They are talking about him.

It pulls him out of his half-conscious stupor, pulls him out of an inky abyss specked with pinpricks of light, pulls him out of a living nightmare. He had long come to understand and accept the fact that he will never dream again; if he is so lucky to fall asleep anymore, he remembers.

"I have a younger sibling too." Foster is saying. Her tone is soft and Loki doesn't quite think that she is doing it for his benefit. He can feel his brother's gaze on his back. He wonders if there ever will be a time when he can exist independently of him, if ever he can escape that blinding light. "I get it. Okay, not really. Or at all. But I get how someone can get it."

Thor laughs quietly. "Is he a troublemaker, too, this brother of yours?"

"Sister. Not really. Our dad died when I was doing my masters. She was in high school; she took it harder than anyone would have thought. There was a time..." Foster pauses. "She's better now. But for a while I was really worried about her."

A long pause. The silence is comfortable; Loki remembers, the way someone remembers a half faded dream, the same kind of silence; easy, calm, without the need to speak to be heard.

"You would have liked him, before." Thor says softly. "He was brilliant. He is, still. But before—our father made us attend him in the diplomats' meetings, made us write reports about wheat intake in Vanaheim and the output of the quarries in the far countries... I used to hate it. I still do, but it was never dull if he was there."

Foster is silent.

"He used to play this game; we thought it was hilarious. Even father tolerated it. Loki has a knack for words, for numbers and for information. When the ambassadors from the lesser realms came to complain—trivial things; the price of the harvest falling, not enough troops stationed at the Bifrost sites—Loki would quiz them. And father would let him. Half the time it turns out that the diplomats didn't even look at the numbers, or thought none of us would know. And Loki would make it sound all so innocent—just a curious child asking questions... You would have liked him."

He remembers. It was always about pitching the voice high, about keeping the eyes bright. He had made many enemies that way - in his short reign, the same ambassadors whom he so embarrassed in his youth had banded together, spread rumours of the quicksilver king's madness through the streets. He doesn't suppose Thor knows that. He doesn't suppose any of them knew the cost he paid for a few seconds in the light.

"Why did he..." Foster pauses. Then she mimes the sound of an explosive.

There is a thread of amusement in Thor's voice that fades as soon as it had appeared. "The elders say that he went mad. Sif... Sif won't speak of it. She went to see him afterwards, after he refused to lift my exile. The only thing she would say is that he knew perfectly well what he was doing. I... Before you were born, many years ago, Asgard fought a war against the Jotnar. They were defeated, and for the centuries afterwards, Aesir children were told horror stories about them - eat your vegetables, attend your lessons, listen to your parents, or the frost giants will come for you in your sleep. Then Loki found out he was one."

"Father took him as an infant. He said that both of us would be kings, that through new blood, Asgard can form a new, true peace." His brother's voice is quiet. "I believed him, before. An amiable, true peace between equals, between brother-kings and blooded lands, no one can ask for more. But now I am not so sure. I'm not sure about anything anymore."

He has to close his eyes, hard. He squeezes his eyes tight, bites down on the inside of his cheek, wonders if Thor can hear the pattern of his breathing change, wonders if the sound of his own heart beating, so loud and so unsteady, can be heard across the campfire. Brother-kings, blooded lands, the realm of snow rising taller and stronger than ever before, the ice spires of Jotunheim's ancient palaces rising to the heights of Asgard; a kingdom fed by the light. And Asgard alongside it, golden and looming and warm and welcoming, a hearth-fire in the centre of the universe, waiting to harken all the worlds of Yggdrasil to the future once they are ready and—

And Loki. King of Jotunheim, Brother of Thor if not son of Odin, a heroic return to his home, his golden brother wrought of lightning and storm by his side. Thor, King of Asgard, Brother of Loki and Protector of Midgard, a benevolent ruler stripping the tyranny from Asgard and arrogance from her heart and—

He opens his eyes, blinks. All around him, the night is dark. The vision dissipates as quickly as it had come. There is a rock beneath him, jutting against his hipbone. His fingers are cold, and one hand clenches uselessly into a fist.

"He will use you against me." Thor says after a long silence. "He will not hurt you, but he will attempt to manipulate you; it is his way. If anyone is clever enough to counter him, it would be you, Jane. But—and I know I have no right to ask this of you, and I know you have every right to hate him for what he did to you and your city and Erik and your earth—"

"Thor." Foster says quietly; not quite an admonishment, a gentle stop. There is something desperate in his brother's voice, something broiling beneath the surface. Something inevitable, like the voice of a man sentenced to hanging by his own hand.

"Please—do not judge him too harshly." Thor says, and his voice is unsteady, hoarse. "Do not lie to him. In my youth I mocked him, and in my youth I did not realize what I had. On earth, the first time, I did not understand until it was too late, and by then I had already lost him. I don't intend to make that mistake again. I cannot make that mistake again."

Something is prickling at the back of his eyelids. He is thinking of Thor, so large and so open even as a human, walking alone through the wreckage of the human town. Thor had not understood, even then, why he would do this, why he would lay waste to the town and kill their friends and kill him—and for what? For a father's promise? For a hollow throne?

He had been afraid, Loki remembers with a dull ache; a fear he had not known before or since. He had been thinking of a boy with golden hair, of a promise to hunt down monsters.

It is only now, with hindsight on his side and the memory of Thor's hand at his throat that he realizes that he had no need of that particular fear. He wonders if Thor knows this much, wonders if his foolish oaf of a brother had stumbled on to this revelation—they will dance upon this line until they die, until Yggdrasil falls and mountains float, until the Norns themselves fade away into the black holes of the universe. When you betray me, I will kill you, his brother had said to him in that cell.

No, you won't, he thinks now, with a curious emptiness in the pit of his stomach. But perhaps it would be better for both of us if you did.

"And if—" Foster's voice shakes. "If you do? If he betrays you?"

A long silence. The fire crackles; Loki is breathless, waiting.

Finally—

"He can't." Thor says finally, and he has to stop for a few seconds to compose himself. "He can't, and I can't—"

Yes I can.

"If he betrays me," Thor says finally. "If he betrays me, after all my promises, after all his oaths, after all he's done and all I have done—then what I must do...it doesn't bear thinking about."

Loki stares for a long time into the dark. He blinks.

When he opens his eyes, the sun has barely awoken, a distant whiteness tinging the sky into a strange blue-grey that he had not seen in what feels like centuries. He lies still, looking upwards towards the last few fading pinpricks of stars, his hands folded on his stomach. Across the burnt-out fire, Thor is snoring loudly, Foster quietly. If he tries, if he applies his imagination, he could almost fancy himself on a hunting trip with his brother and their companions, Sif across the fire with her hand on the knife beneath her headrest, Volstagg rumbling up a storm. In a few minutes, his brother might wake—he did always have a penchant for early starts—and shove him awake to play a foolish joke on Fandral or Volstagg.

Thor didn't dare try Hogun or Sif, he remembers with a small smile.

And then breakfast. Hard bread from the rucksack slung across the horse, a few pieces of cheese and cold meats, or Sif might pick up her glaive and tread over to the stream and they would have fresh fish roasted over an open fire. Volstagg could snort down half a dozen before the rest of them had even started; Loki himself had little appetite for breakfast. Mostly he sat, picking at his bread and fish and cheese, watching the rest of them eat.

In the next second, he becomes aware of a fourth presence.

He is on his feet in an instant, feet picking their way silently through the burnt out fire until he has one hand pressed tight against Thor's mouth. His brother's eyes open with a start, and he presses a finger to his lips, makes a gesture towards Foster.

Thor is silent when he wishes himself to be, but Foster less so. Loki fights down a vague sense of irritation when Foster wakes with a small gasp, Thor's hands on her shoulders; he remembers that she is not a soldier, is not a warrior, has her heart given more to space than arms, and pulls himself on to the first branch of a nearby tree. When Thor pushes Foster in his direction, he lifts her up. She is light; he had forgotten how remarkably breakable humans are.

It is only Thor, alone, waiting in the clearing, when the Svartalfar appear.

"We have to—" Foster starts.

He lets out a sound from deep inside his throat and pushes with his will; the trick isn't to hide, the trick isn't invisibility. It is far easier to find something that is not there than it is to see what is while distracted. He mutes himself, mutes Foster, and while it is hard to distract both sight and sound at once, he manages it.

"Quiet." He hisses at her. "Stay up here. Do not make a sound and don't come down until they are all dead."

"Don't let him do this alone." Foster whispers.

He only grins, a cut of teeth across his face. He can feel the bloodlust singing along his nerves; he needed a good fight. "I took an oath, Doctor."

He jumps down from the tree just as the elves clear the ring of trees, still wreathed in his magic; he can see green at the sides of his vision. When he brushes the back of Thor's cape to let him know he is here, his brother starts only slightly.

"You are far from home, Odinson." The leader, a chokehold of gold at his throat to mark his status, says, voice slithering and cold; of the dark spaces between stars.

"As are you." Thor replies evenly. "You've come far to seek your death."

The elves laugh, and Loki can feel his mother's dagger in the compartment of his boot. His fingers itch.

"We're merely a scouting party." Lies. He spies wear and tear on their clothing, rumpled cloth beneath the hard leather—they had slept in it, he can see. Daggers in their boots, sword at their side, an archer, an axe. Would a simple scouting party be armed so well? And heading in the direction of the city—

"Shall we part peacefully?" The elf asks lightly. "You for your mission, we for ours."

Something bright flares inside him, burning along his core; white hot. He wonders which of them ordered the attack on Asgard. He wonders which one of them ran his mother through, and lived to tell the tale.

Thor's mouth twists, and he remembers suddenly that Foster is still hiding in the tree, can see it all, can see the bloodlust in his own eyes and read it along Thor's tight limbs. How hard it must have been, to convince the humans that the god of thunder did not thirst for violence, did not fall for the taste of blood or the easy simplicity of breaking bone. Loki has no such convictions. Blood is a spectacle—why shouldn't there be an audience for it?

Let Foster see his brother roar for flesh and marrow; it is time she understood what they are.

"Go left." He mouths, the phantom words whispering past Thor's ear. "I'll handle the rest. The leader is mine."

He had not fought by his brother's side like this for quite some time.

Thor always needs someone to guard his flank and watch his back, someone to make him look past his most immediate opponent. In his youth, it was Loki who distracted the enemies, it was Loki who weaved his charms and delivered the prey to his brother's death grip. He had learnt to pitch his knives long and low, aim for the whites of the eyes and the joints of the arms, evade instead of confront.

Now—well. Now he's developed a taste for blood, it seems.

It's not so fair, to hit the enemy without them noticing, to gouge his knives up through the rib cage and twist. They don't see him coming, most of the time—he wouldn't want to reveal to the elves that he had joined the side of his idiot brother and his human before the right time, before a sufficiently grand enough entrance. Surprise is key, and he's never been averse to guile.

It is easy work, in the end.

The grass in the clearing is stained with the dark bile that runs through the elves' veins, a dozen bodies lying haphazardly around them. Thor has a dark stain on his front, staining the armour a strange shade of blue. His breathing barely changed. Only the leader is left standing, and Thor smiles, steps back.

Loki materializes into place behind the elf, his mother's dagger at his throat.

"Shhhh," he murmurs softly, when the creature thinks to start. The dagger bites into flesh, and a thin trickle of blood starts to roll down its throat.

"Liesmith." The elf snarls. "We thought—"

He pivots, spins and slams the elf bodily into the tree behind him. The knife bites deeper. "Thought what? Why have you come? Where were you headed?"

The elf casts an eye behind him, to where Thor is watching the exchange silently. He clamps his mouth shut.

So it's going to be like that.

"Were you headed for Asgard?" Thor bellows, and Loki makes a noise deep in his throat. Next time he has to make sure Thor doesn't talk. "What were you hoping to achieve?"

"I said," Loki snaps, turns around. "Leave it to me. Do you listen to anything I say? Has a single word managed to work itself through that thick skull of yours? Would that Odin chose an heir based on foresight rather than dumb brute strength then perhaps Asgard would not be falling to tatters beneath your ill management—"

The elf makes an attempt to run, and he pitches the knife low, close to the ground. It embeds itself in the elf's thigh.

It is not iron. But he supposes ice is as good a substitute as any.

Ice formed from his blood, from the blood of the royal line of Jotunheim, from the iron-wrought kings of the ice realm. From his cold blue flesh—knives for him, now, serve a decorative purpose—he had learnt to wrought weapons, learned to turn his very self into a well-honed blade. He stalks forward, to where the elf is struggling to get to his feet.

It's useful, too, to seem unarmed when you are anything but.

"So your master wants you back alive." He makes a gesture, and the ice begins to melt, something dark bleeding through its core. He remembers his fall through the abyss, remembers the darkness of dying stars bleeding into his skin; you don't come back from the blackness without a monster inside you. If it made his seidr darker, if it made him toxic, then it's good to know it at least has its uses. "Your comrades in the palace bit out their tongues when they were captured, did you know that? So either you are a very cowardly spy, or a very important captain."

The elf is still trying escape, breathing laboured and broken as the poison black of his magic sinks itself deeper into his flesh. Loki tilts his head, and then brings his foot down on the elf's knee suddenly. He feels the bone give away, and in the next second, the elf screams.

"Loki!" Thor shouts behind him, lunging forward, pulls him off the elf. "Loki, stop—"

"I said before," He spits. "Leave it to me."

He shoves his brother off of him before he could say anything more stupid, waste any more time. The edges of his vision is bleeding red, something reaching and dark and clawing against the inside of his chest and the dark elf is screaming as his magic works itself into the depths of it, curls its way through his flesh and along his veins and into every—single—cell—

Did you look down at my mother like this? He wants to ask, but he has time for questions later. Did you put your knife in her chest and wait for the life to go out of her? Did you stay to say your prayers over the Queen of Asgard? Did you even know that she was the Queen of Asgard? Frigga Great-Heart, of the golden Vanir, the last thread of the House of Odin?

Thor's voice comes to him through a haze, and he barely hears it, barely notices when a new voice joins his, his eyes fixed on the single drop of dark matter burrowing its way through the elf's flesh, twisting through his intestines, working slowly but surely through to his heart. He curls his fingers inwards, and the elf's spine contorts. It is the shriek that comes next that breaks him out of the haze.

"Loki, don't—"

"You're going to kill him!" Foster shouts at him. "Loki, stop, stop—"

Just as suddenly, he lets go.

The breath comes rushing out of him. There is sweat beading at his hairline, running into his eyes; hot and stinging, and he blinks it away. He pulls, and the black bleeds out of the elf through a hole in his side.

"You best tell me what I want to know." He says then, and his voice sounds faint, even to his own ears. "Or else I'll be forced to think up more creative ways of forcing your tongue—"

"Loki, that's enough," Thor steps forward, and it's that voice again, oh, that voice; he could sneer, if he had the energy for it—kingly, mature, Odin bleeding beneath the surface and he is hit with a sudden urge to claw it out of his brother's throat—"We have no time for games or for vengeance, we must journey—"

"Thor." Foster cuts him off. Her face is pale, hands shaking. "Thor—" she shakes her head once, quickly. "I think… I think you should let Loki question him."

Thor blinks at her. "Jane, what—"

"Thor, he was heading to Asgard." Foster says, and her voice isn't quite steady. "He's—armed. His men too. Not enough to attack like last time, but enough for whatever they were planning, and if they weren't going in to spy, and if they weren't going to attack then that must mean—"

"They were going to break me out of your father's vaults." He says calmly. "Aren't you curious, then, as to how they knew? And what their plan is? And what exactly gave them the confidence to attempt to break into the innermost cells of Asgard?"

He is thinking of a dozen things he could do to the elf—to prolong the life, to lengthen the pain, pull out every exquisite thread of agony until he got the answers he wanted, until he got the name that he needed.

"Torture is against the laws of Asgard."

"Then it's lucky that neither of us are citizens of Asgard, isn't it?" He replies smoothly, running his left hand over his right. Where his fingers skim over his skin, it hardens into frost, lengthening into a thin blade of ice with a black heart. "I suggest you take Doctor Foster and leave. I'll meet you over those mountains before sundown. Unless you would like to assist me, brother?"

Thor grits his teeth, his jaw hardens. "I won't assist you." He says. "But I stay. I would not have you sully yourself with this work in my name, and then wash my hands of you."

Foster's teeth bites down hard on her mouth, and she nods, once, tersely. Plants herself stolidly by Thor's side.

He has to blink, fast, twice.

Some do battle; others just do tricks. He has to swallow down the sudden pressure in his throat, has to clench his hands into fists. So the boy has grown.

He turns away, curls his fingers, and slams the elf up and against the wide trunk of the tree directly opposite him. Ice spreads across his chest, pinning him solidly beneath it.

"Were you going to offer me a deal?" He asks lightly. He is not a stranger to enhanced interrogation, not entirely a novice to fates worse than death—on the giving or the receiving end. This will leave marks. He steps forward, pressed a hand against the elf's mouth, and pushes his magic into its flesh, into every cell, until he feels the skin beneath turn hard as iron.

"Now you won't hurt yourself," he says silkily. "Not like your unfortunate comrades. We can't relieve you of your tongue so early. Everything else I can still affect, of course."

"Oh, God." He hears Foster say behind him. "I'm going to be sick."

"Were you going to offer me a deal?" He says again, louder this time. The Other preferred more persuasive, more subtle methods. But the sun has truly risen now; he doesn't have time for subtlety. He would have to break the body before the mind. "Would it have favourable terms? I do hate miserly allies. How would you have gotten in? Exactly what gave you the confidence to seek me out?"

The elf spits at the ground. "Look at you." It sneers. "Cast out, left to die by the Jotuns, hated by the Asgardians, defeated by a force as meagre as the weaklings of earth—a dog, hurrying back to its master. Doing the Odinson's dirty work, even after everything."

In the cell, in the day after Thor told him of Frigga's death, his vision had bled red, and when he closed his eyes he saw the blood coming out of his lady mother like a fountain, saw her mouth bloodlessly whispering for a husband who never came and sons who came too late. He had imagined his mother, dying alone and crumpled and small in a massive room, while all the city burned around her. He had thought of himself, turning away from her grasping hand and her hoarse screams in the throne room, had thought of himself spitting accusations at her when she came to visit, had thought of his own teeth pulled back, his voice cold when he said I have no mother.

If only, he had thought, one could claw a memory from one's flesh.

Now he is oddly calm, the rage at bay; the wrath contained within some hidden corner of himself, honed into a single, sharp-pointed focus. He is not thinking of his mother anymore. Instead, he is thinking of the vein at the elf's throat, the limp broken leg, the puncture in his side. He smiles serenely, and the ice blade forming out of his hand—now blue with cold—turns into a long, thin, serrated edge.

The elf screams. They all scream, in the end.

He twists the knife, embedded in the elf's side, in the puncture that the dark matter had oozed out of. "I asked you a question."

The elf talks. They all talk, in the end.

Even him.

Afterwards, Foster excuses herself, and Thor is quiet and still, watching the elf wheeze, still pinned to the tree though the ice is melting steadily. Loki makes a small movement, pulls the ice blade back into the core of cold inside him, and wipes the blood off his hand.

"Malekith." Thor says lowly. "Now we know who to avenge for mother's death."

"Unfortunate he doesn't know the informer's name. That would have been vastly helpful too. At least we know the source of the security breach." He smiles beatifically up at the sky. It really is a beautiful day. "Send word to Odin. A thorough search of the foreign diplomats and recently indicted guards are in measure, I should think."

Thor stands, and then hesitates. Reading his brother had always been rather much like reading a crudely written, simplistic book. It is easy to read his expression now. "Thank you."

He thinks, with a sudden flare of irritation, do you ever learn?

When his smile comes, it is as sharp-edged and serrated as his knife. "You know what the mortals say." He replies lightly just as Foster reappears from behind the cluster of trees, her face still pale and hands still clenched. "The enemy of my enemy is—" he breaks off into a laugh.

Foster is still staring at him tensely, studiously avoiding the figure behind him. There is something soft, and open in Thor's face, something about the set of the eyes, about the curve of the mouth, as if he is watching a ship thought lost at sea pulling into the harbour. He realizes, vaguely, that Thor should be looking at him the same way Foster is, the same way he feels in some distant part of himself—lips curled back, disgusted, like looking at some horrid mutation of nature. The fact that he isn't—

His fingers itch; he wants to wipe that fond look off Thor's face with his fist, with his knives. Instead, he catches Foster's eyes for a split second, makes sure she is watching, and pitches his knife long. It goes through the elf's forehead, clean into the wood.

He would leave marks, he had promised himself before.

When Foster's hand flies to her mouth and she turns away, body hunching over to throw up the last of bread from last night, Thor tears his eyes off of him, and attends to his mortal. Loki feels like he can breathe again.

They ride in silence.

Thor doesn't speak of what happened, and even the human has ceased staring at him with wary eyes, or prodding him with questions about his seidr. Behind him, Foster is dozing on her horse, her head against Thor's shoulder where he rides beside her.

Loki spends a long time looking down at his hand. It is not the first time he has killed, it is not the first time he had stared into a creature's eyes and watched the light go out of them—Odin believed in blooding his sons early, in embedding war into their souls and into their hands and teaching them of the rush of bloodlust, in what it means, exactly, to render flesh into meat. He realizes, vaguely in some distant part of himself, that he does not remember his first kill—it could have an elf from some of the minor tribal skirmishes Odin sent them to put down, could have been a troll killed in battle. He doesn't remember; he doesn't quite care. He wonders if Thor knows—wonders if there is a tally on his brother's bed post.

He is no stranger to torture, either. In his youth, he did it with words—knew with a sly glance where to aim and what pressure to put at exactly which juncture; insinuate to Sif that she was somehow less of a woman or less of a warrior because she chose the sword over the needle and within seconds she'd be hissing like a wildcat. Fandral is ridiculously vain to the point of crippling, and it doesn't take much to inflate or deflate his ego, just like it doesn't take much to rouse Volstagg into a rage by mocking his appetite, or Hogun through questioning his honour and Thor—

Tell him he can't do anything and he will move Yggdrasil itself to prove you wrong. The exact incendiary cadence of voice, the exact forbidding lilt, and he will barrel into war zones at Loki's behest; and then a hand at the crook of Thor's arm, his voice low and urgent next to his ear, and Thor pulls back. A murmur at the edge of a feast, a quiet dare, a call in the midst of battle—

He supposes that that role is now left entirely to the woman dozing against Thor's shoulder.

She is small, he thinks. Almost a head shorter than Sif. Darker than Asgard's fashion—not blond, as Sif had been, but pale and dark haired with those eyes that would swallow up the skies; she looks as if she might die in childbirth, as if she might stay for the rest of her days in the hallowed silence of the library, as if, as if, as if—

He remembers, suddenly, that she had done in three days on earth to Thor what he could not do in a thousand years, had made him think, had made him question, had made him speak instead of fight, and, and, and—

He remembers Thor's bright eyes as he fell, remembers that low tone of pleading in his voice in the Bifrost, and he is suddenly filled with a hate so blindingly white hot for the mortal Jane Foster, of breakable bones and flesh, that he almost pitches off his horse.

How dare she, he thinks viciously, and his hands tighten on his reins. How dare he, how dare all of them—I told you for centuries to listen, to wait, to be calm, to speak, I told you for a thousand years and you never listened, you told me to hold my tongue and know my place, I told you for a thousand years, I loved you for as long and let them all mock me for cowardice and hate me for hiding for you, every inch for you and you never, ever, listened—

He has to dig his nails into his flesh to curb the sudden red rising behind his lids, bite his tongue to the point of blood to hold back the spells that would peel Foster's viscera from her skin, would toss Thor off his horse and raise the earth to swallow them both. Not yet. Not yet. You are playing a long game; not yet.

When the anger subsides; a cold, dull ache at the back of his throat, he is staring blankly into the trees. Perhaps, he thinks calmly, I should have paid you a visit, Doctor Foster. Perhaps you should have been my first stop.

He settles himself more comfortably in his saddle, and looks down at his hand. He splays his fingers, and smiles.