Those of you who like the All-Tongue idea, BTW, feel free to keep that as head-canon in this story - I won't be addressing it ever, so whatever theory works for you is A-OK!

/


Beneath

Chapter Forty – Strategies

Another argument was brewing. It was inevitable, really, Jane supposed. She still wasn't entirely sure of how she should act around Loki, but arguing with Lucas was familiar ground, and this was little different. The only real difference was that she'd thought sometimes that Lucas might lose his temper and start shouting and ranting, while with Loki there was the risk he might lose his temper and…anything could happen. Strangely, though, his temper appeared more under control than it had been when he'd been pretending to be Lucas. In fact he seemed positively subdued as she made her case again.

"It's not that simple. You have to have some means of controlling the recall."

"I think putting it under my boot and crushing it will control it quite well. Or you can simply disable it, can you not? We made it work; we can make it not work," Loki said, trying not to dwell on the memory that came to mind of the last time he'd tried to take care of a problem by stepping on it. His right food twinged, making it even more difficult.

"But what if there's a problem? What if… You don't know what you'd be walking into. Maybe…maybe Yggdrasil sent the probe to Asgard this time. What if next time it sends it…it sends you somewhere else? Jotunheim, with the scantily-clad ice people. Or the hot one, Muspelheim. Or one of the others."

"It will take me to Asgard every time," Loki insisted, shaking his head a bit at her naïve trivialization of Frost Giants. It was of course his own fault for telling her about them. He shouldn't have done so, but it had felt good to say it aloud, like a release on a pressure valve. "And if for some strange reason it doesn't, it will still count as having completed my task. I know other means of travel from the other realms to Asgard." Except Muspelheim, that would be a problem. Or Helheim, he thought. But it was immaterial. He now had no doubt whatsoever that Yggdrasil would send him to Asgard.

"But…it's just…" Jane didn't know what else to say. Thor had told her he feared Asgard could be headed for war. That Asgard and Jotunheim were technically already at war. That the people on Jotunheim couldn't travel to Asgard, but the people on Svartalfheim might be willing to help them do it. At least that was as much as she could remember. She hesitated to tell Loki, though. What if he decided not to go? Jane definitely wanted him to go, but she didn't want him to set foot on Asgard, realize later he'd landed in a mass of angry Frost Giants, and have no way to escape because he'd crushed or ditched the transmitter that linked back to Pathfinder. She wanted him to go, but she didn't want him to get sliced and diced into a million Bad Guy pieces with ice swords. He might be heartless, but she wasn't. He'd been sent here to learn something. Not to get killed.

"What is it, Jane?" Loki, asked, watching her carefully. "Can it be that you're concerned for my safety?" He backed off from the sarcasm in the question then, in the face of her scowl and clear discomfort that told him that yes, for some reason, somehow, she was concerned, though perhaps not exactly for him. "Don't be. I'll be fine. I'm going home, after all," he finished, turning back to the laptop monitor, where a portion of the code for the structural integrity field was displayed.

"You don't sound very excited about going home," Jane said quietly.

"I…it's complicated," he said, not looking up. Some lies were too audacious even for Loki, who had stood before Laufey's throne and offered up Odin's life and the Ice Casket, who had embraced his mother and looked her in the eye and told her he'd make the Frost Giants pay for what they'd done. He couldn't stand before Jane – or anyone else – and speak of some desperate need to be home in the loving arms of his family. Not now. Besides, he'd already spoken the truth, when he'd told her about Lucas's family. The lie would never stand up to that truth. But he needed her to support his return to Asgard instead of discovering some moral compunction to try to stop it. He needed her to think there was a family in Asgard waiting for him with open arms. The truth, in that case, wouldn't do.

"No."

"What do you mean, 'no'?" Loki asked, turning toward her again, wondering if he'd somehow asked a question and forgotten it.

"You don't get to do that anymore. You want my help, you answer my questions."

Loki drew in a breath and began to harness his anger to show in his face, to display the look that had made men shiver – that had made Jane shiver, once – but it had no more impact this time than the last. He pressed his lips together tightly. This time it had had no impact because he hadn't even managed to get the look fully in place. He sighed and turned back to the laptop again, scrolling down to see the next section of programming, much of which remained indecipherable to him. "If you think I'm going to submit to your interrogation, ask your friends at SHIELD how far they got with that."

"It's hardly an interrogation," Jane said, then wondered what he was talking about, then wondered, if there had been an interrogation – and surely there had been – just how far SHIELD had gotten, and how much effort they'd put into getting there.

"Call it what you like. Listen," he cut in before she could speak. "You work on reprogramming the structural integrity field. I'll piece together a short-range radio frequency on-off switch for the transmitter. We can program Pathfinder to make periodic attempts at a recall, and so long as the transmitter is turned off, no recall will happen. In an emergency the switch can be turned on, and the recall will happen. Does that satisfy you?"

Jane thought it over and found herself nodding. "It's simple. I like it. Can you do that?"

Loki gave her a withering look.

"Fine, fine, all right. Did you seriously never have a single class in astronomy before this? In physics? Mechanical engineering?"

"I studied astronomy. But not the way you did. I didn't need to study physics. I experienced physics. As for mechanical engineering…I've always liked to know how things work."

Jane shook her head at him. "So you just…how did you learn all this? I mean, I could tell there were some weird gaps in what you knew, but…I never doubted you were a doctoral student."

"I bought a book when we were in Christchurch," he said.

"You…bought a book."

"I bought a book. It was a little elementary, more of an introduction to basic concepts in your understanding of astronomy and physics. I also read articles on the internet, and I listened to everything you said."

Jane gave a short laugh. "Could've fooled me."

Loki covered what began to be a smile with a frown and reached down for Jane's backpack, pulling out the thick black notebook. He looked around for a pen and, not finding one, reached into the air and one appeared in his fingers. He opened up the notebook to the first empty page.

"Wait, how…was that some trick? Or did you…did you just…uh…conjure up a pen out of thin air?" Jane asked, staring at the pen in his right hand. It looked exactly like the kind the Science Lab stocked as basic office supplies.

"Some would call it a trick," Loki said, trying to keep the bitterness from his voice. He took the black cap off the pen and stuck it onto the end. "I suppose it's a matter of perspective."

"What would you call it?"

He glanced up at her. It had been a very long time since anyone had asked. "I…I would say I changed its structure. I try to keep one with me at all times here, and I changed its structure so I could."

"In what way? You made it…weightless? Invisible? You had to have created a weak electrical field. Or magnetic? You changed light frequencies and relative atomic mass and weight? But how can you do that? Or…you created a tiny vacuum, and-"

"Jane," Loki said in a slightly raised voice, then quickly lowered it again. "You're a good teacher. I'm not. I'm not going to try to explain such things to you." He turned back to the notebook and began sketching out a design for an on-off switch to control the transmitter. She seemed far more comfortable around him than he would have expected after what happened, and he'd made it a point to appear entirely non-threatening, to never show a hint of anger, to never make an unexpected move toward her.

But that didn't mean he had any illusions about what they were to each other. That didn't mean he'd forgotten the moment of absolute horror when he'd realized he'd nearly choked her to death while she tried in vain with weak mortal hands to pry his much stronger ones from her neck. The terror in her eyes. Her anger when she'd struck him with her palm and wagged a finger in his face. He understood what that was. He understood what it was to have the tatters of one's dignity ground into dust, to be pushed too far and be compelled to take rash and potentially unwise action to try to recover it. She still detests me, as she should, and I…I am still what I am. There's no need to discuss anything more than what is necessary. Besides, she had it half figured out anyway.

Jane bit back the questions she still wanted to ask; she could put together a theory of the physics of carrying around a tethered invisible pen, but couldn't conceive of how he actually did it. Light waves could be manipulated with machines. How is he doing it? Abra-cadabra? Can he touch and bend light waves the way he touches that pen? And…why doesn't he just carry one in his bag like a normal person? She furrowed her brow, realizing she'd never actually seen him take anything out from that black leather satchel hanging from his neck and tucked under one arm, or put anything in it either. Maybe it's a fashion statement, she thought with a mental shrug and only a smidgen of sarcasm. He does seem to care about style. Nobody else here has on a white button-down shirt and silk pants.

She watched him sketch steady straight strokes in her notebook in the partially heated jamesway and was reminded of another time in another place, another Asgardian hand sketching a shape in her notebook on a chilly night. Thor had spoken to her of magic that night, but she hadn't seen him do anything magical – except for his smile, that was pretty magical – until his hammer had come flying out of the sky into his hand. Probably he'd lost the ability when he'd been made mortal, she figured, but then realized she'd never seen him do anything like what Loki just did, even afterward. "Can Thor do that?" she suddenly asked, and kind of regretted it. He hadn't reacted well the one other time she'd asked him something about Thor.

Loki looked up from the notebook, startled. "Do what?" He glanced down briefly at his nearly-finished sketch, a rendering of the schematics for the switch he was going to create to placate Jane. "Draw? I suppose. It's been a millennium or so since I've seen him do it."

Jane narrowed her eyes at him, remembering with a weird sense of déjà-vu a time when she would have given him – Lucas – a light friendly nudge to the shoulder for saying something like that. Not that Lucas had ever said anything quite like that. A millennium. She supposed he meant childhood. "I meant what you did with the pen. 'Change its structure.'"

"Of course," Loki said immediately, then went back to his sketching.

Jane's eyebrows went up. She wished he would have shown her. But she supposed on Asgard everyone could do things like that, and it would occur to Thor to demonstrate it about as much as it would occur to her to say, "Here, let me show you how cool my opposable thumbs are."

"However, he would go about it in a different manner. Rather more destructive. More permanent."

Jane stared at Loki, still engrossed in his work. At first she wasn't sure how to take what he'd said, but then she realized the tone of voice was exactly the same as the one she'd come to identify with Lucas's dry, sardonic sense of humor. This was Loki telling a joke. Sort of. And now she recognized, with the help of what little bit of insight Thor had given her, an undercurrent of hostility to it. "He said he felt like he was in my shadow." "So you're saying…there might be a hammer involved?"

Loki looked up at Jane in surprise again. At times he'd thought her entirely predictable. At other times he thought he didn't understand her at all. She was no warrior, this tiny woman beside him, and she'd confronted her own mortality just a day ago, at his hands, literally. And now a co-conspirator in a jest at Thor's expense? He didn't even understand why he'd said what he said. It was an old habit, one best left in the past where it belonged. "There might be," he finally said, lips twisted faintly into something that didn't quite manage to be either smile or frown.

"Sooo…not everybody in Asgard can do what you can do?"

"Some can…but I am…unique, in many ways."

His cold tone and gaze told her that follow-up questions would not be appreciated. There was something ominous in it, too, real or imagined, Jane wasn't sure, but if he was joking before he definitely wasn't now. She wondered if on Asgard "unique" had a negative connotation like "special" had come to have in the US, because he certainly didn't seem happy about it. She shivered and stood, circling around the table they were using as a desk until it was between her and Loki.

In his peripheral vision Loki watched her do it, watched her remember just who she'd been sharing a laugh with. He couldn't let that continue, that lapse in the distance between them. A certain amount of openness was needed now. Openness was a means of assuring her of her safety after his error, just as a clearly displayed open palm made an enemy relax at least a fraction. But there had to be limits to it. Boundaries. Whenever he'd relaxed the boundaries even a little, she'd reached into him and pulled things out that he kept tightly sealed.

Jane wondered if he really did think she'd been a good teacher as she watched him complete the sketch and begin writing in a narrow column, which she presumed to be a list of the parts he'd need. It was the exact same process they'd gone through when they'd realized – when Jane had realized – they would need more probes, or more specifically, more transmitters to test. It really shouldn't be like this, she thought, her eyes drawn to his hands. If someone had tried to choke her out in the real world – not Loki who needed her help to leave, not at the South Pole where escape or even blending into a crowd and going unnoticed wasn't possible, not indoors anyway – that would've been it. The end. Hasta la vista, baby. But she was at the South Pole. And he was Loki. Thor's brother.

She pursed her lips, letting that thought really percolate for the first time, beginning with really looking at him for the first time. He leaned his slender frame slightly over the desk, left hand over the left side of the notebook, holding it in place, right hand writing in neat printed letters and occasionally pausing to tap the pen against the paper while he thought. His straight black hair was longer now than when she'd first met him, and somewhat ruffled from pulling off his balaclava; one section of it fell over his forehead, partially obscuring his sharp, pale features. Most of the men here grew beards, making them look even more the outdoorsmen that many of them really were, but Loki had no hint of facial hair. Jane had never even seen him with a five-o'clock shadow. She saw nothing of Thor in him at all; in some ways they appeared almost like opposites.

Thor's brother. In the real world, it could have been fun. There was still so much she didn't know about Thor, and here she'd had two whole months with his brother. She could have found out the good, the bad, the ugly, and the utterly humiliating and infinitely tease-worthy. But Loki wasn't exactly Don's brother Jim-the-orthodontist. Her gaze drifted down to his hands again. Loki wasn't the kind of guy you asked about embarrassing childhood stories and then shared a good laugh with.

Except maybe…

He paused, eyes scanning his list.

"So, uh, Thor told me he's not much older than you. Why did he carry you all the time, when you were a baby? Or does 'not much older' in Asgardian terms mean a few decades or something?" Jane asked, and when Loki looked up at her, his expression reminded her of the look he wore when looking at an entrée from the galley that he found particularly distasteful.

"What are you-"

"You said-"

"I know what I said. I was angry."

"Yeah, I think we've established that."

Loki frowned, and with effort kept his eyes locked on hers. "You said you didn't care about who I was then. You were right not to care. It was another lifetime. I didn't know who I was. I know now. Here. Does this look acceptable?" He handed her the notebook.

Jane took it, and after a few seconds gave up and allowed herself to be maneuvered away from her question. She looked over his sketch and his list, nodding. It was efficient, elegant even. She couldn't see any way to improve his design. A short-range RF switch wasn't that complicated, really, but she was still impressed. She'd learned the skills to design and build her own equipment from watching Erik indulge his hobby in his garage, and then through trial and error over a period of years. Loki had somehow picked it up in a few weeks. "A+," she said, handing it back to him. "Uh, top marks?" she added when he looked at her with confusion.

"Ah," Loki said with a nod. "As I said, you're a good teacher. I'll get to work on this now. I'm sure I can finish by the end of the day. And you?"

"Um, well…I told you, software isn't really my thing. But I don't have to do this from scratch, I just have to isolate the segments we have to adjust, deal with any cascade effects from those changes…I don't think anything on the generator itself will have to be physically modified…maybe the modulator…we'll have to run some stress simulations but I still have the programs for those from when we ran them in New Mexico… It shouldn't take that long, if we don't run into any problems. Maybe two or three days?"

Loki gritted his teeth and took a steadying breath. Two or three days to rewrite a few lines of code?

"I'm guessing you'd prefer to make it there alive, right?" Jane asked, his impatience both obvious and familiar.

"That would be my preference, yes," he said with a curt nod. "If you explain what needs to be done I'll help you when I finish the switch." He set the notebook down and started pulling his ECW gear on to begin his next round of Treasure Hunt.

"Wait, you don't need the list?" Jane asked. She didn't particularly want him walking off with her notebook, but she supposed she could rip out the page he'd written it on.

He shook his head. "I'll remember." He pushed the door open and stepped outside, and as cold as it was out here, it couldn't come too soon. Two or three days. Then no more tests, no more delays. It couldn't come too soon.

/


/

"You've been to the Healing Room?" Odin asked as he and Thor walked down the barely recognizable street toward the palace. No battle had been fought in this location, but it was filthy from the thousands of warriors and horses that had plied its length for the past two and a half days, especially in the hours after the explosion. Dirt and blood and manure and unidentifiable random bits of litter entirely masked the street's usual luster. Either the cleaning system had been overwhelmed, or no one had bothered to turn it on.

Thor took a deep breath and his head began to pound again – he suspected it was nothing more than exhaustion, but the smell from beneath his feet and the bright early morning sunlight weren't helping either. "I did. I'm fine. It wasn't serious." He glanced at his father, and though he was now much closer, he still saw no cause for concern, so he did not ask after his health. For a father to ask after his son was one thing. For Thor to ask after Odin All-Father…he felt it would be an insult. He came at it another way instead. "Did you fight, Father?"

Odin nodded, his eyes fixed on the wide porticos ahead of them, the public entrance to the palace. "My throne no longer exists. The time for diplomacy was past." He paused as they turned to the right down another street, heading toward the main entrance to the private wing. "Did you hear that Muspelheim sent women among its warriors?"

"I did. I fought them." Another deep breath. More pounding. "I thought of Sif."

Odin chuckled. "I thought of your mother."

Thor squinted his eyes at his father; the sun was now shining almost directly behind his head and it was difficult to look directly at him. "I'm not sure how to take that."

"Frigga speaks with a soft voice, touches with a gentle hand, and stands quietly by my side. That is all by her deliberate choice, Son. When she's angry, she could be mistaken for a Fire Giantess herself. She would be very angry indeed if I let Asgard fall because I refused to raise a sword to a woman."

Odin was chuckling again, and Thor supposed there was something humorous in it somewhere, but he remembered the woman he'd killed before turning his attention to the portal, and picturing his mother looking like that seemed a grave offense. He tried to forget about it, figuring he was simply too tired to appreciate a jest.

They took two lefts, entered the palace, and began climbing the stairs to the top floor. "Do you believe Gullveig was telling the truth, that he never intended to kill us? Why take such a shameful action and then fail to take full advantage of it?" Thor asked.

"He was telling the truth. It's no coincidence that the explosion happened the first minute all three of us were absent from the throne room since their deadline expired. And the strategy is the same as with the simultaneous attacks through the portals. But let's wait to discuss it with your mother."

Thor nodded. He hadn't processed much of what Odin said anyway. He stole a glance at him and marveled that the old man had more spring in his step than he himself did. He supposed that was due to the effect of his recent Sleep. It was said that during the Ice War he had once gone two whole months without sleep, fighting almost constantly, after three days of Odinsleep. Thor had never questioned those stories, growing up. He couldn't imagine it now. On the other hand, he hadn't felt tired himself until he sat down in the Healing Room.

When they finally reached the top, Thor was reconsidering his unspoken opinion that Tony and SHIELD were lazy for their use of mechanical elevators instead of stairs. Jane he excused from this because she was Jane, and not one of her realm's warriors.

There were four guards in the corridor, where normally only one or at most two stood watch. The one closest to the engraved double doors, Radvald Smidurson, another Einherjar Thor had known all his life, bowed and opened it in perfect timing for their passage.

Frigga was waiting in the antechamber, legs tucked under her on a settee, staring at a book she wasn't reading. She was up by the time the door fully opened, her arms around Thor before it fully closed. Thor embraced her and let her fuss over him, giving a small tired laugh as she unfailingly found and inspected every single now-healed wound, first noticing the blood in his hair and then the bloodied rips in his clothing. She turned her attention next to Odin, and Thor collapsed onto the settee beside her abandoned book.

"Thor, up from there! Have you looked at yourself in a mirror? I'll have to have the fabric replaced. And look at what you're tracking in on your boots, both of you! Up, up up! And don't touch anything until you've had a bath. Now! Go!"

Thor pushed himself back up halfway through and began to trudge back to the bathroom that had been his and Loki's when they were children. He could have fallen asleep on that settee, and wouldn't have cared at all about the mess he made of it. Replacing a few yards of fabric wasn't exactly an onerous task. But he was hardly in a mood to argue. He shuddered as an image of his mother in dark red skin and breathing fire came to mind. It was followed by an equally unsettling image of his brother in rough blue skin and growling at him.

"I can't control what happens beyond the walls of these chambers, Odin. But I can and I will control what happens within them," she said as Thor left the room; he couldn't hear his father's murmured reply.

When did everything turn so upside down? Thor wondered as he took a deep breath and dipped beneath the surface of intentionally cold bathwater. My coronation, he thought as he came back up after scrubbing hard at his head. Why did I ever think I was ready? Why did I ever think it would be so easy?

When he'd been very young, he and Loki had been given baths together in this same tub, made much shallower then. They'd laughed and splashed water at each other and over the edge and in general made getting them clean as difficult on their mother or their nursemaids as they could. Thor glanced around him; the bathroom was largely the same, the scale of everything in it having simply adjusted to his and Loki's height as they grew. The whole room was haunted with memories of long-ago childhood, of innocence, of things that now seemed impossibly distant.

He hurried with his bath, made easier because the water was so cold it verged on painful, then toweled off and left the room as quickly as he could. On the dresser right outside the door in the attached bedchambers a fresh set of clothing had been laid out for him. This room had changed considerably over the centuries, and bore little resemblance to the room that he had shared with Loki for the first decade or so of his life. The two smaller beds on either side of the room were long gone, replaced with a larger single bed in the middle.

Unpleasant as the bath had been, Thor was wide awake now, clean, and his mother wouldn't scold him for sitting on her furniture. He made his way back out to the antechamber and found both his parents in the comfortable sitting room just down the hallway. It was as though he'd entered another realm: his mother's, he supposed. Just hours ago he'd been surrounded by the sounds of bones breaking and men shouting and the sight and smell of blood and death. Now he walked through the finery of his parents' chambers in soft leather slippers with fur lining the top and he knew he'd best not rest them on the low table in front of the sofa. "I almost feel like I dreamt it all," he said as he sank into the soft cushions.

"You didn't," Odin said curtly, back in gleaming armor and clean boots, and Thor wondered if he shouldn't have said that, if his father thought him impertinent. He kept silent while his father caught his mother up on all that had happened.

"This isn't going to be another Ice War," Frigga said when he was done.

"Not at all," Odin agreed. "Warriors met on battlefields then and fought to the best of their strength and skill."

"We have done that here as well," Thor said, the words stinging. Other than the initial reluctance to fight Muspelheim's female warriors, he hadn't seen anyone not fighting to the best of his strength and skill.

"Only for a short time. The other realms continued fighting, continued reinforcing, only while they held an advantage. They sought to shock with swift brutality, to create and maintain the illusion that they control the battlefield, all of the battlefields, that they control even our palace. They seek to cast a shadow larger than themselves, to make us see the futility of our defense. To cause our people to lose hope. To frighten us into capitulating."

"I saw no frightened Aesir."

"You saw two and a half days of battle," Odin said, gesturing angrily with Gungnir. "This is a strategy, Thor. It's only the beginning. Gullveig remembers the Aesir-Vanir War as well as I do. He remembers the losses, the despair on both sides as more and more of our men went to war and did not return, as our crops were destroyed and our livestock died. He doesn't want that for his people, but he doesn't want it for Asgard, either. What good is a decaying realm of rubble to him? None at all. An Asgard defeated after years of war is no longer Asgard. He and his allies will do everything in his power to make Asgard relent. To make relenting seem less painful, more acceptable. To make the people demand it."

"Gullveig's public message," Thor said with a nod, the pieces beginning to fit. "He was trying to paint you as a tyrant and himself as a benevolent ruler who asks for little in return for peace. But our people will never turn on you, Father. It won't work."

"Don't you see, it's already begun to work. You heard my advisors."

Thor's face fell in shock. The idea wasn't fully congealed yet through the exhaustion, but it was almost there. Close enough to know what his father was referring to. He glanced at his mother, who had remained silent but listened intently to everything they said. "Loki. One of them suspects Loki had something to do with the explosion at the palace." He heard Frigga draw in a breath but resisted looking her way again. "We know who did that now, though. Gullveig's man. Tofison…Haladur Tofison."

"It's difficult to keep control of facts during wartime," Frigga put in softly.

"Two of them voiced suspicion. And if two said it aloud, more were thinking it. And this from my own advisors, who know that Loki's on Midgard and that the enchantments I placed on him would make it essentially impossible for him to do something like this. If Loki is somehow complicit in the attacks on us, how difficult would it be to hand him over?"

"But there's…there's no sense in that. If he were cooperating with our enemies, they wouldn't need us to hand him over. They'd already have him!" Thor bellowed, leaving the comfort of the sofa to stand before his father.

"It doesn't have to make sense! It's war!" Odin shouted back.

"Sit. Both of you," Frigga said, her voice tense, her fingers grasping each other tightly.

"It doesn't have to make sense, Thor. It only has to plant doubt. There will be murmurs against Loki," Odin said, his voice back at his normal quiet volume. "Making him a gift to Jotunheim was what some of them wanted in the first place. Is it so difficult to believe they could seek it again? He is an easy target. And of all the realms, which one would actually be justified in seeking to attack us, and has it done so? There will be murmurs that Jotunheim is not truly our enemy anymore, less so than the others, and that we should return the Ice Casket."

Thor followed his father's lead and took a seat again, his gaze wandering to the side as he considered that. He hadn't known the Frost Giants hadn't attacked. He hadn't seen any, but he hadn't fought at the site of every portal. He shook his head. Aesir had despised Jotuns for over a millennium, and hadn't been fond of them before that. He couldn't imagine that changing so quickly simply because the Frost Giants were probably too busy fighting each other in their own civil war to send any here to fight Aesir.

"Then only the tesseract remains. To move it from one realm's safekeeping to seven realms' safekeeping. A very small price to pay," Odin said with a somber smile.

"Well I don't trust their safekeeping, and I don't believe their 'small prices.' They are poachers on our land, trying to steal what is not theirs. I know you don't trust them, Father. No one else will, either. Our men will fight."

"Of course our men will fight. But Gullveig will seek to break their spirits before their bodies. You've only known victory and peace. During the Vanir-Aesir War there were four assassination attempts against me, and-."

"And we won't be discussing that," Frigga cut in sharply.

A heavy blanket of silence fell over the room. Thor recognized that there was much he didn't know, that his father's experience of war vastly outstripped his own. But he couldn't fathom that the Aesir would ever be swayed by petty attempts to get them to lie down and accept Asgard being pilfered. Aesir men had battle in their blood. He glanced at his mother, remembered that she'd slain a Frost Giant herself not so long ago; Aesir women, too, would stand and fight rather than permit such a thing. He thought of the Aesir-Vanir War, of attempts on his father's life – the first he'd heard of this – and of how it had ended without true victory. He thought of the more recent Ice War, and its very different conclusion.

"Father…perhaps there's more to it. When you took the Ice Casket from Jotunheim, it was with Gungnir at Laufey's throat. Would they ever have willingly given it up had Laufey still stood? If you could have gotten him in that position at the beginning of the war instead of years later, wouldn't you have? That might have brought it to a swift conclusion. Laufey's sons" – and here Thor stumbled for a moment – "they were not yet even born. There was no one ready to step in for him."

Odin and Frigga exchanged a look. "Yes, that's correct," he said.

"The explosion in the throne room…whatever enchantment was placed there…that was Gullveig's sword at your throat. We had breakfast in your study that morning, the three of us," Thor said, glancing between his parents. "Why play games? If you're willing to stoop so low, why try to make a point when you can destroy the entire line of succession in one dishonorable blow?"

"Loki is still in the line of succession," Frigga pointed out with a frown; Odin shot her an impatient look.

"Loki isn't here, and we still don't know where he is," Thor said, keeping his tone even. "And if we found him, would his taking the throne again stabilize Asgard?" And much as Thor wished Loki was here, he didn't want to imagine what his brother might do if given the throne under such circumstances.

"Asgard could have fallen into chaos, with or without Loki here," Frigga whispered, a shiver running up her spine as she remembered the quiet, tense breakfast they'd shared that morning.

"For one who discards his scruples, that could be a simpler means of shortening a war," Odin said with a nod.

Thor still could not envisage Asgard's defeat, but he had by now accepted it as something at least theoretically possible, and he nodded as well. "Seven realms against an Asgard without a leader. And yet they didn't do it. How much greater would our losses have been over the last few days had they done so?"

"Go on," Odin said.

"Father, we have Vanir among us who do not wish to fight their fellow Vanir, a few from other realms who feel the same, and who still support us but choose to serve in other capacities. They support us because they know we didn't seek this war. It must be the same on Vanaheim. Aesir who refuse to support Vanaheim. Surely there are even Vanir who don't support this effort against us. You have long sought to maintain peace between all the realms. Hardly anyone has spoken an ill word against you in my lifetime."

At this an eyebrow on Odin's stone-like face rose almost imperceptibly toward his hairline; Thor did not fail to see it. Present company excepted, he understood the reaction to say.

Thor swallowed and continued. "Killing an enemy king on a battlefield is one thing. Slaughtering one who is respected throughout the realms, along with his family, in some display of magic, without even showing your face – that is something entirely different."

No one immediately responded; Odin's intense gaze remained steadily on him, and Frigga, who was sitting beside Thor, stared down at her hands.

It was Frigga who finally spoke. "You believe that Gullveig wishes to incite rebellion here because he fears it at home?"

Is that what I said? Thor thought everything over again, difficult through the haziness of his lack of sleep, and nodded. It was far more eloquent and clear than anything he'd said, clearer even than anything he'd thought, but yes, that was exactly what he meant. It had come to mind vague and incomplete, with a crystal clear image of something he'd never seen but had imagined countless times as a boy – his father standing in triumph over the Frost Giant king, holding Gungnir to his throat – and the terribly ineloquent thought that going after the king usually is how it's done. "Yes," he said.

Odin stood. His stern expression was unchanged, but his heart was beating faster. "You have identified a weakness. Frigga, see that your son gets a few hours of sleep. Join me in the Feasting Hall for lunch. I'm going to find Bragi."

Once his father left, his mother patted his knee and stood. "Do you want to use your old bedchamber?"

"It's closer," Thor said with a nod, hauling himself to his feet.

She hooked her arm through his and walked him back toward the room that had once been filled with boisterous shouts and laughter in the day and whispered secrets in the night. "I'm sorry I shouted at you earlier," she said, resting her head against his shoulder. It was hard to believe now that he'd once fit in the crook of her arm.

"I'm sorry I tracked mud into your chambers."

"That's not all you tracked in."

"Yes, well…I'm sorry for that, too," he said with a laugh.

They reached the door and turned to face each other; Frigga took Thor's face between her hands and drew him downward a bit so she could kiss his forehead. "You gave your father more hope than he's had in weeks. Thank you."

Thor wasn't sure he'd done that, but he smiled anyway, tired enough to take his mother's word for it, too tired to think any further about it.

"Get some sleep, my child. And don't get that look. You can fight in a thousand wars and you'll always be my child. Both of you."

Thor sighed, relenting easily, embraced his mother whose eyes had begun to grow moist, and entered the room. Sleep came easily, even in this haunted place.


/

So I put up another story, Moving to Alfheim, recently. You can find the link on my profile page if you want to check it out. It will have three chapters, perhaps with a fourth as an epilogue. Two are up as of April 5, and the rest is kind of sketched out, I just have to fill it out and prettify it. It's more of my "I need young Loki & Thor fluff to keep my sanity" stuff, though my fluff is never purely fluff.

As for Beneath, big changes are coming...not far off now.

In the meantime, here are some previews from Chapter 41 (maybe I'll call it "Race"): Thor gets another summons from Midgard, and feels Loki's betrayal get way more personal; Jane asks Wright about that picture she asked him to delete; Loki struggles to maintain his focus.

And the excerpt:

Thor turned away from the group, realizing now that the Einherjar was coming straight toward him. He missed whatever idea Sif was proposing, a rather more serious one judging from her tone of voice, as the guard reached his side and leaned in, speaking in a lowered voice meant only for him. "Prince Thor, Heimdall has sent me. Your friend has contacted him and requests your presence."

Thor's brow drew together with worry. Now was not a good time. On the other hand, it was possible that for a long time to come, "now" would not be a good time. "Wait here a moment. I need to speak to my father."