Beneath
Chapter One Hundred Five – Deals
[Thursday, May 27]
Jane spent the entire next day holed up in Loki's room behind a sound barrier. A few minutes at such close quarters with him had once made her uneasy, she remembered at one point with a wry smile, just before repeating back to Loki the entire route from the town where the coach would drop them to Niskit's village.
"Good," Loki said. "But you left out the distances between the turns."
Jane sighed. "What difference does it make? Are you going to make me do the navigating for some reason?" She had been trying hard not to question him all day, when "not questioning" was not her natural mode; he was making the effort to point out things they would do to minimize the impact of their presence in Alfheim's past, so she was trying to repay his courtesy and respect with her own. But Jane had her limits.
Loki sat back and gazed at her steadily, one eyebrow arched. "Shall I remind you again of my little excursion to Svartalfheim?"
"The one with the…consciousness sucked out of your body and…no, that's okay." She did want to hear it, actually. She was curious. But he got angry when he talked about it, and she knew how much Loki wanted them to focus on preparing for Alfheim. He was anxious for her to learn every detail in his mountains of notes and sketches and maps.
"We need to be ready for the unexpected. What if we become separated?"
That was a sobering thought. Stuck on another planet, alone, lost, in the past? "Okay, let me look at the distances again. And let's try really, really hard not to get separated." Jane looked down at the maps Loki had drawn of the portion of their route they would make on foot. Then she looked back up at Loki. "Also that consciousness-sucking thing? Let's try extra hard to avoid that. I prefer for my consciousness to be right here where it belongs," she said, tapping the side of her head with a pen – a normal Earth one now. A Paper Mate, to be precise.
"As do I, believe me. We shall make every effort to avoid it. Niskit doesn't drabble in the same dark energies as Brokk, so there should be no risk of it. Not that I entirely trust Niskit either, of course."
"Of course," Jane echoed, feeling sad for Loki. She wondered if there was truly no one he trusted anywhere in the universe, no one except, strange though it may seem, her. "So, Brokk. Is that your supposed friend that you mentioned? The guy you fought, with the others…with the swords and knives and all?"
"And the fire needles and the consciousness-sucking, as you so eloquently put it, yes, all of it. But you need to memorize these-"
"We've been at this all day. Give my brain a little break, okay? There's a 'Brokk', or I think it was 'Brokker' or something, in mythology."
"Really?" Loki asked in genuine surprise and interest. He was tempted again to read this book of Jane's, or simply look into the mythology online, but there was too much in it, simply from what Jane had told him, that he had no desire to see in cold black and white print.
"It's been a while since I read it now…something about a contest, and a bet you made, about who could make the best magical objects."
"Hm. What did I make?" he asked. He'd never really made such things himself. He occasionally bought them or ordered them custom built, but it had been a long time since he'd needed to use objects to channel magic.
"You set up the bet, but you weren't making the objects. That was Brokk, and…a group of brothers I think. And you, um, well, you cheated. You turned into a fly and bit Brokk to make sure he would lose, and he was making Thor's hammer at the time and he was distracted and made the handle too short." Jane paused, to see how Loki would take the unexpected mention of Thor. His face tightened a bit – she could almost see him closing himself off as the undisguised interest faded into a mask of indifference – but he didn't seem angry or even annoyed. "Brokk still won the bet somehow, but then the story turns gross."
"Did Thor bash Brokk's head in for ruining Mjolnir?" Loki asked, eyebrows raised, unable to hide his renewed interest. Better if he could be the one bashing Brokk's head in, but the story would still be a good one if someone else got to crush his skull, even if it was Thor.
"No. You had bet your head, but when Brokk…I guess came to collect, you said that his claim on your head was fair, but he couldn't take it without harming your neck and he didn't have any claim on that. Somehow that so-called logic saved your life-"
"I'll have to remember that. It's a valid point."
Jane ignored his smirk and continued. "So instead…Brokk sewed your lips together to silence you."
Loki sat in silence for a moment. How ironic, he thought, and wondered if somehow his ability to use magic to do that had somehow trickled down into Midgardian myth. More likely a coincidence. "With needle and thread?" he asked coolly.
"Awl and leather."
"What kind of a story is that," Loki said, making a show of his distaste to hide his discomfort. "Brokk ruined the hammer, and I get my lips sewn shut?"
"Well…you made him ruin the hammer."
"Oh, shall we argue about it now, Jane? Quibble over details in this piece of fiction? While my lips drip blood?" he demanded, leaning forward and angling his not-bleeding lips toward Jane's eyes.
"Okay, you win," Jane said with a shiver, shrinking back in her chair. Loki, too, sat back, relaxed now, with a self-satisfied grin of triumph on his face. She shook her head and rolled her eyes at him. "So, no truth in that one, I'm guessing."
"No. Well…other than Brokk being a double-crossing, back-stabbing, lying, cheating-"
"I get the picture."
Loki grinned deliberately. "It ranks right up there with the story about the horse."
Jane let out a surprised laugh that sounded embarrassingly like a snort. She rested her elbow on Loki's desk and hid her face behind her hand for a few seconds, until she could look up again and pretend she hadn't just made that sound. "So what about Niskit? Is she a…a friend?" Jane asked. She hoped the answer was 'no'; she wasn't sure she wanted to meet anyone else Loki called a friend, if Brokk was any indication.
"In a manner of speaking. More of…perhaps a mentor, at times. An interesting person who had interesting tales to tell, and was always willing to listen to mine and keep them in confidence."
"Hm. She sounds nice. I guess you kind of grew up under a microscope and it must have been a relief to have someone outside of it all to talk to."
"Often so, yes. She always took me in and let me stay as long as I wanted. But I wouldn't call her 'nice,' really. She's a bit of a firebrand."
Loki wore an expression that Jane might actually call "fondness," and that sent her thoughts in new directions. "Was she…more than a friend?"
Loki looked at Jane with confusion for a second or two, before his eyes widened and he was stifling a laugh. "Niskit might set you ablaze for suggesting such a thing." The laughter broke through. "Or not. I really don't know. Niskit is…oh, over 4,500 years old. I don't have a problem with older women, as you may recall, but that would be a bit much. Besides, she remains devoted to her husband. They'd only been married a few decades when he perished in a war with Svartalfheim, four thousand years ago."
"That's a long time," Jane said, eyebrows raised.
"Mmm," Loki said noncommittally. Niskit had never said much about her husband, though he knew she was still angry over it, thousands of years later, and it would burst forth at unpredictable times. It struck him now that he'd tolerated her outbursts before but thought them irrational. Now he had a better understanding of what it was to be so angry you felt like every cell in your body screamed with it and you might explode from the pressure, and yet to hold onto the anger and nurture it and bathe it in still more of its kind because you had nothing else to cling to. Niskit's was a sad existence, he thought uncomfortably. He would not become her, though. He would not sit around for thousands of years nursing his anger but doing nothing to make use of it, strengthening his skills with magic but doing nothing of any significance with that either, his whole life entirely devoid of purpose and meaning. An empty shell…
Loki watched Jane as she picked up the papers they'd left off with and studied the maps. There was no need for such morose thoughts. Niskit surely didn't think of herself as an empty shell, and Loki had never before thought of her that way either, and whether she was or wasn't was beside the point – that was not his path.
A few minutes later Jane rattled off the route, this time with the distances. Loki smiled with his nod; she was doing well.
"It's short-term memory, though. I'll need to study it more to make sure it sticks."
"All right. I'll test you on it in three days."
"In three days? On Sunday? You test me on all this stuff every ten minutes."
"These are not tests, Jane. Merely little checks. The tests will be slightly more involved," Loki said with a grin.
Jane might have called it an "evil" grin, had she not guessed Loki wouldn't take it well, even though she'd mean it only as a joke. "Okay, Professor Cane, let's go on to one more lesson then call it a day. It's almost dinner time and I'm getting hungry," she said, taking her water bottle from the floor and drawing down a few swallows.
"Niskit's town," Loki said, flipping through his papers and pulling out a series of eight pages. "It's called Rombakkin. There's nothing particularly significant about it. It's a small town, village really, home to craftsmen and artists and a few service professionals."
"One more thing, sorry," Jane said, pausing in her note-taking.
"Go ahead." Loki lowered his hands and let the pages rest against his lap.
"Just another thing to put on the 'stuff to avoid' list. Being set ablaze. I'd really like to not be set ablaze."
"If she tries," Loki said, giving her a serious, somber look, "I'll do my very best to stop her."
"Yeah, you still need some work on that 'how to reassure people' thing," Jane said with a wry smile. She knew Loki was joking in his attempt to instill less-than-complete-confidence in his intentions, but she wouldn't have minded knowing whether he was serious about Niskit having some kind of inclination toward setting people on fire. "Okay, tell me everything I need to know about" – she glanced down at her notes – "Rombakkin."
/
/
[Friday, May 28]
The next afternoon, just before lunch, Jane was racing through her work – the work SHIELD had sent her here for – and finding the "racing" part hard. One of her instruments had detected increased muon activity, and there were a couple of other interesting results coming in as well. Were it not for Pathfinder and what she was attempting now with Loki, she could have easily immersed herself in the data on her screen for days on end. Instead she had to focus on capturing it properly, putting it through the proper analysis software, and getting it organized to send back in her regular data package to SISI, where Tony might not ever look at it but SHIELD probably was. The data she was collecting here, especially once she'd located Yggdrasil's mouth, could fuel an entire career's worth of research and discoveries and theories and publishing and massive leaps forward in mankind's understanding of physics.
And that was the tip of the iceberg. She hadn't even had a chance to look at the data from their time travel to Asgard, though she was beyond eager to dive into it. Loki had uploaded it to her work laptop…but it was still out in the jamesway, and she hadn't been back there since returning from Asgard three days ago. She kept thinking she'd go out there for a couple of hours in the evening, but after dinner Loki left her with "homework" – more studying, more memorizing – and her brain was too fried from it all to make the effort, not to mention she'd first have to get him to tell her the password he'd put on it.
She massaged her forehead with her left hand and exported another string of data with her right, then let her eyes drift closed. It was quiet in the Science Lab; everyone else had already gone to lunch. If she concentrated, she could still feel the sun on her face and arms, the gentle breeze lifting the scent of wildflowers to her nose, Loki's presence right beside her, relaxed and in his element…and then there was that other moment. Eyes still closed in reliving the afternoon and evening on the hillside, she felt an echo of it even now. She'd felt so close to him then, and she'd yearned for his nearness… a little more than she should have.
Jane opened her eyes, took a deep breath, and let Asgard slip away. She was a professionally-driven woman, too much so at times, really, but she was still a woman. She needed emotional closeness. She needed a shoulder to lean on, friends to laugh with and cry with, and none of them were here. She'd gotten to know a lot of the other winterovers by now, but she was closer to Loki than any of them by far, and she'd let a boundary get a little lax. Maybe because if there was any man on the face of the Earth she'd thought she wouldn't need to be aware of those kinds of boundaries with, it was Loki. It had never gone past a thought, though, a flicker of a feeling, and Loki certainly hadn't shown any inclination to let her arm linger around him even in simple friendship. It was nothing, really – a moment of need that at the time had shaken her more than was warranted.
She closed her eyes again, and this time pictured the sky. Already the memory was getting hazier. There was just so much visible in the sky beyond the bifrost, and it wasn't even fully dark. She wondered what Thor was doing now, if he was fighting, or still Acting King, sitting on a throne and doling out kingly decisions, or resting, or maybe looking up at the same sky she had been. She wondered if it was a similar time of year there now, if maybe the sky did look the same, a thousand years later. Thor seemed very distant now, and not just in light-years. When she imagined that he was looking at the same sky, though, he seemed a little closer.
This time her eyes flew open. My sketch! She'd forgotten all about it, distracted by being yanked into Selby's room before she'd managed to retrieve her notebook where she was going to copy it. She looked down at her desk and started shifting papers around, thinking it should be there, but then remembered she'd slipped it into the drawer because Wright was standing over her shoulder and it was easier to put the sketch away then face more questions about it. When she opened the drawer, though, it wasn't there. She frowned. She knew she hadn't taken it out, and she hadn't put anything else in the drawer since then; she was more of a stack-stuff-on-top-of-the-desk person, really. Wright must have taken it, she thought, and that was just great because she'd said it was just a doodle and if it was just a random doodle then why would she ask him about it to get it back?
It was just a doodle, she told herself. It's not like I remembered it all perfectly to begin with. With a sigh, she let that go, too. She was fairly confident she'd see Asgard again someday – she refused to seriously entertain the thought of Asgard losing the war it was fighting, and what that might mean. When she did…she'd just have to bring her camera. And maybe a small telescope.
Jane closed the desk drawer and went to lunch.
/
/
"Why Niskit?" Jane asked as she and Loki sat down at his desk for the next round of preparation for Alfheim.
"She's very good. Talented, powerful, clever…and highly skilled with placing magic on a person. That gets rather complex. She's also quite familiar with magic being placed specifically on me."
"Has this happened before?" Jane asked in surprise, shifting in the chair she'd moved down to his room again.
"Odin searing his little lessons into my flesh or using my foot as a pin cushion? No," he answered, angling his chair to more directly face Jane. "I used to let her practice on me."
"I guess I don't know exactly what she was practicing, but despite what you said yesterday it sounds like it must take a lot of trust."
"I suppose it does sound that way. And there was trust, to an extent. But don't be fooled, Jane. She let me practice things on her, too. We got what we needed from each other."
"That sounds really…transactional. And disturbing." Jane was hit with the sudden and strong urge to ask if Loki had any real friends out there, but she was a little afraid to ask. Not really of Loki's potential reaction…more of the answer itself.
"It isn't disturbing. It's appropriate. All I want from her is a simple transaction."
"What does she get from you?" Jane asked a little more nervously.
"A challenge. A chance to undo the All-Father's enchantment. It's a fair deal. She'll enjoy it. She'll learn from it. I should have gone to her first." Loki spoke with no real warmth toward Niskit; Jane was right. Although he'd never thought of their relationship in those terms – it was rather transactional. The extent to which Niskit opened her home to him and listened to his troubles – which he censored only minimally – did not negate her occasional mean streak, and the extent to which she'd kept his ranting in confidence did not negate the fact that when he'd first planned to go to her for help, before learning of the trap on the bifrost, he'd fully intended to kill her once she'd done so to prevent her from revealing that he was free of Odin's shackles before he was ready to do so.
Jane, meanwhile, drew her head back in surprise and confusion. "Who did you go to first?"
Loki's confusion echoed Jane's, but then he realized he'd never actually told her why he'd gone to Svartalfheim, or why he'd met with Brokk. He opened his mouth to explain, then stopped himself, clamping it shut again. He'd been about to tell her everything. Almost everything. She didn't need to know anything about that ill-fated journey – it had no bearing on the one they were now preparing for except as a cautionary tale – but he'd been about to tell her anyway. Even now, as he considered it more deliberately instead of simply answering because she asked, he couldn't really see a reason not to tell her. Yet he remembered the day he returned from Svartalfheim with crystal clarity, remembered everything he'd felt and thought…remembered refusing to tell Jane anything about the journey other than that her silence about the tension with Svartalfheim had nearly cost him his life. When did it all change? he asked himself, not for the first time.
"Loki, who did you go to first? Not Brokk…was it?" Loki wasn't denying it, and she took that as confirmation. "Back in the beginning of April? You were already trying to get your father's enchantments undone then?" The thought bothered her a little, though she wasn't sure why. Maybe just because it reminded her that he'd lied about his purpose in that trip…and that he could be lying about other trips, too.
"Yes, of course. My control of magic had already been diminished then. And it was already clear I'd been abandoned," he added for good measure, though the phrase stung. The last thing he needed was Jane doubting this mission. "Thor was here for three days, I remind you, with his hammer as a signal to indicate when he'd…righted his wrongs, learned the error of his ways, whatever exactly it was," he said, waving a hand through the air in dismissal of Thor's speedy "accomplishment."
"All right, all right. You don't have to go through all that again. I remember. So you…you went to Brokk for help, and he…what? Threw fire needles at you and did the consciousness-sucking thing and the…pain directly into your mind thing and…" Jane gulped. She hadn't really tried to think through any of those things he'd told her – it was so far beyond her experience she didn't know where to begin – and she hadn't asked him about it because he'd only told her about it there on Asgard to get a rise out of her. "No wonder you want to be prepared on this trip."
"Niskit is not Brokk. But Svartalfheim, and especially Brokk, reminded me of the value of an overabundance of caution."
"I guess so," Jane said with a slow nod. "So why did Brokk turn on you like that, anyway? You said you were old friends."
Loki looked away, and his gaze fell on his bed, where every night he permitted himself to sleep he also risked being tormented in his dreams, for if Thanos couldn't get him delivered in chains to Jotunheim, apparently he thought a little long-distance memory-twisting for old times' sake was the next best thing. He wouldn't tell Jane about that. He'd already had to highlight his vulnerabilities to her to convince her of the necessity of the trip to Alfheim's past; she didn't need to know about further weakness. As for the rest…it would do no harm to tell her. He wanted to tell her. His gaze shifted back to Jane. "I suppose you might say he found a more useful friend."
Alfheim was forgotten as Loki told the tale.
"Brokk explores dark magic."
Jane nodded as though she understood; she didn't, of course. She wondered if dark magic had anything to do with dark matter or dark energy, but these were just names, things called "dark" because there was no direct means of detecting them, not yet. Probably, then, they were not related, but she could tell Loki was settling in to tell her something serious, and her curiosity could wait. It turned out to be a wise decision, because then Loki actually explained…sort of.
"As you know, energy takes many different forms…energy and potential energy. Positive and negative, heavy and light, visible and invisible, simple and complex, fast spinning and slow spinning and no spinning, and so forth."
Jane nodded again. She thought he might be talking about the components of an atom.
"Some forms are pliant, willing to bend when those who are able to manipulate them desire it. Other forms are resistant, in a sense, defiant, requiring either great power or an outside catalyst, or both. Brokk seeks out those resistant forms and…experiments on them, you might say. In that unknown lies great potential, but also great risk. And, frankly, a great deal of boredom, when all your effort comes to naught, as it does more often than not," Loki added, recalling how he used to humor Brokk and his experiments, after the thrill of dabbling in forbidden dark magic wore off and approached tedium. "Sometime before I saw him again in April, his effort resulted in a new discovery. I don't know how he did it, but somehow he gained the ability to separate his consciousness from his body."
Jane wondered at first if his "resistant" forms of energy had anything to do with fission and fusion and nuclear power reactors and nuclear bombs, but apparently not, because as far as she knew neither fission nor fusion had ever separated consciousness from body…except in the sense of death.
"Freed of his body, he was able to wander the cosmos unhindered, apparently…and eventually someone noticed him. Someone I happen to know as well." He paused and looked to the side for a moment, wondering about that for the first time. "I suppose he grows bored on his desolate black rock of a world and has nothing better to do than scoop up drifting souls and set them on land to see whether they're worth keeping or should be tossed back. Unfortunately he decided Brokk was worth keeping."
"Who?" Jane asked, then bit down on her lower lip. She'd told herself she wasn't going to interrupt.
He met Jane's eyes again. "He decided I was worth keeping, too."
Jane looked at him in confusion, but a second later she figured it out. "The Chitauri's leader?"
"His name is Thanos," Loki said resolutely, though he'd be lying if he said it didn't send a slight shiver down his spine to speak it aloud to someone else. "Not that it matters. Brokk found Thanos…or more likely Thanos found Brokk. Thanos," he continued, deliberately saying the name as much as possible now to make up, in a sense, for the earlier shameful fear that had once kept him from speaking the name aloud at all, "is full of grand promises. Whether he keeps them, I don't know, because the deal he made with me fell through, and there remains a minor point of disagreement over with whom exactly the failure lay. As I mentioned before, Thanos and his Chitauri army failed, but he believes I was the one who failed, and it would seem he's nursing a grudge."
"But you…you said he wasn't going to try to get revenge on you," Jane said, head spinning a bit. Loki's tone was so blasé, as though he were talking about losing a local election instead of not managing to conquer a planet. She knew he wasn't remorseful about what he'd done, and she had accepted that as well as she could, but she preferred to avoid actively thinking about it, and hearing Loki discuss it so matter-of-factly was disquieting.
"I said he wasn't personally trying to get revenge on me, and he isn't. Why lift your own enormous wrinkled finger when someone else can do it for you? He's using a proxy."
"Brokk," Jane said, as things began to click into place. All those things Brokk had done to Loki had been on Thanos's behalf, because Loki lost Earth and the Tesseract.
"Brokk is his primary proxy, yes. And through Brokk, he has eight realms full of proxies, all moving to the sound of his pipe. The war, Jane," Loki said to Jane's look of confusion. "Why do you think all the other realms so suddenly decided to join hands in brotherhood against Asgard? I don't know exactly how Brokk convinced them, but I can well imagine. Each realm is led by someone with weaknesses and shortcomings no different from anyone else, with desires and jealousies and a great deal of power, but each of them individually is less powerful than Asgard. Stroke egos in just the right place, inflame petty grievances, underscore inequalities, whisper melodic words of glory, promise a magnificent idyllic future, justify it all with the trappings of fairness and righteousness and outright sanctimony, and you too can unite seven worlds in war and make them all feel pure of heart about it."
"You sound impressed," Jane said quietly, still trying to let what Loki had said sink in.
"It's impressive," Loki said, nodding once. "Classic manipulation, but on a phenomenally grand scale. But think it through, Jane. Do you remember the three conditions for peace that I told you the other realms have demanded of Asgard?"
"Jotunheim's Ice Casket, the Tesseract…"
"And me."
"So this is…this is all about revenge on you? This whole war? That's so bad Asgard has to get food from Earth?"
"There is not even the tiniest bone in Thanos's tiniest overgrown finger that is ever nice. You think it a bit overly dramatic? I was to take Earth, Jane. He was to take the rest of the universe."
Jane shook her head in disbelief. "The universe? You're serious? How do you take the universe?"
"I suspect with a great deal of death. But hopefully we'll never know. I was never terribly enamored with his end of our bargain, but I had no say in it."
"How much say did you have in your end?" she asked. He'd given no indication of it before, but if he'd been forced, coerced…maybe that would be worse for him, but it would certainly make things easier for her.
Loki saw the look of hope she wore and felt his temper flare. "Don't delude yourself. I am no one's puppet. I acted in my own interest, exactly as I've learned I must."
"But…was it your idea? To try to conquer Earth?"
"It was not," he admitted after a moment. And there was that nauseating hope again, the hope he felt compelled to crush. "But as soon as I was told of the possibility, it had my full support. Make no mistake, Jane, I wanted this realm. I wanted it badly. For what it represented."
Jane swallowed and looked away. They'd been down this road before. She knew exactly what he meant by that. Thor had promised Phil to protect Earth, right in front of her. "And you didn't care what you had to do to get it," she said hollowly.
"Not particularly." Jane's eyes flashed but she kept silent, and Loki found himself wishing she would yell at him, tell him how cruel and evil and monstrous he was. It would be easier. Simpler, at least. This was uncharted territory, where Jane called him "friend" and did not wave stacks of paper with names and pictures of the deceased in his face or run outside to vomit in the snow. "You know what I am…in part…and you saw what I did. I didn't do that for Thanos."
"Okay, Loki, I get it. I get that you wanted it, and that you don't regret it. But please do me a favor and don't sound so…smug about it, okay? Those were real people that died, just like the people here at the Pole."
Smug? Is that how I sound? It wasn't how he felt, not that he really knew how he felt about it; he hadn't done much thinking about it since the days following his trip to New York's recent past. He'd only wanted to make a point, to disabuse her of the naïve notion that his was a good and noble heart that had simply been corrupted by Thanos, manipulated like the weak-minded petty rulers maneuvered into war against Asgard. Perhaps it had been a mistake, though. He didn't like the way Jane was looking at him. "I don't mean to be smug. I told you…I am short-tempered, and sometimes I…" I say things I don't mean. Or I do mean them, but not quite the way they sound… Or I do mean them the way they sound, but it's the sound I want, and not the meaning…
Loki shook his head and started over. "I was supposed to command the Chitauri army, but it never really worked that way. I was distracted by your Avengers, and the Chitauri acted on their own, or under Thanos's or his lackey's orders, I don't really know. Their strikes should have been well-targeted, they should have taken out the greatest threats first, the individuals known as the Avengers, once I failed to remove them from the battle in advance. Instead they engaged in random carnage, I suppose in the expectation that if they laid sufficient waste to your realm, you would capitulate to avoid your utter destruction. I…I understand that…that there were those who were truly innocent, who never tried to fight me and were never any obstacle to my capturing this realm." A random memory of the florist in New York who was losing her shop came to mind. "But that was not me, Jane. That was not my hand. I never desired their deaths, and I never intentionally caused them." He might have incidentally caused some of them, he knew – he hadn't always been paying such careful attention where he himself was firing, once he took over one of the Chitauri gliders, as he'd already admitted to himself. He'd considered the humans no different from ants, and one did not watch one's steps to avoid stepping on ants. "I told you I am not a torturer, nor am I a sadist, to delight in the suffering of innocents." He paused, licked his dry lips, swallowed. These were not easy things to say. "You will of course believe what you like. But I speak the truth, and…" And I would like it if you believed me. This was an impossible thing to say.
Jane's thoughts raced. It wasn't exactly the expression of remorse she'd long wished she could hear from him. There was still no hint that he'd ever had any concern for innocent civilian life, or that he'd been bothered by its loss, only that he'd not intentionally killed them. It was something, though, she supposed. It was a far cry better than what happened the last time this came up, when he'd flown into a rage and nearly strangled her in a rather spectacular backfire of the enchantment meant to protect people from Loki. Maybe she had been too harsh in her assessment of him then, too. At the time, she hadn't known he wasn't the one calling all the shots. On the other hand, it was still him who'd forced Erik to create the device that had directed the Tesseract's energy to open up that portal. Loki opened the door, and he knew exactly who he was inviting in; that hadn't changed.
Now, at least, he almost seemed contrite, but she wasn't sure if the hint of contrition was for the deaths he'd brought about, or because he'd been acting like a callous jerk about it. "I don't exactly know what to say to that, Loki, but-"
"That's all right," he quickly cut in. "There's no need to say anything. To go back to-"
"No, let me finish, okay? I'm glad to hear you didn't intentionally kill any bystanders. I just…I wish that…" Jane shook her head. She had nothing new to say on this, and she didn't think anything she repeated from their earlier confrontation was going to make Loki suddenly accept responsibility for what he'd unleashed on New York. "Never mind. It doesn't matter what I wish. I am glad that you didn't intentionally kill bystanders."
"You, ah…you believe me then, yes?"
Jane nodded in a bit of confusion. Is that what he's most concerned about?
"Good," Loki said with a somewhat jerky nod. The awkwardness, which Jane did not seem to feel, was almost more than he could bear. "As I was saying, then, yes, Thanos vowed that there would be a heavy price to pay if I didn't get him the Tesseract. Mind you, I was never quite certain I wasn't going to keep it for myself in the end, anyway, so I was not cowering in fear of his threats." Loki took a moment to swallow. No, he'd never cowered. But that didn't mean he'd never felt fear. He was simply too stubborn to cower. "But this is not all about revenge on me, as you said. It's all a grand ploy for Thanos to get the Tesseract, I'm certain of it. Just as certain as I am that the other realms have no idea whose hand they're really playing into in their mad machinations to usurp Asgard's power. The Ice Casket is irrelevant to Thanos. No one cares about it, in fact, other than the lazy louts it once belonged to. It's only included to make the other realms feel good about themselves. 'Yes, you see, such a massive war is awful, terrible, but we undertake it only for justice and integrity and defending the downtrodden, the poor underprivileged Jotuns whom the Aesir have so wrongfully deprived of the one tool they could use to rebuild their glorious realm.'" Loki pushed himself up from his chair, agitated, and like so many other times wished to pace, to expend some of the angry energy surging through him, but more than two or three paces in either direction and he would hit a wall.
"Thanks for the reminder," Jane said after a moment.
"Hm?" Loki said, still distracted by his roiling thoughts.
"I'd almost forgotten you don't like Jotunheim very much." She spoke dryly, one corner of her mouth lifting into something of a sad smile. It could almost be funny, how worked up this overdone imaginary monologue had gotten him, if it weren't so clear that Loki didn't find anything funny about it…and had he not happily admitted to attempting to destroy that planet.
Loki took a deep breath and sat down again. It had snuck up on him, this intense wave of disgust for those creatures and their home, but he was better off not making such a show of it in front of Jane, who knew nothing of them except what he'd told her, and likely did not fully trust his word on their wretchedness.
"Okay, setting aside the poor downtrodden underprivileged Jotuns and their Ice Casket, this Thanos, he's in this mainly to get his hands on the Tesseract, and also on you as…icing on the cake? I thought you said he couldn't travel to Asgard or to Earth, or anywhere, really. How is he supposed to pick up his prizes?"
"He…he doesn't want to get his hands on me. He said…his lackey said, which is the same thing as him saying it, he said he didn't want to waste his time…exacting revenge on me. I'm to be sent to Jotunheim to be their prisoner, to do with as they please. And as for-"
"Woah, hold on. Uhhh," Jane began, mind racing, "you said nobody cares about the Jotuns. So…if Thanos wants you to be imprisoned on Jotunheim, it's not really because of the Jotuns, because of what you did to them, is it? Let me guess, you also gave him one of your rants about how much you hate Jotunheim. And he figured that if there was one place in the whole universe you wouldn't want to be locked up, it would be there. Am I right?"
"Something like that," Loki said after a brief pause. "Yes, that is to be his revenge on me. And yes, as you said, that is his 'icing on the cake,' not his main objective. A convenient offshoot, which it was also easy to convince the other realms to go along with. Much of Asgard itself favors the idea, I heard when I was there. Most likely, more with each day that passes and as more Aesir die for their refusal to hand over the man they already believe a traitor. I suspect they're considerably less willing to part with the Ice Casket and the Tesseract; the Aesir are an overly prideful lot." He didn't bother to mention Thor's oath; he wouldn't have mentioned it anyway, but had no confidence that it still held, either.
"Loki…why do you hate the Jotuns so much?"
"They're the scourge of the Nine. I told you what they tried to do here on Midgard. What they did do here. I know it's difficult for you to understand – you didn't grow up hearing about them, you've never seen them…." He frowned and looked away. He'd intended to go on, but lost his train of thought when he thought of the irony of what he'd just said. "You asked me once what Frost Giants eat. When I was a boy, I heard that they snuck into your room at night and ate naughty children. I was terrified to let my arms or legs be anywhere near the edge of the bed."
"I went through a stage like that, too. I thought there was a tiger hiding under my bed, waiting to eat me. But I guess…I mean, I realized pretty quickly that was a silly irrational fear, and that tigers weren't out to get me at all, much less hiding under my bed. You don't mean that you…I mean, you know that-"
Loki shook his head. "Of course I know that's just a tale, Jane. Do you think me a fool? But there are many such tales. It isn't the same as your tiger. My point was that it's not just me that hates them. Everyone hates them."
"But you're the only one who tried to destroy their whole planet."
"I'm the only one who had the nerve to do what should have been done a long time ago," he said sharply, looking her straight in the eye, unblinking. But only for a moment, and then he looked away, working his jaw. He'd been trying to explain it to her, to make her understand. Jane, he knew, would not understand what he'd just said. He shouldn't talk about this at all; he wasn't capable of doing so dispassionately.
Thor stopped you, Jane thought. It wouldn't be a good avenue to start down, though. She took a moment to compose her thoughts. "Did anyone agree with what you did?"
Loki regarded her for a moment and thought. It was actually an interesting question, and one he didn't know the answer to. He suspected that some would say so, while many others would condemn his actions aloud but wish for his success in the silence of their heart. "I was king," he said in the end. "It doesn't matter how many agreed. I knew what had to be done. But I know what you're getting at, Jane, and I'm quite confident I'm not the only one who knew the Nine would be better off as the Eight. I don't ask you to understand this. I don't expect you to. Perhaps someday, with Pathfinder, or some other means, someday you'll encounter them, though for your sake I hope not, and then you'll understand. But in the meantime…it's probably better if we don't speak of it further."
"Okay," Jane agreed uneasily. When Loki spoke more rationally, more calmly, she couldn't help wondering if maybe they were as bad as he said. But she couldn't get past the fact that Thor had disagreed, and disagreed strongly enough to literally break the bifrost to stop him. "Well, what about the travel problem, then?"
"Not nearly as much of a problem if he controls the Tesseract. I don't know what is planned for it, where or how the other realms say they will store and protect it, but I know that wherever that is, Brokk will eventually obtain it. And then it's simply a question of properly controlling and focusing the Tesseract's power to open up a portal for mass travel, or to direct a few individuals where you want them to go, anywhere in the cosmos. On Asgard, Odin and Heimdall have that ability. On Midgard, I found a way to make it work." I found people who found a way to make it work. He knew Jane was thinking the same thing, from the discomfort that shadowed Jane's face. "It may take him some time, but Brokk will figure it out, too. He'll take the Tesseract to Thanos, and then find out if Thanos keeps his bargains."
/
I've thought for a long while about slapping dates on the chapters - time perception is easily skewed in this story (for more reasons than one, ha!) because some "days" are multiple chapters, while some chapters cover multiple "days," and on top of that if you are reading it as I release chapters, you are reading them a week or (these days) more apart. If you have any thoughts on it, let me know. I can continue doing this moving forward, and have it on my "to-do" list of things to fix in past chapters, to add in dates as well. (Though don't hold your breath on that one!)
The chapter in which Loki first tells Jane about Thanos, obliquely, is Ch. 60, "Aurora Australis."
On Loki's earlier "prickliness" when they returned from Asgard - several of you mentioned it, and it occurred to me it might be worth an explanatory note. Basically, returning to the Pole was an adjustment for Loki, after what he experienced on Asgard (you can interpret that as you like), but over the next day or two he started to relax and feel comfortable again and get back into the groove of South Pole life, with his relationship with Jane further deepened once things settled.
Previews for Ch. 106: The above conversation continues (it was that or have like a 9K-word chapter!); Jane learns a little more about Thanos, and realizes this is important information...but does Loki?; Thor does his best to lead and to learn, as the challenges continue to grow...and I know you haven't forgotten about Thor's journal.
Excerpt:
"Do you swear to preserve the peace?"
He hadn't given even a second's thought to what that meant, to the degree or responsibility it would require of him, responsibility he'd promptly proven himself incapable of when he'd struck the first blow with a smile on his face on Jotunheim and thrown away a thousand years of peace, all in response to a single childish insult. He hoped he was doing better now, even though there was no peace to be found in any corner of the Nine Realms, except, he supposed, on Midgard.
