Beneath

Chapter One Hundred Eleven: Journey

Loki had drilled her on various things going wrong, from her presence being questioned to the carriage rental guy being missing to the business having burnt down and temporarily relocated. Instead it was a quiet sunny day in Alfheim's capital, everything and everyone exactly as they were supposed to be, other than the surprise foot-washing and massage upon arrival. The whole area around the portal was largely deserted; it was a politically inappropriate time for the Light Elves to leave their realm, and the Aesir apparently delayed their plans until the next decade if it was raining when they woke up. The side of Jane's brain that couldn't stop worrying about unintended consequences feared that no other travelers being around was actually worse, since their presence would be all the more memorable. She tried to remind herself that here she was walking around not with Lucas, just another winterover Polie, nor with Lakmund, a random Aesir, but Prince Loki of Asgard, second in line to what Jane supposed was the most powerful throne in the universe. They were going to be memorable no matter how many people were or weren't around, and she'd come to terms with that before they left.

The carriage rental guy turned out to be a carriage rental woman, who tried to get Loki to take their best carriage, but he explained that he didn't want to draw attention and detract from the focus on celebrating Nadrith's ascension to the throne. A few minutes later Alfheim's version of a modest carriage was driven out in front of the stone and wood building they stood before. It wasn't much different from a carriage on Earth – a carriage was a carriage, she supposed – four wheels, covered compartment that was smaller than she'd imagined, of light tan leather and dark metal, a bit of what looked like gilding around the edges but otherwise pretty simple, a seat up front where a Light Elf sat holding the reins. Just one horse pulled the carriage, a chestnut brown one with darker legs, tail worked into a tight braid, the mane in a series of smaller braids. White flowers she'd seen along the garden paths were liberally worked into every braid. It brought a girlish smile to Jane's face; she'd never seen a horse with braids.

"Let's go," Loki said, stepping between Jane and the carriage.

Jane nodded; she'd missed the final transaction and Loki glibly charging the bill to his past self, which was probably for the best. After packing away his cloak, Loki held out his gloved hand, and Jane bit her lip to hold back a giggle. "Kind of princely," she'd said earlier, when she first saw him in this outfit. What a stupid thing to say, she now thought. Here, where he was considerably more in his element than inside a Korean War-era jamesway tent, he looked positively gallant, his pale face practically glowing in elegant contrast to the dark green cloth and black leather and his jet black hair. The past on Asgard or Alfheim had no sense of "past" for her, other than seeing little Thor and Loki on Asgard, but now Jane felt for a moment that she really had stepped back in time, maybe to medieval Europe or something, and Loki was a prince and she was a princess.

Of course, Loki really was a prince – and one who was beginning to look a little less gallant and a little more impatient – and she was just a scientific researcher who apparently got all too easily swept off her feet by princes. She put her hand in his and he helped steady her as she got her feet up on the rail and then into the open carriage door. He climbed in after her, pulled the curtains across the windows on their left and right, then rapped his knuckles twice against the front of their compartment. A second later the carriage gave a slight lurch, and then they were moving smoothly forward.

Jane got up and opened the curtain on her side; Loki got up and closed it back.

"I want to see. You may've seen this a thousand times but I never have."

"We aren't here for sightseeing."

Jane shot him a sour look. "Is there something else we should be doing at this exact moment? Something that would prevent us from having a look outside?"

"I thought you wanted to keep a low profile."

"I just want to look out the window, Loki! I think that's a pretty low profile."

"Lower your voice, Jane," Loki whispered. He formed a sound blanket around them, and struggled to close it just as he did back at the South Pole. He stood up, hunching over because the carriage wasn't really tall enough for him to stand up in. "Move over."

"Why?"

Loki clenched his jaw for a moment, trying to keep his temper under control. "Must you be the most stubborn woman in all the Nine Realms?"

Jane looked up at him and cocked an eyebrow. "Must you order me around without any explanation?"

Loki ran his hands over his eyes and sighed. "You will have a better view out this window," he said, pointing to the window on his side.

"Oh," Jane said awkwardly, trying not to let on that she was a little embarrassed that she'd made such a big deal out it when he'd actually been giving in to her demand. "You could have just said so."

"I just did," Loki said, impatiently holding out a hand in the direction of his vacated seat.

Jane looked at him a moment longer and found herself smiling a bit at the weird déjà vu. Thor had worn a big grin when he said that back in Izzy's Cafe, but there had been no less arrogance behind it. Neither of them meant any harm, though, not in those particular moments. "I guess you did," Jane said, sliding across the leather-covered cushion. "But it would have been more polite if you'd just said that first."

Loki rolled his eyes and took Jane's seat, while Jane leaned forward and opened the curtain. Politeness wasn't on his mind at the moment. Strange that it had ever come to be on his mind, that Jane had come to expect it from him. Now, though, he was anxious, inexplicably so. They had a long carriage ride and then a long walk ahead of them, with nothing left to do, really, until they reached Niskit's home. His nerves tingled with anticipation and there was no good means of letting out the nervous energy.

Jane watched out the window. There wasn't much to see, really – trees, sidewalks, the occasional intersection giving her a glimpse down a couple of other streets and a few buildings with each with signs out front, mostly two or three stories tall, a few elves here and there, some of them on horseback. She glanced over at Loki to see if he was giving her that smirk he liked to wear so much, wondering if the views were actually on his side now, but he was staring blankly in front of him, not paying her the slightest bit of attention. They were only skirting the edge of the city, and heading further away from it as they went, so maybe her view really was as good as it got.

A few minutes later Jane could tell they were definitely moving uphill, and a few minutes after that came the view she'd given up on. The city was down below them, a silvery river snaking through the middle of it, tall buildings that looked unusually thin spiking upward, nearly all of them topped with some sort of roof on stilts. They were too far away to really see architectural details, but the buildings didn't shine like the spires of Asgard did, and Jane figured whatever they were made of here, it wasn't gold. "What's the second roof?" Jane asked as they began to descend and she lost the view.

"Second roof? Oh. It's not a roof. They're called canopies. Louvered screens that divert the energy from the suns. The process powers the buildings and prevents them from getting too hot."

"Huh. How do the-"

"I have no idea."

"I didn't even get my question out."

"You didn't have to, Jane. You're rather predictable. How do the canopies work – that's what you were going to ask, wasn't it?"

Jane shot him a look of mostly feigned annoyance, then laughed. "Yeah."

"You always think I have the answers for everything."

Jane's laughter grew. "Me?" she asked when it subsided. "You're the one who always thinks you have the answers for everything."

"Hardly," Loki said, looking toward his window for a moment, though it was covered. But now was not the time to dwell on all the answers he did not have. "If I asked you how…how a microwave works, would you know?"

"Yes," Jane said with a nod. "It uses electromagnetic radiation in the microwave spectrum to speed up polarized molecules in the food, which causes a build-up of thermal energy, and-"

"Never mind. I don't actually care. What about a car? The engine."

"I'm a little rustier there, but yeah. Remember, I told you my granddad used to get me and my dad tinkering on his old cars, and he showed me how everything worked."

Loki shook his head in exasperation. "The car's electronics, then. The…the airplanes we flew here on. There must be something of your realm that you have little understanding of."

Jane thought for a moment. There were plenty of things she was completely ignorant about, but while she had no real experience with airplanes, she figured she knew enough about the scientific aspects of flight and basic mechanics that she would be able to answer Loki's questions about it, if he actually had any. "I've always wondered how the postal system works," she finally said.

"The postal system," Loki repeated drily. "The one in which you put your hand-written correspondence in an envelope, apply a stamp, and the post office directs it to its recipient?" When they'd first arrived at the South Pole, the post office there had still been open for a few more days, and Loki remembered hearing about it. He'd never thought there was anything particularly noteworthy about it.

"That's the one. But think about it. From the Pole, they put the letters on a plane and take it to McMurdo, and then to New Zealand. Okay. Then what? Those letters are addressed to people all over the world. It's not like they have planes there ready to take your individual letter to New Mexico in the States, and the next person's to Rome, and the next person's to Tokyo, and the next person's to some tiny village in Slovakia or something…how do they get it all organized and to its destination, no matter how big or small or how far away, and so quickly? The US is a big country, but you can send a letter from one small town on the West Coast to another small town on the East Coast and it'll be there in a couple of days. I guess it doesn't seem so interesting, but I've always wondered."

The postal system, Loki thought again, picturing Midgard with its enormous landmasses and seemingly infinite political divisions. "They must have a system in place of routing the mail through the larger cities, then the larger cities distributing the mail to the post offices in the smaller locales."

"That makes sense, but there's still a lot of big cities, and if you start shipping the mail from bigger cities to smaller cities to still smaller ones…I mean, how do they manage that in just a couple of days? There's no bifrost here, you know, just trucks and planes."

Loki mulled it over. "I wish you hadn't brought it up. Now I want to know."

"When all this is over, when everything's calmed down…you find out how those canopies work on Alfheim and I'll find out how the postal system works, and we'll exchange stories. Deal?"

Loki watched Jane, careful to mask any reaction. What does she really think will happen 'when all this is over'? Surely she isn't so naïve to think we'll be sitting around telling stories and laughing like old friends? Surely she understands this will all truly come to an end. Perhaps she simply prefers to think of it that way, in the moment. She will prepare tacos for me and tell me about Midgardian mail delivery, and I will tell her all about Ljosalf engineering. It didn't sound bad, actually. But it was a deluded fantasy permitted only by the strange isolated environment of the South Pole in its long winter. It would not survive the sunrise. Or, possibly, the end of Odin's curse. "We'll see," he finally said. It was the best he could offer. He didn't have it in him to look in Jane's eyes and tell her such a bald-faced lie, one that at some level, she too must recognize as folly.

Jane sat back, disappointed. For a while there, Loki had relaxed, but now he seemed closed off again. They were going to have to talk about what he planned to do with the rest of the winter once they got back. And more importantly, what he planned to do once winter ended and the station reopened. Once they left Niskit's, they'd have several more hours' travel before they returned to Asgard and then to Earth, and she thought that would be the perfect time to bring it up.

A few minutes passed in silence. There were no more hilltop views, and Jane knew from Loki's maps that they were truly leaving the city behind now. She closed her curtain and glanced up at the ceiling of the compartment – soft light emanated from it somehow, but she couldn't see a bulb or any other light source in what looked like a regular leather covering. "Why didn't you tell me about the massage and all? I asked you what those benches were for."

"I didn't know about it. They haven't practiced that in ages, not at the portal entrances. It must have been because of the succession. And when I came here for that the first time, I used the bifrost."

Jane nodded, then lowered the hood of her cloak and pushed the long folds behind her shoulders to peer at her arms again. She saw Loki taking a look as well. "What about you? You don't get sunburned?"

"I did as a boy, when we visited here. Once very badly." He'd thrown up, he'd passed out…he'd been utterly miserable, in severe pain that Eir could only lessen, not fully alleviate. Thor had been fine. Pink-cheeked and thirsty, but fine. Was it because beneath his pale skin he was a Frost Giant? "What happens to Frost Giants in the water? Do you melt?" Thor had asked with a sadistic grin. He hadn't really asked that; it had come from Thanos's lackey. But he might as well have asked. What happens to Frost Giants under Alfheim's intense sunlight? Do you burn?

"You aren't worried now?"

"Once I reached eighteen, maybe nineteen, it didn't bother me anymore." And that had seemed normal enough at the time. Now he wasn't so sure. Why had his body aged and strengthened so similarly to those of the true Aesir? He had no idea how Frost Giants aged, or even how long they lived. Laufey had not seemed old, but he thought he remembered studying that he'd been a rather young king when he began terrorizing other realms. And as he thought about it, he realized he had no idea what an old Frost Giant would look like.

"Must be nice," Jane said, pressing a finger to her arm and watching the color fade and rush back in. She really needed to avoid returning to the South Pole with an honest-to-goodness sunburn.

"Mmm."

"So when you were a little boy you were running around getting scrapes and bruises and broken bones the same as boys on Earth?"

"More or less," Loki said noncommittally. He didn't know much more about Midgardian children than he did about Frost Giant children – he suspected that being attacked by dinosaurs was rather outside the normal realm of childhood experience on Midgard – and he didn't really want to think any further about such things. "You've been enjoying yourself today," he said to change the subject. "You were quite eager to get underway back on Midgard. If I didn't know better I'd think it was you who needed to make this trip."

"You're surprised? Are you kidding? Don't get me wrong, I wish it wasn't in the past, my opinion about that hasn't changed. But I'm on another planet. Again! I'm the first human to ever set foot here. The first human to confirm the existence of a habitable planet in a binary star system. I'm walking around a planet full of elves, for God's sake. Yeah, I'm excited." Loki gave her a small smile; he seemed distracted, and she could understand why. This wasn't a sightseeing trip, as he'd pointed out more than once, but it was unavoidable that for her it did have an element of that. And she was curious to meet Niskit.

"It was your brother that gave me the taste for adventure, you know," she said a moment later. It wasn't so long ago that she wouldn't have dared say such a thing, but things had been different between them for a while now – Loki had been different for a while now – and she felt she could take a chance that he wouldn't be too upset by her bringing up Thor.

Loki looked away and held his tongue; there was nothing worth saying at the moment. Jane didn't seem particularly upset by her recollections of the "adventure" Thor had brought her, but he couldn't imagine that she'd found the Destroyer blasting her little town apart terribly enjoyable.

"I mean I guess it was always in me, but…there's just not that much opportunity for adventure when you're a broke astrophysicist whose theories have been rejected by every reputable scientific organization on the planet. And then Thor came along and changed all that. Everything got so crazy."

"I'm sorry you had to experience that," Loki said quietly, still looking at the curtain over his window.

"I'm not. It was fun."

He turned to face her. "Fun?" He thought it was some kind of jest, perhaps an odd form of irony he hadn't encountered before, but she looked perfectly serious. "What are you talking about?" He'd seen her there, on Midgard, throwing herself over Thor's dying mortal body. She wasn't having fun.

"Yeah. I helped him break into a heavily-guarded government facility."

Loki narrowed his eyes in surprise. "You did," he said with obvious skepticism. At least she hadn't been referring to the Destroyer.

"Uh-huh. Well…I drove him there, anyway. He did the actual breaking."

"I imagine he did," Loki said drily. He hadn't known Jane had been there the whole time, that she'd had anything to do with Thor being there. He'd seen the men nursing bruises and sprains after Thor, even in weakened form, had fought his way past them.

"I couldn't believe I was doing it, you know? Erik thought he was crazy, and he kind of acted like he was, I mean…we just thought he was some guy wandering around the desert drunk, shouting up at the sky…"

Unable to fathom that he would be on the receiving end of such a punishment. Loki, of course, had been unable to fathom that at first, too.

"But I just knew something extraordinary was happening. Like a feeling in the gut, you know?" Jane asked. She waited for a response but didn't get one; she figured she may as well continue – he didn't look like he was on the verge of one of his legendary explosions of temper. "We were driving out there, to that compound they built up around the hammer, and I was just praying he wasn't a lunatic because Erik warned me not to help him. I told him I'd never done anything like that before, and he said he did all the time. And I guess he really did. Both of you. I mean, look at us here, now. If you had told me I would be doing anything like this a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have believed a word of it. Would you?"

The question caught Loki unprepared. He didn't like hearing Jane talk about Thor like that, like he was some hero, a brave adventurer out charming Midgard's scientists – he was supposed to be enduring a punishment, not flirting with mortal women and co-opting them into his attempts to circumvent that punishment. "Would I what?" he asked. Would I co-opt mortal women into my attempts to circumvent punishment? The comparison weighed uncomfortably on him. Thor was nothing to do with him, and any similarity there was purely coincidental.

"Would you have believed a couple of years ago that you'd be here, on Alfheim, ninety years in the past, sitting next to a Midgardian?"

Getting punishing enchantments removed, enchantments placed there by Odin, who isn't my father, seen off by Frigga who isn't my mother and Thor who isn't my brother, prince to king to nothing… "No," he finally said, again averting his eyes. "I would never have believed any of it."

Jane nodded, though she figured Loki probably didn't see it. He looked sad. Subdued. She hadn't seen him that way often; it wasn't really in his usual staple of moods. It didn't sit well on him, she thought. Maybe it was just that she wasn't used to it. "What were you like ninety years ago?" she asked, to keep the conversation going. "Not the friendliest guy in the world, huh?"

Loki took a deep breath and sat back, then turned to look directly at Jane. He wasn't going to spend this carriage ride curled into some metaphorical ball licking his wounds. "I was as friendly as I needed to be," he said, an odd smile quirking his lips up. "Ninety years ago…I was bitter and jaded and yet still so naïve…I still had hope then."

"You don't have hope now?" Jane asked, wondering how far in history you had to go back to find a time when Loki wasn't bitter and jaded.

He thought it over a moment, but clinically, dispassionately. He did have hope now, he thought – he wouldn't be here going to see Niskit if he didn't – but he couldn't quite put a name to exactly what that hope was for. "Hope" was perhaps not even the correct word for it; it was more of a raw need, something dark and violent and aching for satisfaction. With Jane sitting beside him, he thought it best if he simply let that elusive desire lie undisturbed. Whatever it was, it was not the naïve hope he'd foolishly held on to for so long. That, like love, was for children. "Not the same hope," he finally said.

"Okay, so maybe you were a little bit more of an optimist."

"Maybe so," Loki agreed. He wasn't entirely sure it was true, but he wasn't entirely sure it wasn't, either.

"What was Thor like ninety years ago?"

"We aren't going to see him."

"I know. Loki, I'm counting on you to help make sure we don't. But I'm just curious. It's so hard for me to really imagine that you've been out living your lives since the tenth century, even when I've seen it with my own eyes."

"All right. Ninety years ago…he was just as he was when you met him. Arrogant and vain. Irresponsible. Careless. Your people used to believe that the universe revolved around your planet, yes? Thor believes the universe revolves around him."

"Believes? Present tense?" Jane asked, snapping out of a memory of Thor strolling confidently down the middle of Puente Antiguo's main drag, apparently expecting the cars to part like the Red Sea for him. "You know he's not like that anymore, don't you? He sacrificed himself for all of us in Puente Antiguo."

"How very noble and generous of him," Loki said sarcastically.

"Yes, it was," Jane asserted.

"Parading down the middle of a street with no armor and no weapon, where everyone can see his grand gesture, so he can be lauded for all eternity…a true son of Odin," Loki said, his voice steadily growing more poisonous.

Before Jane's eyes, anger and hatred transformed his face, his voice, his entire body language. Though it had been a while, she'd seen this before, and she remembered when reactions like that used to really scare her; she knew by now that it wasn't directed at her. And this time it was different. Maybe not Loki, so much, but her. She was different. She felt like she was watching the whole thing from the outside…like she was watching a performance. Loki was performing. For her, for himself, she really didn't know. He professed to hate Thor, to hate Odin…but for a second there, she saw beneath the mask. Maybe he did really hate them, but behind his venomous words was so much more. Until recently, he'd thought he too was a "true" son of Odin. It had made him bitter and angry to find out he wasn't. If he'd really hated Odin, he would have rejoiced to learn he was not related by blood.

"So are you," Jane said softly, not reacting in the slightest to Loki's posturing.

"So am I what?" Loki said, skin around his eyes stretched taut as he silently threatened her not to say he was a son of Odin.

"You can be noble, too. And generous. I've seen it."

Loki deflated a little and looked away. Noble and generous. He gave a short laugh through his nose. He would love to see Tony Stark's reaction to Jane calling him that. Or anyone's, really. Thor's, perhaps. That might be amusing. "You see what you want to see," he said once calm had returned.

"I mentioned Huntington's to you just that one time, and you tried to go to the future for a cure. Maybe you were trying to prove something to me, fine, but you could have chosen any infinite number of things to do in the future, and you chose that. Don't tell me that wasn't noble and generous. And you came after me when I rushed off to Asgard, and you caught me in your dusty thousand-year-old net."

"Don't end that tale there, Jane, you haven't yet gotten to the part where I nobly restrained you on the bridge and generously let you keep all your ECW gear on."

"Did you hear me say you were perfect? You also bought me sweet logs. Two, I might add. That was generous."

"I bought them with counterfeit money."

Jane laughed and shook her head. "You always do that. What, you can't take a compliment?"

"I can take many compliments. We perhaps define the word differently. I have a reputation to uphold."

She thought that one over for a minute. His expression had changed considerably by the end, in that rapid way his emotions and attitudes could, and if it wasn't quite a smile he wore, it was at least neutral, relaxed…a smile by comparison to just a moment ago.

But Jane thought it was sad. There was something good in him. Truly good. Unstable and chaotic and spiteful and angry, yes. But good, too. Did he really not see it? Did he really not want it to be seen? He might disdain anything good she tried to say about him, but he cared what she thought; she knew that, too. On more than one occasion he'd tried to make her understand something he'd said or done, something that she found incomprehensible, but that made some sort of sense to him. He wanted her to understand. He wanted her to see his side. Not always. Sometimes he just wanted to rant and rave and push her away.

Because she was getting too close? Because he was getting too raw?

"Maybe you could change your reputation."

Loki shook his head slowly, almost absently. "You're incredibly naïve, Jane. It's understandable. You're very young. When I was your age…I was much the same. Do you remember what I told you about freedom? You are what you are. You can't change. Some things…are simply as they were meant to be. As they must be. You can run from your destiny, try to pretend it isn't so, try to prove it isn't true, but that's futile. It's a lie. Life's greatest lie. Life's cruelest lie. So you can run from it," he said with a single nod. "Or you can embrace it."

"Maybe those aren't the only options. Maybe you don't have to run from it or embrace it. Maybe you can…I don't know, confront it. Challenge it." Jane wasn't totally sure what they were talking about anymore, or what exactly Loki meant by running from his destiny, but she thought he was saying that he had no choice but to be the Loki of Stuttgart, the Loki of New Mexico and New York. She hoped she was telling Loki that that wasn't true. That he could be the Loki of the South Pole. That Loki was still far from perfect…but she liked him.

Loki remained silent for a long time, thinking over what Jane had said, even as part of him resisted doing so. Confront it. Challenge it. The thought made him want to revert to running. He gave a short laugh. His running, too, had been a lie, leading him right back to the unavoidable truth. He'd learned to embrace it as a guest of Thanos.

Finally he turned to Jane again. "Let's just focus on the immediate goal for right now, hm?"

"Okay," Jane said after a moment. You don't need to convince him, she told herself. When have you ever convinced him of anything? Just talk to him. Just listen to him. Try to help him see reason when he starts going off the rails.

"Besides, I thought you wanted me to tell you all about Alfheim's dual star system."

Her face spread into a slow grin. "Now that you mention it…"

/


/

Hours passed, and everything was going remarkably according to plan. They'd arrived in the town of Darpin, left their carriage and driver, and slipped easily right back out of town. They attracted some stares along the way – a familiar pattern of eyes falling on Loki, widening, then shifting to Jane, then usually some sign of respect, which Loki returned with a curt nod. He was right, though; nobody was grabbing for cameras or phones or whatever the local equivalent was and snapping off photos for the tabloids. Not that I noticed, anyway, she thought, remembering Loki telling her that she had probably been surreptitiously recorded on Asgard. Even if someone did manage to take a picture of some sort, it would be hard to recognize her, with her hair completely hidden from view, face partially hidden, and even the general shape of her body concealed by the cloak as well.

When they were alone again, except for the occasional fellow traveler on foot or horseback, their conversation resumed, mostly Jane asking questions and Loki trying not to get exasperated as he tried to answer them. As they walked and talked, Jane realized that she actually needed to actively remind herself that she was on another planet. They were on a compacted dirt road, grass growing over it in clumps here and there, tall evenly-spaced trees that reminded Jane of Colorado's Quaking Aspen lining both sides of the road, and more trees beyond those, some of them shorter and flowering in gorgeous purples and yellows. There was nothing magical or even particularly alien about it; Jane supposed that, like the carriage, a road through the woods was a road through the woods, pretty much wherever you were.

"So have you ever seen it?" she asked when Loki told her about an extremely rare alignment of Alfheim's two suns and three moons.

"Twice. It was considerably more exciting the first time. I was eleven," he leaned in and whispered, as though it were some conspiracy.

Jane looked up at him and smiled. She could easily picture Loki at eleven, now that she'd seen him at ten.

"Mother made it a big event for us. We studied it in our lessons, we built special viewing boxes since we were too young to watch it directly, and then we spent the whole day at the palace observatory."

"Nadrith was there?"

"He was." Loki thought back to that day. It was a very long time ago, and at eleven, giddy with excitement over the eclipse, his attention was hardly on Nadrith. He remembered Thor running around confidently, taking the lead as he always did, and himself happily following him. How strange it must have been for Prince Nadrith, heir to the throne of his realm, to look at twelve-year-old Thor and know that one day Thor would be more powerful than him.

Unless, that is, Nadrith and the other allied realms defeated Thor and Asgard…

"It must be hard on Thor, to be at war against people he's known all his life, people he maybe once considered friends."

"Yes, it must be," Loki said in a voice devoid of sympathy, unlike Jane's, "but that is his own foolish fault. I tried to warn him, to remind him who Nadrith was, and as usual he wouldn't listen. It's only Nadrith, though – he's the only one from the same generation, more or less, and the only one Thor called a friend."

"I thought all three of you were friends."

"We were. But I understood the boundaries of that relationship."

Jane glanced up briefly at Loki before focusing carefully on the path in front of her, not that it was all that uneven. She nodded, to herself more than anything. Boundaries were important, and recognizing when you were approaching them, and certainly when you were crossing them – all that was also important. They were also easy to lose track of.

They walked in silence for a few minutes, Loki reflecting on how much of their conversation today had been centered around Thor. They rarely spoke of him, though he was, as the Midgardians put it, the elephant in the room – a rather apt metaphor, in fact. Loki would not be here in Alfheim's past, would not have ever gone to the South Pole at all, were it not for Thor's undiscussed relationship with Jane. He would never even have met Jane were it not for Thor. Yet Jane usually avoided bringing him up, and Loki, generally speaking, would prefer never to have to utter that name again. Today, though, it hadn't bothered him – not very much, anyway – and he wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. The ice-bound South Pole had doused so much of the fire in him. It was more comfortable without that fire. He realized he was at that very moment smiling at the thought – at the memories he had there, the routines he'd established, the pseudo-friendships he had. Carlo had even invited him to visit his family's horse farm. If he only knew…

But the South Pole was a microscopic blip on the timeline of his life. Even if he wanted to stay there and live out his life as Lucas Cane, he could not. Other things awaited him, things that would not be so blindly benign, and he would need that fire. He would need that rage, that hatred, that turned his spine to steel and purified his thoughts. He would have to get it back…but he supposed he didn't have to right this minute. Instead, he started thinking about a question he'd long wondered about, but had never been willing to ask.

"Do you think of him often?"

Jane turned to Loki in surprise, as soon as her first instinct to ask "who" passed; she knew he didn't mean Nadrith. Her mind raced as she tried to think through how to answer. Loki had never asked anything like this before. By unspoken agreement, it was something they simply didn't talk about, except in the most tangential ways. "Are you sure you want to ask that?"

"I wouldn't have asked otherwise," he answered, keeping his voice steady and flat.

Jane nodded, and looked around her to get her bearings. There weren't a lot of landmarks along this road, but she knew from how long they'd been walking that it couldn't be more than another fifteen minutes to Niskit's village, and might be as little as five. Loki had to know that, too, and he wouldn't risk creating problems for their visit to her.

"Well…I guess it depends what you mean by 'often.' I thought about him all the time when he first left. He promised he'd come back for me. I expected he'd be back soon. You know, as in, the same day. And then when he didn't come back that day, or the next, I thought, I'll just have to find him. I thought about him every day. Then when he still didn't come back, and no more signs of Einstein-Rosen bridges appeared, I guess it started to become more about the science than about Thor." And sometimes I wondered if he'd forgotten about me. If I meant anything to him. She wasn't willing to say such things to Loki; if he wanted to find something to needle her with, she didn't particularly want to hand him this on a silver platter. "Now…I try not to think about him too much, I mean, I try not to worry. It sounds like things are pretty bad for Asgard right now, and I know he must be out fighting all the time, and no matter how strong he is, he could still get hurt, he could still…he could still die. And I really don't like to think about that. Sometimes I think about the memories, the things we shared."

"Are you in love with him?" Loki asked before she had a chance to go on talking without answering.

"Woah," Jane breathed, eyes widening. The question itself wasn't so strange. Darcy was the first to ask her, Erik had asked, Phil had even asked in his casual-yet-not-casual deadpan way, and Tony had asked within thirty seconds of their first conversation. That Loki was asking shocked her so much she was almost surprised she hadn't stumbled and fallen flat on her face. It had never been an easy question to answer. Maybe in those first few heady days. "Um…I don't know? We had something… It was just so short. That thing that you can't quite put your finger on but you know it's there. We just…we need more time, you know? Time when he isn't rushing off back to Asgard."

"He will always be rushing back to Asgard," Loki said. He knew it was unkind, and he hadn't intended to say anything to goad her, but he couldn't stop himself, and he pushed aside the tiny bit of guilt that was trying to pull at him. It was true, after all. Thor would inherit Asgard's throne as he was always meant to, never mind that it was technically still Loki's – he'd never voluntarily given it up – and Jane would grow wrinkled and gray and possibly fall victim to Huntington's, while Thor held on to Gungnir.

Jane frowned, but she wasn't upset by Loki's words. He could say much worse, if he wanted to. "I know that being with Thor wouldn't be easy. I know there would be challenges. But I try not to think about that, either. I'm not planning the rest of my life here, or his. I don't even know what he wants. We've never been able to talk about it. But love, real love, with trust and respect and everything you need in a good relationship, it's so rare. Every relationship has its challenges, and okay, maybe this one has more than most, but I'm not going to walk away from it out of fear of the future, before I even give it a chance."

Love and trust and respect. Loki thought this was one of the strangest conversations he'd ever had in his life. If this were just a few years ago, he supposed he could be having a friendly conversation with his potential future sister-in-law. But the very idea was ludicrous. Jane was Midgardian. It was hard to imagine Odin ever approving of such a thing. It was still hard to imagine Thor desiring such a thing. Yet for all Loki had believed the Midgardians to be beneath him, and in a sense of course they were, he could not dismiss them as he once had, least of all Jane. He trusted and respected her. He wondered how much Thor did, or if he just thought she had a pretty face and a nice figure. Attraction to the exotic. To the first woman he knew for certain wasn't interested in him because he was Thor Odinson.

Most importantly, Thor was not his brother, so whatever the future that Jane faced unafraid held, she would never be his sister-in-law. It was a darkly humorous idea – "family" dinners that Loki would join, taking his place at the table as though nothing had happened, smiling as Thor and Jane whispered secrets in each others' ears.

He smiled then himself. Thor and Jane had no secrets. He doubted it, anyway; they hadn't had time to create any. He and Jane, however, had plenty of secrets known only to each other. Thor would never share the type of secrets with her that he did.

"Why are you so curious about me and Thor after all this time?" Jane asked when Loki said nothing further.

"I'm not. Nothing more than idle conversation for a long walk."

Jane turned his way and shot him a skeptical look, but he wasn't looking at her, and though she pulled few punches with Loki now, on this of all things she was still not going to push him. It was miracle enough that they'd actually discussed her and Thor's undefined relationship and everything stayed calm.

"And it's time for such conversation to cease now," Loki added as they rounded a bend. No one else was on the road, but a grain silo appeared before them, the sign that they had reached the village.

They quickly veered off the main road down a side street, and then another; they were soon following garden alleys between plots of land. In this way they encountered only a few others as they walked, and with his cloak back on and the hood up, no one seemed to recognize Loki. He'd never wanted to be known in this village, for the sake of his privacy, and his route drew on a few centuries of experience. Just a few minutes later they were cutting up through the alley right next to Niskit's house, an imposing tall stone wall blocking her actual house from view.

Something didn't feel right. Literally.

Jane turned, realizing Loki had fallen behind her. Loki, whose legs were practically twice as long as hers, never fell behind her. His head was angled toward Niskit's wall, away from her. "What is it?" she whispered. Birds were chirping and some kind of insect was buzzing, but her voice still seemed loud.

"Probably nothing," Loki said. He hoped it was nothing. Magic had been worked into this wall. He wasn't sure he would have noticed it if he hadn't recognized Niskit's work. He still wasn't sure what the magic did; it was just something that was there that had never been there before, faintly and subtly humming across the surface of the stones and mortar.

Jane immediately grew nervous. If nothing was wrong, Loki would have said "nothing." "Probably nothing" meant something was wrong. Loki kept going, though, so Jane kept going, too, following his lead. She knew the route; Loki knew this village and this house.

They turned the corner and came to the gate, a simple wood and wrought-iron one. Loki pressed the buzzer on it. They waited for what felt like an exceedingly long time. Niskit should be home. If she had errands or people to see, she usually did that in the morning. It was already midday here. He hoped it was nothing. But he wasn't going to ignore it like he did on Svartalfheim.

Jane grew antsy as they waited out in front of Niskit's house where anyone could see them. Half a dozen times she'd asked Loki what they would do if Niskit wasn't home. He'd said she would be home. When pressed, he'd said they would wait. When pressed further, he'd said if they had to wait long, he could probably get them past her gate.

Finally a small panel slid open and a lined face appeared in it. The face wasn't really there; as Loki had explained, it was a projection controlled from inside the house. Looking carefully, there was a certain flatness to the image that gave away that bit of magic-slash-science.

"Loki? What are you doing here?" Niskit asked.

"Do I need an excuse? I wanted to see you," Loki said with a teasing smile.

Jane's eyes briefly widened. She had never seen Loki put on such a show of charm, and it had come out of nowhere.

"It's not a good time."

Loki faltered at that. Niskit sometimes groused at his unannounced visits, but she'd never tried to turn him away…not while she was sober, anyway. "I do actually need to speak with you about something, Niskit. I won't stay long," he said, indicating with both words and tone that he expected her to welcome him.

"Are you alone?"

"I brought an acquaintance. You don't know her. She's from Vanaheim. I vouch for her."

"Tell her to step up."

Jane exchanged a glance with Loki; he stepped aside and she put on her best smile which felt rather awkward then moved in front of the panel. "Hello," she said, wondering if she ought to stand on her tiptoes.

The woman frowned sharply at her and gave a huff of displeasure. "All right. Come in, but be quick about it."

The panel snapped shut, and a click sounded on the gate. Loki pushed it open, then stood aside for Jane to pass. Their eyes met as she did so. Jane was nervous. He couldn't blame her. While Niskit did not always precisely embody Alfheim's general culture of hospitality, she was not acting herself. He broke eye contact with Jane to sweep his gaze around the large pebbled yard they walked through now. Nothing looked amiss. Nothing but the height of the trees had changed here in all the years he'd known Niskit.

When the front door of Niskit's clay brick house was some twenty feet away, Loki leaned down to whisper in Jane's ear. "She's acting a little oddly, but everything will be fine," he said in an attempt to reassure her. Jane had more than once told him he wasn't very good at reassurances, though. And perhaps she was right, if reassurance meant turning a blind eye to warning signs. "If, however, you see any candles with odd-colored flames, or any candles at all arranged in a circle, stay away from them at all cost, and keep behind me."

/


I got a kick out of the fact that so many of you used the word "fun" in comments on the last chapter. It was indeed meant to be fun. Our Heroes deserve a little fun...before things start "getting real," as they say. Well, who knows what's going on at Niskit's? Maybe nothing. Maybe something. ;-)

Thank you as always for commenting - I appreciate every review.

Previews from Ch. 112: Jane does meet Niskit...yeah, and that's all I'm telling. ;-) Oh yes, and Thor confronts Nadrith again.

Excerpt (there's not really much I can give you, but let's introduce Niskit):

"All lies," Niskit said, eyes flaring wide for a moment – Jane thought it gave her a look of madness – before smiling.