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The term for this prison isn’t ‘oubliette’, but it holds a similar meaning. Óminnistaðr. It is dark as a midwinter midnight and cold as the dancing lights at the pole, and not so much as an errant weed grows on the minute cracks between the vast obsidian slabs.
They’re not obsidian, of course, but their composition isn’t knowable to man so we may as well go with that: they’re black and glossy and a little distorted by twists in their make-up, like volcanic glass, and they throw back a million misshapen reflections of their prisoner.
Loki Laufeyson, of Asgard and Jotunheim, is not having a good time.
The other word for this place is Óminnigróf, which is a little more literal. Owing to the peculiar physics of the place the top is both ten and ten thousand feet above the prisoner (ten to climb down, ten thousand to climb up).
Permitted no closer than the rim of the pit, Thor watches with extremely mixed feeling as his brother in love if not in blood writhes, falls, and sobs bitterly in a mechanical rotation of symptoms of torturous despair.
“You have wrought your own suffering,” he says, careful to exclude any intimate thou from his speech, “and were it in my power to prevent it, I have no yet the forgiveness to enact mercy.”
For Loki of Asgard is victim to hubris; he executed five heroes and a blameless creature of faith in the pursuit of ultimate destructive power, and has instead made himself the vessel for a power so incomprehensibly vast that he aches in every cell, trying to contain it.
The prisoner composes himself enough to speak from his foam-flecked lips.
“It will kill me,” he pants, “and then it will be freed.” Having exhausted himself with this dire warning, he falls back onto the glassy, glossy floor of Óminnigróf, and fits his shorn head into the groove his thrashing is beginning to wear in the rock.
Thor sighs from the lip of Óminnistaðr and says, as helpless and frustrated as a child, “We will not be fooled by claims like these again, Brother, now your fall through the Realms is chronicled. We know you cannot die.”
“How’s that?” Loki whines, twitching against the rock in the throes of some unseen torture. “If it is because I am of Asgard, remember that Mother died.”
“I am not likely to forget,” says Thor, as quiet as wind in reeds, as grim as granite.
“And if it is because I am of Jotunheim,” Loki continues, reaching for his next breath as a drowning man does, “remember that most of Jotunheim are now dead.”
“Verily,” says Thor, with a certain amount of irony, “’twas thee that killed them.”
“Therefore,” Loki wheezes, “I can die, and probably shall quite soon—“
“Thou art both Jotun and Æsir,” Thor interrupts, forgetting that he wasn’t going to use intimate terms to talk to his disavowed and murderous brother, “and have survived what would kill even Fenrir. The universe, if not Asgard, has some plan for thee.”
“And if that plan is to kill me and release the great beast?” Loki groans, making a C with his bare body upon the hard floor. “How shall you follow this plan, Thor, to the last rune? Or will you fight it?”
Thor frowns, and departs from his vigil as if he has acquired sudden knowledge: Loki does not mark his departure except to curl into a ball and bare his teeth, clenched against some horror of the flesh only he can imagine, and only he can endure.
* * *
“Loki is dying, Father,” he says, from his pose of supplication.
“That is no concern of mine,” says the Allfather, without hesitation or sympathy. “And should be none of thine.” Only those who are acquainted with the grizzled seeker of wisdom might note that he is a God bowed by grief and beset by his woes so that he stoops, woes that he has no solution to; he remains regal, monocular, and the perch of a pair of ravens. He adds, “Loki has been nothing but a source of shame for Asgard and sorrow for me; in his latest act of rebellion he has endangered the Nine Realms and robbed you of your companions. What should you care if he dies now? It would be just.”
“It would be folly,” Thor corrects him, rising unwisely from his attitude of humility, and reaching for his father as an equal. “As we speak, Loki is the last prison of the great beast, and by extinguishing my brother it gains its freedom. You know what this means—“
Odin’s expression is stern and unforgiving. “I know that in spite of all he has done to injure us and to your comrades you still do not entirely hate him, and thus your judgment in this matter must be taken as suspect.”
“He is my brother,” says Thor, as he always has. As far as he is concerned, this is the only answer he has really ever needed.
“He is nothing of the sort,” snaps Odin, stroking Munin absently on the top of its sleek black head. “What do you propose to do?”
Thor thinks about this for a while.
After fifteen minutes have passed Odin says testily, “I do have other people to speak to, Thor.”
“I shall use his fear of death at the instigation of this beast to persuade him to undo the harms he has done,” says Thor, still thinking. “And in this act of goodness find perhaps the lease of life he lacks in captivity.”
“It’s not killing him,” Odin warns. “Don’t let him fool you.” He chucks the raven under the chin, and it craws keenly, turning its head to fix them with one glittering eye.
Thor feels in that moment that he does not altogether like ravens. In Asgard, this is a definite problem.
“See you talk him into being responsible for his wrongs,” Odin says, dismissing his son without a further word.
“I scarcely have the silver tongue in this family,” Thor protests, accurately. A second raven – Hugnin, it might be supposed, unless the one with Odin was Hugnin all along – makes a circuit of the hall, like an independent-minded shadow.
“He’s not going to listen to me,” Odin mutters.
* * *
“I cannot read them,” Loki informs the floor. “My head echoes and bellows.”
“I shall read them to you,” Thor announces, with some doubt. The books he has acquired from the Forbidden Library – mostly without Odin’s knowledge or permission and only after repeatedly bribing the mute, tongueless librarians – are complex affairs written in several systems of writing, and some of them make his eyes hurt to contemplate.
“That will only be worse,” says Loki, raising an arm to beckon down.
Thor lowers the books gingerly into Óminnistaðr. “I have spoken with Father.”
Loki ignores this news and with flinches appropriate to a man being struck by repeated hammer blows, he opens the first of his books.
“He has given leave for you to repair the damage you have done,” Thor informs him, undeterred by Loki’s disinterest. A lifetime of swimming upstream against the tide of his father’s vague indifference to what he has to say has prepared him well for Loki’s sulking. “You shall be released to resurrect those you have slain.”
“No,” says Loki. He sits cross-legged and naked on the hard floor of volcanic glass, and all about him his bare, bald body is reflected back in ever more goblin-like shadows, twisting him from debased god into a tormented beast. In the reflections, the hoof-dents and horn-marks, bulging beast protrusions and hollows in his flesh become visible, obvious, deep as gouges and dark as bruises. On his body there is no trace.
“No?” Thor echoes. He eschews armour when visiting; the environs of Óminnistaðr allow nothing the prisoner might take and use himself, so Thor contents himself with closing his hands over the cloth of his upper arms, as if his hands are plate armour. “Thou shalt be freed.”
“I am a prison,” Loki reminds him, leafing through the book. “Therefore the world is a prison to me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in this pit or not.”
The book is one of those tomes Thor simply cannot read because it contains no runes at all. These books he has never seen the point of: the pages are greasy, greedy things that beg for the touch of hands, and he thinks books should be read passively, not leap out and drag their reader forward, drawing them into a compact from which they may have no escape. The pages of this book are different colours, bound together at the spine with thick tendon lacing, and the covers wooden and carved. He is not sure it is a helpful book, but he was compelled to ask for it anyway: a dangerous kind of book.
Loki lays the palm of his hand flat on the greasy, greedy pages, and closes his eyes. The twitches and flinches of a body under considerable stress become harmonised into a kind of dance, as if under something else’s control. Thor does not like it.
“Come out of your hole,” Thor cries, in supplication. “Atone for your misdoings. Earn forgiveness. I know thou has in thee at least the seed of goodness. Brother, let it grow.”
“Pointless,” Loki sighs, and reads on, bending his body to the book. Thor watches him, and the movement of his brother’s lips shapes syllables he does not understand.
“Father will have more mind to seek thy salvation from this menace if thou showest thyself willing to redeem thyself in other matters,” Thor points out, once again abandoning distance in favour of his heart-felt desire to prove Loki is not as terrible as the evidence suggests. “And in the marriage of thy wisdom and his shalt be no obstacle too great—“
“Pipe down, Thor,” Loki mutters. He opens his eyes to gaze up at his brother with a certain unfriendly fire. “If there is a cure to be found for this condition I shall find it alone.”
“And not ask his help?” Thor asks, sadly.
“I would rather eat my own shit,” Loki says with some finality. He moves his hand across the pages, and his eyelids flicker and his eyeballs dance. Thor decides he does not want to witness this.
Disturbed, he makes one further attempt. “And shalt not seek to undo what thou hast wrought?”
“I don’t see why I should,” grumbles Loki, bending over his book until his torso almost touches the page.
At this Thor’s patience expires, and he makes an exit before he can rage himself into a stupid mistake.
* * *
“I’ve changed my mind,” he says, when Thor looks down on him. “I would like to atone, and bring back those erstwhile guardians of Midgard.”
“Why?” asks Thor, who has been hoping for this reversal, but rather expected it to take years.
Loki shrugs. “I find I cannot live well without your good report,” he says, reluctantly. He spreads his hands in a clear-eyed gesture of defeat. “If I must be torn to pieces by this beast I would rather die knowing I have thy love, at least.”
“Oh,” says Thor, smiling. “Do not expect things to be as they were.”
Loki nods, slowly. “I have no use for the falsehoods of childhood either. But if I cannot do it in the eyes of the Nine Realms, at least let me redeem myself in thine eyes, Brother.”
“Hast thou a plan?” Thor asks, his eyes shining. He desires to reach down and haul his brother up by the hand, to show him that his good will has been accepted, but the mechanics of Óminnistaðr are such that he must fling down an enchanted rope, woven from good intentions and promises, for Loki to ascend.
“In magic,” says Loki, peering up at him, “there is much to be done with reversal.”
“Art thou laden with plans??” Thor repeats, the rope uncertain his hand.
“Of course,” says Loki, eyeballing him above an apparently guileless smile, “When hast thou known me without a scheme?”
A couple of instances spring to Thor’s mind, perhaps aided by Loki’s resplendent nudity, but as those had very little to do with this moment, he ignores them, and lets down the rope.
“You’ll have to haul,” says Loki, knotting it into a harness about his torso. “I fear I have grown weak in my suffering.”
A pang of sorrow vies vehemently with the part of Thor’s heart which recalls, vividly, that his brother is crazy, and that he still cries out for vengeance for the deaths of his beloved friends. Only when his comrades are restored to him, Thor swears, will he be induced to feel pity for his mad sibling again.
He hauls upon the rope like a fisherman pulling in his nets, and he hauls, and he hauls, until his back begins to ache, and his shoulders to burn, and Loki weighs more than a horse, more than a mountain, more than the world. Thor sweats, and he hauls, and with a grunt he pulls the penitent Æsir from the house of oblivion and into the waking world.
This second birth is exhausting, and he stands with heaving breast, the midwife of Loki, as his brother unbinds his own bonds.
“What is thine plan?” Thor asks, clapping his brother on the bare shoulder. Though his form does not waver to the eye, he can feel the Jotun flinch beneath his hand, still twisting and tormented by these unseen agonies. The appearance of calm is merely a glamour, but it shows that Loki’s pride is undamaged.
Loki smiles and says, “First, to be clothed.”
* * *
“I will not be responsible for his deeds this time,” says he, needing no gesture to indicate who it is he means. Loki rather airily ignores this distrust and only stares out over the stars as if he can see as Heimdall does.
“I shall,” Thor swears.
“Do you trust him?” asks Heimdall, as Loki examines the heavens, his bare, stabbed head turning above his shoulders, ugly and out of place.
“No,” says Thor, “that would be madness. But what other way can we get them back?” He lowers his voice. “How fares Midgard?”
“Ill,” says Heimdall. “They fight as well as they are able, but the opportunists descend like ravens on a battlefield now it has been noised about that their principle champions are gone.”
“I must go to them,” Thor says, distracted. He glances back at his brother, and catches in a glimpse an expression of contorted agony, which shifts seamlessly into the blank unconcern of glamour again. “And yet I must remain with him.”
“Any aid you give now is temporary,” Heimdall says, which does little to reassure him. “It is a bucket, when they need a dam. Remain with the Æsir and do not let him out of your sight.
“He says he’s dying,” Thor mumbles, as Heimdall raises his sword in preparation.
“We both know that is impossible,” Heimdall says. He plunges his blade within the works. The dome begins to spin. The Bifrost diverts, glittering, until its flattened eternal arch touches Asgard, and the far end dips onto a tiny world floating in the black and frozen voice between the Realms.
Heimdall nods.
“Good luck,” he says.
Loki stares him blankly in the eye as they step onto the rainbow bridge, and Heimdall draws back very slightly, as if from a foul stench.
The Bifrost links two points with immediate effect, but the distance to the final Citadel of Peace, the last of the locks which once held the great Unnameable in its interdimensional prison, is so vast that they must still walk a full day.
“This plan of yours—“ Thor begins.
Loki only shakes his head. “It’s hardly a plan.”
“You said you had a plan.”
“I have thousands. Not about this. This is a –“ he breaks off and laughs, bitterly. “Oughtn’t you have a rope? Some chains? At the very least manacles. A muzzle for the wild beast, lest he bite, or speak out of turn.”
At present Loki looks so thoroughly worn down by his role as both prison and prisoner that the thought of clapping him in irons is absurd; whenever the glamour flickers or wavers it is clear that what he needs is not restraint but nursing. Loki is fit mostly for a sickroom and sleep, and he will get neither.
“If it is not a plan,” Thor asks, reminding himself of his oath, “what is this ‘reversal’ you speak of?”
“What your friends would call ‘a last ditch attempt’,” Loki says, trudging with uneven step and a grimness on him which bows his shoulders until it is clear in some way he is Odin’s son still; their stoop is identical. Neither would claim the comparison and both would loathe it, but as Loki stumbles with set teeth and a bent back, Thor sees his father in his brother (the old grey wanderer), and laments that neither appear to see it themselves.
“The attempt is appreciated,” Thor says, somewhat stiffly.
Loki says, “Appreciate its success or mourn its failure. Don’t give a damn for the attempt.”
“When didst thou grow so hard Brother?” Thor despairs, shaking his head.
“Apparently,” Loki mutters, “while you were growing soft.”
* * *
Altar remains, along with the fractures, and the spinning void above.
“No one died here,” says Thor. “What need have you of this place.”
“A reversal is a reversal,” says Loki, straightening his back. “We cannot cut corners. Magic is not mathematical.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Of course not. I shall need a knife.” Loki extends his arm. In the inattentive gravity of this world, Thor’s hair is floating: he tightens his grip on the handle of Mjolnir.
“Perhaps you should not—“ he begins, uneasy.
“A reversal, Thor, demands a certain degree of sacrifice, and I no longer have the sceptre,” Loki says impatiently, as if he is speaking to an ill-gotten child. “Or, I suppose, you could just book me very hard in the head with your mallet. I’m sure it will have the necessary effect.”
Thor frowns, and his grip slackens. “That does not seem magical – or practical – or a good idea.”
Loki shrugs. “It’s that or nothing, unless you have a knife.”
Thor says, “I don’t want to hit your head with Mjolnir,” and mostly means it. He has never once attacked a foe who was not attacking him nor his allies, and he has a heart as much given to peaceful magnanimity as it is to noisy rage, and he knows this: grudges are Loki’s province.
“Are you sure about that?” Loki asks, hopping idly on the altar on which he has already been struck down once. In the low gravity the bound carries him effortlessly onto the broad stone. He balances on the tip-toe of his boot: he would look his old elegantly playful self were he not crop-headed like a slave, sober-faced as a corpse, and as sickly as the near-death in a plague, with every slip of his faltering glamour.
“Peace—“ Thor says, warning him. He reminds himself, too, that he swore to have no pity, not that he swore to have no rage.
“Are you sure?” Loki repeats, turning on his toe, “because I killed them, remember. I killed all your Midgardian friends who would come to die, and now the ones who wouldn’t and couldn’t – Selvig, and your woman with the fiery spirit – they’re going to die too, because of that.” He paces slowly along the altar top. “I killed them,” he reminds Thor, as if Thor could ever forget, “I killed them and I enjoyed it.”
Thor readjusts his grip on Mjolnir’s handle and struggles against the rising tide of hate, but it is too late: he recalls Loki’s gloating; he recalls the indifference to the suffering of the Midgardians; most of all he recalls that five good and noble friends met their end at Loki’s hands. “Peace,” he growls, his arms tensing and aching with the effort of self-restraint. “You called yourself contrite—“
“The fastest way out of the pit,” Loki assures him, sprawling face-first on the stone. “Be scure in the knowledge that I shall never regret the death of your companions – and do what is thy heart to do –“
Thor swings Mjolnir with a desperate fury – it is only half the rage of the betrayed and wounded, and half angry frustration at the unceasing, unprovoked cruelty of his brother.
The force, whatever the source, is the same. The mighty dwarf-forged hammer kisses Loki’s temple with the tenderness of a galloping horse, and spits both skin and glamour as if they were paper before it. Loki’s blood flows freely, and soaks into the stone altar as if the stone is a sponge.
His skull, being of Jotun pedigree and Æsir feeding, does not break. A mountain might well fall on it without a fracture, a fact which informed their childhood play and formed it into occasional scenes of horrific violence.
The Æsir lies on his face and bleeds.
Thor drops his grip on Mjolnir and reaches to turn his brother onto his back. Loki is heavy as a continental plate, and it is only with a panicked heave that he rolls what appears to be a slight body onto its back.
For a moment there is only the rictus of death on his brother’s face: Loki’s eyes blink at last, and slowly focus on Thor’s upside-down face, his brows folding into a pained frown.
“Ow,” Loki sighs, making an abortive movement with his hands, as if reaching for the wound in his bare scalp but unable to follow through.
“That was unkind,” Thor complains, drawing back from his concerned vigil and reaching for Mjolnir once more.
“You wouldn’t have done it otherwise,” Loki points out, wincing delicately. He finally presses his hand to the wound and hisses. “You played your part marvellously, Thor. It is terribly easy to anger you, you know.”
Thor groans. “Did it work?” he mutters, sinking back into a slow squat, which carries over into sitting down at least partially on top of Mjolnir. He feels discombobulated by the low gravity, though he’d never use the word: dizzy, perhaps, or distracted by the fading edge of his unwanted battle-lust. He looks to Loki, who has sat up on the altar and is gingerly patting dried blood and a gently-sealing wound with the tips of his fingers.
“There is no way I can be sure,” Loki admits, laying off his self-examination, “until we reach the next Citadel, where the crushing gravity of Penitence and Humility is found.”
“We must begin,” Thor cries, making an attempt to swing to his feet and back to the quest. The atmosphere it appears does not allow for haste: he over-balances, then over-compensates, and falls, as if he is falling slowly forever. “Though perhaps not yet.”
“No indeed,” says Loki, dryly. “I am weary and must rest before we grapple with the mechanics of that world.” He does not seem so weary, though, as he was before.
* * *
“Any progress?” he asks Selvig, as the headquarters shakes under another explosion.
Selvig shakes his head. “Even if Richards didn’t have to keep going on duty this would be close to impossible. I need Tony, or Bruce...”
“Yeah, I could use them myself,” Fury says, pointedly, hands on hips. “But since they’re dead, you’re just gonna have to be better, and faster.”
“It’s difficult,” Selvig mutters, “trying to reverse-engineer something that has self-destructed in totum, in a laboratory that keeps falling in chunks onto your work—“
“Right now,” Fury rasps, grabbing Selvig and shoving him down as the ceiling gives way above him, “this is the safest, most stable place this earth has to offer.”
Selvig pulls his notes out from under his prone body. “At least get Jane Foster here. She has a talent for leaps of intuition and pattern-spotting that—“
Fury does not hear the rest of the sentence, already on a radio link to Coulson and Hill. For the millionth time in recent memory, he wonders what the goddamn fucking hell has happened to Thor.
* * *
He and Loki have arrived at the penultimate of the Citadels of Peace: or for their ends, the second. They are a quarter of a mile from the flat, bunker-like structure, and the heavy gravity of the world is forcing them to crawl on their bellies.
The truth is, were they mere men, the weight of this world would have crushed their bones to flat diamonds and their lungs out of existence but at present neither can find much to be grateful for in this.
“I do not believe the captors of your Unnameable knew what they meant when they built this Citadel here,” Thor complains, inching forward like a peasant under fire.
“The entire scheme smacks of poor planning,” Loki agrees, dragging his body through its own furrow, “Why make a lock when you never want the thing freed? Did we lock Fenrir’s ribbon or did we knot it in convolutions unbreakable?”
Thor only grunts, and drags himself slowly over the surface of the compressed earth. “How do snakes do this—“
“They’re built for it,” Loki grumbles, falling behind as Thor inches ahead. “It abates within.”
“Small mercy,” Thor wheezes.
“Wilt thou give me a knife this time?” Loki asks, some time later.
“No.”
“Have you more stomach to wield Mjolnir then?” Loki asks, with an undertone in his voice that Thor is too tired and distracted to identify.
“Aye,” Thor mutters, driving himself on over the unforgiving land as if his body were a flagging horse, “but by the time we reach that, I’ll have no strength for it.”
“You’re getting old,” Loki suggests, and Thor spurs himself on with this scurrilous accusation.
To raise themselves to open the great doors of the Citadel of peace is a feat that Thor cannot contemplate lightly. He ascends almost to his knees on his own, but Loki tries to use his back as a ladder and so-doing pulls them both down onto their backs.
Thor swears.
Loki begins to laugh, his chest labouring with difficulty under the crushing hand of gravity, his face upturned to the blank reddish skies, his eyes creased. Thor turns his head, as slow as all movement here needs must be, and frowns at his brother’s mirth.
“There is no humour in this,” Thor growls, trying to stand. Loki goes on laughing.
“We could just lie here forever,” he chuckles.
“And doom Midgard?”
“Why do I care for what happens to the Nine Realms?” Loki asks, still laughing. “I can feel the Beast ripping away fragments of immortality and consuming them. I’m dying. Why not here?”
“You made a promise,” Thor says severely, poking him in the side at such a glacial pace that it becomes more a caress.
“What good is a mere promise against the endless nothing?” Loki asks, still cackling to himself. “Can you see not see this is absurd?”
“Get up,” Thor complains rolling over and doing his utmost to punch his unresisting sibling in the stomach. Once again, the explosive power of the blow is dissipated by the atmosphere, and Loki doubles up slowly like a leaf held to a flame... solely with the force of his laughter.
Presently Loki calms down and lies flat on his back, as still as the grave. “Push,” he says, extending a toe. The tip of his boot brushes the panels of the great doors, and they swing open as if he has shoved them with his whole body.
Thor rolls his eyes. It’s the one action that does not require an excess of labour.
“One other thing,” Loki says hastily, tensing as if he means to throw out an arm to stop his brother’s movement, “recall that these Citadels have enchantments upon them to keep the wrathful from awakening evils within – you will be torn apart if you enter with rage or misdeeds in your mind.”
“I mean to store my friends,” Thor says puzzled by his warning. “Nothing could be farther than this from wrath.”
“You mean to do it by bashing my head in with a lump of dwarf-wrought metal,” Loki reminds him, with an uncharacteristic absence of poetics, “which may well for some reason be interpreted as a violent desire. Put it from your mind.”
Thor scowls. “I hardly can, now thou hast brought it to mind.”
“Then perhaps give me a knife and wait here,” Loki suggests, “and I’ll do the sacrifice on myself.”
“No,” Thor growls, as Loki’s plan becomes apparent to him. “No, I see what you are about.”
He thinks, what can I envision which is peaceful to me? And so Thor lies upon his back and thinks of Jane. He thinks of her delicate features and fierce spirit: he thinks of the jokes he doesn’t quite get, and of her courage.
He rolls himself over the threshold with less grace than the flopping of a dying fish, and within the Citadel discovers he can stand at last. The gravity is not much abated, but he can at least move erect, like a man, instead of bowing to the ground and crawling like a dumb and humble worm.
“And how,” Thor asks, as it occurs to him now, “shalt thou cross the threshold? Thou who hast never spent a full hour without some inner fury –“
“Trickery,” Loki says from his undignified and idle position, in a tone of voice that suggests that Thor is profoundly stupid not to have guessed at this.
“Of course,” sighs Thor. He calls Mjolnir to his hand, and the hammer comes, sluggish as if in stupor, to rest in his palm where it belongs.
Loki, meanwhile, stops breathing.
His chest grows still. His extremities gradually change hue: Thor can see the faint blue of Frost Giant in his fingertips, then not so faint, then a deepening, deathsome blue.
“Loki—“
“Shh.” Loki raises his head. His eyes are half-closed, but what Thor can see of them are red. He stumbles to his feet like a man possessed, and, like a sleepwalker, staggers dreamily over the threshold, and into the side of Thor.
“What trick is this?” Thor asks, brushing him off as best he can.
“Torpor,” says Loki, as the blue begins slowly to fade.
“What?”
“Hibernation,” Loki says, as if that helps Thor to identify what he is talking about in some way. “Always remember, I was raised of the Æsir. I was born of Jotun.”
Thor accepts this explanation with the same frail pang of sadness that accompanies all of Loki’s more credible pronouncements of difference, and looks about him. The Citadel looked like a bunker from without, but from within it is a matchless domed hall, riddled with strange geometry that pains the eye and disquiets the mind. There are rivulets in the floor like those in the side of a ritual knife, and he suspects that they have similar function: perhaps symbols, a form of writing, though they sweep and curve in circles and mazes, instead of forming strong, stark runes.
“And now,” Loki says, gravely, “if you wish to restore Tony Stark, kill me.”
“—What?” Thor asks, startled out of his contemplation of the architecture.
“A sacrifice for a sacrifice,” Loki says. “And don’t get angry, or you’ll explode. I don’t know what’s happened to his suit –“ Loki peers about him with what might very well be genuine bewilderment on his twitching haggard face. “I didn’t expect that to be absorbed, too.”
“Absorbed?” Thor repeats, lost. He clutches Mjolnir.
“It seems unlikely,” Loki says, a wraith of his old malice floating over his face, “that anyone could have stolen it.” He paces about the floor, uncertain. “I left him here, on his back – Thor, don’t think about it, you will explode.”
Thor thinks determinedly about Jane’s undisciplined run, while Loki paces, and paces, until comprehension seems to dawn.
“I see his shadow beneath me.” Loki looks up, and adds with an apologetic air, “It is hard to think with this accursed presence on my mind.”
Perhaps it is only suggestion, but Thor thinks he can see the bulge of a hoof against Loki’s cheek, distorting it from within, as if he is a mere skin sack for something stronger and stranger.
Thor raises Mjolnir unwillingly and without even a glimmering of rage: in truth he feels a little afraid, for the scheme he has not been told of seems as if it will not so much restore his friends as it will in this place slay Loki and burst free a being that will end everything. All he can truly rely on is that Loki is entirely too selfish to die just to achieve vengeance.
“He has been eaten by the rock,” Loki says, “or the Citadel has swallowed him. Raise your weapon, not your ire.”
Thor sighs. “I do not like to do this.”
“You shall like it better when it delivers Tony Stark to you,” Loki assures him, impatiently. The walls of the Citadel echo his words and distort them to a hiss, and Thor almost jumps at how far from speech they are mutated.
“Art thou certain it will work?” Thor asks, gripping the handle and adjusting his stance.
“Look at it this way,” Loki suggests, with a sigh. “What do I gain? I haven’t developed a fetish for splitting headaches. I told you, until I can satisfy you with your precious bloody Avengers I shall have no peace.”
Thor snorts. “Do not say you have a conscience to bait you.”
Loki says, “I have no power and I am in your bad graces. I will not stand both at once.”
With effort of will, Thor strains against the weight of the world and swings Mjolnir: such is the momentum of his weapon that, after striking the side of Loki’ head with a crunch that turns Thor’s stomach, his arms shake.
Loki drops like a stone, and hits the floor of the Citadel with a second crunch. Thor sits heavily, carried by the force of his own arm, and breathing hard.
Loki’s blood, red and warm as any other Æsir, not the black of Jotun ichor, seeps out of a broad split in his bare scalp, and fills the intricate runnels upon the Citadel floor.
Thor observes a little queasily that for a moment the whole building begins to throb. His own head aches in strident sympathy that he cannot control; while Loki lies on his face and bleeds, a shadow on the floor beside him darkens and deepens, until it looks like a man in armour has blocked the ambient light without becoming visible himself.
As Thor watches, out of breath and weak for no damn reason, the shadow thickens. Behind it he sees the internal structures of man, like branches in rusty red, forming thicker and more fractal highways, like twigs, then hairs – they grow obscure as the armour darkens, and solidifies.
At last all Thor can see is Tony Stark, unscathed and with arc reactor intact, his mask missing but otherwise whole, if apparently dead.
He blinks furiously, and tries to get to his feet – to what end he does not know – but his head is a struck bell and will not let him rise. Thor hastily diverts his thoughts: he is not angry and aggrieved that he has lost Loki to gain naught, he is – he is – he is thinking of Jane’s hair in the wind. It looks blacker than it used to, and coarser than he remembers.
Tony’s eyes open.
“Stark!” cries Thor, struggling upright against the reverberation and pinching of his skull, “Stark!”
“What the fuck happened?” Tony groans, then, with a kind of darkening fury, “Where is he? I’ll fucking end him—“
“Peace—“ Thor cries hastily. “Peace, Stark, or this place will crush thee with its defences. Peace, I say.”
Tony stares at him like a man with a serious brain injury, which Thor suppose is not altogether unreasonable, considering the circumstances of his death. “What happened to you?
“A long tale,” Thor says, helping him to his feet, unsteady himself. “I hope to recite it in better circumstances, to more ears.”
Tony points a rather shaken finger at Loki, who remains as Thor struck him down. “Did you do that?”
“A reversal,” says Thor, helplessly, hoping Tony won’t ask what that means.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Thor admits. “He won’t explain.”
“Well yeah,” Tony says, waving at Loki’s unmoving body. “He’s dead.”
“Not yet,” Loki mumbles into the floor. “Though I’m starting to think it wouldn’t be much worse.”
“Peace—“ Thor seizes Tony by the shoulders, and only just in time – the man lunges for Loki with a kind of bloodlust which might have taken apart a building. “Peace, Stark, or you’ll have no recourse to another resurrection – the defences of this place –“
“I jammed them before I got here,” Tony pants, as Loki rolls onto his back and wheezes gently. “You know what he did—“
“And I know what he’s doing now,” Thor says with a slight twinge of doubt, in as conciliatory a fashion as possible. “Peace, I tell you, Stark – if you kill him here we shall have no way to restore the others.”
“Maybe he doesn’t care about his friends,” Loki suggests. He seems to be around knee height, as far as Thor can tell from his voice – between cringing at his brother’s deliberately inflammatory words. Loki’s silver tongue has the power to arouse as well as to soothe, and Thor wishes he would employ it more circumspectly.
“Peace, Loki, please—“ Thor groans, groping for the iron arms of Tony’s suit as his newly-revived friend aims a vicious kick at his brother. He launches himself at Tony, bearing him to the floor, but it does not prevent the kick from making enough contact to knock Loki off-balance and bear him to the ground also.
From the floor, in somewhat triumphal tones for one who has just been soundly hoofed in the ribs, Loki says, “He’ll have to make his own way back to Midgard.”
“Thou speakest of impossibilities – peace, Stark, I beg you –“ Thor lies flat on top of Tony and tries to keep Loki in his line of sight. “You are beginning to try my patience,” he adds, sounding then almost exactly the model of his late mother.
“I speak of necessities,” Loki says, and Thor jerks his head about to see him wobble to his feet, his scalp clothed in dried blood, like a scholar’s cap. “If the Bifrost does not kill him, the heat and cold of the next Citadels surely will.”
“What’s this sudden concern for my life?” Tony spits – Thor adjusts himself in case they try to come to blows again, but Tony seems exhausted by his experience and Loki has no present interest in fighting. He only ever goes for violence, Thor reminds himself, when someone is already on his knees. Loki has no stomach for a fair fight. “You killed me. You killed them all, you unparalleled asshole—“
“And were I my own master I should do it a thousand times and never tire of it,” Loki says, with his finest condescending sneer, “but I have sworn to restore Thor’s companions, and it’s not going to look very good if I get you killed before anyone else has even drawn breath, is it?”
“Thy contrition lacks,” Thor says dryly.
“Go back to Midgard,” Loki says, surprisingly reasonable for one who has just confessed himself amenable to cyclic endless murder, “it will need you by now.”
“I don’t trust this asshole,” Tony says, which is also reasonable for anyone who has so much as heard of Loki, let alone been killed by him. “I’m coming with you.”
“Admit that you just want to see me die a few times,” Loki says. Thor is beginning to grow uncomfortable atop Tony, but there is no good moment yet to release him while Loki still jabs at his many wounds thus.
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Tony agrees.
“If I free thee,” Thor mumbles near Tony’s ear, giving up on the idea of there ever being a good time to let go, “do him yet no harm.”
“Jesus,” Tony grumbles, which Thor takes as assent, mostly because he doesn’t want to squash him any longer. He rolls off and onto his feet, and without a thought reaches down to help Loki up, as he has so many times before.
“If he dies of the journey,” Loki says, taking his hand – his flesh is cool to the touch – to pull himself upright, “I am not to blame. Say so.”
“I shall not hold thee responsible,” Thor assures him, releasing the hand. He raises his voice, little self-conscious, and cries, “Heimdall! We three are ready for our next destination!”
The Citadel shakes and shudders, and Loki says, under his breath, “We must go outside to reach the Bifrost.”
* * *
“I think,” Jane says, turning her gaze back to the small fragments they’ve replicated, “the lotus parts will connect with the Tesseract mk 2, but we need to translate between them, and we’re going to need coordinates.”
Selvig’s face, already grim, falls further. His mind feels slippery and unstable, and worn thin. He is having unpleasant flashbacks to possession every time he closes his eyes, and the facility has understandably not prioritised coffee provision while it is under continual attack. “You do not have any idea what the coordinates for Asgard are?” he sighs.
Jane shakes her head. “However Thor took me there—“ her voice wobbles a little at his name, and Selvig pretends not to notice, “—it’s pretty confusing. I don’t think they use a targeting system.” She rearranges the pieces of the black lotus slowly, staring beyond them. “If I remember ... Heimdall directs the Bifrost ... he sees everything...”
“That is what they said in legends,” Selvig says, careful neither to agree nor disagree, as more rubble drops into the net and distorts it above their heads. “But if he can see this, why have they sent no one? Why have they not offered to take on refugees? Don’t they care?”
Jane lines up two of the matte black ‘petals’, with their unfathomably tiny, self-contained circuitry and contactless connections, and acknowledges, “Odin may not. But Thor—“
“Thor may not be alive--“ Selvig breaks off at the look she gives him. It is so full of barely-restrained emotion that he fumbles the tiny dental tool he is holding, and jabs himself in the hand with it. “Ow.”
“Let’s not think about that,” Jane murmurs, looking away. The lump in her throat is almost visible, and Selvig can see the wet rim of her eyes grow wetter as she turns back to the lotus. He puts his finger in his mouth and sucks off the blood.
In the very corner of the lab, one panel of a discarded attempt at ‘petal’ creation lights up.
* * *
“Why’re you trying to stop me coming?” Tony asks, in a tense, terse voice which sounds like he’d like to accompany it with a violent shove. “What are you planning, asshole? Why are you really doing this?”
To Thor’s surprise, Loki ignores him and addresses himself to Thor. His scalp bears now two half-healed wounds and flakes of dried blood stuck to short bristles of hair, and he has let his glamour slip from him entirely. He says, “This Citadel is located in the heart of a sun. I can guarantee no one’s safety. I cannot guarantee the archer will survive his resurrection in such a furnace. If thou wilt not keep back, at least impress upon thy friend that this fire will at best weld him to the inside of his stupid armour, and at worst incinerate him within it like bread in a too-hot oven.”
“I’m right fucking here,” Tony reminds him.
Thor gazes out onto the void between worlds, speckled with a thousand glittering stars.
“You haven’t jammed the defences on this one,” Loki adds, addressing Tony with another unnecessary and vicious sneer, “so if you so much as twitch with the tiniest atom of ire in you, you’ll end up dead anyway.”
Thor watches a far-distant star streak the black with a tear-trail of white light, and swings Mjolnir off his shoulder in a thoughtful and slightly pointed arc. His head aches, just a little.
“What’s the trick, Loki?” Tony growls. “I know you aren’t doing this out of the goodness of your black shrivelled excuse for a heart.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Loki says, with unexpected poise. “And no, little mortal man, you don’t know anything.”
Tony snorts, and Thor insinuates himself between them without grace. “Perhaps,” he says, “it would be best, Stark, if you remained upon the Bifrost.” He hits upon a moment of glimmering genius and almost smiles at the subterfuge he is about to commit, wondering if this is how Loki feels all the time, in between bouts of insanity. He adds, “Should Loki betray me while I am with him in the Citadel, I shall need someone to tell Jane.”
Despite the obvious cunning of his plan, Thor is still shocked that it works: Tony scowls, but assents. Just in time, too, for the Bifrost delivers them then to the boiling environs of the Citadel at the hear of a star.
Thor sits up, sweating and immediately in discomfort, to find that Loki is already in position aboe the spirals and swirls of ritual rivulets, his extremities faint blue, impatient and clearly cooking within his clothes. “Get it over with,” he urges.
“I can scarce believe Barton survived this place,” Thor says, trying to keep a firm grip on Mjolnir’s handle in spite of the sweat.
“He didn’t,” Loki says, even more impatiently. “Keep your cool.”
“You’re not funny,” Thor growls, trying to keep his mind focussed on Jane’s startled laug while his muscle tense for their upcoming work. Her laugh keeps fading into Loki’s, and he shakes his head to clear his mind.
“I’ve no intention of being funny,” Loki assures him. “But please, hurry.”
Thor decides not to wait to be nagged a third time, and takes a swing at Loki’s head. Mjolnir slips from his grasp but flies true, thudding into the Æsir’s skull at speed.
He calls Mjolnir back to him as Loki staggers to his knees, and without a thought, lunges to keep his brother’s skin from grazing the scalding floor of the Citadel. Thor catches Loki awkwardly in his arms, and for his pains receives an exasperated groan.
“Thor, you meathead,” Loki sighs, as blood flows like spilt beer from a crevasse in his scalp, “my blood must touch the ground for this to work. Put me down and stop being an idiot.”
“How much blood?” Thor asks, regarding the stovetop-floor with dislike.
“I don’t know. Some.”
Thor brushes the wound on Loki’s head, and flicks the excess blood to the ground. It spreads far wider than so few drops should, and within seconds the runnels fill with the appalling stench of boiling blood, the air with a kind of pink haze of vaporised blood, and Thor’s nostrils with a profound regret.
“The more revulsion you feel at a work of magic,” Loki mumbles, a close-up witness to Thor’s disgust, “the more you may be certain that it breeches the laws and order of the universe; to reverse death is no small task, brother. To reverse five is to unweave the fabric of reality.”
“And you’ve always had such great respect for the order and laws of the universe,” Thor snorts, as he holds his brother up like a dying comrade on the field of battle. Loki is not so abominably heavy now as he was when Thor hauled him from Óminnistaðr, but he is still a burden not easy to bear in any respect.
“I have no great love for the hall of Odin, but I wouldn’t want it to fall on my head,” Loki points out. The walls of the Citadel heave and sigh as if they are breathing, and the stink of frying blood worsens: it has none of the poignant fragrances of Frigga’s funeral pyre, and all of the meaty scents of unfitted flesh fallen by accident into the belly of a camp-fire. He wonders if it is because Loki’s blood is not of Asgard, but of Jotunheim.
“By such vile smells shalt thou earn thy redemption,” Thor muses, pulling Loki move upright as he begins to drop. There remains dry blood on his finger and fresh on the crop of Loki’s skull.
“If you say so,” says Loki, rather faintly. Thor is briefly struck by a bolt of unimaginable pain across the brow: when it clears, he is holding Loki like a ragdoll and Barton’s voice yelps:
“Ow! Jesus fucking Christ! IT’s warm!”
There is no time to explain the danger of rage in such a place, Thor thinks. They cannot remain. He cries, “HEIMDALL!”, and seizes Clint by the upper arm as the archer scrambles hastily to his revived feet.
* * *
Jane turns down a corridor that only has one light left intact, and can’t suppress a shiver. After experiences with fragile boundaries between worlds and near-death in alien caves, she feels it’s reasonable to be a bit jumpy in dark, loud underground spaces.
She wishes beyond words that Thor would just turn up, the way he always just turns up, and make things alright again, or at least make things less actively on fire and full of screaming. Maybe when everything has been extinguished and calmed down and some kind of fragile order has been restored, he can find a restaurant that’s still standing where the staff aren’t all dead, and take her out to dinner to apologise for vanishing again.
Jane laughs at the modesty of her own fantasy, because what she really wants to do right now is cry, and there just isn’t time for that.
At the end of the corridor there’s at junction, and dead ahead a supply closet. Jane pries the door open, not sure what to expect, and peers into darkness. It is as black as the inside of a tin of black paint, but right at the back she can just about see a small light. It’s not so much an LED for operational electronics as it is a weird blue alien glow.
Ordinary people, Jane thinks, learn their lesson about blue alien glows after the first two or twenty times. She pulls an unseen obstacle out of the way: ordinary people aren’t scientists.
There is a low, edge-of-hearing hum within the closet, and as Jane gropes blindly toward the faint glow, the hum increases in volume, if not in pitch.
Pulling aside a few disused PCs, Jane lays her hands on the source of the blue alien glow. It is a small, curved fragment of metal, a little broader than a thumb, and the same length. In the light of its own inexplicable glow, it looks vaguely like the scale of a huge fish, but she knows it for what it is: armour.
“Thor,” Jane sighs, examining the scale. “Where are you?”
It occurs to her, perhaps appropriately, like a thunderclap.
“Analysis,” Jane blurts. The entire facility shakes like a frightened dog, but she’s too excited to pay attention to it. Jane stumbles over a barricade of broken equipment, bruising herself in about ten places, clutching her prize. She rockets upright and takes off down the corridor, dodging lumps fallen from the ceiling as if making a better go at a broken field run than she ever did in school.
When she gets back to the lab, Selvig is half-dozing and half-dazed, while Ling records a list of future experiments for the ‘petal’-Tess2 interface.
“Never mind that,” she blurts. “We need to analyse this.” Jane waves the scale. “It’s from Asgard – I think it’s trying to home – coordinates –“ The breathless run catches up with her as Selvig rouses himself.
“Did you find any coffee?” he asks, hopefully. She shakes her head. “Better.”
“Sometimes I wonder if the end of the world is really all that bad,” Selvig grumbles, as Ling takes the scale out of Jane’s hand.”
* * *
This does not go over well.
“At least the other wounds have healed,” Clint says, feeling his chest. “That asshole broke my ribs. I still remember the bone fragment going into my fucking lung.”
Tony glares at Loki, who makes an unconcerned figure on the far side of Thor. “What I don’t get is what’s in it for him.”
“Peace,” Loki says, talking to the void off the edge of the Bifrost. “Peace is what’s in it for me.”
“Bullshit,” Clint says, echoed so quickly by Tony that their retort blends into one. “You’re the front-and-centre enemy of peace.”
“Oh, I don’t give a rat’s anus for peace on Midgard,” Loki assures them. Thor tenses, ready to hold apart a potentially fatal battle on the Bifrost – but his callousness provokes no response. “For my own peace I am required to make some token of reparation and thus you are reborn.”
“Don’t expect gratitude,” Clint says, somewhat unnecessarily to Thor’s mind. “You’re a cruel, shitty person. You’re not going to bring back Schwarbage and his girlfriend—“
“Can’t,” Loki says, promptly. “They didn’t die in a Citadel.”
“—and you’re not going to bring back everyone you offed in your petty fucking invasion attempt. So don’t pretend for one second that you care or want to make amends –“
“I don’t want to,” Loki corrects him, “I have to. Were I at liberty and at leisure I would crush Midgard in a screaming ball of fire and laugh as your people expired, and not waste my piss on the final, screaming embers.”
There is a long silence.
At last, Tony says, “This is why you don’t have any friends.”
Loki says nothing. Thor clears his throat. “Who next?”
“Next,” says Loki, with a certain weariness, “you may all accompany me, provided you can swim. I shall require assistance.”
“I’m not helping you do shit,” Clint growls, immediately.
Loki pretends that the interjection was a polite and productive one, and says, “Banner cannot be allowed to wake until he is outside the Citadel. His rage is constant and unyielding and if he is conscious within the Citadel we will all be destroyed.”
Thor sees the expression on Tony’s face and recognises it for the familiar feeling it heralds: the inner conflict of one who recognises that a good point has been made, and that it has been made by Loki. He pats Tony consolingly on the metal shoulder.
Somewhat sulkily, Clint asks, “Why’d we need to swim?”
Loki leans around Thor and bares his teeth in an expression of irritable forbearance and unmistakably faked smile; Thor wonders if, maybe, these men had met Loki before he revealed himself to be mad with envy, monstrous in ambition, and unprecedented in cruelty, they might have liked each other.
It occurs to him that he did not have much time for them until Loki was revealed a traitor and a lunatic, and he sighs. The nature of gain is always loss, he thinks. Every time a man clutches for one thing, he lets another slip through his fingers.
“It floats upon a raft in a vast lagoon of molten gold,” Loki says, and leans back until Thor once more provides an unwitting shield betwixt Æsir and archer.
Tony opens his mouth once or twice, but neither he nor Clint offer any further retort. Before, behind, below, above, and to either side, the cold void stretches seemingly without end, studded with lights as alien and distant as Loki’s heart.
The way is long, and the uneasy silence grows the leagues beyond their natural length, but Thor thinks it is preferable to more arguing.
Clint and Tony, though grim-faced and perhaps still awed by the grandeur of the Bifrost – Thor has no doubt that even now Tony must speculate on its construction – seem unharmed, their wounds healed and their bodies whole. His head throbs.
Loki, bearing three fresh scars and a cap of dried blood caught in growing hair, walks in silence on his far side.
It is ill fortune that sees the end of the Bifrost drop them into the sea of gold, Thor thinks. The floating island and its Citadel are tiny, and the sea is huge from horizon to horizon.
They fall from the golden clouds like hailstones, and only Loki has the presence of mind to turn falling into diving, and slice through the thick liquid gold like a black knife: Thor and his friend hit the surface so hard that Thor thinks he might have bounced. He begins to sink in the viscous fluid, the wind knocked out of him by his impact, and recalls that in armour Tony cannot swim at all.
He is obliged to swim downward, and grope blindly in the cold-molten metal for some solid of similar sort – his hand touches another blindly-groping digit or five, and when his head breaks the surface he finds that he and Clint and Loki have all rushed to Tony’s aid. It is impossible to know whose hand he touched in the dark.
Tony wheezes, and spits out fortunes. Thor treads ... gold ... and thinks that the dwarves must never be allowed to find out about this world. They probably have hymns about it already.
“Over there,” Loki says, pointing to the impossible structure – a vast golden Citadel floating on a tiny island, barely above the level of the water. Thor thanks the clouds, for in direct sunlight he is sure this place would blind them all.
“Stop touching me,” Tony says evenly.
“Don’t be such a child,” Thor sighs. “You’ll drown.”
Tony accepts this with a clenched jaw, and in awkward formation, with considerable difficulty, two allies and one enemy keep him above the line of the waters – still, except where they have disturbed them – and tow him like the wreckage of an iron ship towards the impossible Citadel.
* * *
“Which means he’s not on Asgard,” Jane says, biting her lip. “Where is he?”
“That’s the part giving me problems,” Ling admits. “I need access to the targeting information from Tess1, to make a reasonable estimate, or at least get a better idea of what coordinates relate to where in the cosmos, but –“
“But?” Jane asks, propping a sleeping Selvig up on her arm. She’s impressed he can sleep – half an hour ago a chunk of concrete the size of a cow fell out of the ceiling and broke Ul-Haque’s leg. She supposes that exhaustion must win eventually.
“But it’s classified,” Ling says, shaking his head. “So.”
“It’s classified now?” Jane blurts, not even bothering to gesture to their tiny share in the global destruction. “Now? What the hell is Fury trying to do?”
“Trying to make sure no one else gets killed going after Loki,” says Hill, from behind the cow-sized concrete block. She steps around the obstacle as deftly as a New Yorker avoiding a fallen bum. “Five of the world’s most powerful individuals lost their lives on distant worlds in pursuit of him – we can’t risk losing anyone else.”
“We’re going to lose everyone else if we don’t find a way to get the civilian population off-world,” Ling protests, just about remembering to add a hasty, “Ma’am,” on the end in deference to her higher rank.
“I’m declassifying it,” Hill says, gently pushing him away from the laptop, and addressing herself to Jane. “But that’s not why. Ten minutes ago I checked over the tracker beacon logs, trying to work out if Wade was actually crash-landed in Mauna Loa or if he was just as full of shit as he usually is, and I found something which shouldn’t be happening.”
“What?” Jane asks, her heart beating a little faster. Selvig stirs in his sleep, and makes a noise that sounds like the word ‘jellyfish’, but he doesn’t rouse or move off her arm.
“All of the Initiative, with the exception of Thor, went through that portal wearing a tracker,” Hill says, trying to navigate through a forest of windows and a black splodge on a laptop where all the letters have worn off the keys.
“It’s there,” Ling murmurs, pointing to the screen.
“Shh. Those trackers broadcast to us in unnecessary levels of detail the moment of their deaths. They’re activated by vital signs and will transmit their location continuously as long as the person wearing them hasn’t suffered total brain death. They’ll transmit the location of gelatin in an electrically leaky environment if they’re attached to it, too, but we can’t help that. But.” Hill brings up a graph labelled ‘Stark’, and points to the transmission levels. There is a blot where no transmission has occurred, and in the most recent timeframe, a number of transmissions from several mad coordinates that look completely erroneous.
“It’s gone haywire?” Jane suggests, disappointed.
“He’s alive,” Hill corrects. “The data may be total garbage, but Tony – and Clint - were dead and are now not dead, unless –“
“Unless?”
“Unless the trackers have suddenly come into contact with gelatine and an electrical leak,” Hill says, turning to look at Jane. “Which from what I understand of the Citadels isn’t very likely.”
“Neither is someone coming back from the dead,” Jane protests.
“Ling,” Hill says, without looking at him, “if you quote Sherlock Holmes right now I will personally feed you to Director Fury. We live in a universe with magic fucking gods in it. We have to face the fact that anything’s possible.”
* * *
A moment later Tony reaches down and yanks Clint from the ‘water’ in a shower of gilded drops so beautiful that a bard might weep to see it. So, Thor thinks, would a dwarf.
“Fuck,” Clint splutters, rolling onto his stomach to cough up mouthfuls of dilute gold, like the dubious wet dream of Brokkr. Thor accepts Tony’s augmented hand, bracing himself on the unnatural ledge as best he can. His ascent is nevertheless undignified and untidy, and when he reaches firm land he needs to hold his stomach in and drool out the water he has inhaled.
His brother meanwhile makes his way alone, and with the benefit of prior experience succeeds only in making such a bad job of it that all three must reach for him and pull him up – Clint and Tony with fists clenched within the cloth of his clothing, Thor with a hand to the back of his neck and another to his belt. Loki collapses across them, promptly vomits up a gallon of liquid gold, and makes a sound like a deflating water bladder.
“Get the fuck off me,” Clint complains, rolling him off.
“You’re going to need to get that out of your system,” Loki says, gurgling golden foam on his lips. Tony heaves himself out from under the Æsir with a deliberate armoured elbow to his gut. Loki says in a winded voice, “I shall need you to drag Banner out before he can wake, and you can’t do it in that mood.”
Thor shuffles Loki onto the floor. “I can carry him alone, Brother. Do not impose on their tolerance/”
“No need for that,” Clint says, hastily. “I didn’t learn all that meditation shit for nothing. I can keep calm.”
“I’ll stay here,” Tony says through gritted teeth. “But if anything happens to Bruce—“
Loki climbs slowly to his knees. “If anything happens to Banner my redemption is over. You need not worry.”
“You’ll excuse me,” Tony says, moving away from the temptation to kick Loki in the ribs, “if I don’t take your word for it.”
Thor stoops and hauls Loki to his feet by the arm. His lips are gilded with foam, and gold flecks stick amid the hair of his head, but at least the crust of blood is gone.
“Art thou—“ Thor begins, seizing his other arm in order to hold him still and examine his face.
“I’m dying,” Loki reminds him. “So no, I’m not all right.”
“Can’t help thinking you’ve pulled this one before,” Tony says loudly, “and that no one cared that you were ‘dying’ that time, either.”
Loki doesn’t so much as waste a flicker of a sneer on Tony, but gently, and with some difficulty, pries Thor’s hands from him and brushes open the great golden doors to the Citadel of Peace.
* * *
He knows it must be Hill because the only other person with that level of clearance is in the room with him, bandaging his own forearm with toilet tissue and a torn shirt.
The ‘room’ in question is a men’s bathroom full of corpses, and half of the ceiling is pierced by an attack ship the shape of a paper dart. Fury, recognising the alarm tone, says, “God-fucking-damn that woman—“ and tries to leave the remains of a stall he’s crouching in.
Coulson puts his arm out to hold Fury back, and Fury eyeballs him with bloodshot disbelief.
“Are you holding back your superior officer, Agent Coulson?”
“Yes,” Coulson says, and points at a lump of reinforced concrete, which wobbles, and crunches out of the ceiling onto the ground onto which Fury was about to step. It also unfortunately goes through about half of Agent Petersen, who is at least already beyond knowing it has happened to him. “Okay.” Coulson lowers his arm.
“Get down to Level 3,” Fury says, climbing over the block, “under something solid. Redeploy Grimm onto Structural Integrity –“
“Can’t, sir,” says Coulson, following him without as much difficulty as a man with that many injuries ought to exhibit. “He’s – well, possibly dead but very definitely out of action.”
“Fuck,” Fury complains, drawing a knife. His gun jammed about twenty minutes ago, thanks to a blow from falling masonry, and their as-yet unidentified enemies seem to be as susceptible to stab wounds as most other life-forms, once their armour is off.
There has been some speculation that this is because the armour is part of their bodies. Fury doesn’t care.
He holds the knife ready, and beckons Coulson out with the gesture that he’s never forgotten from his days of military service: he’s never stopped needing to use it.
Coulson follows, keeping as low a profile as an injured administrator can.
“Clear,” Fury mutters, sending him on down toward Level 3 and nominal safety.
From above there is the unmistakeable bowel-curdling screech of the invaders’ war cry.
* * *
Loki is already on his knees, his hands clasped behind his back, which reminds Thor of times not truly conducive to smiting him with a hammer.
“They used to,” Loki says.
“You killed them too,” Tony says in disgust. Thor isn’t sure why he rescinded his desire to remain outside, especially when he immediately adds, “That was resignation, not anger,” as if they Citadels cared about what people said.
“Most of them had already died,” Loki corrects him. “The problem with losing the location of your guard tower in order to keep it secret is that the guards tend to die while they’re waiting to be relieved.” He looks about him at the golden interior of the Citadel, which reflects the ambient light back at itself until the entire place glows. “This one is supposed to have a guardian. She was here before and I don’t know where she went.”
Thor rolls his shoulders and raises Mjolnir. Loki closes his eyes.
The impact shakes Thor’s arms, and Loki flops onto his face. Blood flows from the back of his skull, trickles down past his ears, and slowly fills the spirals and swirls.
There is a bubbling noise.
“What’s he doing?” Clint demands.
“Drowning in my own blood, mostly,” Loki groans. He adds something which Thor cannot hear, and after a long moment the Æsir lays his hands palm-down in his own blood and heaves himself to his feet.
Tony eyes him suspiciously. “Why’s your mouth bloody?”
Loki rolls his eyes in magnificent disdain. “I just died and woke up face-down, drowning in my own blood. Does that paint a clear enough picture?”
“It’s all over your tongue,” Tony persists, squinting at him.
“Tony,” Clint says, pointing. Thor turns too: an as-yet unconscious and almost pitifully small Dr Bruce Banner lies curled up on the Citadel floor. An expression begins to form on Tony’s face, is subsumed almost immediately, and then he’s out of sight, stooping to sling the unconscious scientist over his shoulder.
Without any help from Clint or so much as a glance at Thor, Tony strides out of the Citadel, leaving them to follow in his wake.
Thor gets outside just as Tony lays down his burden upon the golden raft, and turns on Loki. Having successfully somehow avoided literal explosion within the Citadel, he now erupts like a volcano of invective, showering Loki with an unstoppable deluge of furious hate, the majority of it wholly justified and appallingly accurate.
Thor is a little puzzled by his brother’s response: usually when subjected to similar rants from their father, Loki is either stoic or contrite according to his plans, or occasionally hysterical if he has nothing up his sleeve. Over the years, Thor fancies he has grown to learn Loki’s basic set of rules even if the game he plays is incomprehensible and typically odious.
Now Loki seems not to be listening at all. He mutters to himself, twitches his fingers, and stares into some far-distant reaches of space. He looks quite, quite crazy, and Thor finds he is desperate to wipe the blood from his face, from his head, and to restore him somehow to even the facsimile of the Loki he knew. He reminds himself of his vow: no pity, not now.
In a gap in Tony’s bombastic dressing-down, it is possible to hear Bruce Banner say in a groggy and highly confused voice, “Am I hallucinating? Why does my head hurt?”
Thor’s head aches in sympathy.
* * *
Fury sidles around the corner. There is a lanky blackis green figure on the stairs below. The ugly iridescent armoured silhouette that has become so familiar of late. They fade to dirty yellow after death: no one knows why and Fury doesn’t give a fuck yet.
He holds his breath. The alien does not seem to be as hyper-vigilantly aware of its surroundings as they usually are. Instead – Fury creeps closer, trying to will his heart into beating more quietly – it is crouching, perfectly still, and emitting a very low whistle which sounds even to Fury’s unsympathetic ear like something in serious distress.
He sneaks down a few more stairs.
The alien grizzles, a pained sound, and gloopy black-green ichor begins to stream from the cracks in its armour, as if someone is inside, forcing it out. From experience, Fury knows their circulatory system isn’t as highly pressurised as humans – they shouldn’t bleed when cut, let alone for no reason.
The ichor isn’t even rolling down over the plates, either, but pouring out in long, thin, liquid snakes, plumes – like ribbons of water from a tap – but horizontal, perpendicular to the dying alien. The snakes of ichor take off down the stairs, at eye-height, like inky scribbles on the face of reality.
That shit isn’t physically possible, Fury thinks, enraged on behalf of the laws of the universe. What the fuck are these things doing?
As he draws level with the motionless alien he can see even in this dim light that it has faded to a muddy yellow.
Fury tightens his grip on the knife and tries to figure out where the black ribbons have gone.
* * *
The provenance of the bitter-tasting coffee is uncertain, but right now he doesn’t care if it’s three-quarters cat shit. It’s hot – well, warmish – and dark and his imagination can do the rest.
Hell, it might even be decaf, but Selvig is aware enough of the placebo effect to know that doesn’t have to matter.
“This is gross,” Ling says, gulping it down. “Who made it?”
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Selvig chides him, pushing one or two fragments of the replacement lotus towards him. “Also, if you didn’t make it then I suspect Jane is to blame, and I would not like to upset her now.”
Ling finishes his coffee, and takes the petals.
For the next five hours they work in jerky silence, moving a little like marionettes, slotting together components often without looking at them.
Fury’s arrival not long after the end of the coffee, and his disquieted departure a little after that both pass without remark or recognition.
* * *
“I’m not sure you should be letting him do this,” he says at last, staring at Loki. “He’s kinda obviously bugfuck.”
“It was the only way to get you back,” Thor explains, again. He offers no rebuttal to the other charge, because he’d have to be a far better liar than he is to argue the case for his brother’s sanity.
“I can’t speak for anyone else,” Bruce says, carefully, “but I’d been trying kinda hard not to be alive anyway. Granted, that isn’t the way I’d have chosen, but—“
“Shut up,” Tony instructs, wearily, giving Bruce an angrily affectionate pat on the shoulder. “No one wants you dead. And I want you alive, and my opinion is the one that counts here, so even if I have to personally – I dunno, clean my own bathroom or something – to make it happen, you’re staying not-dead. And we’re getting Steve back. We’re gonna bring Steve back.”
“And Natasha,” Clint points out.
“And Natasha,” Tony waves a finger at Bruce, a circling accusing pointing finger. “My point is shut up.”
“Understood,” says Bruce with a faint smile. “How do we, uh, leave?”
“Oh yes,” Thor says, rousing himself. Loki remains lost in some terrible, twitchy thought, and bathed in his own drying blood. Thor thinks he will, as soon as the opportunity presents itself, clean that off him. “HEIMDALL!”.
* * *
So far, every major or minor breakthrough from Basement has been communicated effectively, and the absence of any information concerns Coulson enough to go down and check.
There’s a dead alien crouching in the stairwell, but it’s not half-dismembered, so he doesn’t think that it’s one of Director Fury’s. Remembering his H G Wells, Coulson makes a silent prayer that they’ve all caught some infectious disease and are now dying in their droves.
Coulson heads on down, abandoning the fantasy. It’s never that easy for them.
After a few more silent, echo stairwells, he gets onto the corridor where Basement Research is taking place. Biologics have all their lights out, which bodes ill, and he’d investigate, but he’s obliged to leap into a closet almost immediately.
There is a line of aliens heading into the portal research facility. They’re not executing a manoeuvre, chittering, scouting, or even feeding – Coulson peeks through a crack in the door – they’re just lining up like geeks outside an Apple store, or Brits doing just about anything.
Coulson watches another two move forward into the lab. The line is moving quickly, but as he watches more aliens clatters down from each direction, and politely join the noiseless line.
Just as he’s about to write off Ling and Selvig as more regrettable casualties of this apparently unstoppable invasion – this motiveless war – Selvig comes to the doorway of Portal Research, looks up and down the corridor, and retreats back into the lab.
Coulson sighs to himself, and lets his fingers slide from the closet handle. Fury would doubtless call Selvig a traitor, but the truth is he’s susceptible to possession and – like Agent Barton proved – once opened, the pathways of possession are hard to close properly. Once violated, a person is easier to violate again.
What he’d like to know is who has control of Dr Selvig now, and what the hell he’s doing.
Coulson considers his options: go and look, and be eaten by aliens, or don’t go and look, and get chewed out by Director Fury.
On the whole, he thinks the aliens are the more acceptable risk. He’s never been on the receiving end of a full-scale Fury Freakout and he doesn’t plan on blemishing that record.
Agent Phil Coulson opens the closet door very slowly. The aliens pay no attention, and shuffle forward a few more steps along their line.
He slips out of his hiding place. The aliens focus on their goal.
Coulson nips around the corner, down the parallel corridor, and draws to a halt outside the far wall of the portal research lab.
Structural Integrity is lousy. As he’d hoped, there is a crack in the concrete and a hole big enough to shove a three-year-old through, never mind catching a glimpse. Coulson applies himself to the fissure.
He’s almost immediately blinded by cold blue flames, but through the painful disc, as it dims, he gets at least a glimpse of what’s happening. Rather than pouring fresh troops in, as he’d have expected and feared, the portal is transporting the aliens into another place. Through the flames he can see Ling and Selvig tinkering wordlessly with something out of his line of sight; the vast line of aliens patiently waiting to disappear.
Coulson slumps back against the wall and checks the bindings of his injury. It’s too much to hope for that they’re just leaving, that Ling and Selvig have somehow brainwashed them into going away. He tightens the torn shirt strips: Fury’s going to take this badly.
* * *
The Citadel is at least a mile up the side of a mountain.
“Okay,” says Tony, with a kind of amazement. “I have a functioning heating system, the Other Guy is impervious to cold—“
“Good point,” says Bruce, and he blossoms up and out in a green fountain of flesh.
“—but what are we going to do about Clint? Fuck,” Tony adds, as the acute cold robs the man in question of his consciousness, and Clint crashes onto what looks like a dragon’s tail vertebra like a felled tree.
The Hulk scoops up Clint and stuffs him under his arm.
“That’s not going to help,” Tony sighs.
“Why not?” Thor asks, through chattering teeth, as howling winds blow unidentified cold things into his head and whip his hair about. “His armpit’s warm.”
“I have a solution,” says Loki abruptly, as if waking from a long sleep. He scrubs vaguely at his mouth with the back of his hand, dislodging dried blood. The cold clearly does not bother him, and Thor envies him that right now. “But you won’t like it, and neither will he.”
“Great,” Tony groans.
“He won’t die this way,” Loki says.
The Hulk snarls at him.
“Either you let me do this,” Loki sighs, “or he suffocates and freezes in your big green armpit. Stop being such a giant bestial idiot.”
Thor feels a little wounded that the insult giant bestial idiot has been bestowed on someone else. He’d always thought it was unique to him.
The Hulk lays Clint none-too-gently on another lump of what is almost definitely dragon spine, and stands back with an expectant look.
“I’ll need a knife,” says Loki, looking strangely brutal, no hair to whirl about his head, only new scars and the last clinging flakes of blood. Were his hands not clean, Thor thinks, he’d look the perfect butcher.
The Hulk growls at him again.
“I need a knife,” Loki repeats, “or I shall have to use my teeth.” He bares them into the wind for the benefit for the Hulk, although he is half its size. It looks for a moment like a dog threatening a bear.
The Hulk roars in his face, which does little to lessen the similarity.
“Just let him,” says Tony, putting a hand on the part of the Hulk nearest a bicep that he can actually reach. He pats the giant green monster in a vaguely consoling manner. His face is growing dark with the first stirrings of frostbite in spite of the heating components.
Thor removes a small knife from his belt and passed it to his brother.
Loki slashes his palm and, swiftly, raises Clint’s arm. The Hulk snarls, but Loki ignores the threat of imminent concussion, and slices over the archer’s palm. Then he presses their palms together. Thor cannot help thinking: it didn’t have to be his palm. You just did that so he can’t use his bow. Loki, it seems, is still Loki when he’s being helpful.
“You’d better explain what the fuck you’re doing,” Tony says, through teeth clenched against the cold, “or I let the green guy do what he’s dying to.”
“You’d call it a blood transfusion,” Loki says, pressing his cut hand closer with his whole one.
“Uh-huh,” Tony says, pointedly.
“Jotun blood is more or less anti-freeze,” Loki says, a little impatiently. He does not say ‘I don’t think you understand the sacrifice I’m making’, but Thor understands the inference even if Tony plainly does not. To give up his own blood to someone he considers lesser is a step in Loki’s personal development Thor would never have expected.
Clint begins to stir: Loki releases his hand and steps back. Clint flexes his hand, staring at the cut, and past it, at Loki. “What the fuck did you just do to me?”
“It’s temporary,” Loki assures him, and begins the trek up the mountain.
“How much worse does that make it,” Clint says grimly, scrambling to his feet. “What did he do?”
“Blood transfusion,” Tony says, stepping gingerly from one vertebra to another in the howling wind.
“Through my hand?”
“It’s best not to ask,” Thor says. Clint follows Tony up the spine of the dragon: supposedly the long-dead guardian of his Citadel, should the cold not be enough to deter the determined.
Thor glances up at the Hulk, who rests on his knuckles, squinting into the wind at where Loki toils up the mountainside. The Citadel itself is almost invisible in the flying frost.
“Don’t smash him,” Thor says patting the Hulk on the arm.
The Hulk growls at him. Thor removes his hand.
“I’d also prefer it if you didn’t smash me,” Thor adds.
The Hulk very gently and very deliberately flicks him in the ear.
* * *
“Where the fuck have they gone?” Fury asks.
“I have the answer to that,” Coulson says, a little out of breath, and gets the debatable pleasure of catching Nick Fury off-guard.
“Give it to me,” Fury barks, bracing himself.
“They’re lining up in the basement to go through in the portal Ling and Selvig have opened. I don’t know what’s on the other side of the Portal but neither of our physicists seem to be operating under their own steam—“
“Fuck,” Fury growls.
“If they’ve leaving—“ begins Agent Patel.
“We don’t know where the fuck they’re going or why,” Fury snaps. “Don’t speak out of turn.”
Agent Patel shrivels up like everyone else in the face of Fury’s wrath, but a second later she raises her hand.
“Yes?” Fury demands, hands on hips.
“I was going to say to say, Sir, if they’re leaving, wouldn’t this be a good time to secure structural integrity and try to re-enable Comms?” she asks, with only a tiny, tiny twitch to betray a sense of almost suicidal annoyance at being cut off.
Fury grunts and turns away, which most of the agents are established enough to know means he thinks it’s a good idea and doesn’t want to own up to it.
“Fraser, Okonkwo, Black River, Nguyen,” Fury barks, “You’re on Structural Integrity. Blakemore, Strauss, you’re on Comms. Desmarais, find and assist Agent Hill. Patel, stick with Coulson.”
The rest of the agents exit what was once the upper canteen. Agent Patel looks temporarily nervous, but overall she’s dealt better with Fury than most of the recruits at her level.
“Where did we get you from?” Coulson asks as he helps him retie his bandages again.
“Interning at Yves Saint Laurent, Sir,” she says, deftly looping off ends. “So far this is less stressful.”
“We’re going to the basement,” Fury instructs. “Are you armed, Patel?”
“Yes, sir. One Bowie knife and one bottle of hydrochloric acid, sir.”
Fury grunts his approval. Coulson says, “Less stressful than Yves Saint Laurent?”
“Have you ever tried to launch a spring collection with a bunch of histrionic coke addicts, Sir?” Agent Patel stands aside to let Coulson go before her, and as a sort of afterthought, draws her Bowie knife.
“I don’t believe I’ve had that particular pleasure,” Coulson admits. “Did it prepare you for fighting an alien invasion? What were your combat scores like?”
“Woeful, Sir, but I did have a hundred percent in skills relating to Office Management, which is what I was hired for.” Patel makes a sweep for the corridor behind them, and steps over the carcass of a fallen alien.
Coulson nods. “I used to be a personal assistant to the C.E.O. of a Fortune 500 company,” he says, quietly enough for Patel to hear and Fury to miss. “I think I’ve been shot at less in this job.”
“Fewer unexpected showers of hot coffee,” Patel says, with a philosophical air.
“Coffee,” mutters Fury, in front of them, but he doesn’t add anything else to the conversation. Coulson is quite sure Fury regards the occasional threat of death just a standard part of any worthwhile job.
When they reach the basement the lines are still going. Fury flings himself back against the wall, on the alert, as another alien tramps past, but the creature does not respond at all, and appears not to notice them.
Coulson, who automatically put out an arm to hold Patel out of the way, releases her sheepishly. “Sorry.”
“What’re they doing?” she murmurs, fascinated. “Why are they leaving without finishing the job?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Coulson whispers, as Fury leads them smack into a line of aliens, and walks straight by them like they’re plebs beside a red carpet.
“Oh God, Mario used to do this all the time,” Patel snorts, as they follow him. “At least these fuckers aren’t as mad about it as the press usually are.”
Through the open door they squeeze past the creatures in the most uncomfortable Intimacy Below A Lintel Coulson’s ever had, and now there’s nothing between them and the Selvig/Ling team but the line of aliens.
“Where’s Jane?” Patel whispers.
Coulson can only shrug.
Another alien vanishes into the blue flickering flames. The Portal must be drawing power from, and draining, pretty much the entire rest of HQ, if not the entire surrounding state, too, Coulson realises with discomfort. He wonders how much longer it can last, how many more of them will remain here in the dark with them when the power dries out.
“I really hope you’re not thinking what I’m thinking,” sighs Patel, under her breath.
“I’m afraid I might be,” Coulson admits.
“Dr Selvig,” Fury shouts over the crackling of the portal and the whirring of fans on machines, “Dr Ling. Where are you sending them?”
Coulson is a little surprised by this – he was expecting an order to shut off the device, which no doubt Selvig and Ling would have ignored, leading to some sort of knife-throwing incident. Patel glances at him with the same expression of surprise that he’s sure he’s wearing himself.
“Asgard,” says Ling, calmly.
There is a brief frisson. Coulson and Patel both look to Fury, waiting for the appropriate response. Fury puts his hands on his hips and scowls, deep in thought, as the long line of aliens dives, two-by-two, into the portal, uninterrupted.
“Sir?” Patel asks, after eight aliens have passed.
“They wouldn’t come and help us,” Fury says.
“Exactly,” says Selvig, in the distant voice of someone who isn’t listening and doesn’t really intend to.
“Fuck ‘em,” Fury says, so quietly that Coulson has to strain to hear. It’s not a problem he often has with Director Fury, and it’s not the comfort an outside might assume it would be.
“Sir?” Patel repeats.
“You,” he say, pointing at her, “find team Delta and assign them to the generators.” He is still apparently lost in thought, but he points directly at Coulson’s face, and continues, “You. Find that creepy mutant woman and tell Field Ops to switch from defence to search and rescue. And—“ Fury breaks into a grim smile, “tell Wilson his services are no longer required.”
“We’re just leaving them to invade Asgard, Sir?” Patel asks, following Coulson out past the hauntingly indifferent aliens.
“I’m sure you remember from interning a practice called ‘making it someone else’s problem’, Agent Patel,” Coulson says, walking briskly down the line.
“Of course, Sir. I just wasn’t aware we engaged in the same strategic brilliance here, Sir,” Patel sighs, shooting a sideways glance at the aliens.
“Neither was I,” Coulson mutters.
The aliens continue filing into uninformed, unprepared Asgard like water through a channel, and Nick Fury watches them go with his brow furrowed.
* * *
“I’m not happy about this,” he says.
“Put that from your mind while we are here,” Thor advises.
“I’m not mad,” Clint explains, “I’m fucking worried.” He holds his hand up to show Thor. “Do you know shit about Jotun blood? Or what it might do to me? Because I sure as shit know I don’t.”
Thor shushes him again. The floor – improbably in this frozen wasteland, before bloodshed – has begun to change colour.
Loki takes a step back from the spreading patch of gold.
“What’s happening?” Clint demands.
The gold patch spreads into the shape of a body. It begins to bubble, and with each bubble it sticks in the air, and throws up more solid height, until there before them kneels a naked woman made of glittering, smooth gold.
“That’s not Tash,” Clint mutters.
“Observant,” Loki sighs. “I wondered where she’d got to.”
The kneeling woman rises to her feet. Thor, who has seen a great many naked women, notes that unlike those he has enjoyed time with, this one is without identifying marks. She is quite symmetrical, and quite unattractive in her perfection.
Thor considers that Sif would probably tell him it is because women are not made for him to find them pleasing to his eye, but before he can think any longer on it he is interrupted by the golden woman.
She says,” What business brings you hither to the Citadel of Peace?” and she sounds as if metal had a voice.
Thor opens his mouth to reply, but Loki nudges him silent: this at least he is familiar with.
“We come to restore order,” he says, “to free those who must be freed, and imprison those who must be imprisoned.”
The golden woman regards Loki without any expression upon her masklike face. “Who are your companions?”
“The transformed man and the loyal brother,” says Loki, watching her cautiously. He looks tense: Thor makes the mistake of wondering what kind of threat this woman will pose should they fail this test, and discovers that his imagination is more vivid than he would have preferred.
“And who are you that speaks for them?” she asks, her voice somehow echoing within her.
Loki says, “The jailer and the jailed. The usurper, and the usurped. I come to restore order at the cost of myself.”
The hairs on Thor’s neck stand up in the cold.
The golden woman sinks into the floor and vanishes, the glimmering gold leeching out of the Citadel like blood from the face of a draining corpse.
“Get on with it,” Loki says. He lies down upon the floor.
“Down there?” Thor says. “I shan’t get a good swing.”
Loki stares up at him. “Even Jotun blood will freeze in the air of this Citadel. Have you so great a desire to see a hailstorm of blood?”
Thor considers this. “Now that thou brings it to mind,” he says, picturing it, “Yes. I have a great desire to see this thing.”
Loki scrambles to his feet and gives his brother a sour look. “Either way,” Loki says, “unless you want your Tony Stark to die of hypothermia, hurry up.”
Thor’s head gives a desultory throb, like the pawing of an impatient horse against his sinuses, and he raises Mjolnir, lofty and hale, above his shoulder. His breath crystallises in the air before him.
He glances at Clint, who has folded hi arms, and watches from within a cloud of freezing steam, expectant but not impatient.
Thor sighs, and swings Mjolnir at his brother’s head. The blow connects, but throws him off-balance when it does. Thor loses both his grip on the hammer, and his footing, and while Mjolnir and Loki drop to the supernaturally cold ground, so does he.
Loki lies flat, his blood freezing into a revolting sculpture of death almost as soon as it leaves his body: Thor and the hammer spin in frictionless inertia until Clint puts his foot in Thor’s way.
“Thank you,” says Thor, hauling himself up by Clint’s hand.
“How’s it going to fill the ... whatsits ...” Clint points out, flexing his fingers at the swooping lines, “if it freezes right out of him?”
Thor frowns. “I had not considered that.”
“If I had my quiver,” Clint suggests, “I’ve got an arrow that explodes in flame.”
Thor raises his eyebrows. “Truly?”
“Scout’s honour.”
“Who is Scout?”
Clint shakes his head. “I wasn’t one, anyhow. What’s that smell?”
The uncomfortable stench of singed blood returns to Thor’s nostrils, unwelcome and disturbing: he says, “Perhaps we will not need your exploding arrow,” with a suspicion in his mind.
The blood is frozen once more, but now it forms deep red lines, swoops, and swirls, a writing in scars and scours in the frozen flesh of the Citadel.
Loki mutters through a mostly-closed mouth, “I can’t actually get up. In case you were curious. Or interested in the situation at all.”
Clint says, “I don’t think I have the strength not to kick him.”
“Stay thy boot,” Thor sigh. “Watch for the lady Romanov.”
Clint agrees somewhat reluctantly, and Thor takes his cue to go forth and try to unstuck his little brother from his own spilled blood.
The cap of red upon him is like ice in bog grass, and it crackles when Loki moves. Thor begins by breathing upon Loki’s face, where the ice ties him to the frozen blood upon the Citadel floor, but the moisture in his breath freezes and this exacerbates rather than solving the problem.
Thor rubs his hands on the icy blood to warm and melt it. Behind him he hears Clint exclaim to the lady, and Romanov reply, but he shackles is welcome and turns his mind to freeing Loki.
“I think thou art ready,” he says, presently, his hands red and crackling with refrozen blood. Thor lays his hands on his brother’s shoulders and heaves him upward.
Loki yells in pain, grunts, and comes up from the floor abruptly, leaving a patch of neck skin behind him. Luckily, at least, the blood that flows from his wound freezes almost immediately, too.
“My apologies, brother –“ Thor cries, forgetting his oath entirely.
“How do we get out of here?” Romanov asks. It is rather the more practical question than the ‘what happened?’ queries her male colleagues offered on waking.
“First, we must rejoin the others,” Thor instructs. He is compelled to support Loki from the place on his arm: when they step into the howling wind and even greater cold without, the Hulk is warming Tony’s face with his vast green hands.
* * *
* * *
“Two more,” Loki corrects, covered in matted, drying blood and blesses with a great many scars on his skull. He looks oddly triumphant for one having his great work undone with no reward for it, his teeth clenched and his hair regrown enough to look truly ridiculous.
“What’s he talking about?” Bruce asks, addressing himself to Thor: it is however Loki who replies.
“Before your Captain, there was the sacrifice of the last remaining monk of the Citadels.”
“I don’t know why I’m surprised that you already had all of this planned,” Bruce sighs. Everyone ignores him.
“Why do you care whether you resurrect him or not?” asks Tony, sharply.
“I don’t,” Loki says, hurriedly.
“He’s got something up his sleeve,” Tony growls, as if this is not apparent to absolutely everyone on the Bifrost. “Don’t let him.”
“But—“ begins Loki.
“If you want to do it so badly,” Tony says, “it’s enough reason to stop you.”
“Suit yourself,” Loki sighs, his face a picture of frustration. Thor catches Romanov’s suspicious look and wonders if she thinks the same as he: it is not like Loki to give up so easily – if he has reason to want this thing accomplished, he will try again.
Romanov looks away, into the void, and says nothing at all.
“How d’you think they’re getting on without us?” Banner asks, nervously. Loki trudges at the far edge of the Bifrost, and Thor thinks: I hope none of them think to push him off. The image of Loki’s first fall is still emblazoned upon his guilty dreams, after everything his brother has since done.
“Heimdall sees all,” Thor tells him, with a confidence he suddenly does not feel. “If it were ill, my father would send aid.”
Loki’s derisive snort, from the far side of him, is quite audible. He says, “I should not pus so great a faith in Odin were I as enamoured of Midgard as thou art, oh my brother. He cares for Asgard and for Asgard alone.”
“Pay him no mind,” Thor advises Bruce. “He is but bitter.”
“Suit yourself,” Loki repeats, “but if you consult your all-seeing guardian you’ll find I’m not lying.”
“Nothing in this goddamn universe or any other,” Tony says, irritably, “will ever convince me that every word out of your mouth isn’t nuclear-grade bullshit.”
“I know,” Loki says, with a small smile. “It’s rather liberating. I can say whatever I please.”
“God,” Tony mutters.
“Did Loki ever explain why he killed us in the first place?” Romanov asks, in the uneasy silence that follows.
Thor has no opportunity to reply, nor to see how the Æsir reacts to this question, for at this minute, with a flash and a fearsome bang, they reach their destination.
When he picks himself up off the floor, and then, more apologetically, off from Romanov, he has more or less forgotten her question.
This Citadel is austere. The spirals continue up the walls like vines, but they are carved into ancient stone, and there is nothing much to distinguish it from any other such tall dome, save that its colours seems to come from millennia of dried, soaked-in blood upon the porous rock.
“Rogers was not the first sacrifice made here,” says Romanov, quietly. “This place is an abattoir.”
Loki shrugs, and turns to Thor with a sigh. “Time to spill blood.” He sneers at Clint briefly, “We could use yours, now, but I doubt you’d recover as well as me.”
Clint offers him the floor with one gesture. “No, no. You go ahead. Enjoy your headache, asshole.”
Thor catches Romanov’s eye and she frowns. The headache plaguing him does not appear to have abated.
“Are we doing this or not?” Loki demands, rolling his eyes at the delay. “Do you want your precious Captain back or do you find his complains about Truth and Justice as implausible and annoying as I do?”
“Ware the defences of this place,” Thor reminds his companions: Loki at his most obnoxious would try the patience of a boulder, and the reminder is as much for himself as it is for them.
He hefts his hammer. The whole Citadel seems to hold its breath, and Thor is struck by a sense of something wrong, something askew with the world. He recalls what Loki said, in Óminnistaðr: that these actions might well undo the universe, but now that he stands here, ready to strike his brother down one last time, he isn’t sure that is the source of his foreboding feeling.
He wishes for his father’s wisdom. Odin would know how to interpret dark shadows on the mind, and if he did not, he would know whom to consult in order to have them read. Thor, meanwhile, is at a loss.
“C’mon,” Tony urges, fidgeting about in his suit.
Thor shakes his head to clear it, and swings Mjolnir at Loki’s face.
There is a terrible crunch of bone and cartilage, and the blood that almost sprays out from him is accompanied, once more, by a pressure on Thor’s skull that pains him as if he were the one struck. There is a collective hiss of sudden discomfort. Thor mops his brow, and is sure for a moment that he can hear a terrible thundering, like some herd of stampeding cattle.
He watches through creased eyes as Loki’s face rebuilds itself: as his nose regrows from the crumpled remains, still dripping blood. AS, like a skeleton of veins, Steve Rogers appears upon his flesh assembling slowly, thickening and darkening with blood, bones built from the marrow out.
Thor makes an effort to remain impassive.
At last, Steve says. “What the heck just happened?”
Bruce says, “It’s a long and weird story.”
There is an abrupt crackle of lightning, and without warning or ceremony, Heimdall appears among them, holding a sword. Several of the Avengers immediately assume battle readiness or its nearest equivalent, but Thor waves them down.
“It is Heimdall,” he cries. “What grave news brings thou here?”
“That’s Heimdall?” Tony asks, under his breath. “I thought he’d be more... white.”
“Shut up, Tony,” Bruce mutters.
“Asgard is under attack,” Heimdall reports, without prelude. “Your father requires you at home.”
“Under attack?” Thor cries. “Who would dare?”
Every other person in the Citadel turns to look at Loki, who sighs.
“You have too high an opinion of my abilities,” Loki says, “I have been among you all this time. I have not for a second left my brother’s side.”
“I know not who or what they are,” Heimdall sighs, “only that they come to us from Midgard.”
“From Earth?” shout several voices at once.
“Temper,” Loki murmurs, a small smile crossing his face at their consternation. “Did you really think yourselves blameless?”
“Shut up,” Tony advises.
Loki, rather theatrically, raises his eyebrows, and bites his tongue very hard. He even goes so far as to cover his mouth with his hand and mumble indistinctly behind it.
“We’ve got to get back to Earth,” Clint says, suddenly. He looks uncomfortable, wide-eyed and frowning. “Stop the invasion from our side, if we can.”
Thor nods. “I must return to Asgard. Heimdall – wilt thou return these to their home?”
“What about me?” Loki asks.
“You come with me,” Thor snaps, seizing him by the arm.
* * *
“They’ll send Thor,” Fury corrects, putting a finger to his lips in thought.
“If he’s alive, Sir.”
“I think,” Fury says, to his finger, “there’s some shit going on that we don’t know about. Some asshole is using us.”
Hill says in a low voice – as if either the trooping aliens or the sleeping scientists might have shown an interest in whatever she said – with an unnecessary gesture to the crackling portal: “Do you have someone in mind, Sir?”
Fury turns from the portal and stares at Hill for so long that she can feel her bowels begin to liquefy as if she were still a rookie. “No,” he says at last. “Do you?”
“No, Sir,” Hill lies. If Director Fury doesn’t think their most persistent enemy is behind it, then neither does she. Besides, the last – and indeed only - communiqué they received from Asgard was the curt message that their common nuisance and remaining Jotun Loki was imprisoned once more.
Fury squints at the snoring scientists. He looks back at Hill. “We need another recruitment drive.
“Yes, Sir.”
“We can’t go on borrowing undisciplined superpowered morons from every corner of the planet,” Fury complains, Hill wonders if this means that, contrary to repeated swearing, he does not consider the late Initiative a collection of undisciplined morons.
“No, Sir,” she agrees.
“Good thing you got your old morons back,” says a familiar but impossible voice from the door.
“You’d better have an explanation for this,” Fury tells Tony Stark.
“It’s a long story,” Bruce Banner offers, squeezing past Tony, who is already in his suit.
“Request an explanation for your current activities, Sir,” says Natasha.
“You first,” Fury growls.
“You appear to be invading Asgard, Sir,” Steve points out – Hill stares at his head, which is mysteriously whole, undamaged, and not decorating the walls of a building on an alien world, the way footage said he should be.
“No,” Fury says. “I just ain’t stopping it from happening. What the hell happened to you? AND WHERE THE FUCK IS THOR?”
* * *
At last he is free to investigate the source of the intruders. “Remain with Heimdall,” he tells Loki, and he follows the reports of the guards and goes down, down, and down. He goes down, and down, and there at the rim of the Óminnistaðr is a wide-open portal, and the air reeks of aliens.
Thor sighs. The location of the portal, so far from where anyone would ever look for it, can be no accident.
It is at this moment that something very heavy strikes him on the back of the head, and Thor topples into the pit: ten feet down, but ten thousand feet to climb back up.
* * *
“How the hell do we shut this off?” Bruce asks Dr Selvig.
Selvig shrugs. “I don’t remember switching it on.”
Clint squints at him. “You remember when Loki had us both under the control of that sceptre.”
“Yes,” Selvig says, flinching. “But this is different. I feel as if I have been asleep.”
“You have,” Steve explains.
“I still don’t know,” Selvig says, looking anxiously at Ling. “We will have to figure out from first principles.”
“You could just unplug it,” suggests Natasha.
Ling shakes his head. “It becomes self-sustaining when it isn’t in actual use, look,” he says, and shows her a screen.
Natasha gives him a look with no expression whatsoever, and says, “I see.”
The portal crackles, and the team, as one, turn their heads.
Loki steps through, dishevelled and covered in ichor, his clothing torn and his short, spiky hair flattened in unflattering ways.
Every single member of the team assumes battle readiness. Selvig flinches, and Ling says, “Er... who is that?”
Loki does not bother to introduce himself. “Thor is missing. The kingdom of Asgard asks your assistance in seeking him – it is said you have trackers. Personally, I know that you do – I just hope you thought to attach one to Thor this time.”
“Oh yeah?” Tony snorts, arming one of his wrist cannons as ostentatiously as possible. “Since when do they have you running errands for them?”
“To secure the good faith of my father I must do as he commands,” says Loki. “And he can afford to lose me should you consider Asgard your enemy. It is a tactical decision.” He narrows his eyes and the slightly sarcastic smile on his face vanishes. “Besides: my brother is missing.”
“Since when do you care about Thor?” Tony snaps.
“He definitely came from Asgard,” Ling offers, checking the instruments.
“I told him he should have sent Heimdall,” Loki mutters, turning away.
“We outnumber him,” Steve suggests.
“That hasn’t made much difference in the past,” Natasha warns.
Loki startles them all by giving a faintly sarcastic bow. “I have discharged my duty in begging your aid,” he says, stepping backward, toward the portal. “Odin Allfather considers your assistance a gesture of peace. You have the portal.” He makes a face. “In your own time.” And with this, he vanishes into the blue flame.
“It’s a trick,” Clint says, immediately.
“Is he really dumb enough to think we’d fall for him inviting us through there himself?” Bruce asks, surprised. “I mean sure, he’s crazier than a shaken jar of hornets, but I thought he was at least smarter than that.”
“He’s smarter than Thor,” Tony mutters, “which isn’t saying much.”
“He’s showing off,” Selvig suggests, abruptly. “He knows you won’t go after him, and he has Thor somewhere—“
“After what Thor did to get us back,” Natasha says quietly, “we owe him to release him from whatever Loki has in store for him.”
“Why did he go along with it?” Steve asks, but the decision is already in place, and the Initiative begins to arm itself against the coming fight.
* * *
* * *
“Shit,” sighs Clint.
“I knew it was a trap,” Tony growls, staring into the darkness about them. “I told you it was a trap.”
“If it’s any consolation,” says Loki, from the corner of the dungeon, “it’s not my trap.” He picks up a black lotus from the floor. “May I present Odin Allfather, Lord of Asgard.”
Three guards rush out, and herd the team into the pit. And then, just as Loki promised, there is Odin.
A one-eyed man with a goat-hider of a beard peers own at them. He says, “This, you will appreciate, is for the safety of the universe.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Tony shouts back.
Odin sighs, visibly and audibly. “You have been victim to an unexpected side-effect of your resurrection.”
“That’s not an answer,” Bruce protests.
“To protect you from death, and the universe from subsequent destruction,” Loki puts in, smirking down at them, “You must remain here. Think of it as ... a kindness.”
“Loki, hold your tongue,” Odin snaps. “And wipe that smile off your face. Don’t assume you’re back in my good graces.”
“Didn’t assume anything of the sort,” Loki snorts. “I expect banishment. In fact, if you don’t mind, father, I’m going to get some food before you boot me off the edge of the world.”
When he is out of earshot, Odin squats beside rim of the pit and turns a pitying look upon them.
“He has outdone them all, I fear. The beast that was in Loki was divided as he restored you, as I understand it – the monk has told me all. And now, in fear of what may happen to mortal flesh, and how the power of the unnameable may be unleashed at your death... you must remain here.”
“What about Thor?” Clint asks.
“Mm?” say Odin, as if he has already forgotten about them.
“Isn’t your son immortal?” Steve suggests.
“Thor,” says Odin, “is free to go. I have need of him.”
* * *
He smears it on the thick parchment.
From the scraped hide billows a black cloud, which composes itself, presently into an insubstantial image of a burned and filthy-looking old woman with wild hair. Her body is the black of fire ash, her breasts pendulous and thin like discarded stockings, and her teeth sharp and stained.
“Old Mother,” Loki says, politely, “my thanks. It has been done.”
The Mara cocks a gleaming eye at him.
“It was very neat,” he adds, unable to contain the brag. “Each time my blood was spilled to return them, it became a part of them. Now I may draw upon the power without suffering the consequences of containing its source.” He sucks the blood from his finger, and adds, “I had never supposed that learning this ancient art would have so many applications. To control their actions, their speech. To steal from their bodies. There is no end.”
The Mara licks her lips. “It was well done,” she agrees.
“Except Thor,” Loki scowls. “There are other means to rein him in, no doubt, but I’ve no need of that now.”
“Our bargain,” the Mara wheezes.
Loki wipes the scowl from his face with a gesture. “Of course.”
“How didst thou engineer the invasion?” the Mara asks, with an ingratiating smile that is as sincere as it is humane.
Loki says, off-handedly, “Control over those who make decisions need only result in inaction for success, once the homing beacon is lit.”
* * *
* * *
Loki says, “Of course.”
* * *
Patel jerks the door open, and her face falls immediately.
“No back-up?” Coulson sighs. Patel shakes her head mutely, and draws back: far too horrified to be merely disappointed, Coulson thinks, gently stepping between her and the closet, half to see for himself and half to shield her from whatever she’s seen.
What lies in the closet is recognisible as Dr Jane Foster primarily because of a name badge and her hair. Her skin is more-or-less exploded, and her body entirely desiccated. She must have been here for a while without anyone knowing.
Coulson takes a deep breath, turns away, and pulls the door to.
Patel looks at him curiously for a moment, and says in an unsteady voice, “They told me about Schwarbage and Li when I signed up.”
“You can tell?” Coulson asks, surprised, and still blocking the door with his body. He saw Schwarbage and Li first-hand, an image which has remained in the worried recesses of his mind for its visceral horror, and the recognition of Jane’s fate is currently carefully stewing in the compartment of his mind marked, don’t panic.
“That’s what I imagined they’d have looked like,” she says, shaken at last, really and truly shaken and a little sickened. “Oh my God. Poor Jane. Poor, poor Jane.”
* * *
Loki blinks very slowly, and says, “Do you think I forgot what you did to me?”
The Mara says, softly, “We have an agreement.”
“We had one then, too,” Loki says, looking deep into her non-corporeal, red-bottomed eyes.
“You swore an oath,” the Mara reminds him.
“I lied,” Loki says, simply. “Why is everyone so surprised when that happens? I’ve changed my mind, Old Mother.” He sighs. “My vengeance is incomplete until you are disposed of.”
He takes the parchment, and with a touch ignites it.
The hide takes flame, crackling blue, then orange, then yellow, dancing tongues of fire licking over both skin and illusion, until the silently reproachful Mara is no more, and only ashes blow about in the cold winds.
Loki straightens up and regards the horizon with what Thor, were he here, would recognise as at last a genuine smile.