If you've forgotten where the previous chapter left off, you might want to take a quick look back at the last two paragraphs to refresh your memory.
Beneath
Chapter Ninety-Five – Kindness
Loki pressed the button, and placed both gloved hands over the platform bars on which were meant to rest a probe, making sure the device on his right wrist contacted the bar. Five seconds. He heard Jane's footsteps approaching rapidly, then heard her fall. His neck twisted around, but for less than a second before he looked down at Pathfinder in the dark morning, stars and a sliver of moon the only light. She would be fine. She was short; she didn't have far to fall, he thought with a snicker. His expression sobered. She will be fine. She'll see.
"Loki," Jane called out as soon as she made it around to the back of the jamesway. "Whatever it is you're doing, wherever, whenever you're trying to go, please don't. Step away." She made it around past him, Pathfinder between her and him, to try to get his attention before it was too late. "Let go, and just step back. We can talk about this. Please don't do something rash." She wanted to grab onto him, to pull him away, but she knew that if he didn't want to let her then she wouldn't be able to, and she didn't want to get accidentally dragged along to his unknown destination with nothing to protect her – she hadn't forgotten coming back from Asgard with a portion of the hood of her jacket sliced off.
Loki just stood there, eyes slowly rising to meet hers, waiting for Pathfinder to kick in.
"Loki, please let go. You said you would wait. You said you wouldn't do anything without me. You said it was my choice. I made my choice, okay? Please."
"You don't understand. I'm going to prove you wrong."
"But you don't…" Jane drew in a shuddering, painful breath. She'd pulled on one layer of gloves on the way out, but her head was uncovered. "Just…" Don't do this, she'd been about to say again, because whatever "this" was, she couldn't imagine it was something she'd agree to. But Loki was no longer looking at her, instead looking down at Pathfinder, then pressing the button, which, given the position he'd been standing in, she assumed he'd already pressed earlier. More than five seconds ago, her brain supplied after another couple of seconds passed in silence.
Loki counted the seconds silently after he pressed the "go-button" the second time. When he reached five he felt a slight tremor in his stomach, anticipating the abrupt shift from natural gravity to the relative crudeness of this means of travel, but it didn't come. He kept counting. Jane had asked about time dilation, something he knew nothing of, and he wondered if it could be happening here, because he was trying something new. But he hadn't been anywhere yet, so how could there be any time dilation?
He pressed it again, conscious of Jane standing there, just watching, not bothering to try to talk him out of it anymore. Because she knew it wouldn't work. Of course it won't work, he thought as the seconds again went past five. It's something good, and I'm the one trying to do it.
He stepped back and shoved Pathfinder forward, against Jane though that hadn't been his intention. Snowdrift had built up around its base, though, and he hadn't shoved that hard and it didn't tip that far forward; Jane simply pushed it back into place and walked around it.
"What happened?" she asked, standing in front of him as he stood with his back to the jamesway.
"I think it's rather obvious that nothing happened," he said, sliding his eyes away from her at the end and marching back to the jamesway, where Jane followed.
"Okay, what did you mean to happen?" she asked when they were back inside, Loki removing the Pathfinder-related gear before sitting down at the table.
"Another test."
"Of?" Jane asked, surprised she was having such a hard time pulling it out of him when he'd spoken so readily of it to her yesterday.
Loki sat there in silence a moment longer, before deciding he may as well tell her. "The future. I hadn't tested that. I always intended to, but…" Other things had always come up first.
"The future? Where? When?"
"I thought a hundred years from now, as a first try. Here. Not here…Midgard. I thought…"
"What?" She watched Loki as he looked back up at her, his face nearly expressionless, and she pulled over the other chair and sat down next to him. "What?" she asked again.
"On Asgard, time travel is a forbidden subject. We have no teachers or scholars or writers like your Einstein who theorize about it. When I was a boy, thirteen, I think, Odin and Frigga took Thor and me to Nidavellir. The subject is also not particularly discussed there, I suppose, but it does find its way into a few fantastical stories apparently, and I purchased one of them, though no one else knew about it at the time. I read it, and the story entranced me. Not long after, Thor and I had to create another of those dramas we sometimes had to perform in our lessons, and I came up with it, based on concepts from that book. Father was furious" – Loki paused, realizing his slip, but it was harder to remember when speaking of the distant past, when Odin was every bit Father in his memories – "and Thor was angry, too, because I got us both in trouble. I didn't know the topic wasn't allowed, but I accepted it then, and I never questioned it or really even thought about it again until this possibility with Pathfinder emerged."
"Why is it forbidden?" Jane asked, aware that they had entirely left behind whatever it was Loki had just attempted to do, but fascinated by the story he felt led to tell her.
"I don't know. He used a lot of big words and said them in an angry enough voice that I could barely follow what he was saying. I just knew that I would never pursue the idea again. Our tutor then also lectured us on it, told us how inappropriate the play was. Dangerous, immoral, impossible, seditious…on Asgard, if you're told you've done something seditious…well, you certainly don't do it again." Though apparently that didn't apply when I was king, he couldn't help thinking with a wave of bitterness he then brushed aside.
"It doesn't sound like creativity is terribly welcome there," Jane said, wondering then, not for the first time, if Asgard was not quite all she'd first assumed it to be, and realizing that she didn't actually know much at all about it. While Jane was asking about the bifrost and about Loki himself, her mother would have been asking about Asgardian society and beliefs. She could be. She could be right here, asking. Jane frowned. Even having made the decision, it wasn't easy, and she suspected it would be that way for a while. In a way it was like she'd lost them all over again in deciding not to try to go back and save them.
"It's welcome in some areas, but you're right, in others it's not. The problems come when one doesn't realize precisely where the boundaries are…" Or when you find that the boundaries seem to apply only to you. "But no matter. In that book…it feels strange to speak aloud of it even now…a woman with two young children and an illness that is killing her discovers that she can travel to the future, so she goes there to be able see her children grown. But while there, she learns that in the future, healers have cured the disease that she has, so she receives the cure there, and then goes back to her children and lives a long life."
It hardly sounded scandalous. Unless Loki was skipping over loads of plot, it actually sounded kind of dull. Maybe if you'd never heard of time travel before it was exciting. Jane wondered what Asgardians would think of The Butterfly Effect, if they would run shrieking in terror from the film or throw its creators in prison…or under a giant snake. It was a strange and unsettling thought. "Does Asgard believe in book-burning?" she asked with a grim smile, thinking again of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the Nazi book-burning it had depicted.
"No," Loki said, getting the reference only after a moment of confusion. "I simply ripped out its pages and threw it away."
Jane grimaced. Books she didn't want, for whatever reason, she'd always passed on to a friend or donated to the local library. "On Earth we have a long history of time travel stories, especially in I guess the last hundred years or so. It's a common theme in science-fiction."
"I gathered at least that it was open for discussion here," he said with a nod.
Jane, though, thought he still looked distant, subdued, not fully engaged in the conversation. Of course, she wasn't really sure what the conversation was about anymore. He'd told her he'd tried to go to the future for the first time, and then he'd told her about a book… Jane sat back, jaw falling open in shock. Surely he wouldn't have… "Loki…why did you try to go one hundred years into Earth's future?"
He looked back at her, and knew that she'd finally figured it out. "You have a disease," he said, stating the obvious. "Your healers are nowhere near finding a cure."
For a long time, Jane just stared at him, and it was Loki who broke eye contact in the end. He was a strange figure, this man who sat before her. Pale skin and jet black hair, undoubtedly alien and yet looking the same as any other Polie in his black overalls and thick red jacket. He'd killed his birth father and his younger brother and he'd tried to kill Thor, he'd tried to wipe out another planet and to enslave this one, he'd gleefully watched the pandemonium, as he'd put it, of people running and screaming while he held some scanning device down over a man's eye, a man who ultimately died from what Loki did. He'd also saved her from falling to her death when she'd raced off to Asgard and happily told her about defending her honor and now he'd tried to travel to the future to cure a disease she'd only even mentioned to him once. Who are you, Loki? she wanted to but didn't dare ask. It wasn't the first time she'd seen such a contradiction in him, and it wasn't the first time she'd wondered who the "real Loki" was, but this… "You wanted to see if there was a cure for Huntington's in a hundred years?"
"It was a good test," he said, recognizing the defensive tone of his voice only after the words were out. "And it would have proven that time travel can be used for good. Except that it didn't work."
"I…I don't know what to say," Jane admitted, shaking her head. A man she'd once thought had to be the most selfish, heartless man alive had tried to travel to the future to cure a disease she couldn't even believe he remembered the name of. Why would you do that, Loki? She wanted to ask, but she suspected she wouldn't get an entirely honest answer. Today a cure for Huntington's, yesterday Mom and Dad… She thought then that maybe he really hadn't brought up her parents just to manipulate her emotions. Maybe he had wanted to do something nice for her. "This one is nice, once or twice a month," she remembered him saying as he pointed to his little finger. He doesn't do small. He goes for extremes. Destroy a planet. Rule a planet. Discover time travel. Cure a disease. Maybe it's an Asgard thing. Thor was pretty extreme, too.
"There's nothing to say, since it didn't work," Loki finally said, and pulled the laptop toward him. "Perhaps I made an error in the programming. I'll look at it again."
"Loki…don't."
He looked at her sharply. "What is your problem, Jane? What harm do you think can possibly come of this? Would you not prefer to have your disease cured? To know that you would not risk passing it to your children?" Why are you so determined to set up obstacles when I'm only trying to help? There was a little more to it than that, of course, but still, why could she not simply let him do something to help her?
"It's not…it's not that," Jane said. She'd only barely begun to seriously think through the potential harm of changing the past; the moral and ethical questions surrounding travel to the future were unexplored territory. Some of them came back to the same grail problem as she'd come to think of it – she could imagine countries fighting over it, wanting to travel to the future and bring back the knowledge of vastly superior weaponry, for one. But she didn't think it truly mattered. "A lot of theories of time travel say travel to the future isn't possible. Not in the sense you have in mind. And…if you think about it, and what we understand about how this time travel works…," Jane said, trailing off with a sense of incredulity at what she'd just said. She shook her head for a moment as though to shake off the feeling, then continued. "It uses the branching pathways in Yggdrasil, right? Right?" she repeated more loudly, for Loki was still looking through the code displayed on the laptop. She put a hand on his arm and he drew it away, but it got his attention and he looked up at her.
"Right," he said, annoyed but listening.
"And you're programming it, using Young-Soo's analysis of the branch structure, and that's interfacing with Yggdrasil somehow, telling Yggdrasil where and when to send you. Which branch to send you through. Right?"
Loki exhaled audibly to let her know he was still annoyed, but he nodded, and he was beginning to think, and to see where she was headed.
"And if a tree really is the right metaphor for Yggdrasil, the way Asgard has always depicted it, as you said, then like a tree, Yggdrasil is always growing new branches. But branches for the future just don't exist, because the future hasn't happened yet. Yggdrasil hasn't grown them yet."
A moment passed, in which Loki began to feel foolish, all the more so for such a young mortal to be explaining something to him that he really ought to have figured out himself, given how obvious it seemed in retrospect. He had no doubt whatsoever that she was correct, even if he couldn't bring himself to say so quite that explicitly. "That does seem to be a reasonable interpretation of events."
"So when you tried to tell Pathfinder to send you somewhere that didn't exist…nothing happened."
Nothing happened. He glanced away, taking a moment to ensure that his expression remained unchanged. He'd been exceedingly lucky that nothing happened, he realized. Instead of doing nothing, Pathfinder could have sent him into Yggdrasil and left him there to its ravages, stuck for eternity until someone showed up to "rescue" him. A small, nervous laugh escaped him. Not eternity. Five minutes. And then you would have been brought back here. "Then it was simply not meant to be."
"No. Interfering in time never is, I think. But Loki…thank you for trying. That's…one of the nicest things anybody's ever done for me," Jane said, and found herself swallowing a lump in her throat.
"It was just a test," he said reflexively, looking away from her as she began to grow unnervingly emotional.
Jane nodded, again picturing him pointing to his pinky. That had been light-hearted, though; he seemed rather more serious now. She wasn't entirely sure what to make of what he'd attempted, but she felt certain that if he'd just been trying to manipulate her he wouldn't be deflecting her attempts to thank him for his kindness. She wondered if he'd genuinely come to care about her. Someone that wanted to do such incredible, things for her…that was the kind of person she could imagine Thor had been telling her about back in Tromso, the brother and friend he couldn't give up all hope on.
"I'm fine, you know," she finally said. "More than fine. I'm lucky."
"Lucky," he repeated flatly. "You have a disease that will rob you of control of your body and your mind."
"It might," Jane answered with a nod. "It might do that, a long time from now. But it might not. When my aunt was my age she already had symptoms. It could be so much worse. Yes, I'm lucky."
"Your parents died when you weren't even of age. This is lucky?"
"No. Of course not. It was awful. It is awful. Of course I'd rather still have them in my life. But…I still have to say I'm lucky. When it happened, I had a home to go to. A home where I was loved and taken care of, and where someone understood what I was going through because he'd lost someone, too. I wasn't alone, and I wasn't destitute. I got grants and teaching positions that got me through a doctorate, and I even had a little bit of an inheritance that helped me stay afloat for a few years after grad school as an independent researcher. I love my work, and I have good friends who accept me for who I am and not only put up with me but make me eat and sleep and just come up for air when I get too obsessed with work. I mean…nobody wants to lose their parents ever, much less when you're fourteen, and nobody wants some hereditary genetic disease. But everybody's got a burden to bear, and I guess I just choose to focus on the good parts. And there's so much that's good. So I choose to think…yeah, I'm lucky."
"So this is how you can remain so happy, so kind to others? Because you tell yourself that despite the tragedies that have befallen you, you're lucky?" It seemed ludicrous to Loki; he supposed the parallel for him would be ignoring the fact that his entire life was a lie and counting himself lucky that…he couldn't even think of anything that he should feel lucky about.
"I'm not always happy," she said. He oversimplifies things a lot. And…did he just pay me a compliment? It was weird, because it wasn't one she felt she deserved. "And I'm not even always a very good person. I try, but I'm not always kind."
"Mmmm. I recall," Loki said with a hint of a smile.
"Yeah, well, you weren't being so nice yourself, in the beginning."
"I was perfectly polite and friendly."
"'Friendly?' Loki, every word out of your mouth was a lie!" Jane exclaimed, but it wasn't in anger. His tone was light, almost teasing, and she supposed she was simply marveling at his audacity. In a way, she was also marveling at her own ability to look back on their introduction without getting mad.
"But every word was nevertheless polite and friendly. You, on the other hand, were rude and condescending at every turn."
He wore a smile that could almost be charming, with a glint of mischief, were it not for the fact that his initial plans had come with a touch of malice that he'd hinted at but never quite explained. It sent a shiver up her spine, but those days were in the past, and Jane saw no reason to dwell on it now. Besides, they'd been down a similar road before. "I admit it, yeah, I was rude. Sometimes I can…kind of put work first, and let people slide to second place. I told you, I thought you were a SHIELD spy and you were going to ruin the best professional experience of my life. Well…the best other than when your brother dropped out of the sky."
Loki took a moment before responding. He'd tensed at the unexpected mention of Thor, and since she now knew the truth the compulsion to correct her on her use of the word "brother" was strong, but he resisted it, and it passed. He didn't particularly want this conversation to end, not over him. He could nurse a small flame of hatred for him without letting it blaze out of control and driving Jane away. For this moment, Thor could be an abstract thing, a person they both knew, no one of consequence to Loki. "That was your best professional experience, hm?"
"Yes," Jane said, eyebrows raised, surprised that Loki seemed to find it surprising. "I mean, it was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me. His arrival – the way he arrived – it proved the existence of a traversable Einstein-Rosen bridge, and it led to all this, after all," she explained, gesturing around her. "Don't look at me like that. It became personal, but it was professional. We didn't exactly hit it off when we first met."
"Really. Tell me, Jane, I'd love to hear more about this." He already knew some of it; she'd told him a month ago that – surprise of all surprises – Thor had been arrogant and unappreciative toward her at first.
Jane frowned, wondering if she should really be feeding his antipathy toward Thor. At this point, though, it was more of a funny story than anything else, and she didn't think Thor would mind her telling it, assuming he'd never actually told Loki himself. "Okay, well, here's what happened. My intern Darcy and Erik and I were driving out to see this atmospheric anomaly I'd been tracking. And then this amazing, beautiful thing burst open from a sky, like a tornado but not, and all the energy readings we were getting from the area were off the scale and I just wanted to get there as fast as I could so I was practically pressing Darcy's foot down on the gas pedal to keep us moving toward it, and…well…suddenly through all the dust that was kicked up we saw someone standing there and Darcy slammed on the breaks but we kind of hit him, and when we-"
"You struck him with your vehicle?" Loki filled in; Jane had actually told him months ago, when he was still Lucas to her and they were going through particle emission data hoping to learn more about the wormhole that had opened over Midgard.
"Yeah. Oh, right, I guess I already told you that much." Jane decided she wouldn't mention the other time. One brother teasing her about it was enough. "So…he was really disoriented and out in the middle of nowhere and we just thought he was homeless or one of any number of, well, slightly crazy people who come out to New Mexico looking for Area 51 or chupacabras or something. And we also thought he was drunk. And Erik wanted to get him to the hospital because, well, and-"
"Because you struck him with your vehicle," Loki helpfully supplied, easily picking up on Jane's desire not to dwell on that. He needled Jane because the reaction came naturally to him, but behind that reaction he wondered how Odin would have reacted had his beloved heir been killed instantly upon his banishment. He was certain Odin had never envisioned he was sending his newly mortal son directly into the path of a Midgardian car. Loki hadn't either. At the time, he'd been too stunned by what Odin had just done to even consider what Thor might have encountered upon his unplanned arrival on Midgard. Whom would you have named heir then, hm? He thought then that Odin probably wouldn't have had time to figure out how to avoid leaving him as next in line to the throne – the shock and trauma of Thor's death would have sent him straight into the Odinsleep right there in the observatory, and he might not have learned the truth for some time to come.
Jane, meanwhile, was shooting him a look. "Yeah. That. So Erik wanted to get him to the hospital, and I kind of…didn't. I mean, he was acting crazy but it's not like he couldn't walk or he was bleeding all over the place or anything."
"He was mortal. He could have had serious internal injuries," Loki said, partly bemused that Thor had not only not been worshipped here as the Scandinavians of old had done, nor even adored and celebrated, but rather struck by a car and shown what sounded like indifference, but also partly still stuck on the idea of what might have happened had Thor perished in his encounter with Jane's car.
"Yeah, well…I wasn't really thinking about that. I was just thinking about how incredible this whole thing was. I knew it was the most significant thing I'd ever seen with my own eyes. It left these markings in the ground that were just…well, you know. I could hardly believe what I was seeing. It was the bifrost of course, but we didn't know that at the time."
"And that was more important to you than the welfare of your poor and downtrodden."
Jane grimaced. "It sounds really awful and callous when you put it like that."
"Mmm. It does, doesn't it?" Loki said with a look of deep concern. Needling had regained his full attention.
"Anyway," Jane said, shooting him another look, "so then he started acting really crazy. He was staring up at the sky and talking to someone, and it didn't sound like any kind of prayer I've ever heard. I thought maybe he had a concussion or something so we did take him to the hospital then."
Loki's eyebrows went up, suddenly remembering something Thor had told him while he was SHIELD's captive. "Ah. He mentioned an encounter with your healers. I had the impression it didn't go very well."
"Uhhh, not exactly. But I wasn't there then, we left him and went back to analyze the data we'd gotten from the event."
"You abandoned him there, this poor unfortunate soul that you struck with your vehicle? I'm appalled, Jane, utterly appalled."
"Shut up, Loki. It's not like I knew him. We did the responsible thing…in the end."
"And then you realized that you couldn't be without him and went to find him? Or was it the reverse?" Loki imagined the stars clearing from her eyes and her remembering just what her abandoned homeless man looked like, though he supposed he hadn't looked so impressive without all his princely Asgardian regalia.
"You're awful, you know that? No, neither. When we looked at the thermal imaging, we realized that he wasn't just in the area of the event, he was in the event. So we went back for him. That's when we found out his 'encounter with the healers didn't go so well,' as you put it." And that was where that part of the story would end. Jane herself didn't know exactly what had happened back there at the county hospital, but there'd been an awful lot of cleaning up going on when they'd returned and found Thor gone.
Loki broke out into a grin. Jane had meant it when she said she wasn't always so kind…which, truthfully, made it seem even stranger that she was kind to him, even when she called him "awful" and told him to "shut up." "You went back for your poor downtrodden crazy homeless mortal…to make him part of your science experiment?"
Jane shrugged. "Yeah, well…"
Loki laughed. She wasn't even trying to deny it! "Continue, please."
"We got him back to the lab and I gave him some clothes and fed him and he…well, he was kind of a jerk. Like he was better than us. I already told you that part, I think. His mood got better after he ate."
"Mmm, yes, you did mention it. And his mood often got better after he ate. And drank. But you cared nothing about him except his usefulness to your work, and he was rude and unkind to you. What changed?"
The question surprised her, in a way. She hadn't thought that much about it back then, really, with how fast everything had happened, and when she thought about Thor now, she more often thought about him getting her notebook back for her, sitting out with her on the roof of the lab, sacrificing himself to protect people in Puente Antiguo he didn't even know, watching his reaction to seeing the Northern Lights for the first time, sharing a hurried kiss with him next to a New Zealand sheep farm. Even these memories she tried not to dwell on too much, because the more she thought about him the more she would worry about him, and worrying wouldn't be useful to either of them. "I don't really know. He wouldn't really listen to me at first, but when I put my foot down on the whole mug-smashing thing, he started to pay attention more. I get the feeling not too many people told him no."
Loki nodded. "'The mug-smashing thing,'" he repeated. "Asgardians are famous for it. He is famous for it. And you're right, of course. It's probably been a good half a millennium, at least, since he was last told no. Well, at least until he got himself banished."
Jane shook her head. Half a millennium. Phrases like that could still catch her off guard and throw her for a loop. And half a millennium – or more, since Loki was obviously just throwing out a phrase for effect – with essentially no boundaries…of course Thor had been arrogant. But he'd reined it in quickly when she'd really called him on it. Maybe somebody else should have been doing that all along. "We had a chance to talk the next day, when he figured out his hammer was out there in the desert and I drove him out there, but he was reluctant to tell me much about himself then. That night he was a lot different, when he came home after going out drinking with Erik. I guess that was after you…had your little talk with him," she said, eyes flickering around the jamesway. She didn't really want to go there again with him. "He was really driven when he was going in for the hammer…what I know now was the hammer. He was like a force of nature. He said he was just going to get whatever it was and then fly out. And I kept thinking I hoped he wasn't crazy, because he really sounded crazy. And then later, we went up on the roof and…he finally started to open up to me, and we were talking, and he was just so…" Jane felt herself blushing and turned away more fully for a moment, rubbing her neck self-consciously. Gentle. Warm. Strong. Comforting. Reassuring.
Loki saw the softening in her eyes and was grateful that she stopped. He didn't need to hear this. How he'd crushed Thor, apparently sending him broken-hearted and humbled straight into Jane's arms. How Jane had then worn away his rough edges and made him into someone who would die for mortals and give up his woman for monsters. It was sickening. "You were drawn to him," he said quietly.
"Yeah," Jane said, turning back to him. "Yeah, I guess you could say that."
Loki's expression changed. "I hope you don't think yourself unique. Everyone is drawn to him."
Jane lifted her eyebrows for a moment, but otherwise didn't react. Neither agreeing nor disagreeing would be helpful, and this, she was fairly confident was more of an expression of Loki's jealousy and disproportionate sense of sibling rivalry and what often seemed downright hatred than a comment about Thor himself. And she didn't want to get into any of that again right now, either. "Can we go back to the time travel?"
Loki dipped his head. It was a preferable topic for him as well, albeit one he had to watch his tongue more carefully on.
"Why didn't you tell me about any of this? I mean, if all you were really doing was testing it…why keep it a secret?"
"I wanted to tell you. I almost did, twice, I think. But I didn't know if it would really work…and I didn't know if you'd approve." He knew, of course, that she wouldn't approve of just about anything he'd thought about doing with Pathfinder's new function.
"I don't approve," Jane said immediately. That was an oversimplification, though, and she felt compelled to be honest with him. "But I understand the desire for knowledge, the excitement of a new discovery, and…the inability to leave something alone that probably should be left alone. And it really should be left alone, Loki. It's like the grail, from the Indiana Jones movie. For every good thing somebody might want to do, to…to try to fix history, to right wrongs, there'd be someone else ready to act selfishly or just do outright evil instead of good. And even the things that seem good…there's no way to know what the repercussions would be. Maybe averting one war causes another to be fought instead, an even worse one. Maybe saving one person's life" – Jane paused to swallow, seeing her parents waiting in the car for her again – "causes problems in someone else's, or even means other people die instead. There's just no way to know. Do you know about the grandfather paradox?"
It took Loki a moment to catch up with what Jane was saying; her arguments seemed bizarre to him. Why should he worry about what might happen to some unknown person, if he was able to make the changes in history that he chose to? Then he remembered Nigel. That was exactly what Jane was talking about. And it had bothered him. But that had happened as a result of a pointless change in time. If it were something truly worthwhile – something Jane might call "good" if she chose it – wouldn't it be worth whatever collateral damage was done? "No," he said, once he realized there'd been a question to him at the end. "I assume it's something related to time travel, and I told you, this is a forbidden subject on Asgard."
"All right, well, it's an idea that comes from science-fiction actually, the kind of book you got in trouble for reading when you were a kid. You can take it in a lot of directions, but the basic idea is that you'd be creating a big problem in the universe if you went back in time and killed your grandfather before he had kids, because you'd be preventing yourself from ever being born. But if you prevented yourself from being born…then how did you go back in time and kill your grandfather? There are lots of theories that try to deal with the consequences of that…but it's all just speculation. If-"
"Then what's the point? Why concern yourself so greatly over speculation? I've already done it, Jane. Has your realm come to an end? Have you observed any catastrophes lately? Has anything that matters changed at all?"
"Would I know it, if it had?"
Loki rolled his eyes at that. "You worry too much. I know what's changed. I still remember that when I first arrived here, I had never had the misfortune of laying eyes upon Wright before. And I remember months later, seeing him at the station six months earlier. And I have no intention of traveling to the past and killing my grandfather."
"Loki, you still aren't listening," Jane said, getting frustrated. What she was trying to explain seemed, to her at least, eminently logical, basic common sense, once you thought about it a bit, but Loki just didn't seem to get it. Or maybe he doesn't want to get it, she thought. "Let me give you another example of a paradox," she continued.
Uninterested in her paradoxes and paranoid fears, Loki drew on centuries of experience of listening to speeches he knew were entirely empty to sink into the privacy of his own thoughts while outwardly appearing to still be listening, even nodding at the occasional change in intonation. As soon as he'd declared he had no plans to kill his grandfather, he'd seized on the idea. When he thought of "grandfather," he thought first of Bor, Odin's father. He'd never met either Bor or Fjorginn, Frigga's father – both had died in battle before his birth – but it was Bor whose exploits were legendary, Bor who'd led Asgard in conflict after conflict, and Bor who'd greatly expanded Asgard as the conflicts dwindled and the population grew. It was Bor whose statues were found throughout Asgard and on several other realms. It was Bor whose legacy Loki had grown up believing was part of his own heritage.
Going back in history and killing Bor…the consequences would indeed be enormous, and probably for every single person living on all nine realms. But it wouldn't prevent him from being born. With no Bor, there would be no Odin, and with no Odin, what would be the odds that some other Aesir king would have come along and found him there slowly starving in a Jotun temple? I would have died there. As they meant me to. As I was supposed to.
The thought gave him a shiver, and he turned quickly to thoughts of his other "family," giving Jane a nod and a raised eyebrow, though he had no idea what she was saying at this point. His true grandfathers – true only in the sense that they had lain with the women who had produced Laufey and Farbauti who in turn somehow produced him – he knew little to nothing about. Laufey's father was named Rasfarey and had ruled over Jotunheim in a time marked by frequent unrest in the realm; of Farbauti's forebears Loki knew nothing. What if he managed to kill Rasfarey before Laufey Rasfareyson was born? He didn't know enough about Jotunheim to speculate on how much difference it might make there, but Jotunheim had grown more united and more aggressive under Laufey – perhaps several thousand people of the other realms would have lived instead of being pierced by ice blades or encased in ice and shattered.
No Laufey also meant no Loki, not even a cast-out infant, and Loki next found himself dwelling on the implications of that. Thor would have spent his childhood without a brother, but then Baldur would have come and the two of them would have become best friends once their age difference lost significance. Odin wouldn't have been stuck with a discarded plan for a son, Frigga wouldn't have had to mourn the loss of her youngest…Baldur would have reached his nineteenth birthday and the Trials and other rite-of-passage rituals of his twentieth and probably hundreds and thousands more birthdays beyond that. Exactly what I wanted to accomplish. And the other consequences? Several thousand people of the other realms would live. "Did you mourn?" he'd asked Thor. "We all did," he'd answered. Even if that was not entirely a lie – Frigga had told him after his return to Asgard how much she'd grieved, and he believed her even if he couldn't fully accept her love, and Thor, wrapping himself up warm and tight in the lie of their brotherhood, had perhaps grieved in his own naïve way that ignored the fact that he'd been raised with a Frost Giant – things had gotten even worse since then. Who would mourn me now?
His eyes had been on Jane the entire time without seeing her, but now he really looked. Her face was animated, her eyes bright and alive as they always were when she talked about astronomy and physics, and apparently "science-fiction," too. She sometimes looked like that when he told her some story or experience from his life. She might. But if he'd never come here, she would have simply done the work she'd planned to and befriended even more people here without him monopolizing her time and working so often in secret with her.
"Do you get it now?" Jane asked, confusion wrinkling her brow as she realized how much Loki's expression had softened, and even saddened a bit, she thought, at the end. Quantum mechanics talk didn't usually cause such reactions, but she figured maybe he was getting it now, and understanding the dangers inherent in time travel.
"I hear what you're saying, Jane," Loki said, the question drawing him back to the conversation. "But I simply don't share your concerns. You speak as one who's never done this. I speak as one who has."
Jane sat back and sighed. This was going nowhere. A new idea occurred to her: if Loki had no exposure to science fiction to really make him think about and grasp these concepts, maybe a few choice books or movies would open his eyes. Back to the Future immediately came to mind – she'd watched it with a group maybe a month and a half ago, and invited Loki but he declined – and Marty McFly slowly fading out of existence because he'd messed up the events in the past that should have led to his parents falling in love.
"Allow me to give you another example," Loki said, forgetting his dark thoughts of a moment earlier and indulging again in mining Jane for reactions. He wasn't sure what she'd think of this, but he knew it would get her attention, and hopefully distract her from her ceaseless efforts to win him to her cause. "Wright isn't the only person I've spoken to while visiting the past."
"Who?" Jane asked reluctantly, bracing herself for the answer.
"You." A grin spread across his face.
Jane's frown melted into confusion. "I never met you before that day in Sydney."
"Wright doesn't think he met me in November, either. I made myself look like someone else. Don't worry," he said before Jane could speak, "that's not what happened with you. In Christchurch, just after we reached our hotel, do you remember when I asked you if you wanted to go for a hike?"
"Yes, I remember thinking you were a…" A jerk, she was going to say, before her thoughts suddenly changed tracks. "I remember thinking SHIELD must have told you I was into hiking. And then later, I guess I…I just assumed it was a coincidence. But it wasn't a coincidence, was it?" she asked, eyes widened.
"It was not. I watched from across the street. My past self was still checking in at the reception desk, and I knocked on your door."
Jane shivered. Future-Loki watching her from across a street, then knocking on her door. She remembered then how he'd smiled at her in a way that seemed, at the time, a little odd, and a little overly personal. Because I didn't know him then. But he knew me. "Have you done any other creepy stuff with me in the past? Or anybody else?"
"No," Loki said, noting Jane's look of suspicion with distaste. He wondered if she would find the book he'd given her "creepy." It had hardly been his intention. What she would think of it didn't matter, of course; he'd never tell her how that book had wound up in her room. "You are actually the only person I ever specifically sought to interact with. Otherwise, I avoided interacting with others when possible." The latter wasn't particularly true, but he felt Jane needed the reassurance. "So you see, I even changed your past, in a sense. Not in any way that matters. Nothing was different because I spoke to you then."
"I was more annoyed at you."
"You were annoyed with me from the moment we met, Jane Foster. Do you really think those few seconds made any difference in the course of our…getting to know one another?" He'd been about to say "relationship," but that didn't seem quite appropriate somehow.
Jane stared at him, but he stared right back, and she couldn't help thinking he was right. "That doesn't mean you should have done it. It was a big risk."
"Life is a risk."
"Okay, that's it, I give up. For now, at least." Arguing with Loki could be like arguing with a brick wall; at least the brick wall had gotten a better handle on his temper. "I never went to bed last night, and I'm beat. I want you to tell me about all of your tests. Not the programming, I know we already went through that, but what you actually did. But let's do it tomorrow morning when I can think more clearly about it. For now I'm going back to the station. I want to get in a quick call home and- to Erik," she clarified, when she saw Loki's face instantly harden. "And then I'll get some work in at the Science Lab, as much as I can, and then I'm going to hit the sack early."
"Fine," Loki said, mostly because it was the path of least resistance and he saw no point in arguing at the moment. He knew what "talk about it some more" meant: Jane would lecture him some more about why time travel was wrong-wrong-wrong. He had to come up with some way to convince her she was wrong. Some way to show her that it… "Show me," she'd told him with a sense of urgency, once she'd realized he was telling her the truth about his time travel discovery. What if I show her? he wondered, watching as she started pulling gear back on for the trip back to the station.
/
Thanks to all for reading, reviewing, faving, etc.! I'll keep this brief because I'm beat. But quick aside to guest reviewers: "jacquelinelittle" - I LOLed at Jane distracting Hitler with art projects - I'd forgotten he once was trying to be an artist. It's a marvelous idea. What quirky little things make up big historical events! And good song recs, too - though the Swedish one, ouch! And "melluky," glad you (and a couple others who noticed) enjoyed the Loki-liking-Jane-in-green line. Coming to a chapter near you!
Teasers for Ch. 96 "The One Not Called Harvest" (ha): Loki has an idea; Jane has a chat with Erik that's good, with a side of uncomfortable; Jane continues to wrestle with her conscience, her emotions, and the hit her level of trust in Loki has taken; Loki wrestles with Jane and with fabric.
Excerpt:
"Are you feeling better?" Loki asked, watching Jane carefully to judge how she would react to his offer.
"Yeah," she said, trying to smooth her hair back down from the balaclava and neck gaiter she'd just pulled off. "I slept really well."
"Good. Because I have a suggestion, and it would be best if you were feeling well for it."
