Beneath

Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five – Causation

Alone in Loki's room, Jane had to force herself to simply sit at his desk and do nothing. Loki had probably rifled through her things at some point, back when he was monitoring all of her communications, but she'd never been in his room alone before, and she was tempted now to open his desk drawers and take a look. Partly out of simple curiosity over what exactly he might keep there, but also out of nervousness over what he might have been doing all day today, and the vague thought that maybe one of those drawers might hold a clue. "Do unto others…" She folded her hands on her lap and vowed to respect his privacy.

A simple glance around his room, at what was in plain view, still made it look like he had basically no possessions, but it no longer looked like he as a total neat-freak. A towel was on the floor along with what looked like his clingy shrunken black pajamas, and strewn across his otherwise neatly-made bed were that seersucker suit he used to sometimes wear, and a pair of leather pants over the black shirt he'd bought on Alfheim. The door of his armoire was open and a green tied dangled over it. His white dress shirt had been on the chair, and was the only item she touched; she moved it to the bed with his other clothes.

She didn't have long to wait. Just two or three minutes after she reached his room and found him not in it, the door opened. He clearly wasn't expecting to find her there; he stood there just inside the door and stared at her for so long it grew uncomfortable. "Hi," she finally said.

"What are you doing here?" Loki asked, blinking heavily and pushing past the shock.

"Well…we needed to talk about a few things, and I-"

"You aren't dressed appropriately for this," he said, reaching a hand out. A few jerky twitches later he let it drop to his side again. He'd meant to make her be dressed appropriately, but the feeling of it was so alien, so sluggish and resistant, that he gave up before truly trying. He would have failed to fully make the change anyway.

Jane, meanwhile, was looking down at her clothes. She still looked and felt bulky – she'd shed Big Red and the black Carhartt overalls at the entry to the station but still had on the other extra layers she'd donned before going out to SPRESSO – but she'd never had the impression that Loki considered a tight-fitting flannel and tighter-fitting cargo pants some kind of unacceptable fashion faux pas. "Sorry?" she finally said.

"Nothing. It's just…you lack the fifteen layers of leather and armor and horns."

Jane's face scrunched up but before she could ask him what exactly that was supposed to mean she remembered. She'd once walked into her room to find him sitting in her chair, hands folded in his lap…wearing fifteen layers of leather and armor and horns. One of the last times, maybe the last time, he'd really managed to intimidate her. He'd been there to grill her over Tony finding out about his presence here. And while she had some serious questions she needed to ask him, this was not that, and if he thought it was, Jane was pretty certain it wouldn't go well. He didn't look particularly upset, though, as he stepped further inside and closed the door. "I wouldn't be able to move if I added fifteen more layers."

Loki nodded, staying near the door. It was uncomfortable now, seeing her like this, after observing her private moments with Thor, her sleeping peacefully beside him, moments when, despite what she'd said later – or earlier, he thought, struggling briefly to decide which it was and then giving up – she might have fallen in love with him at least a little, and he with her. Moments when he'd come close to spraying her with Thor's blood. Were you ever really close to that? The knife had been physically close to Thor's neck, but in retrospect it seemed even an inch would have been no different from a mile. Would you have done it, had she not been there? If Thor had tried to insult or humiliate him, or worse yet, made some overture of brotherhood when he knew that concept was dead and gone, he thought perhaps he might have. But absent a provocation… He took a quick breath through his nose. "It went well, then? Your trip out to the Quiet Sector?" he asked. He refused to ask if she were well. She looked well, and the healer had presumably examined her already. It was too late to show the concern he'd failed to the day before.

"Yeah. It was a little scary there for a couple of minutes. We were down in this buried little room, they call it the vault, when the last earthquake hit."

"You must have been frightened." As subtly as he could he looked her over more carefully; there wasn't much to see, but he saw no evidence of frostbite or other injury on her hands or face, and her pupils looked normal.

"I guess. Yeah. To be honest, it wasn't as scary as being in Niskit's basement. We had lights, and I was concentrating on trying to make sure none of the equipment we were there to work on fell off and broke to think too much about…the walls collapsing and us getting buried in there. Now that I think about it…yeah, I guess it was pretty scary," she said with a little laugh. "But we kept ourselves busy, got the work done and got out, safe and sound. Wright and I strapped everything down with cargo belts before we left. In case there's another quake."

"I'm glad it was successful," Loki said blandly. I would have protected you on Alfheim. Who exactly was going to protect you out there? Wright?! Wright might be built like a softer, less-muscled version of Thor, but he was no Thor. He would be able to do nothing to hold up a collapsing ceiling or shield her from falling objects. But then, Jane appeared perfectly hale and the healer apparently this time agreed; he supposed she'd simply protected herself. Or else she'd paid no heed to her safety whatsoever in her pursuit of adventure…and she'd simply gotten lucky.

"So…I don't mean to echo the leather and horns here, but there really are a few things we need to talk about."

"I'm tired," Loki said with a sigh. The sigh was truly his own, but the choice not to hold it back was deliberate. It had worked last night.

"It's still early. And this is really important."

Loki regarded her carefully. The steady look in her eye, the resolve in her posture… Jane had been both tired and injured last night and had let him go without an argument. Today he knew he wasn't getting rid of her without a fight. And he didn't feel up to the effort. "All right," he said, setting his satchel down on the bed along with his dirty clothes, then undoing the fastenings of his jacket and shrugging out of it and then the Carhartts. He hung them up inside the armoire and put his tie from yesterday away properly, self-conscious of the mess he'd left his room in.

Jane's eyebrows went up at Loki's attire. He was dressed more formally than she'd seen for a while – at some point he'd started favoring the henley and the sans-tie dress shirts, and while he was still dressed nicer than anyone else here most days, today he looked like some young hip business executive. "What's with the coat and tie?"

"Is there something wrong with wanting to dress well? To look one's best?" Loki asked calmly. He turned back around and slipped out of the jacket, then the tie, and put those away, too. "Better?"

"No, it's not that, I mean, you can wear what you want, it's just…" Loki was watching her, waiting for her to continue. His expression was polite, she supposed, but…not him. There was something missing, some…spark. It wasn't him, and it was kind of unsettling. Jane was pretty sure there was more to those clothes than just wanting to look his best…though if that was really it then he was succeeding. He looked really good in that suit.

"Let's go to your room," Loki suggested. "You have two chairs." It would also make ending the conversation easier, when the time came. He was certain he would be the one ending it, and Jane had kept so still in that chair that he thought she might be putting down roots.

"Oh, here, you take the chair. I'll use the footstool," Jane said, quickly rising. "I'm, uh, kind of avoiding Selby. He wanted to talk to me about something, but I wanted to talk to you first. I got away from the crowd as quickly as I could and came straight here."

Loki took his time crossing to and settling in the chair Jane had vacated, as he thought that through. Selby wants to talk to Jane, and persistently enough that she feels the need to essentially hide from him? He wondered if Jessica Higgins might have seen whatever images Gullveig provided the Midgardians, and recognized him. Despite everything that had happened since, it was just yesterday that Gullveig had come to Earth, and from Jessica's perspective, she'd seen him two weeks earlier. His "disguise," after all, had consisted of seersucker and slightly curled hair. He could have more truly disguised himself, but that, he knew now if he hadn't quite consciously known then, was part of the thrill. Strolling about this planet wherever and whenever he liked, as though he ruled it, its inhabitants utterly unaware that the man walking casually among them was their would-be conqueror, the thing they now reviled most – or, in that time period, would soon revile most. It had been a choice. If they realized later who exactly they'd seen…that hadn't bothered him in the slightest. It still didn't. His life at the South Pole was already over, even if he technically continued to live here.

"Soooo," Jane said, hoping Loki would say something first, give some hint of what he'd been up to since last night, and what was going on in his head. His eyes met hers for a moment, and then he was back inside himself.

It had felt incredible, that day. That night, spent in America's day. He'd been a man with choices. Free to do as he pleased. In charge of his own destiny… But it had all been a fantasy, incredibly fleeting, as all his fantasies seemed to be lately. "I wish it were real," he'd told Thor. The innocence and happiness of his childhood. The illusion of choice. Of freedom.

When he saw his choices disappearing, one after the other, he'd felt irrepressibly compelled to rebel for as long as he was able, to make the choice to use magic in precisely the ways Odin had forbidden, heedless of what it cost him. That overwhelming fire, too, had died down to embers that barely glowed.

Jane, meanwhile, was taking more care than she had in a while in selecting her words. She wanted to directly ask "Where were you," but she didn't want to set this up as a confrontation, and she didn't want to put Loki into a defensive mode, which might lead to him being less willing to be honest with her…or to answer her at all. She couldn't not ask, though. She wasn't Loki's mother, any more than she was his judge or jury, but when it came to Loki's presence here, she'd essentially taken responsibility for Earth's safety. Tony and the weapons she figured he'd be only too happy to level – and use – against Loki stayed away because she'd promised he wasn't a danger. And that if he became one, she would tell him. Of course, thus far, even if Loki had been doing a little extra-curricular time travel, he'd been no more a deliberate danger than Jane herself – assuming he wasn't changing history while he was at it. He couldn't help what he didn't know. He'd been really good about protecting the timeline on Alfheim, but without her presence alongside him, Jane wasn't sure how much importance he'd place on it. And while she knew his attitude toward "mortals" had improved, if it came down to a choice between causing earthquakes at the South Pole and continuing in vain to pursue getting that enchantment removed in the past…she wasn't 100% certain where he'd fall. She hoped he would choose not to endanger anyone here, but the incident with Niskit left a nagging doubt in her mind. She thought maybe he'd just snapped then, which meant there was no guarantee he wouldn't snap again, so she hoped that if she could keep things calm, reasonable, and free of finger-pointing, he would see the situation clearly and decide on his own to cease all use of Pathfinder.

This is getting ridiculous, Jane thought, and took a deep breath. "I was looking for you this morning, and earlier this afternoon, before we went out."

"I was looking for you. You were in the clinic."

"Oh. Yeah. I guess that glass did more damage than I thought. But it's fine now. Nora cleared me late this morning. I, uh… It's not your fault, you know."

"Of course not. Your centuries of training and of life experience should have told you not to linger under an opening above which danger lay. And you obviously should have diagnosed your own brain injury."

Oh, yeah. Wright totally called that. He just got the reason for Loki's guilt wrong. "It's not my fault, and it's not your fault. It's pretty clearly Niskit's fault, okay? And even then, if I ignore the fact that I really don't like her…I don't think she'd guessed I was from Earth yet then. I don't think she realized that my head can't take quite the beating yours can. So really it was just an accident. But if I'm going to blame anybody, I'm definitely blaming her."

Loki nodded. "Fine. I'll happily blame her as well."

"I mean it. It's not your fault."

"Who exactly are you arguing with? Because I was agreeing with you."

Jane frowned but let it go. She didn't know what else to say about it, and there were a lot of other things they needed to talk about. "I was looking for you later. Where were you?" Oops.

"I was around. Thinking."

"There was an all-hands, at eleven. You weren't there."

"I no longer see the point. My days as Lucas are numbered, Jane. You must know that. I choose to end them now, when I can still do so of my own accord."

"But…but we don't know that. I told you, Tony… We'll come back to that, okay? This is really important, Loki. Did you use Pathfinder today?" Loki would have found a way to ask without asking, but Jane figured no matter how hard she tried to do so herself, most of the time she would default back to the direct route.

Loki tossed it back and forth a few times in his head. The best lies were based in truth. "As a matter of fact I did."

Jane's heart sank. Not because of what Loki had done; that was another issue. Instead because there had been two more earthquakes today, and while it wasn't exactly a scientific conclusion, the evidence was looking pretty solid that Pathfinder – her Pathfinder – was causing them. Even the timing seemed to be closely correlated. The earthquakes were getting worse, and, so it seemed, they were more quickly following Pathfinder's use.

"Aren't you going to ask where and when I went?" Loki asked, genuinely surprised the question hadn't immediately followed.

"Sure, where and when did you go?"

"I wanted real food. A nice meal. So I had one. A few weeks ago. A lovely restaurant with an amazing view. Lobster. Steak. Jane," he said, eyebrows going up. He'd wanted to ask this; honesty was so refreshing. "Have you ever had a dessert known as soufflé?"

"Um…yeah. Once. My- Wait. You used Pathfinder…to go to a restaurant? In the past?"

"The past is the only option now, if you recall. The trap on the bridge on Asgard? The other portals all closed? And let us not forget Gullveig." The trap, of course, was no longer actually a problem, as long as he programmed in coordinates for Asgard so that he arrived somewhere other than the bridge. It was convenient, thus far, though, for Jane not to know that, and there was only so much honesty he needed in his life.

Jane shook her head at the pointlessness of it. At least if he was off somewhere trying to free himself of that enchantment, she would have understood that. His whim of a desire for a juicy steak could have cost lives here. Including hers. He doesn't know that, she reminded herself. "Okay, well I hope it was really good, because-"

"It was. Exceptionally good. It would have been better shared."

"Good. Because there's not going to be any more Pathfinder travel. At all."

Loki looked away for a moment and gave a frustrated sigh. "We've had this discussion before."

"No, we haven't. Not this conversation. Loki…the earthquakes we've been having here…we just had another one, I guess about two, two and a half hours ago now...they-"

"I know. I was here." And you are well. They're all well. He wouldn't ask, but that didn't stop him from taking another quickly appraising head-to-foot glance at Jane and feeling a sense of relief.

"Oh. Okay. Wait, how much time passed between your return and the earthquake?"

"I'm not sure. Perhaps thirty minutes." Laughter bubbled up then, warm and inexplicably good, in spite of the circumstances. "We've been over this, Jane. I don't cause earthquakes."

Thirty minutes. It could be a coincidence. Or it could have been caused by his departure, whenever that was, and maybe another quake was still to come from his arrival. There was no way to be certain. Unless maybe they gathered all of the exact times of every departure and arrival, and plotted them in a graph with the exact times of every quake, ran some analyses of the numbers…maybe a clear pattern would emerge… "The thing is, ironically enough, apparently you do. Not just you. Okay, not you at all, actually. Pathfinder. Maybe specifically using Pathfinder for time travel."

"What?" Loki asked in confusion. These assertions reminded him of the paranoia Jane had exhibited in his early time with her, the paranoia he'd pushed her deeper into. And such thinking would require a form of ignorance that would be surprising from Jane. "I think you must be confusing correlation and causation. It's considered a basic concept of reasoning on Asgard. Did you not study this as well?"

"Yes, of course I did. But this isn't some random correlation. Think about it. Earthquakes hardly ever happen here. There's no fault line anywhere near us. And now we've had four of them, each one stronger than the last. They didn't start until after we were using time travel."

"You're wise to question coincidence. But the concept of 'coincidence' exists because coincidence does in fact exist."

"This is too much to be a coincidence. I can't prove it, not yet. Maybe when we get more readouts from the data recorded out at SPRESSO. Maybe if we compare the timing of the earthquakes and each use of Pathfinder. The first one, the really minor one that nobody felt, was just one day after we went to Harvest Day on Asgard. Then the second was while we were on Alfheim. Then two more today." While you were having steak, Jane thought but held back from saying aloud, because that would be too petty and unfair.

"Again, this has to be merely coincidence. Even the correlation is only a loose one at best. How many times has Pathfinder been used for time travel now? Ten?" It was actually twelve; he'd left out the two trips to Puente Antiguo today. "That means twenty uses of Pathfinder for time travel. And only four earthquakes. I don't know much about this phenomenon; it doesn't exist on Asgard. But isn't it normal that they occur in…groups?"

"Yes. Foreshocks and aftershocks. But Loki…stop and think about this with me, okay? Just because there isn't a linear one-to-one correlation between time travel and the earthquakes doesn't negate the fact that there is no other good explanation for why we're experiencing this series of quakes at the South Pole. There are precisely two really unusual things going on here: time travel and earthquakes. What if we've been causing some kind of damage all this time? Maybe it started even before time travel, when we were only using Pathfinder to travel through space." Jane stood, because this was way too important for sitting; she needed Loki to accept this, because she needed to make sure he stopped using Pathfinder. "We're doing things we don't understand at all. We…we made some modifications and we ran some tests and we found that Pathfinder can be used in conjunction with Yggdrasil for space travel. And you tested it and found out that it can be used for time travel, too. But we have no idea how this is really working-"

"Of course we do. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity. The field equations. The-"

"That's theoretical physics. Mathematical formulas on either side of an equal sign. It doesn't tell us how it actually works. The mechanics of it. It doesn't tell us what actually happens in Yggdrasil, how Pathfinder interfaces with it…I mean, how is a machine communicating with a wormhole? We don't know; we just accepted that it does. And Yggdrasil's not even a normal wormhole. Einstein-Rosen bridges have two mouths," she said, holding her hands up and forming circles between her fingers and thumbs, "one on either end. Not nine, for each of nine realms. Yggdrasil's existence is…we don't have any science on Earth that accounts for that. What if what we're doing with Pathfinder is forcing Yggdrasil to do something it wasn't meant to do? We've been playing with fire and we didn't even know it. We didn't smell the smoke."

Loki wanted to scoff at this. He wanted to dismiss it. But Jane was obviously serious about it. And even at her highest level of induced paranoia, she'd never been paranoid about science. She had a point, he supposed, in that they didn't know what effect, if any, their travel might be having on Yggdrasil. The World Tree, after all, was meant to be traversed by the bifrost, or via concentrated portals, not some Midgardian machine, and it had never been used for time travel. "I want you to get rid of that book." An unpleasant memory. An even more unpleasant thought.

"What? What are you thinking?" Jane asked, bringing Loki's eyes back into focus on her.

"I'm thinking…wouldn't it be interesting…if Odin were right after all."

"What do you mean?"

"About time travel. Remember what I told you about the book from Nidavellir? The drama I came up with based on it? Odin's rather disapproving reaction?"

"Yeah, I remember," Jane said with a nod, picturing a young Loki listening to an angry lecture meant more to scare than to teach. "Yeah, I guess it would be interesting. It would be more useful if he'd've actually explained to you why it was so wrong instead of just castigating you for delving into something you didn't know you weren't supposed to."

Loki smiled, and didn't bother to try to stop himself. Where were you all my life, Jane Foster? "He might have explained it. I don't know. I was young, and…intimidated. And desperate to please. And he was more interested in making sure that I never even thought about time travel again, and clearly much less interested in whether I understood why. When I did think about it again, after realizing what was meant by the time-axis and closed time-like curves…I assumed that his tirade and the lectures that followed were simply about power. Control."

"You were subverting his power and his control by using time travel to get his enchantment removed," Jane said, looking at Loki in something of a new light. He'd never spoken to her like this before, letting her into what seemed some pretty personal thoughts, certainly not without an angry rant accompanying it. And it wasn't even a question; in the moment she spoke it, she knew it to be true. And she wondered how many other things it might be true about, this silent battle for control. "And by getting a nice steak," she then added, as another thing indeed came to mind.

Loki, meanwhile, allowed a sly smile. Jane, after all, didn't appear to be as upset by this idea as he'd expected. "I can't say that held no appeal."

Jane nodded, crooked smile on her lips. "Things are different now. We didn't know then what we do now. The risk is too great to ever use Pathfinder again, not without the extensive modeling and testing that we never did, and that's not going to happen here. We don't have the equipment for it, or the time. If we had a strong earthquake here…what if our generators were damaged and we lost power, how long do you think we can last without heat here? And do you know how flammable the jet fuel we use for heating is? What if the quake caused a fire? Two percent humidity, Loki. The station would be a giant matchstick. What if the support pillars collapsed? We can't mess around with this. We can't risk more quakes. People would die. We would probably all die."

Loki let the past drift away into the distance where it belonged and considered Jane's words. If he hadn't wanted harm to come to any of those who'd gone out to SPRESSO, he certainly didn't want… SPRESSO. They'd been out there in some underground chamber when that last earthquake hit. The earthquake that, if Jane were right, he'd probably caused. Jane could have been buried alive because of him. She's right, he admitted to himself. There was no way to know for certain if Pathfinder were truly the cause, but the risk was too great to take the chance. And yet… And yet… He had so few options left. So little freedom. Pathfinder let him mock Odin's enchantments. It let him throw away counterfeit money on delicious yet unsatisfying meals. It let him imagine there was some other route available besides the ones that had been systematically taken from him. "You don't understand what you're asking," he said quietly, a protest so weak it didn't deserve the name. The argument, if it could even be called that, was over.

"Actually, I think I do. You think whatever other way you come up with to get that enchantment removed, it's going to require Pathfinder. And the enchantment…magic…it's not just about defending yourself, is it? It's a lot more."

Loki sat back. Well. This is interesting. "Yes," he said, leaving it at that. She'd been thinking about him. Analyzing him. Once the idea might have aggravated him, or even angered him. Now it just made him curious. He wanted to hear what else she'd been thinking.

"It's your thing, isn't it?"

"My 'thing'? Ah, my 'thing,'" he said, recognizing the phrasing from her references to "that color thing," and other comments he'd heard in his time on Earth. Jane may have studied many subjects on Midgard and studied them deeply, but he doubted that she – or anyone else here – had studied speech.

"Yeah. The thing you're good at. Before you say 'I am good at a great many things, Jane,' I mean the thing you're one of the best at. Your strongest skill. The thing you're known for."

Loki's eyebrows went up at Jane's mimicry of him, at the words he had indeed been about to say. And what followed…he was certain he'd never told her that. He'd boasted of other things to her, but never magic. "Yes," he said again. "All true."

"So it's a huge part of your identity. Probably a huge part of your…your sense of self-respect. Or worth."

The only part that's left, Loki thought, trying to tamp down the thought but apparently he lacked even the will to fight himself. But a line had become visible that he wouldn't cross; he wasn't going to discuss identity or self-respect or worth with Jane, not when he didn't even want to think about it himself. He inclined his head, not quite a nod, but a tilt down and a bit to the side. While he didn't want to talk about it, neither did he have the energy – or even the desire, really – to lie about it.

"Will you tell me about it?"

"About what?" Loki asked warily. It was frightening to think about the things he might divulge to her in this mood, regardless of what he did or did not want to talk about, regardless of any lines.

"Magic. What it means to you. What it means on Asgard. I was thinking about what happened at Niskit's, when you…you know. It made me think…that maybe getting that enchantment removed was more important to you than I realized at first. And for more reasons. You really scared me, Loki, I think you still don't get that. I mean, first with as bad as she was hurting you and you begging her to do it again, and then with the knife…if you'd done that you would've killed both of you."

"Actually, I wouldn't have," he said. There was no longer any reason not to tell her that.

"Have you forgotten about that scar? The other enchantment?"

"Hardly. But it protects mortals. Not Light Elves."

Jane took a moment to process that. "You misled me about that deliberately, didn't you," she said.

"Yyyyyeees," Loki said with a shadow of a smile. Remarkably, Jane didn't seem upset about this, either. He adjusted his position to a still more comfortable one, one leg crossed over the other. He'd felt awkward seeing Jane again at first, but now he was beginning to feel truly at ease. "Though in my defense, perhaps, at first even I didn't realize the curse only applied to mortals. Odin didn't anticipate me being able to leave Midgard, so he failed to include the people of the other realms in his handiwork."

"You think it's a curse to not be able to hurt humans?" Jane asked, voice carefully even. She knew that wasn't true. If it were, then nothing she'd come to believe about Loki was true. He'd hurt her a couple of times entirely by accident, and immediately apologized with no sign of resentment or anger.

"No, not really. The other one is a curse."

Jane nodded. That made more sense. A curse because it was taking so much from him – not just magic itself.

"And I'm sorry I frightened you, on Alfheim. It wasn't my intent. Things just didn't go quite as I expected them to there. I know what I did there was foolish. I knew she wouldn't respond to threats. But I…I was angry." I was desperate. "I wasn't thinking clearly."

"Yeah, I guess not," Jane said, watching him carefully, those his expression gave little away.

"I couldn't accept her answer. He must have used an incredible amount of power from Gungnir to emplace the curse. For removing an enchantment on me, I don't think there's anyone in the Nine Realms who would be better suited to the task than Niskit. Some may have as much skill, but if Niskit couldn't do it, then no one can." He paused, looked down at his lap for a moment, then back up to Jane. "You asked about magic in Asgard. It is ubiquitous. Though it's often difficult to say what precisely is magic and what is merely what you call technology. Your nuclear physics, nuclear fission…it's a form of magic, is it not? Aided by mechanics. Your vehicles, your engines. Airplanes. At the time of my first visits to your world, they would have been considered magic."

"'Magic's just science we don't understand yet.' Arthur C. Clarke," Jane said with a growing smile.

"An oversimplification, but from a certain perspective…yes. Magic serves many practical functions on Asgard. The best healers are magic users. They have a keen sense of what is happening inside the body, even without the aid of machines and other implements. Healing stones – or 'magic rocks' as you so quaintly put it – are imbued with magic and can be used by anyone. Even you."

"Like the coat rack? In the arena?" Jane asked, delighted. She felt a little like a kindergartener, sitting on the footstool at Loki's knee, but when it came to magic, she supposed she was little more than a kindergartener.

Loki gave a short laugh, enjoying the discussion as well and wondering why he'd always been so unwilling to talk about it with her. Perhaps simply to be stubborn. To deny her what she wanted. He'd been a fool. "Not quite like the coat rack. The coat rack is closer to simply technology. Like the room you studied in at college." He raised his right arm above his head and waved it around; Jane laughed. "The healing stones are full of active magic, waiting to be released by the crumbling of the stone."

"Like…potential energy. A bow pulled taut, with an arrow in it."

"I suppose so, yes."

"Does it heal anything?"

"No. There are many things it can't heal at all. Its primary purpose is to heal penetrating wounds. Stab wounds. And quickly, when a healer isn't immediately available. The most common weapon on the realms beyond yours is the sword, and most other weapons also use blades of some sort. Stab wounds are not exactly rare."

Jane nodded, sobering a bit as she recalled the piece of glass embedded in Erik's chest, and the healing stone Thor had used to save him.

"There are other forms of magic, many forms in fact. The towers and walls around the city are imbued with magic that powers a protective shield. Small objects can be imbued with magic of various sorts."

"It sounds like Asgard couldn't function without magic. But I had the impression, from what you said, that magic…wasn't considered very important," she said, trying hard to leave Thor out of this, in case it would make Loki shut down. Besides, this was about Loki, and not about Thor.

"Battle is a time-honored tradition on Asgard. Not that one is meant to seek out war, but that one must always be prepared for it. To call oneself a warrior…it is synonymous with calling oneself a man. Or I suppose it was until Sif came along and complicated things. Such an ancient tradition, so fundamentally engrained in society…it's bound by rules both written and unwritten. Underpinning it all is the Asgardian notion of honor. You must face your enemy when you fight him. And you must do so at close range, besting him with your superior strength and skill, as a mark of your courage. The Aesir begin preparing for this at age ten, and most continue at least some form of training for the rest of their lives. Magic used in battle is considered trickery, outside the rules. Less than fully honorable. Strength is the purest of attributes. To rely on something else…many would say it isn't even true battle."

The picture was pretty clear now, Jane thought. Thor was physically the strongest, while Loki's magic was good for healing and wall-building and maybe sort-of-magic coat racks, but not for the thing that was the cornerstone of Asgardian culture. And if Thor and Odin had been among those who said magic in battle was less than fully honorable, that Loki's strongest skill was less than fully honorable… That kind of rejection of your talents – especially in favor of your brother's – would be tough to live with, and Loki had lived with it for a very long time. "You know, back in the 1600s, when you were…"

"Around seven hundred," Loki supplied.

Jane shook her head. She would never get used to that. "When you were around seven hundred, here on Earth, the Catholic Church was accusing Galileo of heresy because his studies showed that the planets revolve around the sun. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest. I'm lucky, really, to live in a time when I can pursue the avenues of inquiry I want to, and no one's going to accuse me of heresy for it, no one's going to accuse me of witchcraft, or otherwise think that the things I study are somehow dishonorable."

"And yet they don't accept your work, do they? In fact, they rejected it. You told me so yourself. Your struggles with your dissertation committee, your inability to publish your findings, your failure to find employment. The unorthodox ideas you've pursued, the theories you've formulated…you've faced rejection of them at every turn, haven't you? I would also hazard to guess that you faced a certain amount of humiliation over your ideas. Is it really that different?"

Jane's eyes drifted closed with the memory of a particularly terrible day. She'd received a rejection notice for a paper she'd written, a letter that went out of its way to be condescending. It happened to have been the anniversary of her parents' death. The rejection usually didn't get to her, but that day she'd wound up sobbing on the phone with Erik. She wasn't sure how she would've handled a thousand years of that. Maybe, like Loki, not very well. "Maybe not. But it was different in how long I had to deal with it. SHIELD accepts it now. And as soon as I'm able to make all of the data public, everyone will accept it. It'll revolutionize modern astronomy."

"SHIELD will never permit you to make public the things they've declared secrets. Their entire reason for being is to discover and preserve secrets. They kept me a secret, and I stood atop one of their tallest buildings in broad daylight and on the ground among a crowd."

"Yeah, well, SHIELD doesn't know all the secrets now, do they?"

"No, they don't," Loki said with a laugh tinged by darkness. "No one does, but us." He took a deep breath and a long look into Jane's brown eyes. "We're nothing alike, you and I, Jane Foster. And yet…when you spoke to me, as Lucas, of your frustrations with your career…I understood. I felt…an unexpected kinship, of a sort."

Jane gave a tentative smile as she thought that through. "We're nothing alike…and yet…" Seen in that light, they were more alike than she'd ever realized. "You know where my professional obstacles come from. Scientists are supposed to be open to new theories. To being wrong. But so many of them aren't. Especially when it gets tied up in politics and money. What about on Asgard? I mean…who decided it had to be that way? That one way of fighting is more honorable than another?"

"Who decided…I don't know. But there is a reason for it, though you'll find few who can explain it to you. It's connected to the fact that Asgard has a Weapons Vault full of enchanted or otherwise incredibly powerful weapons, most of which are held there simply for safekeeping, not for using. They are simply too dangerous. Consider the weapons your realm has designed – nuclear, electromagnetic, chemical…a great variety, yes? Asgard possesses weapons that can destroy far more efficiently than anything you have here. The bifrost itself, you'll recall, is a means of travel, but it can be used for other purposes, as well."

Jane nodded; she recalled.

"Asgard could easily win this war they're fighting. They no longer have the bifrost, but they have the Tesseract. A volatile power, and one I doubt they know how to fully control, but one doesn't need full control when one simply wishes to destroy. They'll never do that, though. They are…nauseatingly responsible in that regard. Gullveig however…he might not show such restraint, were the tables turned," Loki added, remembering the explosion he'd set off inside the palace, presumably in order to cow the Aesir into a quick surrender.

"And you?" Jane asked, a little nervous with this talk of nuclear weapons and mass destruction. "What kind of magic do you use in battle?" She certainly hadn't assumed it was anything along those lines.

"Illusions, mostly. Distractions. Concealments. Were you thinking I somehow vaporized the enemy with a thought? I do my real fighting with daggers and smaller throwing knives, as I've told you. Which aren't considered ideal weapons, either, by the way, given that I can fight with them from a distance. But they're better than magic, in Asgard's eyes. Do you see, though? Imagine what Asgard and the other realms could do to each other if we pursued warfare through the most powerful enchanted objects, and set about creating new ones? The escalation would eventually obliterate us all. Look at the Frost Giants. Had Asgard not intervened, they would have used their Ice Casket to freeze your entire planet. Perhaps a few pockets of your kind would have survived. And those would have probably become slaves. Or," Loki continued, remembering something Jane had once asked him, "food." He made a connection then that turned his stomach – he was sitting here with Jane – and he wished he hadn't said it.

Jane grimaced, but otherwise ignored the tacked-on anti-Frost Giant stuff. "Yeah, I think I get it. You stick to close-quarters old-school fighting because anything more than that would eventually lead to mutual annihilation."

"That's the historical reason. The living reason, the only one you'll hear now, is that it's about bravery and strength and honor." Loki stopped and laughed. "Why am I telling you all this? This isn't what you were asking about."

"But it's kind of fascinating. I'm glad you're telling me. It helps me understand you better, to understand where you come from."

"You don't want to understand me, Jane. It might drive you mad. It might make you hate me."

"I don't hate you. I did, you know. When I didn't know you. When I only knew what you did on Earth. You might make me mad sometimes, you might scare me once in a while, but you aren't going to make me hate you."

Give me half a chance, he thought reflexively. But maybe, he thought then, she was right. He didn't want her to hate him. He didn't want to do anything that would earn her hatred. "We were talking about Pathfinder. You were asking me not to use it anymore."

"Yeah," she said, sitting up straighter on the footstool, hoping that she wasn't going to have to go back into convincing-mode again. She didn't think she had any better arguments in her.

Loki breathed out heavily through his nose. He had no actual plans to use Pathfinder at the moment, but to give a blanket agreement not to use it… "Fine. I understand. I won't use it."

"Okay. Good," Jane said, relieved.

"I have no further need of it, anyway. I have no more plans. No more solutions. I don't know what to do. I don't know how long…how long I am to languish here. As a shell of myself. Just waiting for my enemies to come. That is not who I am. Someone who just sits and waits. But I no longer have any answers." "Erik said it was a good thing to realize you don't have all the answers," he heard Thor telling him. Thor, perhaps, had been trying to rationalize his circumstances, to find meaning in them, while Erik had been simply trying to make him feel better. Because it wasn't a good thing. It was a terrible thing. A miserable and maddening thing.

"I'm sorry," Jane whispered, not wanting to disturb Loki or otherwise break the mood. She could hardly believe he was being so open with her about this, about everything, and if he had an ulterior motive for the things he was telling her, she couldn't see it.

"This won't last much longer. It can't. And I haven't the slightest idea what I'll do when they come for me."

"I still don't think anybody's coming for you. Nobody knows you're here. Remember what they told us when we first got here? What Wright said? This is the safest place on Earth."

"I don't share your confidence. But let's say you're correct. A scant…four and a half months remain before the station reopens to flights. What am I to do then? You've spoken of it so casually before. You cooking tacos for me, as though I lived some normal Midgardian life. But you know that can't be."

"Well…it would be complicated, that's true," Jane admitted. "What did you plan on doing next before all this happened?"

Loki stared at her, blinking in silence, until finally giving a dry laugh. "I planned on getting these curses removed. After that it was always a bit murky. Revenge comes to mind. Reclaiming the throne was an occasionally tempting thought. If you're open to it, and willing to work hard and be flexible, opportunity always comes your way."

"Revenge? Against who?" Jane asked, not entirely catching what followed. Loki's anger at his father and brother had been unmistakable, but he'd never really talked about revenge. He hinted at it though, she thought, remembering that he'd more or less told her that his original plan in seeking her out had been to somehow use her to hurt Thor.

"You don't really want to know," Loki said. He'd been thinking of Brokk, actually, but now that he'd been roused from near-apathy and latent Asgardian philosophy he was glad to let Jane think something else, as she clearly did.

"You say things like that, like you expect them to get some reaction out of me, like you want to scare me for some reason. You could just tell me, you know, instead of giving me these vague empty words. I know things are…strained, between you and your family."

"You want the truth? Fine. I want to eviscerate Brokk. And if you think I mean that metaphorically, I can assure you I mean it quite literally. I would like to fillet him like a fish. Feel better now?"

"Not exactly. I know you know that 'I meant Brokk' would have been sufficient."

"But so much more dull," he said with a dark smile. "Jane, Gullveig coming here has changed everything. I can no longer freely walk the streets of your realm. My unwilling and unwanted benefactor is degrading the images shown on the internet, but not on television, correct? Not in video." He gave a huff of air through his nose. "I suppose I could always just call for Heimdall and give myself up."

"Give yourself up? You aren't a criminal. Well…," Jane said, nervously tucking her hair behind her ear.

"I know what you mean. But remember, they think I'm behind the war."

"Okay, but what if there's no other choice? I know it's not what you want, but maybe you have to go to back to Asgard once winter ends. Like what Niskit said."

"To beg Odin's forgiveness? While he shackles me and prepares me for passage to Jotunheim? It's not an acceptable alternative. I can't do it. I would sooner die."

"Okay," Jane said again, trying to roll with what Loki was saying. To say his relationship with his family was "strained" was an understatement. "Oh…wait. Didn't I tell you?" she asked, thinking back.

"What?"

"That Thor's king now?"

"What?"

"I guess not. I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to keep it from you. Tony told me and I guess I just…I don't know, it-"

"Has Odin fallen?" Loki interrupted as everything else fell from his attention. He wasn't sure how he would feel if the answer were yes. Perhaps he would feel nothing. But in the next instant he thought the answer couldn't be yes. If Odin had fallen, his magic would have fallen with him. Probably. This magic was enhanced by Gungnir, and perhaps its control ultimately lay there, rather than with Odin.

"No. I mean…not like that. It's-"

"The Sleep? And Thor has been made king. He carries Gungnir now." There was a little bitterness in it, that Thor now wielded what had been given to him, and what he'd never willingly relinquished, but it surprised him how little the bitterness truly was. Fate was reasserting itself. Thor was not meant to die on a rooftop in Puente Antiguo. He was meant to become Asgard's king, as he always was. Gungnir being placed in Loki's hands was the aberration to fate, the thing that was never meant to be. And so it had been quickly taken from him.

"Loki? What's Gungnir?"

His head cleared and he realized Jane was asking a second time. "Odin's staff. The king's staff. Imbued with incredible magic. But do you understand what this means? Even if I were willing to grovel before Odin, and even if by some wonder I were not simply thrown into prison for treason or carted off to Jotunheim…there would be no point. Thor may have the staff now, but he won't have a clue how to use it. I doubt he even knows how to use it as a weapon. Do you know how long it took him to really learn how to use Mjolnir? For years he was content with doing nothing with it but smashing things, no different from what you'd do with any old hammer. Even if madness overtook him and he decided in his insanity that he wished to release me from these curses, he wouldn't be able to."

"So no going back to Asgard. We'll make it work here, then. We can disguise you. It shouldn't be that hard, without any magic at all. When we get to McMurdo we'll dye your hair. Keep you in sunglasses when-"

A knock came at the door. Loki and Jane stared at each other for a moment, then Loki got up and went to the door. "Hey, man, how's it going?" Rodrigo said.

"Fine, thanks, and you?"

"Pretty good considering. Crazy day. I'm beat. Listen, have you seen Jane?"

"Yeah, here, Rodrigo," Jane said, standing from the foot stool and moving over to Loki's side.

"Oh, hey. I was trying to reach you on the radio. You've got to keep your radio on, with everything going on here."

"Sorry," Jane said, hiking up a couple of shirts and reaching down to the radio on her belt to flip it on. She'd turned it off when she got back to the station to avoid getting radioed by Selby.

"Your pal Tony Stark is calling again," he said, withdrawing one of the Iridium phones from his pocket and handing it to Jane. "He's tried three times. He's calling so often lately I figured I'd just leave one of the phones with you. Don't abuse it, okay? I know you won't, but I have to say it. We don't have any money for satellite phones. For Tony Stark…not a problem, I'm guessing. Anyway, keep the phone, call him back soon, okay. That guy makes my crazy little sister look like some zen yoga instructor or something."

"He can be a little…animated," Jane said.

"I was going to use a different expression," Loki said, which earned him an annoyed look from Jane.

"Yeah, well, I just told him you were working on a project related to the earthquake. I didn't tell him you were out at the SPRESSO thing. Figured he might flip his lid."

"Okay, yeah, thanks. You might be right. I appreciate it, Rodrigo. Get some sleep soon."

"We're still getting some calls in from McMurdo and the USGS, so it'll be a while yet, but yeah, soon, I hope. See you, Jane, Lucas."

"Are you going to call him?" Loki asked once the door was closed again.

"I have to. For all I know he's already got the suit on again and crossing the equator."

"Again?"

"Yeah, uh, last night…was it really just last night?...yeah, he called me mid-flight."

"You turned him back."

"Yeah."

"What are you going to tell him?"

That question, unfortunately, wasn't so easy to answer. "I don't know," Jane said.

/


Blast from the Beneath past: For the incident Loki refers to, with the "fifteen layers of leather and armor and horns," see Chs. 68 "Trust" and 69 "Space-Time" (which has the actual quote).

This chapter is super long, so keeping stuff here super short. THANK YOU to all readers, reviewers, favers, followers!

Previews for Ch. 126: Bragi suggests a change in focus; Jane surprises Tony with what a good guesser she is; new information leads to more tough decisions.

Excerpt:

"Mm-hm. Jane, you know if you get hurt down there Thor's going to hammer me into a pancake."

"Tony, come on. You're not responsible for me. And Thor's not some neanderthal, you know."

"Oh, I beg to differ. On the first count at least. Maybe a little on the second, when his temper gets involved. But look, I'm the guy who knows who's down there with you and said, 'Hey, no problem! Have fun with Thor's wacky little brother!' I think that makes me a tiny bit responsible."