For those of you who enjoy the music-while-you-read thing, in the second half of the first scene, when things calm down (you'll know what I mean when you get there I think), by coincidence I was listening to "Odin Confesses" from the Thor soundtrack, and I thought it went pretty well with the scene.

/


Beneath

Chapter Sixty-Three –Winter

Thor set down easily on his feet, despite the distraction in front of him, while Volstagg stumbled and barely stayed upright, not sufficiently accustomed to traveling with Mjolnir's aid. "Do you see the same thing I do?" Thor asked, his eyes fixed ahead of him. They'd come around to a different part of the mountain, where the Vina began its flow, or where it should have, anyway. They were a little higher, and it was a lot colder.

"If you're referring to the massive hole in the side of the mountain, then yes, I see the same."

Thor glanced over at Volstagg and found him blowing out a heavy breath through a wide-open rounded mouth and watching the cloud of vapor that was created.

"We're at higher altitude here," Thor said even as a small shiver went through his chest.

Volstagg nodded and ran a hand through his long beard.

Thor grit his teeth. "Come on," he said, keeping his voice low and setting off toward the new passageway into the mountain, eager to get to the bottom of this mystery and restore the rivers' flow.

"You should sound the horn," Volstagg said, following him and adjusting the grip on his double-bladed battle ax so he would be ready to use it at a moment's notice.

"Not yet. We don't know what we have here, and our warriors are spread thinly enough already."

The two men advanced to the snow-capped mountain, where a sheer steep incline of smooth gray rock was violently marred, and the rising land they stood on was littered with the rubble born of this unnatural gaping hole. They picked their way over the rocks and around the boulders and soon stood at the mouth of the hole, wide enough for five or six to pass side-by-side and perhaps twice their height.

They went inside and found a new man-made cavern that continued deeper into the mountain, until they could hear small trickles of water. It was cold. High enough for a giant to pass through, Thor thought in the second before they rounded a slight bend in the tunnel and saw three Frost Giants kneeling over a frozen pool of water.

"We have guests," a voice said, startling Thor even as he instinctively raised Mjolnir.

The Frost Giants stood, and as the one on the left turned, behind him Thor caught a glimpse of a much smaller figure in a familiar pale cloak. He was only in view for a second, but it was enough for Thor to have no doubt that the smaller man was Brokk. There was no time for pondering Brokk's presence, though, for three Frost Giants were now facing Volstagg and him. Thor released Mjolnir just as the closest one began to grow an ice dagger, and the hammer hit him at full force in the chest, knocking him to the ground. As Mjolnir flew Thor ran, and he grabbed it from the still chest of the fallen Frost Giant and turned to strike the next who ran toward him, while the third, he saw to his right, had taken a hit from Volstagg's battle ax but fought on, swinging a massive fist at Volstagg's head.

With the second Jotun down, Thor meant to assist Volstagg, but four more giants then appeared from further back in the cavern, and he left his able friend to handle his battle on his own while he confronted the next group, at least three of whom were headed his way.

"Why so few of you?" Thor shouted as he swung Mjolnir hard into a giant's knee, making him howl with agony, and followed it up with a hard punch to the side. "Do you know how many we fought on Jotunheim?" The giant fell and Thor finished him before dodging a deadly spear of ice aimed right for his heart.

"Warmongerers. You started this, petulant brat," came the rumbling voice of the one who'd thrown the spear.

Thor turned and quickly angled his body to the side to avoid a dagger grown from the giant's fist, but in avoiding that one he failed to avoid the one in the giant's other fist. He tried to twist away again but he was late and the ice sliced into the side of his neck. It stung but he took little note of it. He brought Mjolnir around and slammed it into the Frost Giant's arm; bones snapped and the red-eyed giant gave a grunt of pain. The giant still had another good arm, though, and this one again grew a dagger, aiming again for Thor's unprotected throat. Thor pivoted on his right foot as he ducked, the ice dagger whizzing through the air right above his head, and he swung upward, intending to knock the giant's other arm out of its socket. This one was fast, though, a good fighter, and he twisted and spun himself, removing himself from Mjolnir's arc and landing a glancing blow against Thor's shoulder.

The move gave Thor a glimpse of what was happening behind the giant he fought – Brokk stood there, glancing at the fighting, and opening a silver-framed portal. He meant to escape, and take at least one of the Frost Giants with him, one who hadn't yet attempted to fight either him or Volstagg. The sight made him even angrier. "Cowards!" he shouted before aiming another swing at a knee, which the giant blocked with a shield of ice formed over his lowered hand. The shield shattered; the hand did not.

The battle was frustrating, for the giant was too close for Thor to throw Mjolnir, leaving him only to swing it. The Frost Giant, though, was down one arm, while Thor was down only a few drops of blood. His foe could not parry all the strikes he made relentlessly, and soon even this wily opponent fell under the force of a blow that crushed his bare chest.

Thor's attention went immediately to Volstagg, who'd just felled his second giant, then to Brokk and the final Frost Giant. It was too late to stop Brokk; he'd already gone through the portal. Thor's eyes fixed on the giant, whose head turned to meet his gaze for a moment. Then the giant turned back to the portal and broke into a run to follow the Dark Elf.

There was enough room now. Thor lifted Mjolnir high over his head and threw it with all his might at the retreating Frost Giant, catching only the tail end of Volstagg's shout as the faithful hammer hit its mark, the back of the giant's head. The crack was audible from where Thor stood. The Frost Giant collapsed, his momentum carrying him forward another step. Only a few feet further away, the portal flickered and closed in on itself.

Thor called Mjolnir back to his waiting palm as he looked around the cavern, once again silent and still. He gave a satisfied smile. Seven Frost Giant bodies marred the stone floor, seven who would never attack Asgard again. "Well done, Volstagg," he said, coming over and clapping his older friend on the shoulder; two had fallen by Volstagg's hand.

Volstagg gave a short huff. "I'm only grateful it didn't end in disaster."

"Disaster? Did you truly doubt we'd be able to handle seven Frost Giants?"

"Thor, you threw Mjolnir straight toward that portal. You could have sent it flying to Svartalfheim or Jotunheim or wherever it went. And when it closed…well," he said, interrupting himself with a short laugh. "It hardly matters now. Just for goodness's sake don't do it again."

Thor looked back out over the area where the portal had been, where one Frost Giant lay dead. Much as he might hate to admit it, Volstagg was right. And in earlier battles in this war, he'd taken care not to throw Mjolnir when an open portal was nearby. It was different here, he realized. He'd been caught off guard, expecting rockslides, not Frost Giants and Brokk and portals.

His gaze refocused on the ground, where the first three giants had been crouched around a frozen pool. Everything he hadn't had time to think about before came rushing back. "Look at this. This is why the rivers stopped running. They've frozen the Eilif Springs."

He and Volstagg approached, stepping over bodies to reach the edge of the ice. Not even a trickle spilled over into the rivulets that would join other rivulets and form streams which would join other streams and gush out of the mountain to form three of Asgard's most important rivers. Thor wondered how deep the ice went.

They made their way further in, both to ensure there were no lingering giants or elves or anyone else, and to inspect the springs. The outside light from the new hole in the mountain no longer reached them, but a few shafts of light from the setting sun made it through the gap, keeping them from total darkness, enough for them to see what they needed to. Thor quickly recognized that this cavern was not artificial, only the hole and the large tunnel that had led to the cavern had been created by the Frost Giants and Brokk.

"Come on, Thor, let's keep going," Volstagg said as Thor scanned the cavern wall, looking for something.

"Come on, Thor! Hurry up!" Loki called, his head craning back and forth from Thor to the cavern's interior.

"I can't! I'm stuck! I think I ate too much for breakfast." Thor pushed against the rocks digging into him from above and below, to no avail.

"So suck in your stomach. If I made it through, you can. Come on! It's beautiful in here. You have to see it."

Thor smiled at the warm memory. He'd cut himself, rather badly in a few places, for a youth at least, trying to force his way through a long but thin horizontal gap in the rocks to reach this segment of the springs, and Loki had felt terrible for pushing him so hard. Terrible enough that once they'd had their fill of exploring he'd searched for hours to find an easier path out, not so terrible that he hadn't teased Thor for weeks about his appetite.

And there it was. "Volstagg, look. Do you see that gap up there? Where the light filters through? When Loki and I were boys…"

"What?" Volstagg prompted.

Thor's attention snapped back to his friend, and away from an image in his mind of Loki, not twelve or thirteen or however old he'd been then, but a grown man, a man full of bitterness and anger. "Nothing. Just…we used to play here, sometimes. We should go back. These caves go on and on, and the sun's going to set soon. I don't think we'll find anyone else hiding up here, but we can send Einherjar back to make sure. We both know what we're going to find at every spring."

"A useless block of ice," Volstagg said with a nod.

"We need to report it back to Father. He may know some way of speeding it to melt and restoring the rivers."

Back at the first spring they'd come to, Thor's gaze was again drawn to the seven enormous still bodies on the ground.

"At least none of these creatures managed to grab on to me today. My arm ached for a full week after one of them nearly froze it right off on Jotunheim. Look at me now. Not a scratch to mar my svelte figure."

Thor gave a light laugh, but he was only half listening; he hadn't seen what happened, and only learned exactly how Volstagg had been injured as stories were told at the feast celebrating his return from exile. He couldn't stop staring at the bloodied head of the Frost Giant who'd tried to run.

The one who'd never lifted a fist, or blade, or ice weapon against him, or against Volstagg, as far as he'd seen. The one whose eyes had widened in that moment when they'd met his own, right before he turned to run. Right before Thor threw Mjolnir.

He remembered how, in the first series of attacks, he'd fought a warrior from Vanaheim as the battles came to an end. He'd defeated that man, but spared his life. Even after the Vanir had taken advantage of a moment of distraction and slashed open his leg with a knife, Thor had merely struck him hard enough to knock him unconscious. It was true he'd realized after first subduing him that the Vanir looked familiar, but he'd never known his name and never asked; he hadn't spared him out of any sense of familiarity. He'd simply known the Vanir was no longer a threat. He'd known the battle was over.

Hadn't this battle been over, too? Hadn't he known it was over? Taking the Frost Giant prisoner had never occurred to him, nor had allowing him to leave alive. The Vanir man he'd seen as a person, someone like himself. But this…"creature," Volstagg had called him…Volstagg doesn't know…

This "creature" had a family. A mother and father, perhaps a brother, sisters. Perhaps a wife, perhaps children. This "creature" had a name. And I struck him in the back. Thor looked down at Mjolnir in his right hand. How was I able to lift it after such a dishonorable act?

"Thor…we should go."

Thor turned his gaze away from Mjolnir and onto his friend, who looked back at him with a smile that seemed awkward. Volstagg's hand was on his shoulder. He wanted to tell him. He knew he could tell Volstagg – or any of his four closest friends – anything, that he could trust him to keep it in confidence. And Volstagg, he knew, would find something positive to say; he always did. But it was not up to Thor to entrust anyone else with this secret that belonged to Loki. He looked back to the Jotun.

Loki…. Loki looks like that. Loki was born like that.

He nodded and gave Volstagg's arm a squeeze. "You're right. Let's go."

/


/

"May I speak with you a moment, Jane? I think there's a problem with one of your devices."

Jane looked up, startled. She'd been immersed in conversation with Rodrigo, Zeke, and Tristan, and hadn't even seen Loki approaching. It wasn't a difficult decision; she knew Loki hadn't bothered with any of her equipment at all except Pathfinder once she'd found out who he really was and he didn't have to pretend anymore with her. She'd finished her sausage and most of the scrambled eggs already anyway, so she excused herself and followed Loki out of the galley, clearing and dropping off her tray along the way.

"What's up?" she asked somewhat nervously when they were out in the corridor and Loki kept walking. She couldn't recall him ever pulling her away from a group like this before; he usually wasn't that eager to speak with her.

"We need to talk," he said, scanning the doors to the left and right as they made their way down the corridor.

"Okay, talking's good," Jane said. He'd said that before, she was pretty sure, and it usually wasn't followed by anything particularly good. As she thought about it, she realized Thor has used similar words in her Tromso hotel room, words followed by informing her that Loki was here on Earth. Jane started to dread whatever was going to come next.

"In here," he said after they'd crossed the divide into the B wing and reached the Game Room on the left.

Not everyone worked the same schedule, but on this Monday morning no one was playing pool or ping pong, and Jane figured it wasn't terribly likely that anyone would show up and disturb them here. Which was, she figured, a good thing…probably. You're being ridiculous. Look at him. He's not upset. He's not angry. He's not going to lose control and hurt you. He doesn't even want to. He just wants to…to talk. Jane looked up at him and flashed him her friendliest smile…which felt quite false. She was still nervous, after his unexpected immediate return yesterday and his outburst about traps and kings and traitorous friends and war trophies.

"I need to know your intentions."

"My…"

"Your intentions," Loki asked impatiently. "Toward me. Toward my presence here." He'd made a terrible mistake yesterday in telling Jane so much. She'd kept his secret because he'd promised to leave. Now he'd confessed that he couldn't leave, not without immediately making himself a prisoner again, and even worse, he'd told her – if she applied the basic deductive knowledge he knew she would – that he was wanted as a war trophy.

"Loki, I don't…I don't have any intentions. Do you mean you want to know if I'm going to call SHIELD? I told you that as long as you don't hurt anybody, I won't tell anyone. That hasn't changed. And I still expect you to tell me the truth, and not threaten me, either with words or with those looks. It's the same thing I told Thor, more or less, in Tromso. He said you were on Midgard, and he said your father didn't want SHIELD or the Avengers to know. He didn't want them locking you up. And I told him that if you weren't causing trouble, I wouldn't say anything."

Loki gave a short laugh. Am I meant to take this as evidence of your concern for my well-being, dear Father? I am not so naïve. How could I learn your precious "lessons" from interacting with the magnificence that is humanity if I were incarcerated and tortured? "Swear it," he finally said to Jane.

"My parents taught me that my word should mean something without my having to swear. But if it makes you feel better, fine, I swear it."

"I feel much better now," Loki said, his expression heavy with sarcasm.

"So…what will you do when the season ends? Where will you go?"

"I haven't yet thought much beyond today. Getting that oath from you was my top priority. My only priority." It was the truth, and it sounded depressing to his own ears. "For today," he added, unable to leave it on that pathetic note.

"Okay, well, I guess you can say you accomplished something then. And you've got a while until the station opens again. It's April 26. The earliest you'll be able to leave should be late October. You can't just sit around brooding for six months."

"I don't brood," Loki said with distaste. How cliché.

"Well, sorry, I have no idea what you're doing when you lock yourself up in your room all day, because you don't tell me. You just say you're 'thinking.'" And I prefer to think of it as brooding rather than, I don't know, coming up with a new plan for how to take control of my planet," Jane said, hands on hips.

"You really do have an inflated sense of your own self-importance."

"You seemed to think we were important enough when you wanted to conquer us the first time," Jane said, careful to keep her voice calm.

"Because you had the Tesseract."

"But you took it. Within a few minutes of arriving on Earth you had the Tesseract. You could have taken it and left."

"My heart is warmed by your faith in my abilities, Jane, but I wasn't able to reopen the portal that brought me here on my own. I needed…I needed assistance," he said, deciding at the last second to avoid the name that he knew would upset Jane.

Jane nodded stiffly and steadfastly refused to think about that. "So once you had your own portal opened from this end, why didn't you just take it then? Why did you really want to rule Earth?"

"I was told to take it. As a prize."

"By the Chitauri? The Chitauri's ruler?"

"Yes."

"If he wanted you to take Earth as your prize, then he must have known it was something you wanted. So why did you want it?"

Loki sighed and sat down on a simple dark gray chair that was really too low for him to be comfortable. He clasped his hands and rested them on the flimsy white plastic table. "Why do you never cease asking me such things, Jane?"

"I…I guess I just want to understand. From the ground…from Norway…it never made much sense."

He looked up into her brown eyes, then away again. "I don't have any answers for you." He did, though. They just sounded petty to his own internal ears now, said in her presence.

You didn't care about Earth for its own sake, then, for yourself…so you cared about it for…for someone else… "You did it to spite Thor," she said as her eyebrows went up. "You were only interested in Earth because he cared about it." Another realization followed quick on that one's heels, one she couldn't believe she hadn't really thought through before. "The same way you were only interested in me because Thor… You said you followed me because you thought I could help you with the technology needed to get back to Asgard. But that wasn't it at all, was it? You…what…you said I wouldn't like your original plan." And then somehow Jane regained the presence of mind to stop speaking, because just as he'd said, she didn't think she would like his original plan, if his pattern was to hurt the things Thor cared about. Thor's weak link. A hostage on a cop show. She'd realized before that this must have been a back-up plan of sorts when he was on Earth the first time. It had been Plan A when he returned.

Loki kept his head turned away, toward the bare patch of wall where he'd thrown darts on the evening of the sunset. His eyes, though, slid toward Jane for a moment. He'd told her far, far too much already, and now she was pouring her acid deeper than ever before. But he could hardly bring himself to care anymore. "You speak of the past. The past should be left where it lies."

Jane pulled up another chair, identical to Loki's, and sat down. "But the past still affects the present. Why do you hate him so much? Did he do something to you?"

Did he do something to me. Loki couldn't stop himself from laughing. Thor did nothing. Thor did everything. Thor was Thor. And I was me. What more is there to say? He was hardly going to recite a lifetime of things that had made him hate Thor, and he was hardly going to explain the discovery that had made him see those things for what they really were. "He forgot my birthday last year," he finally said, a smile still playing on his lips.

Jane sighed. She'd thought this time, maybe, he would tell her the truth, after he'd spoken so openly about the Chitauri's ruler and his attempted takeover of Earth. She wasn't ready to give up though. He was so subdued, quiet, less combative than she could ever recall seeing him. "I know he isn't perfect, you know. When he first came here…he was really rude. He…he barely looked at me when I talked to him, kind of like he couldn't be bothered. He didn't show any appreciation for what my friends and I did for him, and he had this air of…superiority, I guess you could say." Kind of like someone else I know around here…

Loki listened, riveted to her words in a way he'd never been before, not even when she'd told him that most entertaining version of Thor's would-be wedding. He kept staring, thinking, for what seemed like a long time after she'd fallen silent. Part of him wanted to exult in the fact, that yes, she'd had a tiny taste of the Thor he knew, the arrogant, overconfident boor, too greatly enamored of himself and his position. Part of him wanted to make clear to her that her day or two with a rude Thor who showed her insufficient appreciation hardly compared to growing up with him and living side by side with him your entire life, knowing you would always be second-best no matter what you did, no matter how hard you worked, knowing you could never escape his massive shadow. Part of him actually, almost sickeningly, wanted to defend Thor. He could only attribute it to a reflex not yet dead in him, a code between the brothers they'd thought they were, that said that whatever they did or said to each other was one thing, and if another did or said the exact same thing it was a different matter entirely. Not that Thor had always lived up to his end of the code. Remembering that made the reflex to defend fizzle out.

"Did he…did he act that way toward you?" Jane asked after at least a minute or two of silence. She knew it was a bad idea to put herself in between two men who'd been brothers longer than anyone else she'd ever known had been alive, but Loki had been really listening, and she was pretty sure that when he zoned out he was thinking about what she'd said. It was the most he'd ever let her say about Thor that wasn't in story format, and if she was ever going to press him on anything, now was the time to do it, in his current peaceful mood.

A slow smile spread over Loki's face. "What way? Superior? Rude? Lack of appreciation? Is that what you meant? Did I miss anything?"

"No, um, that about covers it."

"Well, what did you expect? He was a god among mortals. Or at least he thought he still was. I'm sure it was a difficult lesson for him, to lower himself to your level and appreciate the scraps you threw his way."

So much for that peaceful mood, Jane thought, although he remained calm; only his words had grown combative and…superior and rude. "But he did learn, Loki. He learned quickly. You said he was here for three days, and you've been here nearly three months. He was willing to learn, and you…I don't know what you're doing here, mostly because you never tell me, but you're still acting superior and rude and you lack appreciation for just about everything here."

Loki leaned forward and whispered, as though he were letting her in on a secret. "That's because I still am a god. I've no need to learn such things."

"That's not what Thor said," Jane responded, her heart beating a little more rapidly as she otherwise ignored how close Loki had leaned in toward her, and how an edge of menace had come through in his voice even as his face showed nothing but the hint of a smile. "He said you were here to learn, like he did. And from what you said yesterday about you being at your father's mercy until you learn your lesson, you know it too. Which means that unlike Thor, you simply aren't willing to learn."

"Oh, but why stop there, Jane?" Loki asked, standing to tower over her as familiar – comforting – anger rose in him. "I've been compared to Thor all my life, you see. This is nothing new to me. What did Thor really learn here? He learned weakness. He learned to be weak. Thor, who's always been the strongest and the best at everything that mattered. Not everything, you understand, just everything that mattered. So yes, of course he is superior and rude and lacks appreciation. What is there to appreciate when you are the best that Asgard has to offer, and Asgard is the best of the Nine Realms?"

Loki looked away, his gaze sweeping absently over this room with its childish games and ugly gray floor and white cabinets and exposed ductwork in the ceiling and he couldn't escape from it and he hated it and he hated Thor. His eyes unfocused and he could see Thor standing right in front of him just as he had the day before, staring into nothing, unable to see him, because that's what he was to Thor, nothing. Thor had never really seen him. "Oh, yes, I could never compare to his greatness. My skills were in other areas. And that wouldn't have mattered so much if I'd been born anyone else's brother, if I'd…and I wasn't," he said, correcting himself with a short laugh. "I wasn't even born his brother; he was fate's great gift to me. And fate laid me down in his crib and stood back and waited and laughed. I can't escape it. His shadow. Even here it looms over me. So you compare me to him," he said, whirling around to face Jane as he remembered her existence in the midst of his sudden torrent of emotion. "My mother…Frigga…she used to tell me not to compare myself. She was a fool." He felt hatred creeping up toward her as well – she'd made him believe he could be so much more than he ever could have actually been in Asgard – but he recoiled from it so sharply, so painfully, that he had to put his back to Jane to force the reaction from his face, and from his mind. To regain the composure that had slipped away from him all too easily.

"Your mother sounds like a good woman," Jane said, standing and gingerly approaching Loki, now that his rant seemed to be over. She had the sense that he'd entirely forgotten she was there for a while, and had probably not meant to tell her such personal things, more than he'd ever said before about himself. She remembered a brief conversation in Loki's doorway a couple of weeks ago, when he'd said Thor's strength came naturally but he had to work for his. What he'd said today was a veritable floodgate. He grew up feeling second- That thought was immediately dropped when the rest of Loki's words caught up to her.

"Loki…what did you mean when you said you weren't born Thor's brother?"

He'd been about to turn around and excuse himself from this intolerable situation with some biting remark he hadn't yet come up with when Jane's words froze him in place. Did I say that? He had to go back and try to recreate everything he'd said, everything he should never have said, to realize with another small laugh and a certain amount of strangely giddy disbelief that yes, he had said that. It didn't have to mean anything, though. Perhaps it would even get her to stop bringing Thor up so often.

Having collected himself he now turned to face her again. "I meant exactly what I said, Jane, as I always do. I was born to someone else, and taken in by the king and queen of Asgard as an infant. Some might think it a privilege. I can assure you it is not."

"You were adopted? Thor never mentioned that."

"I'm sure he prefers to deny it. To not think that I taint his family with my lack of Odin's blood. And Thor always did love playing games of pretend."

"'Taint his family'…? Loki…is there something strange or unusual about adoption in Asgard? Because here it's perfectly normal. One of my friends from college-"

"Please, spare me your stories, Jane. I don't care about your friend from college. This is so very pedestrian, and lacking in relevance to absolutely anything."

"I don't think-"

"I don't care what you think, either. All I care about is that you not reveal my presence here, which you've already sworn to, and if it took Thor to make you do it, then that is perfectly acceptable to me. Beyond that, I really don't care to discuss him again, if you can possibly manage to contain yourself."

Jane wanted to scream in frustration. "Loki, you say I don't let things go, but it feels to me like all I do is let things go. You open up little bits of yourself, or what's going on out there beyond Earth, and then you shut it down and I let you. I wish…there's so much I want to ask you about, so much I wish you would tell me. It's…it's just my nature to want to understand things, and maybe…maybe to help somehow. To contribute something. And you never let me."

"You contributed to returning me to Asgard, to even traveling there yourself, even if you nearly got yourself killed doing it. I'd say that's something."

"Yeah, that's something," Jane said, nodding reluctantly, for she wasn't sure at this point whether her pioneering invention had done more harm than good. "Look, it's six months, Loki. We're going to have to talk about something. Please don't tell me you're going to do nothing but hide in your room, come down for an occasional breakfast, and sneak off to the Weight Room in the middle of the night."

"I don't mind talking about things with you, Jane, sometimes. Arguing with you is occasionally a diverting pastime, and I enjoyed listening to your story from Midgard's mythology. Perhaps you can tell me more such stories. But you won't need six months of them. This…invigorating little chat has miraculously renewed my commitment to finding a way off your world. I thank you for that. I really don't think I could endure six more months of living here. And I really despise the cold."

Jane's head was still ringing from everything he'd said before, but she tried to ignore it and do what she'd learned to do with Loki to keep the conversation going: go with the flow. She cracked a smile. "Did you look this place up on a map before you decided to follow me here?"

He felt the corner of his mouth pulling up into a smile, and saw no need to stop it. He was relieved Jane hadn't continued to press. "The map wasn't accompanied by a temperature gauge. If it had been I might have come up with a different plan."

Jane laughed a little in spite of the rather disturbing thing he was joking about, now that she was certain his initial plan was considerably more sinister than using what had come to be known as Pathfinder to get back to Asgard. "You really didn't know what you were getting yourself into, did you?"

I really truly didn't, Jane. As the anger simmered and finally cooled, that strange lethargy was coming over him again, and his gaze lingered directly on Jane long enough that she broke eye contact and looked away. "I didn't mind it so much in the past, not as much as now. The cold, I mean."

"Maybe you're just getting old. I remember my grandmother used to always complain about the cold. And you're way older than my grandmother was."

Loki narrowed his eyes, but his anger was only in jest this time, and he smiled to make it clear to her, in case she tried to accuse him of giving her "looks." "Maybe," he said with a shrug of his shoulders. "Maybe it's just one of the coldest places I've ever been."

"'One of?' All Canada jokes aside, Mr. Lucas Cane, this is the coldest place on Earth. Not even the North Pole is this cold. And it's only going to get colder. You said Jotunheim is like summer here, so if I were placing bets, I'd bet this is the coldest place you've ever been."

"It would be a wise bet," he allowed. "It wasn't quite right, though, what I said before. I only meant the temperature, and even then it was just a guess. On Jotunheim there are no television screens hanging everywhere to tell you the exact temperature. Just ice and ruins. But summer here means constant daylight. There it's like the winter here all the time, neverending darkness."

That set off questions in Jane's mind immediately. "Is there a moon or something that has just the right orbit to constantly block the sun?" She held back on her other main line of questioning, how anything grew or lived on a planet of ice that never saw sunlight; she'd asked a version of the question before and he'd been annoyed and suggested cannibalism.

"I don't know," Loki answered, not interested in the slightest. Then it occurred to him, it wasn't as if he'd ever stayed there for weeks or months on end. If he visited the South Pole several times over the course of the long winter, would he not also assume that sunlight never reached it? "Perhaps it does get sunlight sometimes. But I never saw it when I was there."

"Loki…don't get mad, but…I don't understand why you wouldn't know things like that. I mean, maybe it's just me with my desire to understand what's out there beyond my own planet, and maybe it's my curiosity about other cultures that I got from my mother, but…there's Asgard, and then there's eight other worlds. It's not that many. Didn't you…I mean, surely you went to school? Didn't you study things like that? Jotunheim, and all the rest? We studied our planets in school, and they don't even have other people on them."

"Where to even begin, Jane. School. We don't call it as such, but yes, I went to school. Private lessons with…with him, from the time I was four until the time I was twenty. And of course we studied the other realms. We studied them as needed. We even visited them on field trips. But I told you what the Jotuns are to the Aesir, did I not?"

"Ummm, yeah," Jane said, needing a moment to catch up, still stuck on trying to picture Loki as a child in a classroom, then Loki as a child on a field trip, with Thor…going to Earth? "You said…ugly, liars, scantily-clad. Oh! And they can make things, swords, out of ice, and they freeze things when they touch them."

Loki was torn between going into a rage and laughing. He sat back down, wondering why even as he did so because sitting indicated staying – he told himself it was to take the pressure off his right foot. But really it was because…why not? He had nothing better to do. Laughing won out, though he held back on releasing it. "I'm quite certain I never used the term 'scantily-clad.' You make them sound like tavern wenches."

"Tavern wenches?" Jane repeated back over incredulous, delighted laughter, settling back down in the chair opposite Loki. She could hardly believe this was Loki talking.

He found himself further lulled by the obvious pleasure she was taking in this. He hadn't seen her look so truly happy since – he thought back – since before she'd found out the truth of who he was. One layer of the truth of who he was. She had no idea about the layer beneath this one, and if he had anything to say about it she never would.

"Tavern wenches," he confirmed with a smile and a nod. "And they are most assuredly not tavern wenches, who are much better-looking than Frost Giants. When we studied them in our lessons, we studied the Ice War. I mentioned it briefly earlier. The day we watched the aurora. It was…by your calendar, around the middle of the tenth century. The Frost Giants had long been attacking other realms; they were a thorn in Vanaheim's side in particular. Then they launched a ruthless attack against Midgard. They-"

"What? You've got to be-"

"Hush, now. You ask me these questions, and then you don't allow me to answer? Who is rude and lacks appreciation now?" Jane made a face at him to which he smirked back, then continued. "They attacked in several locations, most of them sparsely populated, and mostly in your modern-day Norway, to a lesser extent in Sweden. They were attempting to bring about a new Ice Age on your world. And they would have succeeded, were it not for Asgard's intervention. Asgard, you see, had long treated Midgard as under its protection from the other realms, because you were unable to defend yourselves. So when Jotunheim attacked and refused to relent, the Aesir met the Frost Giants on a great field of battle outside a town called Tonsberg. It was a brutal war, and your people suffered greatly in it, until at last the Frost Giants were forced to withdraw to their own realm, but still they carried out periodic attacks and would not surrender, so the war merely resumed there. And they…they were defeated, and the ancient relic that powered their warmongering, the Ice Casket, was taken from them.

"This is what we studied, then, in our lessons. The Ice War, the other attacks of the Frost Giants upon other realms. Then, in our training, when we learned how to be warriors, we learned where precisely to place a blade to most efficiently kill one. It's important, you see, because they're so much taller than us. The normal techniques don't apply.

"We studied the other realms, too, and Asgard itself, of course. About Midgard we studied some of your kingdoms and clans, and of course the Ice War. You were then, as you are now, far too fractious to study the entire realm in any depth."

Jane chose to ignore that last bit, the part that seemed to allude to him still thinking Earth would be better off – less "fractious" – if he were ruling it, and found it quite easy, actually, because there was so much else to think about, so many questions she wanted to ask, that she wished she could somehow ask them all at once and have them answered all at once. She asked more about the war, and found out Odin had led the Asgardians and lost an eye. She asked why these attacks from another realm weren't recorded in Scandinavian history, and Loki said he didn't know, but noted that there were probably very few human survivors of the Frost Giant attacks. She asked whether he had been on field trips to Earth as a student, and she could barely contain her excitement when he said yes.

"Where did you go?"

"Northern Europe, mostly Scandinavia. Iceland. I don't really know why, but Father was-" Loki caught himself and went a little wide-eyed for a moment; it was not often he made this slip-up now. But he was speaking about the past, and that was what he'd believed Odin was to him then, so he let it slide. He knew the truth now. "He felt more comfortable having us go there for some reason. I wanted to see China and Cordoba, Thor wanted to see the Byzantine Empire. As the years passed we paid Midgard little heed, and we were unaware of how much it had changed."

Mind still reeling from trying to grasp the idea that young Thor had wanted to see the Byzantine Empire, which she had studied in an ancient history class, Jane managed to ask him what Scandinavia was like back then.

"It was a long time ago," Loki said. He wasn't unwilling to tell it, not today, but the earliest memories would make the best stories, while the later ones were clearer in his memory. The later ones when he'd accompanied Baldur, which he would not discuss, and when he'd gone there to tease the mortals, which he knew Jane would not react well to.

"So just tell me what you remember," Jane prompted, but as she was speaking the door opened.

"Hey, Jane, Lucas," Tristan said, walking past them, the pool table, and the ping pong table to the refrigerator.

"Hey, Tristan," Jane said.

"Good morning," Loki forced himself to say politely.

"Jane, stop by any time if you want to see my aurora shots," Tristan said as he took a bottle of something from the refrigerator.

"Yeah, definitely, I'll do that, thanks." He'd been telling their table about his photography at breakfast.

"Oh, and Wright was looking for you guys a few minutes ago."

Jane's eyes went wide, then her face fell into a pained grimace. "Shoot. Okay, thanks," she said; Tristan gave a wave and left.

Loki, meanwhile, reflected back on this strangest of conversations, strange simply because it was happening. How many times had he steadfastly refused to tell her any such things? How many times had he blatantly told her that he was not here to satisfy her insatiable curiosity? How quickly had he slid into thinking of himself as part of the "us" of the Aesir against the "them" of the Jotuns, when really they should all be "them"… But again he found himself not caring. Everyone needed a day off, he figured. A day to forget who he was, and who he wasn't. He deserved his day off.

And then his day off came to an end with the door closing again and Jane speaking.

"I completely forgot. It's house mouse day."


/

The incident Thor recalls in which he fought and spared a warrior from Vanaheim is from Ch. 37 "Squeeze."

Thanks to all readers & reviewers!

Teasers for Ch. 64, "Intent": Thor reports back what he & Volstagg discovered at the Eilif Springs; Thor is troubled and has a chat with Odin; Jane recalls a Disney classic in a kind of odd moment; Jane & Loki discuss Norwegian architecture and birthdays; Thor comes up with a way to deal with some of the stuff he's thinking about with regard to Loki; Lord Alfred Tennyson is probably rolling in his grave as Loki has Dark Thoughts.

And excerpt (it was really tough to choose this time! most individual segments made little sense outside the larger context or were too spoilery):

"Something troubles you," Odin said after the small group had all parted and he and Thor were making their way to the private wing of the palace.

Thor looked up at his father in surprise. "How did you know?"

"You're my son. And you have been for a very long time. What happened at the springs?"