declared it time to stop for the day, wanting to make it to the galley in time for supper and try to keep something closer to the normal nine-hour South Pole workday at least a few days a week, they'd argued again. In the end Lucas stormed off and Jane put on her brave face and sat down for dinner with three people she barely knew – no seat for Lucas. As far as she knew he never even showed up for dinner. She felt guilty about it now; she got the sense that he needed a friend even if he acted like all he needed was work, and she'd wanted to try to pull him back into South Pole life with her, not deliberately push him away like when they'd first met. But he made it so difficult sometimes.
Definitely greenhouse time now. Just thinking about the constant tug-of-war with Lucas today made her headache worse. Jane dropped the mythology book back in its drawer home and grabbed her rose book instead; if the greenhouse was deserted it would make for appropriate and, most importantly, stress-free reading material.
/
/
Odin had returned to Alfheim with new tactics – an assurance that the tesseract had only been vulnerable in the first place because it had not been on Asgard and that it was fully protected now that it was, an offer to cast an enchantment over the bifrost, once it was rebuilt, preventing Loki from ever using it again, and an invitation to attack. The attack would be a controlled experiment, a test of Asgard's safeguards of its powerful treasures, to be planned and carried out however Alfheim and the other realms saw fit, the only proviso being that no one from either side was actually harmed.
"'We have never asked you for anything. And now we ask for but two treasures out of so many, and your criminal son,'" Odin repeated to Thor on the balcony outside the feasting hall. "My 'criminal son.'"
Silence lingered, heavy and uncomfortable.
"One week remains. You may yet convince the remaining two realms of their foolishness," Thor said at last. He felt it was what he was supposed to say.
"I will attempt it. But you know as well as I that it's unlikely to make a difference at this point. Svartalfheim and Vanaheim have taken the lead in this alliance against us. We must break them apart, or, barring that, we must peel away all the others from their influence. But if not even Alfheim can be swayed…"
Alfheim may not have been the close ally that Vanaheim had long been, but Alfheim had never raised a weapon against Asgard, something not even Vanaheim, which had fought a protracted and brutal war against Asgard, could claim. The realm was hardly pacifist, though; it had seen alliances and wars come and go with its sister realm, Svartalfheim. The two currently were operating under a treaty of truce, with peaceful relations marred by the occasional tension. For over a century Alfheim had had better relations with Asgard than with Svartalfheim.
Odin looked down over the city without really seeing it, deep in thought, while Thor waited for him to continue, to bring wisdom to this madness.
"You said the Midgardian warrior with whom you spoke suspected Svartalfheim of intending to steal the tesseract from Vanaheim."
"He did say that."
"There is a certain logic in this idea. If this is really about Svartalfheim wanting the tesseract, they will find it less of a challenge to wrest it from Vanaheim than from us. Still…I believe there must be more to it. Why insist also on the Ice Casket? On Loki?"
Thor thought it over, letting his own gaze fall over Asgard. "I have never known the Dark Elves to show much interest in the Frost Giants. Perhaps…perhaps they wish to disguise their true interest. When I met with Gullveig on Vanaheim, he only mentioned the Ice Casket and Loki. Not the tesseract."
Odin nodded. "He knew we could never agree to surrender the tesseract. The Ice Casket is a cold trinket by comparison, and Loki…"
Thor glanced over at him, but Odin had angled his face away. They had spoken very little of Loki since he'd been sent to Midgard, and Thor hoped for a sign that his father considered Loki just as valuable as the tesseract, and not a "cold trinket." He grimaced. He knew his father loved Loki, but he also knew their relationship was complicated, and had been for a very long time. And Odin was a king, not just a father. Thor had seen the persistent sorrow in Odin after they'd thought Loki had perished. He knew the value his father placed on Loki; he did not know the value the All-Father placed on him.
"Whatever is going on here, even if we accept what we have been told at face value, we may be able to benefit from the suggestion that Svartalfheim plans to steal the tesseract."
"How so?" Thor asked, turning to face his father fully.
"We spread rumors that Svartalfheim is using the other realms, committing them to a war merely so they can take the tesseract for their own purposes. In this manner we may be able to make them turn on Svartalfheim and end their alliance against us."
"We…spread rumors?" Thor repeated, stunned. Trickery? Deceit?
"Yes. It's a potent weapon, and one we can draw first, without drawing blood."
Thor fought to remain silent as long as he could, to try to think the words before he said them. He tried, and then the words came tumbling out, but calmly, if not quite as calmly as he'd intended. "Why should we play along with these games? We could draw a real weapon. No one would be expecting it. We could strike against Svartalfheim. Remind them and every one of their so-called allies that it is unwise to make threats against Asgard.
"We cannot be goaded into that, Thor. It would only confirm what the other realms have said about us. We cannot act against them now without provocation."
"We have been provoked!"
"Yes, you're correct," Odin said, not matching Thor's raised voice. "But we've been provoked only with words, and we will respond only in kind. Thor…we must try everything we can to prevent this war from engulfing the realms. You have experienced battle many times over. But you have never experienced war, not truly. I have. You've seen Jotunheim; that is what war looks like. I don't want that brought to Asgard."
"Jotunheim is what defeat looks like. We are not Jotunheim." He had reduced his volume, and the words came out tightly controlled, rumbling and low.
Odin exhaled slowly, then nodded. "No, we aren't," he agreed. "Jotunheim fought only us and a smattering of Vanir. At the moment, we are challenged by the Frost Giants, the Dark Elves, the Light Elves, the Vanir-"
"I know. But we are the Aesir. We-"
"We have no guarantee of winning every battle. We have no guarantee of winning every war. If we must raise our weapons we will do so, and we will do so with great honor and make our ancestors proud."
"And fighting with trickery? Will this bring us honor?" Thor demanded, unable to hide his disdain, unwilling, really, to try.
"If it spares the lives of our sons and daughters and safeguards our place at the top of Yggdrasil, yes, I believe it will."
Thor shook his head and closed the small distance between him and the sun-warmed stone railing. He leaned into it and gripped it tightly, thinking back to all the stories of battle he'd grown up with. Asgard was steeped in such stories. Wars fought in Asgard and on multiple other realms. Battles with creatures of all types, and the occasional bout with some from outside the Nine seeking to flex their muscles. Feats of great strength and courage. Sharpened blades and weapons forged with powerful magic. Warriors returning home and heroes mourned and celebrated. He recalled no stories of using deception to avoid war. The very thought was almost too distasteful to imagine. And Odin, the mightiest warrior Asgard had ever known, had proposed it.
And yet…and yet…this would not be your biggest deception. You raised us with deception, both of us. Was there honor in that? Why did you lie? And yet…he knew. He knew why Odin lied. He knew everything; his father had explained it all. And he'd understood. A father's desire to protect his child wasn't so difficult to understand, even if Thor was not a father himself. But he found his anger building and focusing on Odin nonetheless. Surely there was a right time, in all those years, to tell Loki the truth. A better one than had actually happened.
"I will present this proposal during war council tonight. If you disapprove, you may voice your concern in the council hall. You may also present your own proposal, if you think it has merit."
Thor nodded but did not trust himself to speak.
Odin stepped closer to him and put a hand on his shoulder. "Do not assume victory, Thor. Remember Jotunheim."
Jotunheim. The place of defeat. Memories of his own battle there coursed through him. Of a fist thrown here, Mjolnir thrown there. Of blood roaring in his veins and a roar bursting from his throat. Of a feeling of invincibility. Of assumed victory, if he'd have taken the time to assume anything. Of standing on the edge of an ice sheet unable to see what lay below or how far down "below" was, while hundreds of Frost Giants approached, surrounding him and his battered friends. Odin had rescued them. Thor had never allowed himself to think what might have happened had Odin not shown up when he did.
"Words can also be a sharp-edged weapon, Son." Odin gave his shoulder a squeeze and turned to leave.
That evening, someone else suggested an attack against Svartalfheim, while another noted that attacking Vanaheim was also a possibility. A few murmurs of approval followed the mention of Svartalfheim; uncomfortable silence marred by the occasional cough or shuffled feet followed the mention of Vanaheim. Neither proposal sounded appropriate when he heard it in someone else's words, so Thor remained silent and listened.
/
Thanks so much for reading, double-thanks for reviewing, to guests also to whom I can't respond via PM (Guest 1/11: "mutually fond of" + "mutual exasperation," well-put! Loki would disagree with the first part, but you can see in this chapter he wouldn't be answering entirely honestly), I really appreciate all of your comments and reactions. You who have read so far, some of you for months now, it's such an honor that you've stuck with it.
Did you notice there's a picture now? I took it from Wikipedia. I was really excited to find it - that's an aurora right over Antarctica, folks. And green to symbolize Loki's presence. ;-) Pic by NASA. I think it's obscure enough though that new readers will not see it and guess the story takes place in Antarctica. If you as a reader who once did not know it took place in Antarctica disagree let me know please.
Teasers from "Chapter 29: Forgetting" (I think that's what I'll title it): Loki starts thinking more and more about leaving, and leaving the past behind, and how that's easier said than done; Loki is a big faker (surprise, surprise); and more of Loki's control over Jane starts to slip away, even as he realizes Odin has more control than he thought.
And excerpt (some of it refers to stuff that happens right before this bit):
"Don't you read your e-mail, Lucas? They've sent out two about the Mass Casualty Incident drill."
"I read e-mail every day without fail, Jane," he answered with a smirk. He read hers every day without fail. But he didn't bother with the internal United States Antarctic Program messages; they were not of concern. Thor probably has no idea what e-mail is, he thought sarcastically, trying to recover a little of the dignity he thought he'd ceded with his slip, but instead setting off a battle inside him.
