And that's a wrap :) Thanks to everyone who reviewed, especially the people who weren't signed in and who I haven't been able to thank personally. All your reviews have gladdened my heart and made me write faster. Thank you!

o0o

The journey home should have been delightful. If the land had been sulking before, it was now wreathed in smiles that manifested as a forest in blossom, under crisp, cider coloured sunshine. Every patch of sky, seen through emerald leaves, was sapphire and serene, every small brook chuckled underfoot as they crossed it. Instead of monsters out of the corner of his eye, Steve caught glimpses of white deer, and dancers, and once, for a fleeting, incredulous second, the arched white neck and golden horn of a distant unicorn.

None of it helped. Loki kept up a stream of relentlessly humourous anecdotes in an increasingly strained tone, and Steve found himself pulling further and further inwards as if he fell through the increasing pressure of the abyssal sea. He did not want to know what kind of amusingly ironic lesson was coming his way this time, but he was beginning to think the anticipation was worse.

By the time they stopped for the evening in a forest clearing, Loki had lapsed into sullen silence. When the jitters made Steve drop a heavy log of firewood on his foot, he threw the rest of the branches to the ground in exasperation and shouted "What? What are you waiting for?"

Loki's head jerked up. His eyes widened. Then he gave a rictus grin that stirred the hairs on the back of Steve's neck, and spread his arms wide - a challenge or an invitation. "I'm waiting for you," he said. "Why must you brood on it all day long? Just hurt me and have done with it. Come on. Hit me. I won't try to stop you."

"What?" Steve was sure he wouldn't ever get used to it, the way Loki could twist the universe inside out between one word and another. But the sensation was at least becoming familiar. "Why would I...?"

The god's bright false cheeriness was as painful as his laughter. "I know I got it wrong. I always get it wrong. I try to give people things I think they'll like, and then they punish me. That's how it works." It was impossible to tell if it was a smile or a snarl on his face, his eyes wild. "So come on. Punish me! And then we can get back to normal. Why will you keep delaying it?"

"But..." Steve lowered himself to his knees, scraped up the fallen wood to give his mind time to work, "I'm the one who messed up your plans. I've been waiting for you to punish me."

It was like watching the fuse blow on a furiously spinning machine, a snap of shock behind Loki's eyes and the sense of a dynamo slowly winding down from overload to stillness. It balanced for a long time on puzzlement.

"Why would I, when it is I who am wrong? I have no real interest in ruling a kingdom – I like to take them to show that I can, but it was no hardship to me to hand it back after. Indeed, I'd rather conquer Midgard. You and your little friends make that so much more entertaining. But I thought you would be pleased to have me safely away from your realm. I thought it would repay you, properly, for your gift and your faith in me, if I were to leave your world alone and take another."

Loki sat on the other side of the pile of sticks and began to lay a fire with the ease and expertise of someone who's done it so often they can do it in their sleep. His words were just as practiced and sure when he said, "I tried to give you a gift and I got it wrong. So now you beat me up. That's how it works."

"You..." Steve turned this idea around to see if he could fit it into his mind. It carried on being the wrong shape, too big, too embarrassing, "conquered this world... as a present to me?"

Then he thought again about presents, about Mjollnir - how Loki had given it to Thor and, in return, Thor had held Loki down for the dwarves to sew his mouth shut. Thought about what he had heard of the god's fall - how Loki had tried to hand ultimate victory to his father as a pledge of his loyalty, and had had it so thoroughly rejected all he could think of to do next was to plummet into the abyss.

"I did, but you didn't want it." Loki was still picking at this as though he expected the scab to come off and reveal an old wound. He lit the fire with a flare of green witchery, but as the wood caught the flames turned slowly into honest yellow and amber, bright now that dusk was falling.

"I didn't want it," Steve agreed, letting go of his own fear. So there wasn't to be a lesson for him after all? Well, he could get behind that. The relief freed up a place inside him that was immediately filled with sorrow and pity, a wish that he could wrestle with the past and pull it into a better shape. He smiled, encouragingly. "That doesn't mean I don't appreciate the thought. It's the biggest thing anyone's ever done for me. And I really appreciate you giving it back when I asked. That was the act of a good friend. Thank you. I don't know how..." you could have thought I was angry with you.

He cut the sentence off unsaid, partly because he had been very angry indeed at the time, until he spotted the loophole. And partly because he was sure Loki was right, that brutal retribution was the only tactic the Asgardians had ever used when they tried to deal with him.

Steve thought about them trying to beat some morals into the boy, from when he'd been a skinny little scrap of chaos to now, when he was sharp and brittle as obsidian. It must have been as effective as trying to cure a blind man by thrashing him. Punishment wouldn't ever make him see. It would just make him a blind man who had good cause to hate everyone.

Putting his head in his hands, Steve heaved a great sigh of frustration and sympathy. "Buddy," he wished he hadn't been on the other side of the fire, wished he could touch, didn't know how it would be taken if he did. "Haven't any of them ever tried to understand you?"

Loki's long frame had been tense as a bowstring. Steve only noticed it now when the slow relaxation changed his movements from staccato to fluid. His face had closed up around thought, wore the blank, neutral expression Steve thought of as his mask, but then the brows pinched in a little and he was suddenly present again, curious, remembering something.

"There was one," his lips turned up – the memory pleased him as much as it surprised. "In a different life. The one you remind me of. I remember his name. Hoenir, Odin's brother." He put his head in his hands, covering his eyes, concentrating on some inner landscape. "We... used to travel together, as you and I are doing now. The three of us. And human men would call upon us when they needed help."

He looked away, swallowing hard. Then he reached out and put both hands into the centre of the fire. Steve choked off a shout, as the flames poured joyously into the god's cupped palms and danced there, their light lining his face with gold, flickering in the startled green eyes. Loki tilted his head to one side and poured the fire from one hand to the other as though he were pouring molten metal. "How odd. I remembered that I had been a fire god, in those days. God of hearth and home, god of the forge fire, domestic and bright."

He looked at Steve and it seemed he was just as taken aback by this as Steve was. "Hard to believe, I know, given what I am now. And yet even the hearth fire, left untended, will find a way out – will find a way to burn until it consumes the house – and that... that I do recognise. It is in me to keep pushing until I'm stopped."

Pinching a flame between finger and thumb he lifted it out of the fire and let it burn on, playing over his skin. In its light, Steve caught the quick slide of sly thought behind his eyes, and shuffling closer he caught Loki's wrist just as the god was about to throw his handful of flame at a nearby tree. Loki laughed.

"You see? It is not in my nature to restrain myself. If I see a loophole, I will use it, or a weakness, I will exploit it. Make something almost impossible, and I will have to do it to show I can. Someone has to stop me from the outside. This is as true now as it was then, and he... for a long time, he did."

Steve found the bag of provisions the elves had pressed on them before they left, broke out a wineskin, bread, cheese and apples. There wasn't a cup, so he balanced the skin on his shoulder, unstoppered its mouth and drank to cover his pause for thought. So he'd been right all along, had he? What Loki needed was someone to be his conscience for him. It even sounded, a little bit, like he knew that himself, and wanted it.

"What happened to him?" Steve crossed his mental fingers, but still expected the answer to be 'I killed him.'

It was not. It turned out to be more surprising than that. "Odin sent him away," Loki said, thoughtfully. "Do you know, I sometimes wonder if my father wanted me to become evil – to become the doom of the gods. Why else would he send away the only one who could control me? Why else, in this life, would he goad me to fall?"

He was talking to himself perhaps, but Steve couldn't help but wonder if Thor was wrong about which one of the brothers had been adopted. If this was true, it seemed Loki got his weird amorality directly from his dad. But that was a topic for another day.

"Well in that case," he handed over half the food and dared a teasing smile, "maybe you should become a hero just to spite him?"

And suddenly everything was okay again. Loki laughed and devoured his food as though he was starving. When he'd watched Steve's every mouthful, like a dog who hopes for scraps, he commandeered the wineskin for himself and said "Perhaps. In the mean time, since my gift did not please you, what would you like from me to replace it?"

Ingrained politeness almost had Steve saying "I don't need anything," but he bit down on it before it could get out. This was his chance to use this friendship to achieve something good for the world. "What I'd like would be for you to promise to stop killing people. That's what I'd like most of all."

It didn't take the chill that sharpened the god's face into a sculpture of ice to make him feel ashamed. His own heart did that, because when it came down to it, if you used a friendship for an ulterior motive it wasn't really a friendship at all. "But it's your choice, okay? I'm not trying to blackmail you or rule you, or whatever. And it's not like I'll stop being your friend if you say no. That's a given, no matter what. Okay?"

He must have had on his most earnest face, because half way through his protest Loki relaxed again and by the end he was laughing. "Peace, Steve Rogers. Do you think I am incapable of the same degree of friendship myself? I am not about to destroy you for answering my question honestly. I will consider what you ask."

When Steve emerged from Fury's office, the last stage of a series of health checks, psych evaluations and skin swabs by the doctors and the astrophysics team alike – all of them fascinated by the thought that he might have brought something from Alfheim home with him – it was to find Dr. Selvig in the anteroom with the results of the tests.

"Oh, hi," Steve said. "I imagine he'll be a while calming down before he gets to you. Can I ask you something in the mean time?"

"Please do, though if it's about the data you've just provided, I can't tell you before I tell him. I shouldn't tell you at all, in fact. It's classified."

"It's a myth question, actually." Since bouncing back from his own encounter with Loki with a shrug and a 'well, what else could I expect?' Selvig had become SHIELD's go to guy for the myths, a position he took very seriously now it was so clearly tied in with his work.

Reassured, Selvig sank back down on the comfortless, waiting-room chair, "Go ahead."

And Steve, who'd been pondering Loki's last question all the way through Fury's harangue, couldn't think of a better way to phrase it than to just put it out, flat. "Do you think Loki's capable of real friendship? Fury says no, but he doesn't know the guy the way I do. I'd like to think he is, but... let's say it's hard to be sure about anything with him. I'd appreciate some kind of informed second opinion."

Selvig gave his gentle, sceptical smile. "Do you know about kennings, Captain Rogers? They are a poetic way to describe something by referring to its most well known attributes. So if I said 'the gannets' bath' I would be referring to the sea. If I said 'Hrungnir's killer' I would mean Thor. And if I said 'the loyal friend of Hoenir' everyone would know I was talking about Loki."

He gave a quiet laugh - a slow, soft-spoken man with resolute eyes. "Make of that what you will, Captain. But it's used three times as often as 'Deceiver', if that helps?"

"I think it does," Steve smiled and gave the man a half salute. "Good luck!"

"Thank you," Selvig chuckled, "but I expect he's shouted himself out already at you."

Steve was still feeling pretty good about his decisions when he got home and found the parcel in the middle of the Avengers' kitchen table, waiting for him. It didn't take the spiky writing on the top to tell him it was from Loki. The fact that none of his housemates seemed to be able either to see or touch it told him that.

His heart sank as he poured himself coffee. Today he'd already had reprieve and reassurance. Judging from the rollercoaster ride of this friendship so far, that surely meant he was overdue for something nasty next.

Looking through the shared fruit bowl for anything that hadn't gone off while he was away – it turned out that two days in Alfheim had been three weeks on Midgard – he ate an over-ripe pear and wondered what he could have done wrong since they'd parted on good terms. Coming up with nothing, he pulled the cardboard box close and, braced for everything from explosions to zombies, broke the wax seal on top.

The shape of the handwriting on the letters inside made him catch his breath with awe, and he lifted out the stacks of photos with a joy that went so deep it was indistinguishable from agony. Peggy's writing. Pictures of her, sombre after the war, and then slowly brightening. There was a man, and eventually children. Birthday cakes and Christmasses, and her face slowly becoming softer, more serene, lined with smiling.

It wasn't until the first drop spattered onto one of her letters, smearing the ink, that he realized he was crying, and then he pushed the box away, set his face down on his folded arms and wept for loss and gratitude and relief.

She had been happy. He couldn't give that to her, but someone had, and he was glad. Glad despite the pain.

There were home videos below the photos. When he could stand up without snivelling, he took them into the sitting room and played them and wept again to see her as a grandmother, calling out "Steven, put your coat on!" as she wrapped up her grandson for an outing to the swings. And yes, that ached. It ached hard. But he knew already that when he'd stopped mourning it would be thankfulness that was left.

Right in the bottom of the box was a note in the angular writing of someone more used to runes. It took him a while before he could bring himself to look at it. But it only said;

I cannot swear not to kill. Would you ask such a thing of Thor? Of yourself? But I hope this will serve instead. I stole these things from the house of your lady's granddaughter. I attach the address, should you wish to return them. Perhaps her family will be glad to hear what you have to tell of her. To tell a warrior's story is to make them immortal.

Until we meet again,

your friend,

Loki.

And, in the end, that too made him smile.