Beneath

Chapter Eighty-Eight – Return

Jane closed her door as quickly and as quietly as she could, then practically jumped into bed and yanked the covers up to her chin. She was shivering and her breathing was shaky, almost like tearless sobs. She wasn't getting enough oxygen, the first time she'd felt the altitude in a long time.

She pushed herself back up into a sitting position at the head of the bed and breathing instantly got a little easier. "Note to self," she whispered, her voice eerie in the quiet and dark. "Do not walk in on Loki when he's having a nightmare."

He had spoken to her like an old friend, had spoken of things in a way she suspected he'd never spoken to anyone else, not in a long time, maybe never. She thought she'd seen straight into his soul. And then he'd spoken to her like the Loki who'd come to subjugate Earth. She'd half-expected him to order her to kneel like he did in Stuttgart instead of telling her to go have cookies and milk. She'd really started to trust him. But he was volatile; that hadn't changed. This was no fairy tale. Loki was dangerous.

Abruptly she turned her head to the right, as if she could see through the two thin walls between her and him. He was dangerous…but…he hadn't tried to hurt her. He hadn't made any truly aggressive moves at all. He'd scared her with his sudden shift into angry condescension, but all he'd done was order her to leave, and, so it seemed to her, insinuate that she was going to have nightmares about him.

Words.

Words were his game.

He'd realized just how much of himself he'd let her see – she had no doubt what he'd told her about Baldur, which she hadn't even really begun to process, was the truth, or at least the truth as he saw it – and he'd wanted to scare her off. And it had worked, just like almost every other time he'd tried to manipulate her.

Fear and anxiety quickly morphed into anger. Anger at him for the constant manipulation and attempts to control. Anger at herself for falling for it again and again.

Jane threw the covers back down to her feet.

Not this time.

/


/

Loki sat unmoving in his desk chair just as Jane had left it, facing the bed and the stepstool. The dream was proving recalcitrant, slipping away on tendrils as uncatchable as mist. They came in three distinct phases, usually, and usually related in some way. Muspelheim was first this time, rafting with Thor on those odd elongated Fire Giant constructs. They had done that more than once, and Loki couldn't remember talking very much while navigating the fast-moving currents among the rocks. Sometimes they sang, sometimes songs were interrupted when one of them spotted an obstacle ahead and called it out. From the dream Loki could now only remember Thor standing up in the raft, which would have been difficult to impossible, staring down at him, and speaking to him with hatred and disgust. It wouldn't have happened like that, but would whatever words Thor spoke to him in the dream not be the things he really would have said, had he known the truth then? It disturbed Loki that he already couldn't remember any details of that portion of the dream, for he feared he would look back and not be able to trust the accuracy of his memories of the actual experience. In the grand scheme of things it hardly mattered – all of those memories were soured now anyway – but he detested ceding even that much control to Thanos.

Then the dream had suddenly all become about Baldur. Why? When he'd recovered from the horrors of being trapped in the void of what he now knew to be Yggdrasil, and decided to stop babbling like a baby to anyone who would listen, The Other had taken more active measures, sifting through his memories then seeking out anything positive that remained and trying to twist it into something horrific, to ensure Loki had no lingering loyalty to Asgard, to Odin, to Thor. It was entirely unnecessary. He'd severed all those ties and let go of his former life when he'd let go of Gungnir, assuming he would be falling to his death. It enraged him not against Odin and Thor – he already felt enough anger toward them to last a lifetime – but against Thanos and The Other. He'd done his best to keep the depths of that new rage hidden, though, and instead meticulously worked his way through each manipulated dream-memory pushed into his mind, identifying the intrusions into the true memory, both to keep his sanity and to prevent anyone else from ruling him. By the end it was becoming harder, and Loki decided to change his tactics and cast himself as a subservient ally. Only the "subservient" part had been difficult. He'd wanted Midgard. He'd wanted his throne.

But in all that time with the lackey, Baldur had never been dredged from his memories or sent to him in dreams. It hadn't even occurred to Loki at the time to be surprised that it didn't, keen as the lackey was to inflict pain in any way that could help drive a further wedge between him and the life he'd left behind. But a thousand years had passed since Baldur drew his last breath, and hardly any vestiges of his existence were left. Loki would not wear yellow, the unexpected scent of lavender could still turn his stomach, and mistletoe no longer grew anywhere in Asgard. But there were other wounds and insults and injustices that were much more recent, and that had permanently changed the course of his life – that had delivered him to Thanos in the first place.

The dreams were almost always about Odin or Thor, or both, and sometimes about Thor's friends, or some other Asgardian Loki had known. Sometimes The Other had slipped Frigga in, but even in his dream state Loki had rejected it so strongly that she always faded from the dream. There had been one dream he'd had here at the station, Loki remembered then, connected to Baldur – when Thor had nearly beat him to death when he thought Loki had tried to kill him. But even that dream had been focused on Thor, on feeling every blow of his fists, seeing every look of fury and revulsion, the sense of betrayal…The Other hadn't even needed to tamper with that one; it had been horrific all on its own.

He'd thought of Baldur here more than he had in a very long time. Jane and her question about which colors he would wear. Jane and her mythology book with its faulty family trees. Jane and her ignorant questions about a song that hadn't been sung since Baldur's death – not in Loki's presence, anyway. In whatever weak connection The Other forged when he manipulated dreams while Loki was vulnerable in sleep, he must be able to pull in things from Loki's subconscious, and from there stimulate the associated memories.

And that made it Jane's fault. Like everything else here, he thought spitefully.

He took a deep breath in, held it, then slowly let it out. You know that's not true. Far from shutting her down from her mythology stories, he'd mostly enjoyed sharing those myths with her and essentially encouraged her to continue, until the last time. And Jane had nothing to do with Thanos, and nothing to do with Baldur, who'd died in the time of her ancestors. In the time not long after an argument that had gone far worse than Loki had expected, he thought, trying to remember what dream-Baldur had said and what real-Baldur had said. He began to fidget; it wasn't a pleasant memory either way.

The door suddenly swung open, and Loki, whose eyes had drifted closed, shot up out of the chair, pulling a knife from its magical hiding spot.

Jane walked in, tray held between her hands. She fell still for a moment as her eyes went to the knife and Loki looking like a hunter about to attack his prey, but then deliberately turned her back to him and nudged the door closed with her foot. "I knocked," she said as she turned back around. The knife was already gone. "But I guess you've got your soundproofing back in place."

"You might also consider that perhaps when I told you to go, I meant it, and that I simply wanted to be left alone so I could go back to sleep." He sat down again.

"I might, but you don't look like you were trying to go back to sleep. I don't imagine you could sleep after all that. I know I can't. So I took your suggestion."

"Yet here you are," he said, letting his voice run ice cold.

"Did you already forget what you suggested?" Jane lowered the tray in front of Loki, then set it on his desk.

Two glasses of milk and a plate of cookies.

Loki stared at the tray's contents, torn between laughing at the absurdity and shouting at her refusal to obey. "That milk is horrible."

"Yeah, I know," Jane said, taking one of the glasses and two of the cookies and lowering herself carefully down to the footstool Loki had been sitting on earlier.

Laughter almost won out, but he managed to restrict it to the barest of smiles. "You are quite possibly the most stubborn, persistent woman I've ever known, Jane. And you have a way of wearing me down. Like acid."

Jane's eyebrows went up. "So that's what you meant by that," she said, then took a bite of a chocolate chip cookie and thought it over for a few seconds. "I'll take it as a compliment."

"Take it as you like," Loki said. "But I'm not going to talk about…about Baldur."

"Okay. I figured you'd say that. I thought I'd tell you something about me, instead. After my parents died," she said, pushing forward before he could tell her no, "I was kind of in shock for a while. Like somehow…I don't know, I spent a lot of time kind of in a daze. It was like it wasn't really true, they weren't really gone, and at some point I would snap out of it and they'd be there. After a while, it wasn't too long, I guess, I did snap out of it, but they weren't there. And I kind of lost it. I was angry at everything and everyone and I mostly took it out on Erik. I would make fun of the way he talked and dressed, and I'd yell at him for being late picking me up from stuff after school and sulk in the backseat all the way home. My grades were slipping and I quit the softball team. And then I started having nightmares. They were really awful. Things about my parents or the crash, but sometimes about Erik, too. I realized later that the reason I would get so mad about him driving me anywhere was because when the accident happened Mom and Dad were driving me home from a game. And that started getting into my dreams, too. I'd have nightmares where I was yelling at Erik in the car and we'd get in an accident and he'd be killed. So I stopped yelling and started shutting down again, thinking that if I kept quiet and didn't complain about anything, then I wouldn't lose Erik, too.

"He was so good to me during all that. I said some awful things to him, and he never gave up on me. I'd be shouting at him and he'd tell me he had a hug for me when I was ready for it. And he brought me milk and cookies whenever he knew I'd had one of those nightmares, and we'd sit up together. Usually I couldn't tell him about the dream. It was like if I talked about it, it would make it real. So we'd talk about something else, or nothing at all. Sometimes we'd put on old movies. If 'Swedish film' ever comes up as a category on Jeopardy, I'm your girl. Then- Oh, sorry," Jane said, noticing Loki's look of confusion. She'd sort of forgotten who she was talking to, or at least that who she was talking to was not from Earth, much less the US. "Jeopardy's the name of a television game show, and you have to answer questions in categories, or actually you have to ask the question to…never mind. It's not important.

"Anyway…I just…I guess I just wanted you to know you're not the only one who's ever had a really vivid nightmare, or dealt with loss. I don't know what really happened back then, and I'm not asking you to tell me, unless you want to. But it helped me a lot, just knowing that I wasn't alone. And you may think you are, but you aren't alone, either, Loki. I bet there's even a Swedish movie or two here. Maybe something more recent. The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo's supposed to be good. We could go look for it."

"I don't want to watch a movie," Loki said somewhat testily, uncomfortable now that Jane was telling him of her own free will some of the deeply personal things he'd tried to manipulate her into telling him before they'd even made it to the South Pole, deeply personal things that it was difficult – unpleasant – for him to picture. And now that she was trying to comfort him in the same way Erik Selvig had once comforted her.

"Okay," Jane said easily, waiting for some sign of what he might want to do instead, and thinking up other suggestions if he didn't want to talk to her anymore.

Loki was again lost in his own thoughts, now about Selvig. He'd manipulated the man, with a technique taught him by The Other, a simple thought slipped into a mind that was already receptive to it, and later enslaved him with the scepter, but Loki had never really known him. He possessed the knowledge, the intellect, and the access Loki needed, and that was all there was to it. All except for Jane Foster. Clint Barton, the one nicknamed Hawkeye, he'd grilled about SHIELD's weaponry and personnel and procedures and likely actions and reactions. Erik he'd mostly left alone and the man had worked himself to exhaustion, Loki's need and his own curiosity combining to form an insatiable obsession. The only conversation he'd ever really had with the man was about Jane, a minor obsession of his own that Loki'd had no time to truly indulge. Erik had answered thoroughly. Enthusiastically. Proudly. Though he hadn't really thought about it like that at the time, the depth of Erik's love for her was clear. As was now the depth of Jane's love for Erik. Somehow he wished he'd understood that better at the time. Or rather, that he'd cared, because he certainly hadn't. Erik had even told him how they'd watched Swedish movies together, "when Jane was having a bad day." Even with his mind enslaved, he'd protected Jane's dignity. Loki had nodded sympathetically and held back laughter at the loathsome weakness in his display of sentiment. "I never hurt Erik," Loki said, the words spoken before he could weigh them; his need to say them was too strong.

Jane didn't react immediately, the out-of-the-blue statement catching her completely off guard. She'd been wondering how he might react if she suggested trying out the Xbox, and if she really wanted to be slaughtering computer-generated avatars alongside Loki. "I don't think we should talk about that," she finally said, remembering how Loki had said something similar when she asked what he'd meant with his "free from freedom" talk. They both knew, she supposed, that there were some topics for conversation that just wouldn't go well. But that one, Loki's perplexing attitudes about freedom, hadn't gone badly in the end. This was different. This was personal. This was Erik.

"You're probably right," Loki said after a moment. "I just thought you should know that."

You just thought I should know that? "Why do you…why do you have to do things like that? To say things like that," Jane said, shifting and straightening awkwardly on the footstool. She'd been trying to say something good, something encouraging, maybe even comforting, and he had to bring up that, and not let it drop, and act like he was so innocent, like he'd never done anything harmful to Erik at all. "You did hurt him, Loki. You hurt him a lot. He has nightmares every time he closes his eyes. I think sometimes he has them even when his eyes are open. He's not eating enough, or sleeping enough. He hasn't been able to really go back to work. He's talking about retiring. He doesn't trust himself anymore. And it breaks my heart to know he's going through all that, and I can't be there to help him. When I got this opportunity, he told me he was fine, and I didn't know he wasn't. He told me to go for it, to follow my dreams. He didn't…he didn't want me to… Loki, you used him to kill twelve hundred people. Tell me again how you didn't hurt him. Let me guess, you never meant to hurt him, huh? Why does that sound familiar?"

She stared hard at him, lips pressed tightly together, hands clenched into fists, milk forgotten on the floor beside her, a cookie resting on her leg. Somewhere amidst her anger-fueled words a voice in her head – the voice of reason, the voice she'd learned a long time ago to wait for and listen to when it came to dealing with Loki – started telling her to shut up, that antagonizing Loki had never proven a good idea, that he was probably going to make her regret going so far and pressing a button she knew he had to be sensitive to. But she couldn't help it. She would walk through fire for Erik, for everything he'd done for her, for everything he'd put up with from her, for everything he was to her. She'd let it go once, soon after she'd learned who he was, when she'd still been frightened for her life. Never again. There was no way on Earth, or any of the other realms, that she was going to let Loki get away with telling her with a straight face that he hadn't hurt Erik, no matter what the voice of reason said.

Loki waited until Jane's rigid posture relaxed somewhat – and the peak of his own instinctive anger subsided – before responding. "No. I did exactly what I intended to do. He had the opportunity to get to know the Tesseract better than anyone else, so I needed him. I used him," he said quietly. He'd meant for it to sound colder than it did. He failed because he'd let himself get caught up in her emotional story, in her fierce loyalty to and protectiveness of the man who'd raised her to adulthood, and become mired in the same sentiment he'd silently ridiculed Erik for. Not exactly the same, though. He knew what he'd felt, what he was still feeling despite the way Jane had lashed out at him in retaliation. Guilt. He used to swear he'd never feel it again. It was part of his freedom. Freedom from guilt. Now he felt the burden of it like a physical weight. Jane Foster. Erik Selvig. Heinrich Schäfer. Nigel Hawkins. Baldur…Baldur Odinson. Erik at least had been intentional. For Jane's sake he regretted it, but Erik had been essential to his plan – there was no avoiding his involvement. Baldur was different. Intentional, but not intentional. Intentional actions, unintentional consequences, and he'd suffered because no one had believed there was ever anything unintentional about it.

"I'm sorry…for his difficulties," Loki finally said as Jane continued to stare defiantly at him. It was all he could offer.

Jane looked away and absently picked up the glass of milk and took a large swallow. "Stop worrying about him," she remembered Loki telling her once, when she still thought he was Lucas and she'd briefly confided in him about Erik. She remembered thinking what a strange thing it was to say, because of course you worry about the people you care about. Now Loki had as good as told her he wasn't sorry for what he did when he came to Earth. She supposed it was better than him lying, saying he was sorry when he wasn't. She supposed hoping for more had been naïve. What did you expect, anyway? You remember how he reacted to the list of the dead. She took a deep breath, a hand going reflexively to her throat. She remembered. And she realized then that while it was hurtful, this was actually an improvement. He hadn't lost his temper at all, and he'd even tried to express some misguided form of sympathy, if she could call it that. And that after she'd definitely – deliberately – provoked him.

"I'm sorry for…dragging Baldur into it."

Loki gave a small shrug. "You don't owe me any apologies."

"Will you tell me about him?"

"I told you I wouldn't-"

"I know. I don't mean about what happened. I just mean…about him. What was he like?"

Loki shook his head. "We don't speak of him."

"Who's we?"

"My f- His family. Everyone." "We'll never speak of him again," he heard a much younger Thor say.

"Why not?"

"It was easier that way."

"But don't you want to think about the good memories? Or…I mean…unless there aren't…if you didn't…"

"There were many happy moments. I was not…I was a different person then. I know who I am now. Had I somehow known then…I probably would have killed him deliberately. It was my destiny."

"Loki," Jane began, face scrunched up in revulsion, "you can't mean that. Sometimes you talk like you're some kind of psychopath or something, like you don't have any feelings at all. But I know you better than that. You just told me that you would've traded your life for his to spare your mother the pain of his loss. I know you love her. And you told me outright that you do have a heart."

Loki rubbed a hand tiredly across his face. He should never have opened this door to Jane; tonight he'd gone too far. He'd let himself be far too affected by that dream, and he could think of nothing but Baldur's death in its aftermath. He did have a heart; it was a weakness. He did love Frigga; he was working on that. "Things were different then," he finally said.

"So tell me what things were like then," she persisted. "Sometimes those old memories are painful. But the good ones can help keep you going when things are rough."

"I should sustain myself on memories from a thousand years ago?" On lies? he added silently.

Frustrated, Jane felt at a loss for what else she could say. There's just no reasoning with him, she thought. Then something hit her, and she thought she understood him even more than she had just a minute or two ago. Frustration turned to sadness, and combined with everything else she'd seen and heard from him tonight, even without knowing what precisely had led to Baldur's death, she felt pure undiluted sorrow for him for the first time. "Do you ever think about any happy memories?"

Happy memories, Loki thought as he searched for and failed to find a snide response. The phrase was anachronistic. An oxymoron. His memories were all corrupted; Thanos's eager assistance in that effort was actually superfluous. The facts behind them, this had happened there with that person, these he knew; they were unchanged. Everything else about them was false. Excited over the snow, happily sledding with his brother? Thor was not his brother, and Loki had been born to snow and abandoned in snow. Terrified of the tree outside the window of his bedchamber in Uncle Villi's home, because he'd gotten it into his head that it looked like a Frost Giant? Uncle Villi was not his uncle, and the rest was sickeningly ironic. Training with Nadrith and Thor? The intended future kings of Alfheim, Asgard, and Jotunheim sparring and laughing together, friends who were destined to be enemies.

"I'll tell you one such memory, from long, long ago," he said after a while. "Odin and Frigga were celebrating a thousand years of marriage. Baldur was eight. He was a happy child, exuberant, instinctively obedient and well-mannered, friendly to everyone he met. Everyone adored him and doted on him. He was the light of all of Asgard."

Jane listened, then waited silently for Loki to continue. He sounded distant, and she didn't want to say or do anything to disturb him. When he spoke again, though, the distance was gone and his tone was much more matter-of-fact.

"The public celebrations lasted for an entire month. One of the gifts was a poem celebrating the fruitfulness of their union" – Loki spoke this phrase without concealing a bit of the sour taste it left in his mouth – "and a performance of it that required some coordination and preparation. Thor had many parts to act out. He always enjoyed the showmanship of the dramas we performed as children. I had one part. And Baldur had one part."

It took only a second for it to click, and Jane sucked in a quick breath. She'd joked about it earlier today, technically yesterday, and that was when he'd turned rude out of the blue and stalked off. Now she knew why. "The Journey and Challenges of-"

"-of the Valiant Odinsons. Yes."

"Three Odinsons. The farmer's children – that was really Baldur?"

"Baldur raced against thought. The first time we performed it, and many times thereafter, he could hardly contain himself once it began. He would be out of his chair jumping up and down long before Bragi got to his part. His enthusiasm and joy were infectious. He made everyone around him happy."

"He made you happy, too, didn't he? I can tell how much you loved him." What happened? Jane wondered. Anger, malice, defensiveness, all those things that so often colored anything Loki told her about his life disappeared when he spoke of Baldur, yet Loki had taken Baldur's life for some reason, and borne the blame for it though he said hadn't meant to do it. But there were some things she knew she would never press him on.

"Of course I loved him," Loki said, a sharp edge to his voice. "He was…I believed he was my brother. But Jane, do you see? That was all so long ago. What happened then has nothing to do with anything that is happening now. Everything has changed since then."

"Just because you found out you were adopted? Family isn't limited to blood, you know." And here, if she could shake some answers out of him, or better yet some sense into him, she would gladly do so.

Loki gave a harsh, short laugh. "Sometimes it is. But I'm not going to argue with you about this. I'm telling you, those events are ancient history, in the timeline of your realm. I've spoken more about Baldur today than I have in many centuries, and I've said more than enough."

"But it's not ancient history in the timeline of your realm. And it's obviously not ancient history for you. Not if you were having a nightmare about it. You were really upset. I mean, while you were dreaming."

"It wasn't-" It wasn't a normal dream. It wasn't a natural dream. But that was a vulnerability. No one had ever known that Thanos or anyone else exercised any ounce of control over him at all, and he wasn't going to change that now by telling Jane that someone outside the Nine was able to control what he dreamt. Out of boredom, perhaps? he wondered. After all, the nameless one had told him he wasn't worth the time required to torture him for his failure to secure Midgard and with it the Tesseract. "It wasn't a normal occurrence."

Jane's shoulders sagged. "Because I brought him up? And I asked about the song again… I'm sorry. I didn't know. And I'm sorry that thinking about him brings you bad dreams instead of a smile. I guess…I guess with all the circumstances around it…it's understandable." Snakes and venom and a mother who couldn't look at you and a father who tied you up and walked away… She frowned and tried not to think about it for the moment.

Loki shook his head minutely. How happy he would have once been to let her take the blame for something like this so that he wouldn't have to further explain himself. No longer. Still, he had no choice. "It wasn't your fault," he said, knowing she wouldn't believe him, and not trying very hard to sound believable. He had checked some box for politeness, what else should anyone want from him? "You didn't know about the song because I didn't tell you." Because I lied. He didn't need to say it. It was only three or four days ago, she wouldn't have forgotten that he'd said he was the one who raced thought.

"I'd still like to hear it sometime," Jane said after a long moment of silence had passed. "It sounds like it is a good memory. Or it should be, anyway. But I won't bring it up again."

"For the best, I suppose," Loki said, then abruptly stood up and held out a hand. Jane looked at it for a moment in confusion before picking up her glass with her right hand and taking his with her left, and Loki helped her up from the footstool. "It's very late, Jane. I would say it's nearly sunrise…but unfortunately that wouldn't be true. I do so loathe untruths," he added with a crooked smile.

Jane gave him the same crooked smile back, feeling somewhat off-kilter. Loki was telling her the conversation was over, as he often did, but this was hands down the politest way he'd ever done it. She wouldn't have been much more surprised if he'd kissed her knuckles. "Um, yeah…four more months," she said with an awkward laugh.

"Four more months," he repeated, trying to imagine that length of time left to go before even seeing the sun, much less the first plane landing on the skiway. What would he become if he remained here all that time? He knew in some ways he was not the same as he'd been when he'd first arrived at the South Pole, just three and a half months ago. Whatever his behavior with Jane, though, or even with the rest of the winterovers, it would be irrelevant once he left this place. Things may have changed here, at this tiny outpost in a desert of ice, but they had not changed anywhere outside this enclave. The other realms were still at war, and he was still alone, shackled, wanted, a traitor in Asgardian minds.

Jane went to the door, empty glass in hand, but Loki quickly stepped around her.

"I trust that what was said here will remain between us. I know that when this is all over you'll feel compelled to speak to SHIELD about me – and if you don't they'll ensure that you change your mind – but I see no value for them in hearing about things that happened on Asgard over a millennium ago."

She thought it over; it didn't take long. "You have my word."

Loki nodded, opened his mouth to say something, to thank her perhaps, but the words didn't come.

"So, um, from what you said before, I guess you do okay without a night's sleep, but if you happen to make it down to breakfast and don't see me there…don't worry, okay? My alarm's going to go off any minute now, but I'm going to turn it off and sleep in."

"Sleep well," Loki said, stepping out of the way of her exit.

Jane nodded. "Hey, by the way…"

"What?"

"Are your pajamas supposed to fit that tight? I told you you shouldn't risk putting those Asgardian fabrics in the dryer."

Loki stared blankly. She wants to talk about laundry all of a sudden again? But then a smile slid across her face and he realized she was only jesting. Except that his pajamas, as she called them, were tight. "If you would stop barging into my chambers in the middle of the night, you wouldn't have to see my ill-fitting pajamas. I assure you they remain perfectly comfortable" – well, that was a slight exaggeration – "and most importantly, they are clean."

"Whatever you say, Loki. Good night."

"Good night."

/


/

Jane closed her own door behind her yet again. She stood there in the dark, leaning against it, letting both of these middle-of-the-night encounters with Loki wash over her. Though it had all ended better than she would have ever hoped even with her generally optimistic nature – she remembered with crystal clarity her deer-in-headlights moment when he held out his hand to her in a way that could actually be described as charming – everything that had come before left her head spinning as she began to think back over it.

It wasn't just her that was off-kilter. The world had tilted slightly off its axis. There was something unsettling about seeing Loki in the throes of a nightmare, or even knowing that he had them, and she wasn't quite sure why. She already knew he was human in the metaphorical sensethat try as he might to hide it, he had the same feelings as anybody else, so it shouldn't really be a surprise that he could have the occasional bad dream like anybody else. And that one had seemed really bad, like the ones she'd had after her parents' death. So it wasn't that such a thing should really be surprising, but… Jane stopped chewing on her lip as a new idea formed. It was more that it was totally incongruous with the image Loki cultivated for himself: invulnerable, unbreakable. Physically, certainly, he seemed pretty close to invulnerable. She'd nearly passed out from pulling the broken blade of a sword from his back, but it hadn't seemed to faze him at all. She was pretty sure a human wouldn't have survived that injury; at the very least a human wouldn't have walked away from it, calmly asked her to pluck out the sword, then in perfect lucidity teased her for her squeamishness.

She shivered and quickly twisted around to hit the light switch, squinting her eyes for a moment because they'd already adjusted to the dark. When she could look at her room again, it made her smile. Half a dozen tissue paper flowers adorned her desk wrapped by their pipe-cleaner stems around the reading light and a picture frame and whatever else had been handy, and two more were attached to the metal posts at the head of the bed. She'd made them two nights ago with Sue and Nora, and they brightened the room with their vivid colors and suggestion of spring.

She went over to the alarm clock by her bed and turned it off, set the glass on the desk, applied some more Chapstick, then sat back on the beat-up chair by the covered window. Sleep might not be in her future at all tonight, she thought. This morning, she corrected herself.

Her thoughts quickly turned back to Loki and his desired image. He prized the ability to threaten. To be the one holding the cards. To be the biggest, scariest thing in the room. He didn't always exercise that ability, really hardly at all with her anymore, but it seemed to her that it was always there, ready for him to draw on it if he needed to. Because of a centuries-long rivalry with Thor? Maybe. But it wasn't just about physical vulnerability and making threats. It seemed more like a defense mechanism, she thought, when he stood up and shouted down at her after confiding in her about his punishment for Baldur's death. That was emotional vulnerability, a response to an emotional threat.

She'd seen glimpses of vulnerability in him before, but never quite in this way. She knew now too that he hid a great deal of it from her, maybe masses of it, like the iceberg lurking beneath the surface – when he'd told her it was him who'd raced against thought in that song, she hadn't noticed anything to suggest the emotion it must have evoked in him. And how long had she known him before he indirectly let slip that he was adopted, and how long after that before it became clear that that fact genuinely, deeply bothered him?

Loki didn't like admitting to vulnerability. He didn't want anyone to get the idea that he wasn't the biggest scariest thing in the room.

That was a strange idea, too, because for a while there after she'd realized who he was, he'd certainly seemed like the biggest scariest thing around, period. But he wasn't. The giant metal machine that had come from Asgard and torn up Puente Antiguo was certainly bigger, but she hadn't had time to think much about that thing in the moment. Erik had told her about Loki getting smashed around by the Hulk. Loki himself had said Thor was stronger. On Asgard there were probably plenty of things stronger than Loki.

Like snakes and fathers.

Jane had assumed that Loki had flat-out murdered his other brother; Thor had said very little about it but nothing he said contradicted that assumption. But Loki said he didn't mean to kill Baldur. It could be true. Or it could be just an excuse. Or he could believe it to be true, the same way he seemed to believe it when he said it wasn't his fault all those people in New York had died. Whatever the case, and whether mistletoe that never swore an oath was involved or not, the punishment was, in part at least, true. She hadn't expected that at all. Something in her brain shut down every time she tried to picture it, or worse yet imagine herself in Loki's place. She hoped it didn't erupt in her own dreams. It was so over-the-top, it seemed so cruel. Don't they just have regular old jails in Asgard? What was done to Loki sounded an awful lot like torture. If it was done anywhere on Earth, there was no question it would be considered torture. Maybe when you lived for thousands of years, punishment had to be…more memorable or something. But it was hard for her to imagine anyone enduring something like that, for however long he had – clearly longer than a few days based on what he'd said about losing track of time – and coming out on the other side of it somehow a better person. She supposed it was a pretty good deterrent, though. I wonder if they cut off hands for stealing there…

Her stomach really started churning, and she pressed a hand over it and regretted the cookies and milk – Loki hadn't even had any. It wasn't just the physical aspects of it. Loki's own father had done this to him, had maybe decided on the sentence himself. Who does something like that? she wondered. Her parents hadn't even believed in spanking. "Don't speak of him like that," Thor had told her in Tromso, annoyed that she hadn't shown Odin the proper respect. He'd also said Odin had Loki sent to Midgard, and that Odin and he both hoped Loki would learn something while here. What was he supposed to learn while being tied down and blinded by venom? What was Thor's role in all that? Did he think it was okay? Aren't the Asgardians supposed to be the good guys? Isn't Thor one of the good guys? He'd said Odin punished Loki severely for Baldur's death, and she didn't recall him saying it with distaste.

Jane shook her head and started chewing her lower lip again, the Chapstick not enough to stop her. As traumatic as it clearly had been for Loki, physically and psychologically, it hadn't destroyed him. Even if Thor condoned this kind of brutal punishment, if this had broken Loki, if it was what had filled him so full of anger and hatred, Thor would know it, and he would have said so. "So, Jane, there was this thing that happened with Loki a long time ago, and it knocked a couple of screws loose…" Instead he'd said he didn't know what had changed, that he'd missed something.

So there was more. Jane gave a short laugh that lacked any humor. There was always more with Loki. She remembered the bitterness and ire in him when he'd said he'd told Thor his father was dead because he wanted to take from Thor what was taken from him. Loki had still loved his family after all that, if he'd considered it lost, if he wanted revenge for it. Maybe finding out he was adopted made him think back to his punishment beneath the snake and question that love. Maybe he thought he'd been treated that way because he was adopted – the adopted son had killed the biological son. Maybe he saw himself now as less valuable than Baldur.

Whatever exactly was the case, it would be an awful thing to have to live with.

/


/

Loki sat back down with a deep grimace – mortals' injuries hurt, he thought with another pang of guilt he chose not to dwell on – and watched the door for a few minutes, half-expecting Jane to show up again. She had the perfect excuse: she'd left the tray with its cookies and remaining glass of milk.

When he decided that she was in fact probably not coming back, he turned around to look at the tray. After a moment he gave a mental shrug and took an oatmeal cookie. The cookies weren't bad here. Better when they're fresh from the oven, he thought, biting into it. The milk he would not touch. It came from a powder – though he assumed a cow had been involved at some point – and it tasted like it. Besides, on Asgard, milk wasn't often drunk by adults, who by and large drank mead and wine and ale, water after strenuous activity, and juice or perhaps tea in the morning, depending on the temperature and one's tastes, while here milk was drunk almost as much as juice and tea and coffee at breakfast. Though he still made no move to touch it, his eyes lingered on the glass. Erik had shared a glass of milk with Jane when she suffered a nightmare. Mortals were permitted weakness. Mortals were defined by weakness. Yet how many times had Frigga done the same with him, when he was still a boy and something had upset him?

Frigga.

She'd been so good to him, so patient, and he'd brought her so much pain. Her false son was now thought to have betrayed Asgard, fit to become war spoils a second time. But it had hardly started with that. How many times had he embarrassed her, angered her, disappointed her? Yet only once had she ever really allowed him to see it. Or, in a sense, not to see what she would not have been able to hide from him. He hadn't looked on her face for years after Odin's judgement. When he finally saw her again, he'd bawled like a child and she'd swept him into her arms and wept and they'd somehow wound up on their knees. Apologies wrenched from the depths of his soul spilled one after the other from his lips, incoherent through his sobbing and utter emotional and physical collapse. Her arms had remained securely around him the entire time, and she'd whispered her forgiveness over his apologies.

His brow furrowed as he remembered what else he'd said to her that day. He'd made her a promise. Deeply felt. Wholly sincere. Impossible to keep.

"Mother, I swear to you on my life, if there was any way at all to undo it, I would."

Impossible to keep.

Until now.

/


Should have put this on the last chapter, but I forgot, in part, but also that chapter ran way long. This one's a little long too. Anyway - as some of you might have known from the updates on my profile page, yes, portions of 87 "Nostalgia," and also 88 "Return" were written back in Sept. 2012. I had written Loki's side, then went to bed thinking about Jane's side, and it was so crystal clear in my head that I had to get up and write it down. Some things changed a bit, of course, because in various ways Jane and Loki have both changed a bit from where I imagined they'd be at the time, but some parts are pretty much word-for-word. So this has long been one of the "key moments" in the story, some of the reasons for which have not been made fully clear yet. (Some of you might have a decent guess about it though.) In a sort of short-hand format, Ch. 89 "Parasite" has also been around since that time.

Speaking of 89 "Parasite," it would be highly spoilery of me to put any teasers/excerpt here. As I've done in the past, though, if you'd like that, say so in a review or PM if you prefer, and I'll send you something, easy to do.

THANK YOU for your support and encouragement. Truly. I write this for me, but "me" isn't enough of a reason to keep writing it after all this time. That reason is you.