Chapter 1
Surtr moves from the south
with the scathe of branches:
there shines from his sword
the sun of Gods and the Slain
“S’nice,” Stark remarked, once Loki’s light-making spell had ricocheted across the walls. “Kinda blue, though.” The ice glowed a faint blue in places, lighter in color where the surface wasn’t as thickly layered with sheets of frozen water, darker in places where the light didn’t reach. ”I was expecting more…. I dunno. White?”
It reminded Stark of something he’d seen somewhere, once, on TV maybe. A movie about a mountain climber falling into a crevice while scaling a mountain. Which, well, that probably didn’t end well, now that he thought about it. They didn’t make movies about mountain climbing that ended well.
Tony paced, examining the ice structures up close. A few were impressively detailed, with fragments of ice and rock poking through the surface, a veritable moonscape this far underground. “Would make a good vacation spot, if it weren’t—” he checked his internal sensors, “Wow, negative 60 Celsius. And you know, in a cave. I hate caves.”
Loki grunted, fixated on the green glow that encircled his palms from where knelt on the ice, his back towards Stark. Before him the ice-cavern floor had been swept clear of rubble, shards of ice and rock entwined into a mush-like surface warmed as Loki’s hands swept across it, again. The green light pulsated once, twice, before disappearing into the ice.
“Can I ask you another question, Lokes?”
“No,” the man huffed. “But you will do so anyway.”
“You said you’ve been here before.”
“Yes. A thousand of your earth years ago.”
“Uh huh.” Stark shifted on his feet again, scanning the entrance. “Why was that again? Not exactly the first place I’d stop on Earth, even a thousand years ago…”
“Punishment,” Loki muttered casually under his breath. As though he’d just commented on the weather. Cold and sunny, actually, with a spot of rain due later in the day.
Tony glanced over his shoulder again. Loki’s hands were glowing green, fingers contorted in a complex pattern as he shifted each digit to the beat of some sort of archaic wave or tune that only he could hear. The light pulsated from his fingertips, before disappear again into the ice, as the surface faded from violent green to a dull, soft pastel shade lit from below.
“Punishment?” Stark’s repulsor boots crunched on the ice. He paced a few steps closer to the entrance. It was quiet. Too quiet. “So Daddy Odin sent you to an ice cave instead of your room, back on Asgard? That’s, um… I mean, my old man wasn’t ever going to be considered father of the year material, but an ice cave?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Stark.”
“Never do, Snowflake.”
Stark shifted again. Ice underneath his repulsors felt wrong, like he was attempting to skate while wearing a steamroller suit. He felt like a Zamboni, except he was pretty sure the suit was scuffing up the ice rather than resurfacing it, if the way the ice cracked and crinkled as he walked was any indication.
But what he liked even less was that the ice made the suit feel hesitant when he had to take flight. Sure he’d fixed the little de-icing problem—when flying—but his entire upward mobility depended on downward thrust, and when the surface you were, er, thrusting off of, melted on contact…. It didn’t exactly give him confidence in his reaction time.
“Almost done?” Stark’s repulsor-clad fingers tapped nervously at his chest plate, where the reactor had been once upon a time. Old habits, yadi yadi yada... Tony grimaced, stilling his fingers as the metallic sound of his drumbeats echoed around the cavern walls.
“No,” Loki murmured, this time sounding further away than he had before. Tony turned, surprised to find the glowing bit had grown in diameter, almost a foot across now.
“Are you sure this is going to work?”
“No.”
“Oh, well,” Tony shifted on his feet, letting the edge of the boots crunch a little more loudly than necessary. “That’s good. Good thing I, you know, told everyone I know to fuck off and go on this adventure with you, if it’s not going to—”
“Stark,” Loki hissed.
“Yeah, yeah, you need—”
“—to concentrate!”
Stark grimaced, pacing a few feet away from Loki. “I just don’t like caves.”
It was a few minutes before Loki shifted back on his heels, cradling his right wrist. “Is this—” Loki hissed as he turned his palm upward, “—dislike of yours for any particular reason?”
“Hmm?” Stark glanced at the Asgardian, then did a double take. “What dislike? Are you okay, Lokes, you look—”
“I’m fine.”
“Your palm is, um. It’s um, bubbling.”
“I know.”
Tony sighed, flipping up the faceplate. “Look. This little… truce? I guess? Doesn’t mean we have to be best friends, yeah, but it might be easier, just a teensy bit, if we can talk about what’s going on? Our feelings, you know? Hopes? Dreams? Or you know, for example...your skin—it’s actually bubbling. Bubbling. Like soup!”
Loki twisted to sit on the ice, the barest hint of a grimace in his uncoordinated movements as he extended his palm towards Stark. “It’s overload, Stark.”
“Overload?” Tony scoffed.
“Yes.”
“Like a magical version of overdosing?”
“Precisely,” Loki cradled his palm in his lap, long white-knuckled fingers wrapped around his wrist as though he could stop the pain from traveling through his bones. “My nerves are overloaded, because the magical pathways that extend throughout my body, throughout the body of every magical creature in this universe except for Midgardians, are taxed beyond their capacity.”
“So you just overdosed on the magic?”
“Yes,” Loki grimaced. He slowly lowered his palm to the ice, letting the cool surface melt and sizzle under his flesh.
“Can I ask a dumb question?” Stark asked a moment later
“Have you asked any other sort of question since we’ve met?”
“Har har, so funny I forgot to laugh,” Stark leaned forward. This close and even in the sub-zero temperatures, he could feel the heat radiating from Loki’s hand, like standing too close to a campfire, with none of the nasty smoke. “Does that hurt?”
“Of course it bloody well hurts!” Loki hissed. “What do you think I am, made of rubber and metal? My skin is bubbling, you imbecile!”
The edge of Stark’s lips turned up in the barest of smiles. “See? Look at you, talking about your feelings. Sharing is caring, Lokes.”
The green-eyed man rolled his eyes. “I have no desire to share with you, Stark.”
“Yes, you do,” Tony offered the other man a wink. “Otherwise you’d have come alone.”
“My need for someone to watch my back against your Avengers does not mean I want to share,” Loki hissed again, this time as he removed his hand from the icy slush that the bubbling skin-surface had created.
Stark blinked. “You.. um…”
“Yes?” Loki queried. His sharp grin was all teeth, and it set Stark on edge. “Do tell, Stark. Sharing is caring, is it not?”
“You’re blue.” Stark gestured to Loki’s hand; the skin had stopped bubbling like an unwatched pot of water, but now from where the god’s forearm disappeared into his sleeves until the tips of his fingers, the previously pale flesh had turned cobalt, with sharp, black nails at the tips of the other man’s fingers.
“What a novel observation, Mr. Stark.” Loki studied the patterns across his palm and wrist. “I’m touched that you noticed.”
“Why are you blue?”
“Why don’t you like caves?”
Tony turned back towards the entrance, letting his face mask fall in place. “Forget I asked.”
“Oh come now, Stark,” Loki chidded. “You said it yourself. We may not be, what did you call it, best friends, but it might be easier if we, hmm, talk about our feelings?”
Stark shifted to his other foot, digging the heel into the ice to brace himself. One of his perimeter drones registered vibrations, but it was too far off to tell if it were mechanical. He let the facemask flip up, meeting Loki’s eyes before he gave an exaggerated shrug with the suit. “You tell me about Thanos, and I’ll tell you about Afghanistan.”
Loki barked a laugh, bitter and hysterical at the edges. “Stark, if I began to tell you about the Mad Titan now, I’ll never be able to complete my spellwork. And that would truly be a shame, would it not?”
“Yeah,” Stark dropped the faceplate back in place. “Shame.”
For a moment, the only sounds Tony could make out were the echoes of his own breathing inside the helmet and the measured chuckles of the god behind him, before the other man let out a terribly long sigh, followed by the tell-tale crunching as he knelt again on the ice, hovering above the pale green surface. Then Loki was chanting quietly again, his voice more strained than before, catching in places as he exhaled the chant.
The vibrations were getting stronger. Snowmobile, maybe. He couldn’t risk an aerial drone, with the white-blue landscape outside and far above the tree line in the Nordic wilderness. It was obvious. Too obvious, even for Captain Goody Two Shoes.
Stark lifted his faceplate. Friday would tell him, if the vibrations came closer, and he couldn’t see the details of Loki’s jerky movements under the helmet, what with all the other data and figures streaming across the screen.
The god’s movements were slower than before, his fingers swollen in places as the taller man knelt over the surface. It was apparent that Loki’s hands still ached, even though the blue skin seemed pocked at times by white patches as he shifted and moved his fingers over the ice again.
Then, when his chant broke off, echoed once on the cavern walls, Loki’s hands fell again into the icy surface. All traces of the blue-man-group had vanished, leaving one exhausted-looking alien at Stark’s proverbial feet, in front of a pile of green glowing ice. Tony thought he saw sweat dripping into the other man’s eyes…. Before he realized it was tears, dripping from Loki’s eyes, instead.
Actual. Fucking. Alien-God. Tears.
“I was in a cave--” Stark blurted out, before clearing his throat. He began again, his voice clearer--calmer--this time. “I was in a cave, in Afghanistan.”
“Ah,” Loki muttered. “That is why you dislike caves.”
Tony nodded once.
Loki gestured to his palm. The surface was blistered now, a bluish-red crust covering the inside of the god’s right hand, fading to white around the edges. “I’m Jotun.”
“Come again?” Tony blinked.
“I said, I’m Jotun!” Loki growled.
“Uh, gesundheit?” Tony asked. “I don’t actually know what that means, but it sort of sounds like you sneezed.”
Loki rolled his eyes skyward, and for a moment Stark thought he’d gone too far, that the other man would stand up and look for yet another skyscraper to defenestrate him again. “Come now, Stark, you must know about-- You do know how Jotuns… how the races came to be?”
“Uh. Yeah.” Stark crossed his arms. “Science?!”
Loki shook his head once, pinching the bridge of his nose with his good hand, before his deep voice rang out against the cavern walls, “Just as from Niflheim there arose coldness and all things grim, so what was facing close to Muspell was hot and bright, but Ginnungagap was as mild as a windless sky.”
“Seriously, do you need a tissue?”
Loki shot him a scathing look, continuing, “And when the time and the blowing of the warmth met so that it thawed and dripped, there was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man, and he was given the name Ymir.”
“Uh…”
“Midgardians,” Loki muttered like a curse, moving to kneel over the surface again. “Stand ready, Stark. This is the hard part, breaking Midgard’s ties to the pathways.”
A warning beep sounded, and Stark turned towards the cave entry. “Uh oh. We got company.”
“Keep them off my back a moment longer, Stark.” Loki’s palms moved in a rhythmic circular motion.
Tony dug his boots into the ice, bracing himself. “Whatever you say, dear,” he tossed casually over his shoulder, before the faceplate slammed closed. “Now let’s see what Avengers are still taking orders from the original FroYo...”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Tony interrupted. “That’s not how it went down at all!”
“Oh?” Loki purred, like the cat who’d eaten the canary, and Tony was the canary. “And do tell, what essential element did I miss from my story?”
“Uh, the part where you were destroying all of the pathways to Earth. You know, essentially stranding yourself here? On Earth? With us pithy humans?”
“Oh,” Loki studied his nails with feigned casualness. “That.”
Tony grimaced; Loki’s nails had never turned white again, after blackening when the taller man had spelled the guidelines to skip over Midgard. “Yes, that. Which is precisely why I think you all,” Tony pointed around the room at the crack-pot team assembled around the makeshift conference table, including the surprisingly not dead Phil Coulson, “You all just need to back off just a little bit.”
“No can do Stark,” Coulson said. His hands were crossed over the table surface in a strange manner, and for a moment Tony wondered why Coulson’s cuticles looked so much neater on one hand. “Loki is still considered an international terrorist here on Earth. Rerouting some mystical alien being or not.”
“Surely you jest,” Loki grinned, like the Cheshire just before he disappears. “If I wanted to just,” he snapped his fingers, “vanish one day without warning, well I certainly wouldn’t have bothered saving your world.”
“Naw,” Tony reclined in his chair. “You’d miss me too much.”
Loki hummed. “We shall see, Stark. We shall see.”
“Maybe we could get back to this debriefing?” Phil’s smile was too predatory for Stark’s liking. “I, for one, would like to know what motivated you to help a convicted mass murderer who shows up at the very window he threw you out of, begging for help.”
“I don’t beg,” Loki sniffed.
“Semantics,” Coulson conceded. “But I’m sure there’s a good story here.”
“Oh, yes!” Loki grinned, teeth bared as his eyes crinkled with humor. “A very good story.”