my lips are laced with silent kill
to make you come alive
against your will

-cynthia gomez

"There's a legend that outlived the rise of secularism and science of Earth," he rushed in spite of the fingers crushing his throat. "During the seventh hour of the Northern Lights sailing across the skies—so the legend goes—a plane of reality bends." The fingers loosened enough to let the rasp in Tivan's voice smooth over. He cleared his throat, continuing, "The tension causes a sort of lucid aura that can't be traced back to any elements of the Terran spectrum (harmless really...it just looks super blue). Should anyone venture into the twelfth hour of Norway's Polar Night while the Northern Lights sparkle, they'd walk right into a polar reality."

Loki's loosened hold retreated altogether from The Collector's powdered neck. Instead, his dagger aimed home, and his eyes just dared the frazzled blond to make an unwanted move.

"What help is your legend to me?"

Tivan flung his fingers up to straighten the tousled locks of his hair. "You said you want the Time gem."

"Which, for the third time, was your job to find."

Right... Loki masquerading as the All Father made that quite clear, but you know, sometimes it's best to let the gods play their little game. As for Tivan and his intergalactic museum, he preferred living so he could gloat in his possessions a while longer. What would all his precious creatures do without his pampering?

He pressed out a wrinkle from his shirt, pretending he didn't hear a thing. "Since no one knows where it is, you could go into a polar reality and find it wherever you want there."

"What do you mean by wherever I want?"

The Collector feigned an astounded expression before grinning like an insane clown. Maybe gods is a drop too generous. "You're from Asgard and you don't know?"

The dagger pinned a sleeve into the wall before he saw Loki move. "Answer the question."

"Aren't we temperamental... I was getting there, you know. I would say come with me but I'm a bit stuck."

Loki's burning eyes narrowed. "Your diversion is unnecessary."

Tivan's layers of fur coats danced with his laugh. "I'm a dramatic, Princey, of course it is. Come on, pluck it out. Gently, gently—this was a limited edition fur."

"I am not amused," Loki grumbled as he tore the dagger out of the stone wall and thick sleeves.

The two stopped next to a table of glass, where Tivan plucked the marker from the center and erased all the scribblings already on the glass.

"This is our reality," he said, drawing a circle to the left, "and this is a polar reality," he said as he drew another to the right. "Polar realities are not alternate realities. They are frail and unstable unlike alternate ones, so they can be manipulated indefinitely. Time and laws don't need to make sense inside them." He drew a straight line between the two and smudged it with a finger. "See, this is what Norway's Polar Night is: this is the lucid blue gateway.

"A little imagination and reality bending is all it takes to manipulate these. You want the Time gem to be in the first tree you stumble across? It'll be there. You don't need to be a Master Magician to have your errands done."

Loki crossed his arms as he took in the drawing. "I take it these polar universes don't exist just anywhere then."

"Yep, that's the thing," Tivan said with that infuriating grin again, "These little gateways are anomalies. Like a machine would have an error, these are errors. Yggdrasil happens to have a reoccurring one there in its central planet." He sighed and sat on the table. "But then there are others that believe these Polar ones are the cards of a conscious universe, which is a different story altogether."

That made Loki stand up straighter. His expression relaxed into curiosity, and the only hunger in his eyes was for knowledge. "Keep talking."

"Now you're amused. Oh yes, they are such fine anomalies that there have been six souls who've been reported as missing since...well, since Terrans could figure with their minds. On the other hand, races like the Kree who are prone to loyal corruption and misbehavior have three times more souls reportedly taken into the Polars."

"And there are no survivors to attest?"

Tivan shrugged. "Unknown. Something happens since no one talks about them." He pulled a vaporizer out of his coat. "My guess is that there's some sort of memory wiping." He tipped it to Loki at once. "Want some? Dried Elven blood. Helps phenomenally with memory; tastes like Carmel."

Loki grinned and shoved his weapon back into his belt. He spun on his heels, striving towards the exit. "Satisfy yourself, Tivan. Don't think you're off the hook because of this. I will be back."

And that is how he came to live for a time in Svalbard, Norway. By day he resharpened all his skills by testing on objects and trees and sometimes small animals. By night, he walked along the land where the Northern Lights had been reported last year, feeling for the pulse of the gate that was supposed to open soon.

It just so happened that the night the lights shone and the moment the Polar Night settled and the proper hour struck, the skies broke with a terrible thunderstorm.

"LOKI," boomed Thor as in the blink of an eye he flew right into him. They crashed through the swishy vision of trees and snow and right into the blinding blue of the gateway.

At first there was no sense of change, in atmosphere or in elements, but then Loki felt a cold bite in his veins. Meanwhile, Thor fell to the ground gripping his forehead. His groaning covered the sound of billions of veins of lightning meeting. Loki scrambled to his feet ready to dig his fingers into the phenomenon the second the blue started washing into white smoke, but Thor knocked him off balance with a fist to his leg.

"What did you do?"

"Shhhh."

"Loki!"

"For goodness sake, Thor, just shut up for a second." Everything whirled too fast for him to keep up. Air, particles, atoms–all of them shifted between properties and forms. It was like watching a Casino machine: he couldn't stop staring even though the sight of so much changing so fast made anxiety screw up his control. He latched onto a stable element: fluorescent rays of light.

The rest happened in a blink. To their left human silhouettes walked and to their right the ghosts of furniture and the haunting of ambience grew stronger, clearer, like a movie scene fading into the screen. Loki thought it was alright. Tivan said he could manipulate whenever he wanted. Except the whole scene faded in, and it had other ideas.

A woman in a mauve suit stopped in front of them. "Mr. Hiddleston, Mr. Hemsworth, thank you so very much for coming to see our kids." She held out her hand, which Loki shook after a split second of disorientation. "I'm astounded that you came in your costumes too. The kids will absolutely adore this." She switched to Thor who was still on the ground. "Are you feeling alright Mr. Hemsworth?"

He waved a hand and stood up. "Yes, just tying my shoe." He shook her...arm.

The woman laughed. "Oh! Is that how Australians shake?"

Thor stole a glance to Loki, who mouthed yes. "No. This is how Thor salutes kind humans like yourself." He couldn't help grinning at Loki's internally scolding face.

"Why thank you so very much for it, Thor." She turned to Loki with a wink. "I see you have competition, Mr. Hiddleston."

Loki shoved his hands in his pockets and shrugged with an elastic grin. "Did I ever not?"

She giggled. "You two are such a fantastic team. Excuse me for one second. Let me get the nurses moving." She backed away, still talking. "I'll fetch you both some water and crisps while I'm at it." The brothers nodded, one stretching his grin through bitter contempt and the other struggling through a torrent of nausea.

Loki met Thor the second he felt his unrestrained, burning gaze on him.

"You betrayed me."

He pulled his hands out of his pockets as he held back a laugh. "Save the killing part for later please."

Thor actually growled. "Is this a game to you? Does it make you feel stronger every time you see me break?"

A roaring fire in his ears made Loki whirl to face him dead on, unblinking. "What the Hel is that supposed to mean?"

"It means you pretended to die just to remind me one more time of how much you hate me and that I should hate you in return for a reason you still haven't spoken."

This time, Loki did laugh. "That is rich. You, breaking? The one and only Odinson does not break...though he might bend."

Static gathered below Thor's shoes as he curled his hands into fists. "Yes, because you know me so well."

Loki's frazzled energy concentrated into a grin. He waved at a nurse who observed them from a distance. "Smile, you oaf." She waved back and wended on her way, so he faced Thor again. The grin fell off his face so fast that Thor wasn't sure it was there in the first place. Shadows stirred behind his poignant blue eyes. "What makes you so sure I pretended to die?" he muttered. Then, he took a moment to do some tapping into the atmosphere. "Who are these Hiddleston and Hemsworth anyways?"

Thor's grimness startled. "You...did not pretend?"

Loki burst out laughing all at once again. "Hilarious! Hilarious!" Thor watched, utterly confused as his little brother patted his arm. "Good joke."

That was when Thor noticed the woman in the mauve suit nearing them again. He too forced a few chuckles.

"Here you gentlemen are," she said, dropping a bowl of chips and two bottles of water onto a table she rolled closer to them. "Ben is bringing you two some tea. Let us know if you need anything else."

The two men bowed, saying "Thank you."

"Our pleasure." She clapped once. "Time to get them rallied, no?"

She disappeared down the hall again, so Loki took back to inspecting the polar reality. Its skeleton looked like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that didn't even connect rammed together, but as mismatched as they were they seemed to still have a structure that he couldn't trace with just a glance...which made no sense. It was all-in-all beyond messy. An average magician couldn't manipulate this place; he would be lucky if he could even color a spot on a blade of grass red. "Strange. He told me this place would be easy to manipulate."

Thor slung his wrist through Mjölnir's wristband and sighed. He didn't care to ask who the coconspirator was. "Where are we?"

Loki's sour frown turned into a smirk. "Well, by the looks of the clothing the women are wearing and the smell of too-much-clean, I would say we are in a hospital."

"No, you idiot, which world is this?"

"A polar one."

"A what?"

"A polarrrr oneeee. Are you deaf?"

Thor barely resisted rolling his eyes. "No, I just do not know what that means."

Loki waved a hand. "Not my fault you never paid attention during lessons."

While his brother kept mumbling about the knot in his belly, Loki turned his back to Thor and others and closed his eyes. He took a go at tracing the structure of the reality. He found a sort of system connecting the pieces holding it together, then lost it in a jumble, then found another system, but the sound of screeching children burst his concentration just as a whole squiggled patch of chaos came up. His eyes tore open as he spun around.

"Thoooooor!"

"Lokiiiii!"

A dozen miniature humans fretted inside their wheelchairs for their nurses to push them faster while others with IVs and whole variations of tubes gained the miraculous strength to almost run towards them.

"Loki..." Thor whispered, holding his hand out in front of his little brother.

A nurse in blue with a photography camera leveled the childrens' excitement with a warning that the next person to scream would be sent back to their room. "Keep it calm. Let's not scare our special visitors away," she added.

The woman in mauve repeated the warning. "Pictures first, Anniken," she finished, so the nurse with the camera settled in front of them with the camera lens already plucked off.

Out of the crowd of nurses circling them, one wheeled a boy between the princes of Asgard.

His wide hazel eyes marveled up at Thor. "You're real big in real life."

Thor couldn't help but smile. "You could be as big as me too."

"Really? Even without a lung?"

Loki grew stiff. Thor just smiled. "You are mighty no matter how small or weak you think you are. All it takes is bounties of faith and a pinch of pride."

The boy grinned, his blue-stained lips holding more life in them than all the nurses combined.

"Alright boys, ready for the picture?"

Thor knelt down next to the boy's wheelchair, and after Loki blinked out of his distance, he did too.

The woman in mauve touched Loki's shoulder as a nurse helped lead a girl to them and the tea was brought. "Are you alright, Mr. Hiddleston?"

Loki swallowed the forming knot inside his throat, nodding with a faint smile. "Just jet lag. I will be alright, thank you." He stole a sip of the tea while the girl with three IVs reached to touch Mjölnir.

"Would you like to try picking it up?" asked Thor as he lowered it for her.

Her thin red curls bounced with her laugh. She couldn't be more than six yet she had such old eyes. "Isn't it heavy?"

"Not if you are worthy."

"What..." she cleared her throat, staring up at Mjölnir like it was the most precious thing in existence. "What makes someone worthy?"

Thor's mouth opened at once to answer, but mid-breath he realized he still didn't know what to say. Loki was strangely still when Thor stole a glance to him for some help.

Anniken saved the moment: "Alright, let me see three brilliant smiles."

The spirit of the hospital only grew brighter yet more pressing with each child that approached them for a picture. Thor let at least half of them pick up his hammer. By picking up, it meant he cupped the hammer into his palm and lifted it slowly as the children tugged the handle with all their strength, which was so little he doubted they could pick up more than a novel. About an hour later, after some of the most heart-wrenching conversations with glowing but sick young faces, the brothers took their given break while the children went back to their rooms for their scheduled naps.

"Is the tea too cold?" asked the woman in mauve.

"No, it is just right still."

"Speak for yourself," Loki muttered. It tasted like silt.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Hiddleston?"

Loki whirled around to face the woman. "I said I have never had such wonderful tea," he said with a wink. "Thank you."

The woman's eyes warmed immediately. "We worried when we didn't find enough of one kind." She laughed a few times. "It was Ben's idea to mix a few together."

The Odinsons grinned from ear to ear, both hiding their mortified disgust.

She was about to dive into a new conversation, except a girl stole the moment. Anniken, who was sharing some photos with another nurse nearby, set the camera down at once and rushed towards her. The woman in mauve did too.

"Livia, what are you doing all the way out here without Isobel?"

Anniken tried to pick her up. "Quite. You know you can't be walking alone."

But Livia swerved away from them both as if the two did not exist. She took continuous heavy steps towards the brothers despite how light she really looked. All the while her empty eyes remained fixed on Loki.

"Livia," shouted the nurse bolting down the hall ahead.

Thor did not know what in the world to do, so he just watched as the pallid girl with thin, bland blond hair and stickers all over her arms and an IV backtracking with her blood and veins sprouting everywhere behind onion-thin skin ran his little brother up against the table just because she wouldn't stop creeping towards him.

"You're Loki," she said after planting herself three feet in front of him.

Isobel stopped next to her, panting. She tried to make her back up. "No, this is Tom Hiddleston baby girl. Let's go back to our room now. It's time for your purple medication."

The girl shoved her hand off her shoulder. "I'm not going back to my yucky room!" Her green eyes flicked to Thor, and traveled back to Loki.

"Pick up Mjölnir."

The nurses and the social worker laughed, but Livia spun around to them with a fierce glower.

Anniken was the one that kept chuckling. "Come on, Livia. You need your medications and your nap. The gentlemen can visit you in your room later if they'd like to come back after you've treated them like this."

Loki eased against the table as the girl took a step back. He risked a glance at Thor, but his brother gave him the look that meant he should stay absolutely calm until they figured out what was happening. What neither of them expected was for Livia to burst into tears.

The girl's face reddened in a mix of emotion and fever. "NO. I'm tired of all the ugly white and salt water and Doctor Adam's cold coat." The nurses and woman in mauve grew rigid as she pointed at Thor. "Mjölnir: down. If Loki picks it up then I'm not dying."

"You—" Thor cleared the rasp in his throat, "Should really go back to your room, little one. You don't look well."

"I was born dying," she yelled. "I live in this stupid hospital or die." The dead fury in her eyes seemed to soften as her eyes fixed on Loki again. "If you're strong after everything, then I'll be more strong longer."

Isobel tossed her own loose bangs back violently across her forehead. "Livia, this is wrong. Come on, your fever is soaring."

But the girl screeched over her like an animal that recognized the shadows of a cage when it locked around them, which made her nurse jump back. The three women grew mute from shock. She might be a dying girl, but she looked like she would be all too willing to hurt the next person to interrupt her.

Thor risked it anyways. "Livia, you should never let another person determine if you should live or die."

"You're the hero." The anger coursing through her skin calmed as if it tired from the effort she'd given. "You fell once but you don't fall forever. Loki's home cause he knows that feeling."

The weary old spirit behind her eyes soaked the beige space between she and him so thoroughly with hope and fear and life and love that Thor let Mjölnir fall out of his grasp before Loki could think of running from her oppressing presence. If Thor knew his little brother once, he knew forever that the kind of situations that commanded him to bare his soul drove him to lash out like a mother dragon would to a Dwarf hunting down her offspring. Thor didn't want him to do that in front of a dying child.

For a moment it seemed Loki froze. The edge of his shoe pressed against the block of Mjölnir. But Loki seemed like a lot of things in his life, most being false. "Don't," Thor warned.

The three women held hands by absolute accident, but Livia just stood taller than ever. Something had called them here...or maybe just his little brother. Thor was determined to see whatever had to happen through, but Loki was a different story.

"Well, darling girl." His clamped hands moved from gripping the table up in front of him. "There is one thing you cannot do in Asgard, which is steal another warrior's weapon. See, Mjölnir is, uhhh, Hemsworth's only."

Livia crossed her slender arms. "What happens if you do?"

Loki laughed that stressed laugh of his. It made Thor grind his teeth together. "Great question. Um, well, something rather weighty. I would be im—no no, executed. It is a serious offense."

The angle of the sunlight pouring through the windows that had so far been mute suddenly flooded onto Livia. Four shadows raided the tiles underneath her bare, blue-ish feet, but the women didn't seem to see them.

"But you're on Eva, not Asgard."

Whatever strength Loki still possessed, her razor words slashed down. There would be no escaping this child's unbending yet tragically misplaced faith, much less her certain twisted suicide.

The woman in mauve exploded at his silence: "For goodness sake, Mr. Hiddleston, if the girl wants you to pick it up then do it."

Loki swallowed hard, nodding. He glanced at Thor through the corner of his eyes. Help.

Thor scuffed his boots against the tiles. I can't. They will see.

His little brother's gaze shot towards the hammer. A clammy, trembling hand reached down. For a moment the panic in his eyes settled into placid peace. Serenity kissed the crows under his eyes. He reached with more confidence than Thor could remember him ever having...but then he noticed the right hand rising behind his back. It held all of Loki's screaming nerves, and it was closing in the way his hands always did when he was making a new magical move.

"Loki," Thor warned.

The tiles bled into mirrors that reflected a disappearing ceiling as the real people, even Livia, transformed into pillars of spilling ink. Loki stumbled away from where he'd been as he fought to reshape the ghost of the hospital hall into the gateway he and Thor had come through.

"LOKI," Thor hollered over the noise of what sounded like mountains ripping apart.

For once he didn't care that his brother flinched through the fog separating them. "I couldn't. I couldn't,"Loki yelled over it all.

After a few moments, the noise faded into oblivion and the fog drained along with the last of the shadows of the women. Thor let out a sigh of relief when he found Loki a distance away. He looked as rattled as a deer that had outrun a hunter, but other than that he looked unharmed. "I know," he said, half the tension in his shoulders thinning away, "It was for her good."

Then he stole a moment to take in their new atmosphere. It did not look in the least familiar. It also felt more bizarre with each passing second, like different atoms were holding it together. "Where are we?"

Loki pressed through his suffocating anxiety to find out. No one and nothing but Thor and Mjölnir were there, yet there was something heavy about the empty space...as if the bright golden light without a source would form fangs and shred them both if they made a single wrong move, or as if the white floor below the invisible concrete(?) they stood on and the twin floor above would switch on to crush them. It was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

"I have not the slightest idea," he whispered. An urge to not blink ascended upon him at once. "Get Mjölnir. Quickly."

"We can fly out?" Thor asked, searching over his shoulder for the eyes he felt were hunting him.

"Possibly." That made Thor pivot back to his little brother with a glare. "What?"

A year or so ago, Thor had learned that it was pointless to point out Loki's mistakes. Instead, he buried his criticisms, tucked away his fear, and reached for Mjölnir.

It didn't budge. "LOKI."

"Pull harder, you ninny. It must be the atmosphere." Mjölnir still didn't move as much as a millimeter no matter how much Thor strained his muscles. Panic marched like ants inside Loki's skin anew. "What did you do?"

"What did I do? What did I do? What did YOU do?" Thor stormed towards him. "You weren't supposed to leave the girl like that. YOU ruined the atmosphere cause you damn thought you knew what you were doing."

"What would you have had me do?" Loki screamed. "Make an idiot of myself for not being able to pick up your precious plaything?"

Thor's face melted into a grizzly sneer. "Always about you. Poor you and your ruthless ego."

Like sugar on a stovetop hardens, so did Loki's eyes. "You want me to be honest then?"

Thor scoffed, turning on his heel so he could grumble from a proper distance. "You could never be honest no matter how much you tried."

Loki choked down the dawning hatred woven between Thor's every word. He stood up straighter to lie to himself that it didn't hurt. "Call me whatever you want, brother, but I will NEVER be the cause of a child's death." Yet Thor just kept on walking away.

The raw distance between them made something inside Loki snap: made it all the more clear to him that he had killed in New York, and blasted him over the head with the truth that Thor had seen the lives he had crushed. For some children he killed their souls when their mother or father didn't come home from work. For others, he was the reason they lost their sight thanks to the barrels of oil he had pierced. And still for others, he was why shrapnel flew across the skies and into knees, slicing across ears, crushing ankles underneath dismembered bumpers of cars. Before he realized what he was doing, he lashed a bolt of blinding energy over Thor's shoulder. It was nothing more than an elementary trick all magicians learned: just manifesting fury into a stream of electrons, yet mid-step, despite dodging the bolt, his brother hardened into a pillar of calcium. The air all around reeked of burned sulfur.

"No. Norns, NO." Loki bolted to his side, tried throwing a whole variation of spells to undo his mistake, but he ended up making the calcium thicker. He could hear Thor's bones cracking under the increasing pressure.

"Yes, Laufeyson. That was exactly what you were supposed to do," rose a voice from what felt like the ground, up. It sounded like winds rolling between hallow canyons. His blood ran all the more cold as the lights flickered. "To the girl that is. This was not necessary, but it will do."

He spiraled around for the source, but there was still nothing above, below, or in any sense near. "W-who speaks?"

A brush of some presence against his cheek made him swing backwards. Tears already compromised his vision.

"You ask the wrong questions, child."

Suddenly, the temperature plummeted to below freezing. Through chattering teeth, he asked what questions he should be speaking.

A specter with a crimson crushed skull and withered veins stretching from the knots of her back crossed his blind spot. He saw her for but an instant yet it was more than enough to make tears break free.

"You should be asking why you are here. We shall answer anyways. You never understand that it is your moments with the greatest potential of humiliation and pain that offer you a chance to a new path." Despite its ghastly appearance, this one sounded like doves singing in meadows of morning dew. "So you have met our grace, but you have run...again."

Loki shrieked as fingers of fire burned scars through his armor and onto his arm. The second he blinked, an image of a giantess with frosted over blue eyes and lips made of her skin tearing apart flashed in his mind. It's voice sounded like rusted metal grinding sand. "Listen closely little prince. You finish running this moment."

He wanted to scream as her phantom claw reached into his chest, but the sensation of snapping chords in his mind—almost like vessels—made him freeze in place. The second he opened his eyes was the second she disappeared. She took half of him with her.

"No powers anymore, child. Not until you unlock your new destiny. We, the voices that you hear and the beasts you see at the edge of your sight are the past, present, and future weavers."

"It doesn't matter who weaves what, not even which speaks, for we three have that same problem with you: you run too much."

If you know me so well then you know why I run.

A rumble shook the invisible ground under him. "Ooh yes, child." A vision of the giantess's heinous face splitting into hot laugher made him jump behind his encased brother. "Pitiful. As if you alone are a wronged creature."

"Now, sister mine, have patience. Contrary to popular Aesir belief, Laufeyson, we are peaceful keepers. We weave our stories to protect Yggdrasil and nothing more. We are what you know as the Norns."

He swore his heart stopped beating, but really he just couldn't breathe.

"Yeeees. And you should know that we despise those that do not heed grace. You, Laufeyson, have repeatedly refused they that were extended by your own family."

"Indeed. Your mother is dead because of your ego. You will murder your brother a week from now in a fit of blind fury—earlier than Ragnarok. And the Borson will drive Yggdrasil into Ragnarok because of you."

"Mhm. Out of hatred and love. He will be the one who faces you upon the field of the last battle with a sword made to destroy you forever, yet he will cast that same sword into the inferno of a dying star. What will you do, child, after you have played him with your gentle watery eyes? After a show of confession and innocence, and a shower of his grace? Cast him into that star; take the crown; annihilate all who stand in your way; reverse time with the precious stone you're looking for as if you could erase all your crimes."

"No!" he cried, "I would never."

"You have foraged your way whether you like how it concludes or not. We are weavers, not creators, and so all the choices you make give us the threads to work with—threads that are poison in our hands. But that is not important. We are here for new spools."

His eyes closed under a spell. He felt three sets of hands take his weight not a second after, and then carry him until they let him plunge into a void that howled against his ears. He shattered through the brick roof and crashed onto the beige tiles of the hospital again. The woman in mauve tapped on his shoulder, so he shot back onto his feet from between the debris. Her eyes were frosted blue, yet her lips were human. "Accept that you cannot take up the weapon, child."

"But the girl—"

Isobel, but dressed in all black scraps, interrupted him. "What is she to you? You have annihilated many more. Only honesty will satisfy your story now."

Loki sucked in the sobs stuck at the edge of his throat. He stared at the girl who looked as strong as Hel, and each second she drove a knife deeper into his chest. "I will not add her blood to my hands."

"She is insignificant, Laufeyson. It is your actions that weigh more than hers at this moment."

By the Norns themselves, he wanted to shatter them into a billion pieces. "She deserves to live, you shallow creatures! She is surely not mature enough to understand what her 'bargain' even means."

A mist glittered behind Isobel, who'd regained her posture from the exact moment before Loki had manipulated the jigsaw. He swore the mist had lips that curled into a smile. "Pick up the hammer then. Satisfy the tragic bargain."

"I can't," he shouted, and he didn't care that his voice cracked. "You heard my prayers yet here you mock them. You know I could never lift it."

"Then she dies. There is no loophole, Laufeyson. You will be here a million years if that is how long it shall take until you accept this consequence of all your wrong choices."

Loki shut his eyes. Once they were sealed tight, like the pressure growing inside his chest, he released a deep, wavering breath. There was always a loophole. "I want to make my own bargain."

Dead silence was his answer. So Loki opened his eyes again, set his chin, and stared straight at where he felt a presence looming. "You heard me. If my story matters so much to you oh dear Fates, it will include this bargain."

Three orbs of amber light materialized from the debris. So small were the bodies wrapped inside each that his Jotnar eyes could not adjust enough to see them even as they flew up to his face. "What is it then, little villain?"

"You said I would kill Thor in a week."

"Correct."

Loki blinked, and there where Thor had been was where he stood before. He was frozen just like the women and Livia, as if to remind him of what he had caused moments before and what he could have done. His deep blue eyes faced him full on with uncensored trepidation and hatred. "The child said this was Eva." He trailed back to the orbs. "Not Earth."

"We told you this is your trap; our curtesy. It was purposefully created to be incompatible with Yggdrasil."

Loki rung his hands together behind his back just so they would stop shaking. "Then I will lay myself down in it upon this term: you let me live here. I must right the wrongs I will cause, and I must know she will survive."

One of the Norns hummed. "What if we told you this child has no mother or father?"

For a moment he imagined what it would have been like if he would have died in Jotunheim. Infected by the dead? Starved by time? Buried by snow? The memory of Odin screaming that one or all had been his fate made his eyes sting. He had lived a jealous, painful millennia, but he had a brother to pester him, a mother to hold him, and a father to chase down the halls of a home that once overflowed with warmth. These memories are what each child should have. "Then I will be her father. And I will striveto be a good one."

"Ahh, but what would you say if we told you she could be your end?"

Like you were almost the end of your father. Like you have been the thorn in his heart ever since you mastered chaos."I will be her father as long as I live no matter what." Is that what Odin said to the Norns when he first picked him up from a blood-soaked ground? Did he too bite his lips so he wouldn't weep when he remembered his own child was driven mad in a frenzy for his crown, his death?

He felt the color draining out of his own skin as the parallels settled. A dying, helpless child and a choice and a bleeding heart are what he and his father shared in this twisted plot of the Norns. He didn't even feel anything besides the retching in his body.

"You would give up the universe you know for her?"

He swallowed the knot in his throat too quickly. A flush washed over his face. "Yes, for her. For Thor, for my father, for Asgard." Having said it all aloud, he found he could speak louder. No more regrets. No more wrong choices. No more death on his trail. "That is my bargain."

A chorus of crows scattered behind the windows. They filled the frozen world with terrible cries. "We accept,"the three voices hissed in glee."Go on then, finish this."

And thus, the world animated. The nurses stared at him while the woman in mauve puffed in her outrage at him not acting while Livia kept on trusting with her faded green eyes while Thor bit down on his tongue as he realized they had stepped back into the past.

This time, Loki shot for Mjölnir so that he could not even think of running again. It was for the better of all if he would be separated from Yggdrasil for eternity. Good would come out of his ego's destruction, and that is what the Norns intended. He closed his eyes as his fingers sealed around the edge of the handle.

He opened them again just to make his ego shatter faster, except he, Loki Odinson, brother of Thor, spawn of Jotunheim, was liftingThor's weapon. Every fiber in his being screamed as the weight of the weapon grew lighter and lighter.

An orb flew right between his eyes the second before he could let go. The other two flew to his hand, crushing his thumb and fingers against the weapon—not letting him let go. "This is no trick, Laufeyson. You have always been worthy, but it was your own heart that made you unworthy."

Livia screaming of joy, so somuch joy, snatched his ankles and anchored him, reminded him this was no sort of dream.

"Your sacrifice has shown your true heart. Now you know at last who you could have been."

"But more than that, you know who you can be now."

Through his delirium he found Thor, perfectly alright and absolutely shocked. His welling tears and aching, overwhelmed smile said the words he could not say: I always knew you could.

"But a bargain is a bargain, and it is time the Odinson took his crown."

The orbs of the Norns disappeared into thin air while millions of threads cascaded from the roof of the building right between the brothers. Another million fell between the women and Loki just as Livia wrapped her arms around him. They scared Thor out of his silence.

"Loki, what is happening?"

But all Loki could do was hold Livia as tight as he could. "You will be alright, Thor. I promise." Then he let go of Mjölnir, and picked up the girl that would survive.

A whole wall of threads being braided by invisible hands blocked Thor before he could reach towards Loki. "Brother, do something!"

Loki wanted to cry, but all he could do was laugh. Laugh because all the pain would be worth it, because Thor would live so beautifully long. All the stress wrinkles would be gone soon. His eyes would be as bright as the Sun again. "Live four thousand years, Thor. You will be the best king Asgard has ever had."

Mjölnir flew through a hole between closing threads into Thor's hand. "No, brother, stop this," he screamed as he tossed all his weight against the ever-thickening walls between them.

He tore a hole big enough to reach his hand through, but the blinding light of the limbo room flashed into the blue fog of Norway's polar night.

I'm sorry, Thor. I always loved you.

#

The touch of a soft, small hand closed around his made Loki open his eyes. Livia's smile was the first thing he saw. It almost reached to her ears.

He forced himself through the last of the fog. They were still in the hospital. That explained the folders and plastic bags of sirens and faeries and long dresses in his other hand. And the woman in mauve walking towards him.

"Mr. Odisen, congratulations on your angel's discharge. Do you need any other assistance?"

Livia let his hand go just until he shook hands with the woman. She didn't seem to recognize him. It probably had to do with the shorter hair and casual business clothes he had on.

As for discharge... He looked at Livia again. Her skin was the color of blossoms and her eyes as vibrant as the forests of Vanaheim. She was still as thin as a needle, but goodness was her good spirit contagious. She was to his soul like a cup of warm tea and a splash of milk was during winter.

"No, thank you. It is about time we two go take our walks in the park again."

Livia jumped at that. "Yes. And I want blue raspberry ice cream."

He grinned as he fixed loose strings of her hair. The Norns had been so graceful that they had weaved a story between them already. He could feel more details popping into his "memory:" they had a two story house somewhere in this alternate form of Norway with a pond they could skate on in winter, she went to a special school for proteges—children above the average IQ, he had a job as a political ambassador...and she had survived a ravaging disease against all odds.

Livia gasped as a nurse walked into the hall with a whole bundle of balloons. "Can I have one, Daddy?" she asked, tugging his hand.

The woman in mauve snatched her one before he could respond. "Enjoy it, beautiful. I hope you and Daddy can stay a while longer. We have some special guests coming."

And by "coming," she meant coming in five seconds or so, which was exactly how long it took before a crowd started making noise in the entrance hall. The woman led them to the commotion.

While Livia clung to his hand as she tried to see past everyone already there, Loki's eyes landed on a pair of absolute replicas of he and Thor. The man that looked like him stopped talking the moment their eyes met.

Loki took Livia into his arms and walked closer. "Mr. Hiddleston?"

Tom sucked in a sharp breath. "My God..."

Livia laughed as she took glances at both of them. "Eva is a strange world, isn't it Daddy?" She didn't wait for him to say anything before she held out her hand to Tom and started talking all about how much she loved Loki.

Eva. Loki stole a glance to who had to be Hemsworth. The sting of being so far from his Thor made him tear up for a moment, but later that night as he carried Livia up to their roof, he saw the stars of Yggdrasil and they reminded him that everything would be alright.

They told him everything would be alright again when nineteen years later, Livia turned just as forewarned. All Loki could do was hope and hold on and keep loving even as Livia took up Persephone's rein of the underworld under a new name: Hela.

A/N: I've been on a four-month writing slump. Thanks to Chris and Tom's videos at the hospital and A MONSTER CALLS by Patrick Ness for inspiring this fic. If you liked this story please leave a comment (the prose isn't my best but it has been a while). Go comment on someone elses' story too!