(no subject)

[apiphile]

Title: Full Circle
Fandom: Avengers
Words: 20k odd
warnings: Eh.
Disclaimer Oh shut up

Last one in the cycle.


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.
* * *
Shortly afterward, Thor goes to his father. He plants himself before the throne of Asgard with a wide-legged stance, and at the last minute recalls that if he is to beg, he should do so on one knee. He lowers himself to the floor, and lowers his head in a more appropriate position.

“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.
* * *
Thor leans over the edge of Óminnistaðr. His brother lies in the same position he lay in when Thor left him three days ago, his head clasped in his hands. “I have books for you,” cries Thor, with as great cheer as he can muster in the face of once more conflicting emotions.

“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.
* * *
When he returns to Óminnistaðr some three days later, Loki has closed the book, and stands in an attitude of patient good manners at the centre of the pit. Thor is immediately suspicious: a contrite Loki bodes ill for all.

“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.”
* * *
“We must begin at the end,” Loki decrees some time later, clad in his customary green, gold, and black, without his helm, and checked thoroughly for any enchanted daggers. They stand upon the fractured iceberg edge of the Bifrost, healed and thrice-broken rainbow bridge between the Realms. Heimdall watches Loki with the wary intensity of a thrice-kicked dog, the stain of his treachery cast deep into Heimdall’s mind.

“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.”
* * *
The cracked eggshell of the lonely last citadel, when they arrive, is as empty, cold, and dead as they left it, when Loki - the memory makes Thor’s hackles rise - when Loki tricked him last and damned himself with his own cleverness.

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.
* * *
Nick Fury’s team these days consists of Peter Parker, who is annoying; Stephen Strange, who would be in the dog house still were circumstances not so dire (and Strange’s argument that he had nothing to do with the original problem is compelling up to a point); James Rhodes in a back-up suit, who at least knows how to take orders; Reed Richards, and Ben Grimm (for all the use he is); and one temporary member Wade Wilson, who is so thoroughly irritating and who spends so much of his time bickering with Parker that Fury is considering firing him. He’d have liked more or indeed any women on his team - believing both that they usually stop the male members from fighting so goddamn much and also that Hill is more productive when she’s not muttering about misogyny under her breath - but the majority are busy mounting their own defences; Sue Storm has at least offered to assist when necessary, but Fury does not want to contemplate allowing a very pregnant woman, super-heroine or not, into the field of battle.

“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.
* * *
What has happened to Thor is this:

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<>/i>?”

“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 ill 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 is 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.”
* * *
The ceiling of Selvig’s lab shudders, and shakes. The research team brace themselves, as tense and alert as a troupe of meerkat in eagle territory, but there is no further deluge of tiles or plaster: the tensile net strung in place holds against the ongoing structural damage. Selvig grunts, and turns back to his work.

“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.
* * *
The Bifrost appears to have no ill effect on Tony Stark, which carries problems all of its own.

“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.
* * *
Deep beneath the earth at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ, Jane Foster is on the hunt for coffee. So far her one-time mentor has made astonishing progress with their attempt to contact Asgard, but he is visibly flagging. Coffee is in short supply and asking Fury for anything non-essential right now is akin to shoving your hand into a piranha tank.

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.”
* * *
Upon the Rainbow Bridge, Thor finds himself acting as an unwilling buffer between two revived friends, and his brother. Barton complains, too, of a headache: Loki throws oil on the fire by pointing out that he had an enchanted sceptre ploughed through his skull and can therefore expect a little soreness.

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.
* * *
“As far as I can tell,” Ling says, showing Jane the slightly cracked screen of his laptop - a black splodge lances through half of his results, and he’s shrunk and arranged as many windows as he can to avoid obscuring their contents, “it’s not trying to get back to Asgard.”

“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.”