This is part of the If and Only If series. Read order is on my profile page.

Last short fic. Next time, we will open with Bifurcation. I expect that to begin sometime this weekend or early next week.

Inverse functions are two functions that undo each other. If you put the output of function f into function g, then g will output the input of function f. Or, in other words, f(x) = y and g(y) = x. Or g(f(x)) = x.

My thoughts on this chapter: Attaboy Loki. :3

Inverse Functions

"Aesir."

A claw-tipped hand reaches down, grabs a fistful of black hair and pulls up; poison green eyes roll and slip over the things surrounding him.

(Aesir, Asgard. No. He needs to go to Midgard there's something there something waiting, something lost, x sub n loss.)

"What should we do with him?"

(The thing about a negative slope is that it leaves plenty of time to remember: Odin, half-Jotun, dying, sunflowers, every single thing he did wrong because he is half-monster, laughter and fract—)

His eyes slide up, meeting ice blue ones.

(frozendisgustingthing)

"I have not given my Lady an Aesir in a long time."

(He does not equal Aesir)

His eyes roll away. Something old and cold and dead stares back at him, smiling sweetly. If he had the strength, he would growl and snarl and lunge at her—knows her

(firefirefire destroy end)

but his head rolls down as the hand lets go and he forgets. Words buzz around him, but they don't matter.

(Midgard and just a rather very—

XXXXXX

Pain is quantifiable.

(He burns alive in the heat of a dying star.)

Thor (not-brother)(watched him die), he remembers, throws himself into battle until his head is clear.

(Acid and venom fill his blood until it swells into white noise and he can feel the droplets searing through his veins drop by drop.)

Numbers, though, are what sing to him and pain, physical pain is nothing but numbers (except x sub n equals x sub loss, soul tear that defies everything). It sits couched in the equation of oneself, a variable that fluctuates constantly.

(He is stripped down and down and down to nothing with dull knives, vocal chords snapping as he screams.)

Negative slope outside of Yggdrasil is quiet, numberless, and leaves time to remember.

(They replace his marrow with boiling lead and drown him.)

Pain gives him numbers, focuses his mind, and lets him rebuild.

XXXXXX

The very first thing every Aesir learns to do—warrior or healer, man or woman—is to invert pain. It is not regarded as seidr though that is what it is. Some are good at it and some not, but all can at least dull pain a little. The more complex the pain, the more complex finding the inverse function for the particular pain is.

He never had much interest in it; too many other things demanded his attention.

They want him incoherent.

It feels as if he passes through every possible agony; he relishes it in near drunken euphoria, finds the knife-edge balance of pain and pleasure and uses it to rediscover his own function (ignores the missing parts(it's not as if they matter)), listening to his captors speak and whisper when they think he cannot hear.

They mean to kill him, sacrifice him to that woman he saw.

(Midgard t != {0,1,1,3,5,8…} Midgard has what is lost what he needs fract—)

They think him Aesir. Death is… beautiful, worshiped, and they mean him to be their overture.

(What is that thought? Sunflowers, light at 67 degrees from the southwest, fract—)

Loki has no intention of dying.

He has something to find first.

XXXXXX

The lives of eight realms are greater than one Aesir's.

Certainly greater than one half-Jotun.

Frozen blue eyes consider him and Loki smiles wide and easy and mamba-like. Trust me that smile says.

"I'll even show you how it works," Loki adds, an after-thought. "No realm would be beyond your grasp."

"No realm is beyond my grasp, fallen."

"Ah, yes. But it would go so much faster with the tesseract, would it not? Wouldn't that be lovely? To not have to wait between your sacrifices to Her?" His eyes sparkle, voice rippling with glee and something dark (destroy), nearly breathless. Reverent.

(His blood is singing.)

"You desire something in exchange. Something more than your life."

Loki does not have the grace to look ashamed. Nor does he have the grace to pretend to be cowed by the threat.

"Midgard is mine. Mine to make safe, mine to keep. Mine and not Hers."

Thanos stares at Loki and Loki lets him in, lets him rummage through his mind, ignores the locked box of half-remembered things to examine later (t = ?). When Midgard is his to examine at leisure.

(when he is safe)

Loki keeps smiling, wide and easy and mamba-like.

Trust me.