Disclaimer: Thor belongs to Marvel and its creators, writers, artists, and other respective copyright holders.

Notes: I was unexpectedly busy this past week, unf. I apologize for the delay, but, WOW! The reviews! Y'all are too kind — and, yeah, I knew about the whole 'Loki is/likes to be a Lady' thing. That's why I decided to do it. Okay, maybe this also had something to do with it: "Loki once spent eight winters beneath the earth as a woman milking cows, and during this time bore children." That made my day when I read it. Thank you, mythology books. And wikipedia. That too. ;D

So, yeah, my last line? Sarcasms. Hehehe.

Wolf in the Fold
01: The Cold, the Heat

Loki had a thought, as he was oft to, and while it was not his most dangerous thought of the minute, it was interesting — his thoughts often were. It absorbed his attention so that he paused in buttoning his pale, moss colored blouse up, leaving the lacy bra exposed. Despite the chill of his chambers, his skin did not prickle or clench into a bumpy slate like a mortal's would. His painted fingers finished buttoning the blouse, though he left enough undone so that the hollow of his throat and a portion of his cleavage remained visible. A necklace with a slim emerald that hung between his breasts and stood out prettily against his darker flesh went around his neck after a moment of consideration. He found himself considerably enamored and contradictorily disgusted by the richer tone his skin had taken in order to disguise himself as the human woman he had slaughtered. Still, his lips quirked upward when he caught a glance of himself in the mirror.

He hissed out a laugh before he retrieved a rather inconspicuous manila folder from his dresser and tucked it under his arm, and then made for the door. It slid open for him, and the sound of his high heels striking the smooth, shiny floor echoed pleasantly in the mostly empty hall. There were a few, sharp-dressed suits who nodded at him, small smiles on their faces: "Mornin', ma'am," was how they would greet him, or, "You look pleased today, Miss Cross." It all depended on their level of bravado.

His smile would get broader depending on how brave they were; Cross had always been fond of smiling at her employees, and it made his cheeks sore by the end of each day.

Of course, he had made some changes from Cross's previous "business", if it could have been called that. He had brought it from shady rendezvous in back alley's and underhanded taking over of other businesses to a more benevolent seeming organization, building weapons and such, seeing as the weapons industry had undergone an exciting boom after Tony Stark had withdrawn Stark Enterprises from the practice of weapons making. Thought the apparent benevolent nature of Cross Labs tended to be a front for the continuous shady and preferably illegal experiments and methods happening behind closed doors. His business attracted the runaways from SHIELD and Stark Enterprises' weapon making days.

A lot of his runaways had a thing for explosives and malevolent artificial intelligences, and, occasionally, for unleashing those on unsuspecting citizens.

Loki never defended those particular researchers if they got caught in the act, preferring to remain blissfully unattached to any mayhem and mischief that he himself did not cause. To do so would likely push back his machinations by far; and he would rather not have any unfortunate blips in the scheme of things. Besides, if there were any of those unfortunate blips, they would be dealt with, soundlessly and painfully.

Elsie Cross had lived in the same building as she worked and operated in, and Loki had seen no reason to change that: convenience, and that his experience with finding a place to dwell and rest in Midgard had been unpleasant to the date. Although, he had changed the sheets to a softer, silkier make with a practiced hand, and superimposed his own, personal flair to the decorations of the chambers and the office. Nothing entirely noticeable, nothing that would bring attention to a major shift in Cross's personality. Not that any of her employees, friends, or family would have been able to prove that Loki was not, in fact, Cross. His magic seeped down to his bones; his transformation was flawless in the genetic regard.

He took a seat behind his desk, and flipped through the file he had brought with him in a casual manner; he had pilfered the folder from a research facility in New Mexico, where a certain Jane Foster was working alongside SHIELD and Stark Enterprises to reconstruct the Bifröst on a mortal level. From the file, which had been updated two days ago, he could tell that they were making very little progress, despite all of their funding and geniuses. With nothing but speculation and the end point to go on, reverse engineering — or even engineering in short — something as technologically and magically complex as the Bifröst was taking them time.

They had a good foundation, though, and Loki would estimate it as another four Earthen months before they were testing a prototype.

It was a short while for Loki, for Thor, for any æsir, but a long while for the mortals.

"Tea, Miss Cross?" asked a familiar voice, belonging to a pleasant young lady who was interning at Cross Labs, and was fond of making him tea in the morning. She was trying to schmooze him, that he knew, but saw no reason to discourage her; her physical resemblance to his brother might have been a part of that — blond hair, blue eyes, a bright and cheerful grin. Her startling honesty, however, was often turned to dry sarcasm as the humans he had come across were fond of. Insatiably so.

Usually, the young ones were more practiced in the art.

Loki smirked at her, and set his papers down, noticing that she already had a mug in hand, curls of steam raising from the top. He caught the scent of milk and cinnamon, "Of course I do. What kind have you brought today?"

She passed the mug into his outstretched hand, "Rooibus tea, the cinnamon chai kind — with milk, your favorite."

He took a sip of the rooibus — it was sweet with what was best described as a sharp aftertaste, and it fit his taste better than anything Asgard had ever offered. Asgard's meals had always been rich, thick in taste and heavy on the blood; whereas he had found that subtle flavors were more suited to him, as was his personality. He hummed around the rim of the white mug, painted lips leaving a mark when he pulled away to offer the Thor-lookalike a look.

"What's in the folder?" she inquired, hands folded daintily behind her back. Ah, so that was what she wanted today.

"Oh, Natalie," Loki returned, eyes narrowing, "Why do you want to know?"

Natalie breathed, her brow twisting with annoyance. "I'm curious, ma'am. Does it have to do with Foster? I've seen you looking up anything you can get on Jane Foster's wormhole project."

"Think of it as an interest in Stark's work; he is competition, whether he knows it or not," he offered, his expression unconcerned but his eyes deadly. He had been rifling through Stark's projects when he had come upon the Bifröst one. "You're dismissed, Natalie — go see if Gerard needs any assistance in his latest project. Report to me if he's doing anything he shouldn't be." Not that Loki didn't already know that the man was planning on unleashing some product of an unholy union between a robot and a crocodile unto the world. He wasn't sure what city yet, but that was because even Gerard didn't know.

Alone, he turned to the expanse of window, and looked out over the city: bustling streets, rushing and scrambling little mortals trying to fill what little time they had to live.

He had a thought, neither dangerous nor mischievous, as he often did, though it was interesting, as they often were — time, he reasoned, flowed differently on Midgard than it did on Asgard. Time on Midgard was fleeting, and fast flowing, which was why the mortals had advanced so fast, so far in so little time in comparison to Asgard: Midgard's day was his hour, their month was his day, and their year only a portion of his month. To him — to Thor — it had only been a few weeks of separation between the two realms, while for the mortals, especially the ones working on creating a Bifröst, it had been more than a year.

Loki hissed at the thought that the mortals might be losing their motivation after a year of their time spent, seemingly fruitless.

His mind turned to the remains of the Bifrost. It would have, logically, fallen to the cold wasteland of Jötunheim, where the jotnar would have poked and prodded at it before deciding that it was utterly useless to them, and left it to frost over.

If Foster, with SHIELD and Stark's assistance and funding, could not complete the Bifröst, could not lure Thor back down to Midgard, then who said he couldn't help? He had the means to get to a broken piece, to drop it off at Foster's facility, and then haul the rest of it back to Cross Labs to be reconstructed under his supervision. A deadly smile twisted into existence on his face, and he leaned back, closed his eyes and tugged aimlessly as the hidden threads that pulled him into his secret passageways between realms. He followed the familiar pathway to Jötunheim, the air growing colder and more comfortable as he walked.

He looked out onto the frozen landscape with a considering expression: where had it fallen?

Thor was about to take his hourly — hourly because he had been enlightened to the fact that time passed differently on Midgard than it did on Asgard ("On Midgard, time flies. Our hour is their day. 'Tis why they seem so rushed, the mortals, that is.") — visit to Heimdall, in order to ask about Jane, when the doors to Conference Hall slammed open. In marched Heimdall, a determined and slightly torn expression on his face: his all-seeing eyes slid from Thor, to Odin, and then back to Thor. Was Jane injured? Was she ill? Was she in danger, when he could not reach her? Had she stopped working on recreating the Bifrost?

All eyes turned to him, and without preamble, Heimdall announced: "I have seen Loki."

"Brother — he lives?" Thor roared, grasping Heimdall by the shoulders; he remained oblivious to the paling faces surrounding him. "Loki survived the fall? Is he well?"

"He lives," the Gatekeeper repeated, looking beyond Thor to Odin, "He is well enough, if he can be well, considering that he was immensely pleased at having taken the form of a mortal woman."

The Thunderer paid no heed to the whispers filling the Hall; his brother lived, despite it all, his brother was alive. He had felt no joy since the trickster tumbled down to the void.

It was cold. Mind- and ass-numbingly cold, and Loki felt more comfortable — more at home — than he ever had in Asgard (his body belonged to the jötnar; his rearing belonged to the æsir; his mind was of his own make). And yet, yet there was a part of him, infantile and strange, that longed for the roaring hearths and golden splendor of his once-home; familiarity, he begged, decided, and then denied. It was the fire.

It was always the fire; the soft, mad crackle and snap of burning wood (sometimes, sometimes it was burning, singed flesh) would always lure him, entrance him like some fire-mad beast. Like an animal, a newly weaned foal or dazed dog, he would stare, enamored and deep into the churning heat until the glow faded down to the coals, when his eyes would slide to a shut. His heart would slow, and his blood would turn sluggish. Now, though, the fire would quicken the pulse in his neck, and dance for him. The heat crackled, cooed, writhed and moved for him; it was no longer the powerful mystique that hypnotized him as a youth, now it was he that hypnotized the flame.

Asgard had been full of flame, of that rolling, burning heat: Odin burned bright, but not as bright as the savagery that had thrived in Thor — the æsir and the ásynjur burned, not as bright individually, but in large groups the flames could not be doused. He grew up surrounded by fire, literal and metaphorical, and that made the cold, however loving and longing, foreign. It accepted him, and his body accepted it, but his mind and once-home could not accept the cold as a welcoming thing.

Loki hissed and drew back from his thoughts, wary and wild.

His pupils dilated and his heart quickened, a macabre mess of tangled imaginings surged forth, and he wanted —

Loki breathed.

"Where," he asked after the storm, a churning flurry of snowflakes ghosting past, "Where is the Bifröst?"

For a moment, he thought his birthplace would deny him — and why not? He had tried to destroy the place — and then he heard it, on the wind. Soft. No more than a whisper that he would have missed had he not been listening for it. A small, faint voice on the horizon, near his ear, but not; a minuscule creature, dainty and white, with twinkling little wings made of ice shards. It perched on his shoulder, leaned close to his ear, and whispered. His ears strained to hear the normally inaudible sound.

East. Go east — to the great chasm before the palace.

He skipped the east and just went to the chasm, and stared long and hard over the edge, down into the darkness. He stared for a moment longer, swallowed a nervous little swallow, and then stepped over the edge —

Loki fell, but only for a little while; he struck the ground on his feet, silent and cushioned by magic and strong, dense bones. There was no jötunn in sight, beyond himself, and the Bifröst lay smoldering before him.

Later that night, Jane Foster would awake to find a small, but informative piece of the Bifröst resting on her pillow.

Later that night, Loki would magic the rest of the Bifröst to Cross Labs.

Later that night, Thor would once again whoop with joy.

But it was then, in the now, that a smile spread across Loki's face, one that threatened to crack, and he laughed. Neither loud nor maniacal. It was hushed, sweet and smooth.

Even Jötunheim could bend to his will, and thus, he would go far — farther than he had ever planned.

Notes: Oh, god, Loki. You are making your plans scarily big. Stop that. D:

And stop comparing people to Thor, darn it. Just. Stop. You will only make it hurt worse. So, so much worse.

The next chapter should be longer, by at least a thousand words (hopefully).

Up next: "So, this is a god?" Stark wondered, "I thought he would be more... you know. More."