Beneath
Chapter Eighty-Four – Revisiting
The rocky ledge was no longer safe. The four men dead on the ground could have been simply scouting for their own vantage point over the battle, or someone could have directed to them to this spot in particular; either way, the man on the far right had begun sending a communication to someone.
Loki quickly considered his options. He couldn't go back to where he'd started from. He was covered in blood. He had a nasty cut on the right side of his face and one on his left arm he'd never even noticed getting and he also wore the blood of the Vanir, particularly the fourth one. He could leave from here, counting on the rocks to mask much of the flash of his departure, but Pathfinder's next recall signal could be up to five minutes away, and five minutes was too long to linger in this vicinity. Invisibility, he decided, was his best option, even though it would cost him.
He whirled to the right, where he picked up the faint sound of boots crunching over rocky earth. Someone was approaching. Loki took a quick accounting of his surroundings. His sword was on the ground near his feet; he wiped his bloodied hands on his pants then grabbed the sword and sheathed it on his back. He found the two knives he'd thrown; for expediency's sake he slipped them into a narrow pocket on his thigh. His helmet was behind him; he retrieved it and put it on, softly groaning as it slid in place past the cut. As he did so he remembered that he'd used magic earlier without thinking about it, when he'd conjured illusions of the Warriors Three. He hadn't been punished for it. Because I was protecting myself, he thought. This is also to protect myself, he said, hoping the curse would agree. He saw no better alternative; it was this or draw his sword again.
Just as he was about to work this familiar magic, he caught sight of the healing stone still in the one Vanir's hand. Jane had once asked him why he didn't have any, and he'd sarcastically retorted something about forgetting to pack some for his little vacation on Midgard. He reached down and pried the stone from the dead man's fingers, then quickly searched for and found the leather pouch it had come from, and took the only other stone it held. Wiping his hands again, he opened up his satchel and carefully placed the stones inside, atop the stolen cloak he'd decided to keep.
The footsteps were loud now; soon he would be in sight of whoever was approaching. Loki put all his concentration behind manipulating the recalcitrant energy that resisted his tugs, then crept silently away without consequence toward the south to loop around and back toward the plain below to the north. He decided to take advantage of the invisibility, and work his way closer to the fighting, to see the condition of the fighters and the rate of casualties – all the things he could not make out clearly from the distance of his previous location. He heard shouts when the others reached where he'd been, but he never bothered to try to see who it was.
Loki descended and approached the plain from the west, and an hour later he was cresting the hill that brought the morass below into view. The shouts were still indistinct, the fighting a blur. He descended further, steering clear of a healers' station where injuries were assessed and either healed with a stone or other basic methods, or the warrior was sent back to the Healing Room for more thorough treatment. Loki counted six healers and dozens of warriors there, perhaps up to a hundred. His eyes swept out over the plain again, and found what he couldn't help looking for – a glimpse of a red cloak. He stood watching for some time, familiar resentment burning in his stomach, a feeling that had been there long before he'd learned why he could never live up to Thor's image, and had boiled over into hatred since. He was a force of nature on a battlefield, the true Odinson was. Literally, Loki thought, as Thor brought down lightning on a group of Vanir who'd tried to surround him. He thought of the Vanir he'd killed earlier, rather swiftly thanks to one of his "little tricks," as Thor called them. My gift to you, Thor. I think you owe me one. Or four. But Thor had nothing he wanted. Nothing Thor would ever actually give, anyway.
Loki drew closer, still well clear of the nearest fighting, but it was easier to make out individual warriors now, even the movements of the swords and other weapons. Thor fought a Dark Elf now, a brawny one who handled a heavy scimitar – usually wielded only on horseback – with impressive skill, blocking blow after blow from Mjolnir then going in for strikes of his own. Thor faltered for a moment, distracted by something, and Loki looked out in the direction Thor had been looking. Some twenty, twenty-two dwarves of Nidavellir, the taller, ganglier Durin Dwarves, were racing toward him. When Loki looked back at Thor, the Dark Elf was already lying on the ground in a heap and Thor was facing the rapidly approaching dwarves and spinning Mjolnir.
Loki watched this next battle play out with curiosity. It was a strange match-up. These dwarves swung short swords around in both hands wildly, seemingly erratically – their thin arms generally lacked the strength to wield a full-length sword with the necessary control, and their disproportionately long arms didn't need the extra length anyway – and rushed at Thor with little finesse. Under some circumstances well-trained Durin Dwarves could make frightening foes, but broad daylight on an open battlefield against one who wouldn't be intimidated in the slightest by the unpredictably swinging blades was hardly the most advantageous set of circumstances for them. Thor brought them down efficiently one after another – absent his beloved quips and taunts, Loki noted. A sign as clear as any other that this war has been costly.
Thor again took his eye off his own fight for a moment; Loki again followed where he looked. This time it was a handful of Asgardians surrounded by four times as many Light Elves, the trampled orange fabric on the ground telling Loki the Asgardians were losing this particular fight.
When he looked back, Mjolnir was flying off Thor's fingertips into a group of dwarves. Thor kicked another dwarf hard in the lower abdomen as a blade glanced off his armor; Loki grew bored. There was no point to this, he was learning nothing new from watching Asgard's hero slaughter fools. He began to turn away, when out of the corner of his eye he caught a strange flickering of light. He narrowed his eyes and sought out the source immediately; there was only one thing that could logically cause a flicker with no discernible source under these circumstances. Magic. Looking for it head-on, he couldn't find it. Strong magic, then, he thought. He was drawn to it as to a magnet, needing to know what it was, what its purpose was. Some form of protective magic, or something more sinister?
He strained his eyes to see beyond the visible light, to the things that only those gifted with the innate use of magic could see, and still there was nothing. Then he saw it again, a distorted flicker, and at the same moment Thor shouted, his arm fell to his side as a puppet whose strings have been cut and Mjolnir sailed right past him, its momentum pushing him around and sending him face-down into the ground.
Loki ran forward a few steps out of some age-old instinct before drawing to a quick halt, trapped in indecision by utter shock. He started forward again when one of the three remaining dwarves lifted a sword above Thor, about to thrust it into his neck, but Thor suddenly flipped himself over onto his back again and the strike missed. Loki forced his attention off of Thor and in search of that manipulation of energy again, the one he now knew to be a second invisible person on the battlefield, this one not simply watching impassively. He located it, just in time to see the fuzzy outline of a sword plunging into Thor's left shoulder. The sword withdrew; the arms that held it jerked downward again. Thor was already back on his feet, though, and was grabbing one of the dwarves with his left arm.
A grin spread across Loki's face. That's it, Thor. You take care of the skinny little visible ones. Leave the other one to me. If Thor was to be brought to his knees and to his end, better that it be by his hands. If it could not be by his hands, better that it be by the hands of a worthy foe. It would never be by the hands of some assassin slinking around invisible, attempting to sever his arm from behind. Thor's death would be the most glorious of them all. It would not be this. The figure Loki alone could see glimpses of, with immense concentration and then only in a vague outline, was approaching Thor again, this time trying to slice into his left arm, but Thor was already turning away, and Loki knew the strike would not land. Loki understood the strategy, though. Killing Thor wouldn't be easy. Fully eliminating his ability to use Mjolnir – or lift a sword or even swing a fist – would make it much, much easier. As would making him bleed to death before a healer could intervene. Loki drew his sword as he continued slowly forward, maintaining careful focus on his target as well as his own concealment, and drove hard into the center of the energy distortion, slicing through flesh and scraping blade against bone. The assassin staggered backward, but Loki's attention was pulled from him by a familiar whizzing sound that made him instinctively duck.
Sure enough, Mjolnir flew past his head and landed in Thor's outstretched left hand. Loki was about to offer himself smug congratulations for the left-handed catch that he knew Thor never would, when he saw that hand thrust up into the air. Loki's eyes went wide in fear. There was no time to run, no time to create a shield or any guarantee it would work given his weakened control of magic. You idiot! he hissed in his mind. The assassin is already down!
He could already smell the peculiar build-up of ozone particular to Mjolnir, so he did the only thing he could think of to avoid risking an even more senseless death than the one he had just prevented – he raced to Thor's side and wrapped a hand around his limp right arm. The nerves were obviously deadened enough that he couldn't call Mjolnir with it; as long as he was careful not to pull, Thor would never notice the hand clinging desperately to his arm, the second grabbing on just below it, where his bracer met his palm.
And so he became, for Mjolnir's purposes, an extension of Thor's own body. It was all utterly humiliating, Loki thought, eyes squeezed tightly closed against the onslaught of energy arcing all around him, raging against Thor for attempting to electrocute a dead or dying assailant and instead nearly electrocuting the wrong invisible person, even as he clung to him out of instinctive self-preservation while Thor stood there in complete ignorance. Though he supposed if the bursts of lightning had killed him, Thor might have considered it less the wrong victim, and more as two for the price of one.
When it was finally over, Loki released Thor's arm as though it burned him, let himself drop to the ground, and scrambled backward, bumping into the body of a dwarf and pushing himself right back up. He was panting for breath and he was certain that absent the helmet his hair would be standing on end. He hated lightning. He checked that all of the concealment magic – including sound – was still in place. "I hate you,"he seethed, relishing the ability to say it aloud while Thor remained just as ignorant as ever. Thor was walking in some strange circular pattern now, and Loki had to get himself out of the way again. He shook his head. "Have you finally unleashed one bolt too many, Odinson?"
Thor continued pacing in a circle and suddenly Loki began to laugh. He lifted his hands to his head to run his fingers through his hair and hit the shape of an Einherjar's helmet instead, and he laughed harder. A Frost Giant, disguised as an Aesir prince, disguised as a Midgardian scientist, disguised as an Asgardian Einherjar, made invisible. Eight days in the past, watching a battle that had already been fought, killing an invisible assassin whom Thor felt the need to kill a second time since Loki having done it first obviously wasn't good enough, then hanging onto Thor's arm like a frightened child. And Thor had no clue about any of it, and had quite possibly lost his mind somewhere in the process.
Or perhaps, Loki thought, still laughing as Thor finally came to a halt, it's I who've lost mine. What am I doing here?
That thought sobered him up. He had no idea anymore. What did he really want from all this? he wondered. What did I gain from coming here? Nothing of any real importance. It was self-indulgence. Idle curiosity. Pointless and unnecessary. He began to walk away; blue-caped healers were racing toward them.
"Loki."
Loki froze mid-stride and performed a quick check again of his concealments. They had not slipped.
"Loki," came the voice again from behind him, Thor's, louder this time.
Loki turned slowly. Thor was bent over on the ground. Loki glanced up at the healers; they were still some distance away. He circled around. He'd long since lost sight of the assassin, but even without looking for the evidence of his magic, Loki knew now from watching what Thor was doing that he had not been addled by the lightning and the blood loss, but had been searching for the assassin. And he'd found him.
"Loki, get up," Thor said, his voice weak and shaking.
And he thought Loki was the assassin.
"I would lift Mjolnir to protect you. I would go to Jotunheim in your place if I have to. I have sworn, Brother. Or perhaps I'll just assume you're trying to kill me and lift Mjolnir to burn a hole straight through your chest." Loki's breaths were shallow and loud. It would be so easy – so easy – to kill him right here, right now. Eight days ago. Thor was weak. Barely able to remain upright. His right side was drenched in blood that still pulsed out from his arm. He wasn't even looking around him in case any visible enemies attacked.
"Prince Thor!" one of the healers shouted.
"What?!" Thor thundered, standing up straight and swaying on his feet.
It would gain him nothing to do it, though, and in any event, the moment was already past. Loki turned his back on him and walked away, back toward the city, to find a place Pathfinder could pull him back from where the flash would not be visible. He briefly pictured himself laughing hysterically back there like a fool, just a minute or two earlier, and thought yes, it was him who'd lost his mind for a short moment – the moment something had possessed him to get involved. If he were to truly turn his back on these people who had turned their back on him, it wouldn't matter whether Thor died the last man standing in an insurmountable attack against Asgard, or cold and alone in a ditch alongside a road from tripping and accidentally impaling himself on a blade.
For now, though, Thor would live, with or without his right arm, and Loki would die. Asgard was in the middle of a fight for its existence; how much time and effort would they expend to determine whether it was really him lying lifeless on the ground, when Thor said that it was? Convenient as it might be to be thought dead, Loki didn't want to be remembered this way, a crumpled invisible body, dying a pointless death, defeated by the great Thor Odinson who hadn't even broken a sweat to do so. He tried to picture his funeral send-off, then realized there wouldn't be one. Celebratory tankards of mead and new poems composed to laud the mighty Thor's slaying of the traitor would replace any funeral or mourning.
He wouldn't give them that. Not today, not ever. He reversed his course. Thor had collapsed to the ground and looked unnaturally pale, surrounded by four healers. Loki spared him only a glance, bypassing the frantic huddled healers and going to the spot where Thor had found his attacker. He crouched down and felt with his hands, not for the body itself, but for the buzz of energy surrounding it. The magic was still strong but definitely weakening, and perhaps would have eventually fallen away on its own anyway. Loki wanted it gone now. He pulled and yanked and prodded, and while no one was resisting his efforts – the dead body before him or someone else, perhaps, who'd worked this magic for him earlier – undoing another's magic wasn't easy, and Loki was far from peak ability.
Several few minutes later he managed it, though, and stood up on legs tired from the exertion. It was a Dark Elf, and Loki thought with a bitter smile that if they'd felt for the ears they would have easily figured out it wasn't him even if they hadn't bothered to try to retract the concealment. Thor was being carried away on a litter; one of the healers at his feet gave a sudden cry and dropped his corner of the litter at Thor's feet upon catching sight of the body that hadn't been there before. Luckily for Thor, the woman next to him shifted and held up both corners.
Loki walked away and this time stayed his course.
/
/
"What about you, Wright? Big plans after the Pole?" Carlo asked.
Jane sat back with her legs stretched out in front of her and her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. She, Carlo, Austin, Wright, Selby, and even Su-Ji for a change were sitting around the Science Lab, all work having somehow come to a halt as Carlo told them about his plans to spend three weeks in Bali with his girlfriend after departing the Pole. Jane had relaxed into the story of all the things they planned to do there, hiking, climbing if it wasn't rainy, swimming, diving, surfing. It sounded like paradise.
"No way. I want to hear more about the jungle hikes. I think I'm actually salivating."
Jane laughed with the others; they were probably all salivating a bit.
"I'll send you the e-brochure for the tour. You can salivate over the pictures."
"Okay, okay. I'm meeting up with two of my old buddies in Sydney and we're going to camp our way across Australia to the west coast. No ice anywhere, not even ice cubes. At least that's the plan. One of them's still trying to figure out if he can take off from work long enough. How about you, Sue?"
"Nothing special. I promised my parents I'd go stay with them for a while. Vermont. Probably a decent amount of snow and ice. But lots of trees."
"Trees with maple syrup!" Jane chimed in.
"Wrong time of year, unfortunately. You have to tap the maples in the spring. Just having the trees will be great, though. What have you got planned, Jane?"
"Me? Oh…well…" It was strange to try to imagine winter coming to an end, the station opening, and leaving here. Her life had changed so much since Thor dropped out of the sky into the middle of it, and despite everything that had happened there was a certain stability here, an equilibrium of sorts. She wondered if Loki had figured out what he planned to do after the winter, and suspected it might have an impact on her own plans.
"Wanna join us in Australia?" Wright said.
"Sorry, I just zoned out," she said quickly, unsure if Wright was serious or joking. "No, this guy I know, he's got a place in Malibu, overlooking the ocean. He said I could use it if I wanted when the season ends."
"'This guy you know,' hmmm? How come I haven't heard about this guy you know before?" Wright asked with a big grin.
"No, no, no, it's not like that," Jane said, hoping to put a quick stop to the endless teasing she saw in Wright's eyes. "It's my sponsor's house, actually."
"Tony Stark?" Wright said, eyebrows going up. "Sweet. Must be a mansion. With butlers and maids and all. Changed my mind. Can I go to Malibu with you?"
"Sure, Wright, I'll ask," Jane said with an expression to let him know she was being just as flip as he was. She hoped the embarrassment she felt wasn't showing on her cheeks. Tony Stark's sponsorship – at SHIELD's behest – through the newly-created Stark Institute for Scientific Innovation wasn't exactly a secret, and she'd mentioned it to Selby and Wright early on, but no one else looked surprised at the mention of Tony' s name, so she assumed they'd told the others at some point.
"We'll all go," Austin said. "Dark Sector reunion, Malibu, California, courtesy of Tony Stark."
"Guys, I barely know him. We've never even met in person. It's not a huge deal. And actually if you wanted to swing by for a visit I'm sure he wouldn't mind."
"I'll have to decline. I'm meeting Renata in Bali," Carlo said.
"Yeah, okay, you're right, that trumps Malibu," Austin said. "Selby, you've been awfully quiet, where are you going when you leave here?"
"My wife and I had talked about taking a honeymoon in Hawaii. Now I'm not so sure."
"What happened?" Su-Ji asked.
If Selby answered, Jane didn't hear it; her radio beeped and she answered it quietly. It was Rodrigo. She glanced around as she said hi to him; no one was saying anything in the lab and there was a general sense of awkwardness.
"You've got a call on the Iridium. Guy named Tony. Same guy as before."
"Okay, I'll be right there. I'm just down the hall."
When she looked back up again she got a few grins and a suspicion that Wright was going to be joking about her and Tony no matter what she said, but it was Selby who made her heart skip a beat. He was watching her with a stony, even angry expression. He turned away when she looked at him. She excused herself and left the lab.
What is that all about? she wondered as she hurried down to Comms. She thought maybe she should try talking to Selby again, but it hadn't gone well the last time, and Loki provided more than enough drama in her life as it was. By the time she reached her destination she'd decided she was best off letting sleeping dogs lie. Selby could come to her if he had something to say.
"Yeah… No, really… No, that's all we've… That's true… Long as you're buying, man. Listen, here's Jane." Rodgrigo muted the sat phone. "Is this guy crazy or what? He says he's going to see about getting us another satellite."
"Borderline," Jane said with a smile and a shrug before taking the phone and heading back into one of the unoccupied offices right down the hall. "Hi, Tony. You're buying us a satellite?"
"Yeah, well, I said I'd look into it. I didn't make any promises."
"Rodrigo thinks you're crazy."
"It's amazing what you can accomplish when people don't take you seriously because they think you're crazy. Being a billionaire helps, too. Is everything okay?"
"Everything's fine, Tony. I didn't miss a phone call. Is everything fine on your end?"
"Oh, sure, sure. Better than it was. We're getting there. Hey, how's your local yeti?"
"Yeti? Oh, you mean Loki? He's fine. He's out working in…in one of the outbuildings," Jane said, quickly deciding she'd best not mention the jamesway. Hardly anyone knew what a jamesway was – she'd never heard of them before coming to the South Pole – but with her luck Tony would know, and would also know that there was no reason for either her or Loki to be in a Summer Camp jamesway during winter.
"Yeah? Are you sure?"
"Um…where else would he be?" Jane asked somewhat nervously. What is it now, Tony?
"I don't know, you tell me."
"Tony…I thought we agreed this was going to stop. Everything is fine here. So what's going on?"
"Oh, nothing, you know, little of this, little of that, busy-busy. How about you?"
Jane leaned heavily on the desk in front of her. "You know, Tony, I had the joy of finding out that the assistant SHIELD sent here for me was actually Loki. That was actually a teensy bit stressful, and I'm fine now. So if something's on your mind and you're afraid it's going to freak me out or turn me into a nervous wreck or something, it won't. Trust me. Loki has kind of inured me to that. Just tell me, okay?"
"It's just…well, I don't know if you've noticed, but Thor doesn't always tell you quite everything you might need to know in a given situation. I told him we'd have to work on that, but we haven't had a chance, what with a war going on and all."
"Did you have something particular in mind?"
"Well, just as a little example, did he by any chance happen to mention to you that Loki can change what he looks like? I don't mean wash the oil out of his hair and tie it in a ponytail, I mean he could look like you. Or me. Or Thor. Or- Jane? The next time you see Thor, please, please come up with a test question. Something there's no way Loki could know. Sorry I didn't tell you about this before, I didn't think of it. When I bagged him in Stuttgart I saw him change the clothes he was wearing, or looked like he was wearing, with my own eyes. It was kind of like…a hologram changing, or an optical illusion, maybe. But that's just an appetizer apparently. He can go full course. Did you know that?"
Jane stared down at the desk and tried to get that strange concept to sink in. That uncomfortable concept. That really scary concept. He can look like anybody else? He can pretend to be anybody else? But he hasn't done anything like that…has he? "No," she finally answered. "But I knew he could make things…disappear, I guess is the word. Random objects that …stay with him somehow and he reaches into thin air and they're there. And he can make himself invisible…I think. I'm still not entirely sure what I saw there," Jane said, remember the time he'd suddenly appeared behind the jamesway without Pathfinder's flash, when she'd already heard noises from the area.
"Invisible. Right, got it. That's good to know. Potentially relevant. Filing that one away under 'Things Blondie Conveniently Forgot To Tell Me.' And, random objects like knives and pointy glow sticks?"
"Um, well, more like pens and mirrors and jackets."
"Hm. Not exactly what I'd expect. Kind of like an invisible closet he carries around with him?"
"Maybe. I don't know. He never really explains this stuff to me when I ask." She thought back to the first time she'd seen him do that, when he pulled out a pen to write in her notebook. All she could get out of him was something about changing the pen's structure.
"Can't say I'm surprised. He doesn't seem like the teacher-type. Except he does like to give pretentious speeches and act like he's the smartest person in the room. Anyway, my point is, if Thor never bothered to mention that stuff before – he only told me about magic makeovers when he came back to ask me to look for Loki – what else can our Rudolph do that we don't know about? And what I want to know now is if Loki can go poof."
"Poof?"
"Yeah, poof."
"Uh…Tony…"
"Oh, sorry, I keep forgetting you can't see me. We really need to work on getting you guys more bandwidth down there so you can do video. I'm making a poof with my hands. Okay, never mind. Can Loki, you know, pop out of one place and appear in another?"
"Go poof," Jane said, nodding as she got it.
"Exactly. Can he?"
Jane hesitated. Had Tony somehow figured out about Pathfinder? If she had to confess, it probably wouldn't be too bad, as long as Tony could keep that from SHIELD, too. It wasn't like either she or Loki could use it anymore, now that some kind of trap had been set on the bridge that would get her killed and even Loki couldn't escape from it except by returning to Earth. "I…I don't-"
"I know it sounds strange, but so is this other stuff. We live in a world of strange now. And even if you haven't seen him do anything like that, it doesn't mean he can't, right? You didn't know he could do the shapeshifter thing."
"You're right, I suppose," Jane said, still trying to hedge her response, trying to decide what to say. Whether he was talking about Pathfinder or not, she was leaning toward going ahead and telling him anyway. She didn't like lying and keeping secrets, and she didn't like that she was getting better at it.
"The thing is, I'm pretty sure I've figured out where all the problems with my building started, but it's on a private floor, and there's no record of anyone entering that floor all day before it happened. And I keep good records. Well, Jarvis does. And this attack…it took out the big arc reactor. From inside my building. That's not exactly child's play. It shouldn't even be possible. There's also something missing related to the suit tech. And lo and behold, right here on little ol' planet Earth, unbeknownst to the masses, happens to be one Norse god of tricks who's not my biggest fan – and let's be honest, it's entirely mutual – so you can see why I'm thinking maybe he can go poof."
"Ohhh, okay, poof as in go from here to New York with a blink of an eye? No, Tony, he can't do that. If he could he wouldn't stick around here. He doesn't really like it here. He complains about everything."
"I still think you trust him too much. He could have his reasons for making the South Pole his lair."
"His lair? He's not in a lair, Tony. He sleeps in a little 8-by-10 room that looks a lot like my college dorm room except the bed's really tall, two doors down from mine. He eats in the galley with everybody else. He's-"
"Just humor me, okay, Jane? Do you know where he was on Friday, May 7th, around 4:00 to 4:30 in the afternoon?"
"Friday?" Jane asked, a sliver of worry cracking through her certainty that Loki couldn't go poof. "No…we don't work together on-"
"Sorry, sorry, my bad. It was Friday here. Your time…Jarvis, help me out here…right. Saturday the 8th between 9:00 and 9:30 AM."
"Oh! Right, of course, that was the day…the day you sent me that video."
"Exactly. Another thing that made me think your resident modern-day Viking could be behind this. I'm sure he didn't like you being reminded of who he really is."
Is that who he really is? Jane thought, not for the first time. It was a distraction right now and she brushed it off. "He didn't do it, Tony. He couldn't have, even if he could go poof, which I seriously doubt. We were working together then. He was sitting right next to me all morning. We didn't even see the video until…I guess it was around noon sometime, because we were talking about going back for lunch. That's when I checked my e-mail."
Tony swore, apparently disappointed he didn't have his culprit; Jane was relieved. Whatever exactly was done to the power and computer systems in Tony's building, it wasn't Loki who had done it. If him wintering over at the South Pole was somehow not proof enough, then him sitting less than five feet away from her at the exact time of the attack certainly was.
"Back to the drawing board, I guess," Tony was saying. "Jarvis, pull up that list of enemies again. The corporate ones, too."
"Good luck. And Tony? I really wish you would call and ask about the weather someday."
Tony laughed. "I'll do that, sweetheart. And I do hope you'll take me up on the Malibu offer. You deserve a vacation. I'll come out and meet you, and we can go for shwarma. Have you ever had shwarma? It's kind of a little tradition among those who've had to put up with Loki for a while. We've only done it once, actually, but every tradition has to start somewhere, right?"
"No, I've never had it," Jane said, and half-listened as Tony continued. His own attention was clearly divided; with Loki eliminated as a suspect, he was eager to come up with a new one, and occasionally interrupted himself to say something to his AI assistant. "Those who've had to put up with Loki for a while…" The phrase kept coming back to her. Have I just been "putting up with him"? She'd definitely seen it that way in the beginning, both when he was "Lucas" and once she'd accepted she was going to be stuck with Loki for the winter if she wanted to avoid a real-life Mass Casualty Incident at the South Pole. But it didn't feel right to think of it that way now. It didn't feel accurate, at least. Right and wrong was another question entirely. Loki was the most interesting person on the planet right now. She wanted to know about Asgard, about the Nine Realms, about magic and how it related to science, about everything he'd seen and done in over a thousand years of a life so different from hers, about growing up in a palace and being a prince and a king and a younger brother to the heir, about harnessing the Tesseract's power from some faraway place and winding up on Earth seeking to control it. She wanted to know about him, both the good and the bad. And he was finally opening up to her. It was much more than "putting up with him."
She wanted to know more about Thor, too, and about the relationship that Thor and Loki seemed to view very differently, but talking about Thor didn't usually go terribly well, and she didn't want to listen to Loki maligning him in his absence. It wasn't fair to Thor. She would just have to hope that Asgard found a way to win this war, and quickly, so she could ask Thor himself all her questions about him. He'd already told her he would answer them. There had just never been much time. It occurred to her then that she'd spent only a few days with Thor, plus a couple of short encounters in Tromso and Akaroa, in New Zealand, while she'd spent about three and a half months now with Loki.
"This weekend, then? Jane?" Tony asked.
"Oh, yeah, sorry, I'll call you this weekend."
/
/
Feeling far, far heavier than his actual weight, Loki allowed himself to virtually fall into a chair back in the jamesway. He put up a seal around the door, relieved to find it not too difficult – it would not at all do to have Jane walk in on him like this.
He'd left the Einherjar's armor behind on Asgard, for he had no need of it here, and if for some reason he would need it again on Asgard, he knew where he'd hidden it, and he knew where to get more if it was discovered and taken. He'd had so much blood on him – far more than what he'd managed to wind up with on his first trip back to Asgard – that even his own light armor that he'd kept on underneath the Einherjar's was covered in it. He briefly wondered whether Jane would scream and pass out if she saw him…or simply pass out. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against his palm and thought back to that day, when he'd done what he'd never expected he would: come right back to this forsaken land, having utterly failed in everything he'd set out to do. He remembered teasing Jane, making her think she would have to stitch his wound. "Let's do it on the bed." He laughed at himself now, at how he'd reacted to her words. Jane, he thought with a sigh once the laughter faded, picturing her bustling about the room trying to work up the nerve to stick a needle into his skin. He could see it now, in a way he couldn't when he'd first met her – she was beautiful. Vivacious. Spirited. It was no wonder he'd reacted the way he did to her innocent words. His senses had been heightened, having been ripped away from the middle of a fight for his life, his body pumped full of adrenaline. He was a man, and she was very much a woman. Albeit a very short one, he thought, laughing again. No good could come of letting his mind wander in this direction. And a mortal one, he added. Thor's mortal.
The mere thought of Thor shifted his thoughts away from inappropriate and unsettling thoughts about Jane and back to the bitter anger he'd felt on Asgard. Sitting here wallowing in sentiment – "brooding," as Jane had once called it – wouldn't do any good. Taking action would.
Loki set his jaw and went to work. He stood and went to the table, where he shut down the laptop. The satchel came off and went on the table. Piece by piece – thankfully there weren't so many of them in this set – Loki peeled off the metal and leather that stuck together due to the blood. The tunic he'd tried to repair before had a fresh tear on the left arm; he pulled it off and set it atop the pile of armor. The cut on his arm was not a bad one, smooth and fairly shallow. He reached for his mirror and pulled it to his hand to look at his face. That cut, across his right cheek and into his scalp, was worse. It had bled copiously, and the helmet he'd donned had aggravated the cut and smeared blood all over the side of his head. He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself from the renewed anger that rose in him at the sight. After all he'd seen and done in his life, blood did not particularly bother him, but he didn't enjoy being coated in it. He didn't even have Jane's water bottle here to clean himself up, and he wasn't in the habit of carrying one around himself.
At least he had an easy way to heal these wounds now. He reached for his satchel and from it pulled one of the two healing stones. Leaning to his left and bending his neck far to the side, he grasped the stone hard until it began to crumble, and soon felt the familiar tingle and warmth as stone fragments and dust interacted with and sealed the cut. He retained his position longer than necessary; there was an unexpected comfort in this act, and in the familiar sensations of flesh magically mended. When another tiny piece of the stone slipped through the cracks between his fingers, falling uselessly on already-healed skin, he straightened up and lifted his left arm, crushing the remaining bit of stone over the wound there, hoping it would be enough. The flesh knitted back together again amidst tingling and warmth; it was enough.
The muscles in his chest fluttered with a sudden shiver. The temperature was just below the freezing point in here, and he was beginning to feel it. He picked up the tunic; the blood in it was beginning to dry, but it shouldn't be so set in that he couldn't coax it out with a little effort. It was a simple matter of attracting the particles – molecules, Jane might call them – that didn't belong and drawing them out. A little effort, though, quickly turned into serious effort that made sweat break out on Loki's brow, and still he'd made minimal progress. It wasn't an easy skill, and not one he'd had a lot of practice at. Still, he should be able to do it. He should be. Working on a stubborn spot he could make no headway against, he finally tossed the bundle of fabric aside in a fit of temper. I am not a tailor and I am not a launderer! he thought in angry frustration.
But the truth was, he should have been able to do it, and it was time to truly face up to the problem. He closed his eyes. It was going to be bad, he knew it. He picked up the tunic, pulled it on with a grimace, and settled on the test: a transformation of his own attire into boat shoes which he knew he'd never get to appear, tan dockers, and the green turtleneck sweater. He was used to making far more complicated transformations of his clothing. This one should be easy. When he opened his eyes he was looking at his feet, at boots and gaiters, as expected. His gaze quickly traveled upward, and he drew in a sharp breath. There were no dockers, only black leather with patches of blood. On his right side, dirty gray tunic was still visible about halfway up his torso before giving way to green knit fabric. On his left, when he looked closely, a small area of tan was there in place of black leather on his upper thigh.
If this was, as he'd long suspected, an indication of how much control of magic he'd lost, particles being separated from their bondage to his will, as Odin had put it, then he was in real trouble. Odin had also said he could lose all control of magic. For the first time Loki felt a chill of real fear, that what Odin had said could actually come to pass. He shivered at the thought, and at the cold continuing to seep into his bones.
There has to be a way. There has to be a way, he told himself in frustration fueled now with anxiety. What am I without magic? He might tease Jane, even seriously so, about being better than her, but he had nothing to prove to her, or really to anyone else on this realm. He'd already withstood things from them that would have killed a mortal ten times over – sprayed with bullets, blasted by some sort of hybrid weapon based on the Destroyer, knocked off a flier by an exploding arrow, tossed about a concrete floor until he could barely move. They may have bested him in the end, but they all knew he was stronger than them…except the Hulk perhaps, but he was an aberration. Elsewhere in the Nine Realms…in the training grounds of Asgard, Loki wasn't the best at anything. Not at anything that mattered, anyway, as he'd put it to Jane. He wasn't the most skilled with the preferred Asgardian weapons. He wasn't the best at hand-to-hand fighting. He wasn't the strongest. He wasn't the weakest, either, but he definitely wasn't the strongest. And he was reminded of it every single day when he looked at his supposed brother. With magic he'd found something that set him apart, that made him something more than Thor's weaker little brother. It hadn't won him many friends, in the end, but it was still a point of pride for him. It was something he defined himself with. Losing it was absolutely unacceptable.
A month and a half ago, he'd come back here without getting the curses removed, and he'd done nothing about it since – he hadn't even really thought about it, other than vague notions of going back and winning the battle over New York and ensuring Thor never dragged him back to Asgard in chains in the first place. He'd thrown himself into testing travel along the time axis, and he'd virtually ignored what was his most pressing, immediate problem. Nothing had changed, though. He could program locations in Pathfinder now, but the only individuals he'd thought might be strong enough to break Odin's enchantments were on Svartalfheim and Alfheim. Pathfinder had never sent anything or anyone there, though, and this use of Pathfinder required numbers that he had to obtain from somewhere; Loki had no idea what numbers he would need to program the device with to send him anywhere other than Asgard or Midgard. There should still be one hidden pathway to Svartalfheim that only he knew about and would thus be neither guarded nor blocked, but he couldn't get past the trap on the bridge to try to reach it.
Realization then struck so brightly Loki could have sworn the sun had come out of hiding and shone straight through the heavy tented roof of the jamesway. A smile of pure mischief and utter delight spread across his face. Everything has changed, Loki corrected himself. Asgard has no need to set traps for you when you set them for yourself with your own limited thinking. There is a trap on the bridge now. Passages between realms are blocked now. Svartalfheim and Alfheim seek my capture now. But I am no longer limited to "now."
/
Suggested re-reading: Ch. 74 "Regrets" (the end), Ch. 75 "Curiosity" (the beginning); plenty of other past things are referenced of course but I'll only refer you back to things related to time travel.
BTW, no offense at all meant to teachers by Tony's comment – I have close friends and family in the teaching profession and have teaching experience myself. I just figure Tony was smarter than most of his teachers and he was probably not the most respectful student.
A belated gold star to "clandestine-dot-elegance ", who said back in Sept. 2013 on her review on Ch. 59 "Trickery," "Is there a subplot to [the book] having been pulled out by a servant?" Why yes, yes, indeed there is. ;-) I have tried to keep track of such comments, but for some reason at first I always just think "I'll remember." No, ninepen, no, you will not.
Dear readers, thanks to you all for your support and encouragement in this massive endeavor! I just wanted to let you know that the next chapter may be delayed in coming out; I have to do some travel this weekend to deal with some family issues and may not be able to write during this time - I'll be granting myself the option of not writing if it doesn't seem feasible. So if you don't hear from me for a few days or don't get the next chapter when you might expect to, don't go assuming the story's been abandoned, it's certainly not!
Previews for Ch. 85: Loki both gets and gives a lesson he never expected; Jane both gives and gets a lesson she never expected.
Excerpt:
"I'm not going to ask if it's true, because I already know it's true, but…will you show me?"
No was on the tip of Loki's tongue, his automatic answer to all such questions from her. But then he reconsidered. It would do no harm. It might even be fun. "Go stand in front of the door. I don't want any surprises."
Jane's eyes lit up; she couldn't believe he was actually going to do it. She hurried over to the door, and when she turned to put her back to it, she gasped and jerked back, banging her head into the door.
