"What do you feel?" He circled her slowly, hands down at his sides. Visible, where she could watch them as needed.

"Cold," she said.

"That is what your body feels." He smiled as she shifted away, veering into the circle he created with his movements. The air around them shifted, vibrant with bright blues, reds and greens which swirled in all directions. Her doing, not his.

"What do you feel?"

The hues dampened. Blue darkened to the color of a healing bruise; red swirled down to the ground, became blood upon the floor. The greens congealed into a form, distant, alluring. She shuddered.

"Hurt," she said. "Bruised."

"Tell me of your family," he said. He knew how she hated the word.

"I don't have one." She snapped the words out, a spray of yellow bursting from her lips. Her anger was the pale color of billowing fires against the night sky. If he pressed, that anger would darken to orange, deep and surging, spreading around her in a great wave.

"No?" He paused in his circuit and approached her directly. Her hands were balled into fists; this was surface temper. "No one?"

"They didn't want me," she whispered. Burnt orange outlined her figure where once a sallow green had weakened her. Before she had been blues, greens, purples - an open wound demanding an outlet, a weak soul tormenting her own body. Now that sadness was harnessed and spun into the gold of rage. He flicked his fingers through the small rivulets shimmering around her form. The singe made him smile.

"Why didn't they want you?"

Here, anger fled in the face of confusion. She did not know, and so her mind drifted away from the question, redirecting her attention to a question she could easily answer: Who wants me now? He sensed the change in her, saw the fire leaching into a calm, easy glow. She was tempered, sheathed. She was tame.

He tasted the air around them. Vulnerable, but not enough. The anger dampened the moment she thought of them, her comrades in arms, her pack. He needed to dig further, to find the irritation, the petty grievances, the insults and frustrations to build upon. He needed her hate more than he needed her calm.

"Tell me how you met them," he said. She squirmed under this command, her mind balking as her body shied away. The colors around them swirled reds and blacks in her discomfort and fear. An old reflex, an ingrained reaction. Even here, isolated from all else, inundated with his power, she remembered that he was no friend to her comrades, and she knew that he might use information she gave him against them.

He stepped back, physically decreasing his imposition on her space. The reds and blacks blended into a soft pink. She never reacted to the colors changing around her. She couldn't see them.

"They saved me…" She was hesitant, uncertain. The first sign of a crack from years of effort, of pushing, of patience. He was tempted to press. He remained gentle.

"Are you sure?" he asked, his voice quiet, calming, full of reason and compassion.

"I-I'm sure, they…"

All that time, delicately pressing against this point. The years gave way to a single moment, victory in a small, stuttering hesitation.

She was nearly broken. He stepped closer and extended a hand, watching her. She did not move away, did not pull back when he gently wound a finger into her hair and stroked the loose strands from her face.

"Tell me, my child," he said. He smiled kindly, unassuming and close. He had her.

"Tell me, and we will cleanse your pain."

Loki followed Thor through the hallways of Tony's compound, the building sturdy and strong in the face of the inhabitants who lived there. Thor entered his own quarters, the furniture and walls all fortified against Æsir strength and weight. He set Mjolnir to the side, resting among other trinkets and tools which he had forged or been given over the years. Loki examined the objects, and could not stop himself from taking up a bottle of scented liquid. He raised both eyebrows and looked at his brother, who smiled ruefully.

"Jane has good taste," Thor said with good humor. Loki chuckled quietly and set the bottle back down.

"You didn't tell me what you'd done," Loki said. He kept accusations from his tone, though he felt annoyed at this revelation. That Thor had concealed such information, for millennia, and Loki had never guessed at it. The trickster was galled at his own naivety and impressed at Thor's deceptiveness.

"I did not," Thor said. He gestured to the sitting area Tony had provided at his request: several chairs and extended couches with sturdy backs and frames, a gathering place for the type of man who enjoyed entertaining friends within his own quarters. A record player sat to the side of the chairs, which Loki only recognized because Lynn had showed him such a device inside a mortal store. She had asked one of the store workers to demonstrate how the device worked, and Loki had been fascinated by the strength of the sound produced by such a small needle running across a vinyl surface.

He pushed the thoughts aside and sat across from his brother, who was flipping delicately through a box of housed records to see if one piqued his interest.

"You're very calm, brother," Loki said. He saw Thor's cheek crinkle into a smile, and his annoyance grew. "Are you not concerned at all? Amma Lynn -"

"Is contained safely," Thor said. He pulled a record free and began the process of setting the turntable to working. Both Asgardians paid close attention to the process, one to ensure the record and turntable survived his attention, and the other in quiet fascination at mortal technology. When the music began, both leaned back and simply enjoyed the sounds for a few moments of mutual peace, lost in past reminiscences.

"Why did you do it?" Loki asked after a few songs had passed. His irritation was not gone, but had decreased enough that he could broach the issue without snarling.

"The stones were too powerful," Thor said. "I could not risk Thanos' ambitions again."

"He knows what happened before, brother," Loki said. "He has surely seen it within her mind and knows each of your comrades."

"That explains his tactics now," Thor said quietly. "He could not use the stones as before, so his rage is diverted and his weapon changed."

"I believe he wishes to eliminate your resistance before enacting whatever plan he has chosen," Loki said. Thor pursed his lips and shook his head slightly.

"Ours, surely," the thunderer said. "Or do you not count yourself among us?"

"Thanos will not seek my death, Thor," Loki said. "I am still the heir of Death, which he so craves."

Thor said nothing for so long that Loki narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. He braced his arms against his knees, his nostrils flared. His eyes burned with anger.

"What did you do, Thor," Loki said. Thor felt his brother's ire beating against his mind, a sensation he had grown accustomed to in centuries past.

"The accident of your birth will not haunt you any longer, brother," Thor said quietly. Loki hissed and shot from the chair he occupied, pacing furiously back and forth, shooting a snarl in Thor's direction with each passing.

"You fool!" he finally cried, his emotions bursting forth. "You great oaf! And you lie, brother, I know that you lie, for we heard mother when she saw me, we heard -"

"Ragnarok lies within your future still." Thor remained seated, allowing Loki the dominant position for this conversation. Loki continued pacing, though slowed after his first outburst. His intensity had turned inward, where Thor knew he would reach several conclusions at once. He couldn't predict where his brother's mind might lead the trickster, but there was no need to force Loki to speak sooner than he was ready.

Loki's erratic pacing calmed until he once against sat across the Thor, weaving his fingers together. Sighing. Shaking his head.

"Why would you do this, Thor," Loki said. "Why would you change my very nature, when you know my destiny remains." Loki stared at his hands as he spoke.

Thor remained quiet. Loki was not asking a real question. He was venting quietly, thinking out loud. If Thor spoke now, the trickster would bluff away these emotions.

"No one would ever suspect as much." Loki chuckled. "Not from pure, honest, noble Thor. No - I am certain of that. It was why you were the one who had to do it, to recreate everything - but not to change -"

Me.

Thor waited. The album had finished, the needle popping quietly for a moment before the automated arm moved it away.

"You think too highly of me, brother," Thor said. "Jane asked if I had changed her at all."

Loki laughed outright. "Mortal confidence is fickle. Amma Lynn -"

He paused, his mood souring.

"We Asgardians," he said after a long, silent while. "What a trio we are, pining after creatures who will be dust long before we see our old age."

Thor smiled. "Do you pine so much, Loki?"

"Ah, brother." Loki shook his head. "Leave me some secrets."

The intercom flickered on the wall above their heads. Both turned with raised eyebrows, and they heard Natasha's voice.

"Hey boys, she's woken up." Loki tensed and glanced at Thor, who stood from his chair.

"Come, brother," the thunderer said. "Into the fray."

Natasha watched the video playing on the screen in front of her with a blank expression. The dark-skinned woman in the image was small and fidgety. She appeared young, early twenties at the most. In truth, she was close to thirty by now. She was strong, healthy, and functionally immortal - a curse she had once hated. Now...

When she'd first met Lynn Creed, Natasha wasn't certain the girl would survive the night. Now, she wasn't certain if any of them would survive Lynn.

"When I was first sent to them, they sat me down and said, 'we want you to think of this as your home.'" Lynn was speaking to no one and everyone. Speakers fed voices in and out of her containment cell. No one sat in the cell with her; no one stood outside a glass barrier and observed her. She was alone in that room.

Natasha felt the itch steadily growing in the center of her back, and longed to reach and scratch. But the itch wasn't an over-stimulated nerve, and a scratch would not relieve her irritation.

Behind her, Steve spoke.

"What else did they say?" He had his arms crossed, his expression intense. His muscles thrummed with restrained energy. He was ready to spring in any direction.

"They said they wanted me to…consider what it would be like. If they were my parents."

Lynn looked up at the speaker. Her eyes were dark, black in the video feed. Natasha creased her brow. She pressed the mute button on the console.

"Do you think she can -"

Lynn's voice interrupted her and she fell silent.

"I believed them," Lynn said. "I worked...to make them see me as one of theirs. It took a while. I thought, there's no way. There's no way that they'd keep me, when no one else did. But they did."

Tears had started falling, unheeded. Lynn's face was a mask of unbridled pain. Her breathing shook as she drew a long breath, held it, and let it go.

"I told them I wanted to stay."

Lynn laughed and licked her tongue across the inside her cheek, shaking her head.

"It took me two years to trust them, to believe them. And when I told them I wanted to stay…they told me I had to go."

Lynn dragged a finger through the water staining her left cheek. She examined the wetness on her fingers, sighed and shook her head. Tony's voice echoed now.

"Why did they tell you to go?" He was in another chamber with Clint. Thor was in a third, his brother isolated from the rest of them. Loki's panicked agitation had become too great a burden for Thor's comrades to tolerate.

"She had cancer," Lynn said, "and I couldn't stay. I was gone the next week."

The tears continued as she spoke, ignored. Her voice never warbled, never shook. She appeared calm. But her voice began to grate.

"But they kept that knife turning," she said. Her tone dipped and rose, powered by emotion rather than inflection. "Always deeper, never gone. They'd send me cards, call me, track me down. And I…I couldn't tell them…"

She shuddered and closed her eyes. Natasha turned her head away. Tony spoke again:

"You couldn't tell them you didn't want them around you anymore."

Lynn laughed quietly, a short exhalation of breath.

"It was too hard. I did…I did want…but they said no, and…"

She shook her head. Her lip turned up, a smirk morphing into a snarl.

"They never talked about it again."

Now she was hostile. Bumps rippled across Natasha's arms; her hairs rose, standing at attention at the threat they both sensed.

Lynn stood, flexed her fingers. Cracked her neck.

"Amma Lynn, do not -"

Lynn walked through the cell wall and disappeared from sight.

"Shit," Steve said. On the intercom, Tony and Clint, shouted orders to be on the lookout while Loki snarled angrily.

"Can you find her?" Natasha didn't specify who she was addressing; only one of them might be able to work that sort of magic.

"No," Loki said, "as I've told you all before. She will not allow -"

The comms died in a sudden fizz of power. The power surged in the building, the lights brightening to the point of blinding before giving out, spent in one brief moment of unsustainable power. Red emergency lights activated, casting them both in a hazy red. Alarms sounded outside the room. The door remained sealed.

"Shit," Steve said. He ran for the door and pulled at the metal weight. They were barred in, unable to communicate. Trapped deep below the ground in a bunker designed to keep Lynn safely contained.

"Natasha, help me," Steve said. They hauled at the door together, but the metal wouldn't budge. Distantly, she could hear Thor's hammer swinging repeatedly against the metal of their own cage.

Loki shimmered into view, offering a hand to them.

"Quickly," he hissed.

"Where are you taking them?" Lynn's voice echoed quietly against the wall. Loki flipped around and backed himself toward Natasha and Steve, a target to draw her eye. Lynn stood with her hands at her sides. She tilted her head. The collar around her throat rattled gently. Her eyes flashed to Natasha.

"Take it off," she said. Her tone remained quiet. Natasha watched Loki's fingers twitch, his desire to pull them all out of this place given away in the small convulsions.

Lynn stepped forward.

"Take it off," she said again. Her hands balled. "I won't ask again."

"Amma Lynn, enough," Loki said suddenly. He had clenched his hands into fists to prevent their twitching, and now opened one to gesture at the two Avengers at his back.

"They are not to be harmed," he said. Her eyes flicked from Natasha to Loki now, the snarl spreading from one cheek to the other.

"Amma Lynn, no," Loki said. His voice was stern and commanding. She stepped closer. "These are your friends."

She breathed deeply, quietly. Watched him for a long, cold minute. The alarms silenced in the hallway; the door began to shudder as Thor wrenched at the braces from the outside.

Lynn offered him a hand, her face calm once more. Serene, balanced. Sane.

"Come with me," she said. Echoes of a distant past, separated by millennia. His own voice weaving with hers as she drew upon a memory. Her eyes flashed golden, rimmed with night stars. He was entranced; he was undone. He reached forward. Steve grabbed for his shoulder.

"Loki, no -"

They joined hands, her palm wrapping tightly around his. She looked at Natasha and smiled.

They were gone a moment before Thor tore the door from the frame.