Anew

After the fight, the door hissed open without any more fuss. From the next room came a rush of stale air, and with it the kind of reek you had to more or less expect from a ship like this: unwashed bodies on top, piss and shit below, plenty of other sourness around the edges.

Val dropped the guard she was still holding and stepped through the doorway, hand on the hilt of her sword. She ignored the muffled, pissed-off moans from the floor behind her. These guards weren't a problem anymore, but if there were any more inside, they might be.

Took just one glance around to figure out there weren't any more guards inside, after all. Instead she found four empty cells lined up along the same grimy wall. All empty. Val checked each one twice, then a third time in case she'd missed something in the shadows the first two times. The whole thing took about five seconds, which was at least four more than she'd needed to see there was no one in here.

Damn. They must have moved him. If they'd had him in the first place. If she was even on the right fucking ship.

"Start looking now, alright?" she said, on the off-chance the Gatekeeper happened to be watching. "I'll call you when I'm--hold on."

There'd been that rush of air coming in, but had another one brushed against her ankle just now? Val bent down, waved her hand in front of the lower wall.

Yeah. There it was. Bit weird to have a vent near the floor on a ship like this. Even weirder that the whole wall was empty, when they could have built in a few more cells instead. They'd have been tiny, cramped ones, but it wasn't like slavers would mind.

All that plus the air vent led to an obvious conclusion: there was something on the other side of the wall.

Any space that got hidden like this on a bounty hunter's ship had to be pretty low-tech to get into. Or at least low-ID. Not like getting into the hold in the first place had been, having to shove a live guard's face up to the retinal scanner. Slavers, pirates, smugglers, all that sort, none of them wanted the bother of disabling entry-exit records, or having to fake them up if they got caught in an audit. So there had to be a manual switch somewhere nearby.

Didn't take long to search a place like this. Not if you knew the tricks of it. Val felt around, palms and fingers spread out, relaxed, methodical, checking for any surface different from the rest. She felt up and down the walls, all of them, several passes with several different kinds of pressure, until, just inside cell number two, something moved in response to something a bit more than a feather touch and a bit softer than a firm one. Across the hall, the wall above the hidden vent opened in a creaking yawn.

Val ducked into the new doorway, darker and narrower than the main door had been, and found what she'd figured she would: cell number five. At first glance, the bars were definitely made of much stronger materials than the rest--if you could call sizzling energy a material. There were runes glowing on the wall, too, which made her feel really confident for a moment--

Until she actually got a look at the person they had locked up in here. He was lying on the cot at the back of the cell, turned away from her so that she couldn't have been sure one way or the other...except that he was way too blue to be Loki.

Scrapper 142 would have called it an opportunity for booze money. Val of a year ago would have called it someone else's problem. The Val of now, more tired than she remembered being back when she'd always been too drunk to care too much about anything, said, "Hey, you. Want out of there?"

The Jotun--that's what she'd figured he was, right off, not so much because this was a part of space where you could expect to run into them as because, out of all the blue races in the universe, that was still the one she defaulted to--turned around and sat up. And, in the first surprise of the day, turned out to be a Jotun after all.

"What took you so long?" he demanded.

For a second, he was still a stranger. Then, in surprise number two, he wasn't.

"Lackey?" Val squinted at him, and yep. It was their runaway prince, all right. So that was one question answered. Good thing, too, since all the other questions were breeding--but getting answers to them would have to wait. "Is there a switch for your cell?"

"There," Loki said, indicating a section of the wall.

Val reached for it. Pressed down. Once she was applying medium pressure, the shimmering bars between her and Loki faded out without a sound.

The yawning creak from behind her made up for it. She turned to the door she'd come in just in time to see the wall close, leaving them both on the wrong side.

"There's nothing in here that opens that back up, is there," she said.

"What do you think?"

"I think I tied the guards up pretty tight. Might be a day or two."

"Amusing," said Loki, not looking concerned about this development. "How far behind you are they, really?"

"Who?"

"Don't pretend you didn't bring the Hulk."

"Try again," Val said.

Loki's eyes widened. "Then you must be waiting on Thor."

"Nope."

For a second, there was one of those expressions on Loki's face. One of the ones that meant you could figure out what was underneath all his defenses if you weren't half-asleep. Before Val could decide if she was more or less interested in doing that than usual, though, it was gone again, replaced by an awkwardness that didn't seem to know how to be anything else.

"He really didn't come with you," Loki said. "I am, for the moment at least, his heir, and he couldn't even be bothered to learn what's become of me."

And sometimes you didn't have to chase whatever was under there, because it'd all come spraying out anyway, even if you'd just decided you didn't actually care.

"It's just me," Val said, but what she was thinking was, for the moment?

How she'd missed it at first glance, she didn't know. There wasn't any hiding the state he was in. Either he had a gigantic melon tucked under his shirt, or he was pregnant. As in really pregnant. As in so pregnant it wouldn't be all that shocking if he went into labor in the next five minutes. Hello there, surprise number three.

She turned back to the wall. Searched it up and down and everywhere, just in case. But there wasn't anything. No other switch. No apparent structural weakness, either, judging from the way nothing happened when she gave it a series of good, strong kicks.

"It would seem I'm no better off than I was this morning," sniped Loki, eyeing her from his cot, where he still sat.

"Guess not." There was only one place for her to sit, so Val walked over and took it before Loki could get any bright ideas like stretching back out. She eyed him again, the unexpected hugeness of him, the radiating awkward that made a lot more sense now. "That had better not be mine."

"Oh, believe me, it isn't."

*

"How would that even work?" Loki asked, a minute or two later. "It being yours."

Val shrugged. "How should I know? Jotuns are weird."

"--A day or two, you said?"

"Yeah," Val said, not so much offering mercy toward a subject Loki clearly wasn't keen on talking about as having decided she didn't care enough to pursue it. "Less if they've got reinforcements coming. Wouldn't count on that, though."

"You scrambled their signal."

No props for that guess; he was the one who'd spent four or five council meetings arguing that they needed a ship that could do that. Something quite a lot more intimidating than the Commodore , with some big-ass guns to go with it. Ones you could use with all the doors closed, even. Kind of an important quality in space. As far as Val could tell, the only reason anyone had dragged their feet on that in the first place was because Loki had been the one to bring it up first.

"Yeah," Val said. "Settle in."

So saying, she leaned back in the cot until her back hit the wall, then brought out her bottle and took a good long swig. Little bottle, big swig, but the contents didn't go down at all. Loki'd been good for some things before he'd taken off. He'd immortalized one of Sakaar's stronger vintages for her. It came with a weird aftertaste, but Val'd gotten used to it, somewhere along the way. Didn't recall when, exactly. It was one of those things that was mostly back there in the haze.

"--Don't you have any questions for me?"

Val brought her feet up, glanced at him. Still huge, still Jotun, still annoying as fuck. "Got everything I need, thanks."

"So instead of attempting to have a conversation, or even come up with a plan, you're going to get blind stinking drunk. When you don't have any idea when that door's going to open."

"You got a problem with that?"

"Oh, not at all," Loki said, so smoothly he had to be lying. "I just wanted to be clear. Are you planning to share?"

Another big swig. It burned down her throat, settled hot in her stomach. Booze always made it easier to look at things. It was making it a lot easier to deal with him. "Not even if you weren't knocked up."

"Perhaps I've merely let myself go," Loki said, not so much smoothly as carefully, this time. The way he was looking at her now was careful, too. Less like the guy he'd been in the middle of things. More like the guy he'd been before the beginning, back on Sakaar.

"Seems more like you're about to pop out a Jotun," Val said. Booze made it easier not to be careful. Not that she would have been anyway. Everyone thought they had to be, with Loki, but that had never been something she was going to bother with. Even less now. It was just too bad kicking his ass wasn't looking like an option. She'd been looking forward to that. "What's with that, anyway? Have you been one this whole time?"

"--Did you even watch my play?"

"Yeah. But I thought all that stuff was a metaphor. Or something."

"It was not," Loki said coolly, "a metaphor."

"Yeah. I got that." It was a little hard to remember what that whole thing had been about, not least because the further along the plot had gotten, the drunker Val had gotten about it. The drinking game had been the only think making it bearable, really. Harder to remember, now, why she'd bothered going in the first place. "So you're saying you're, what? Odin's bastard? Or did he, just, pick up some random Jotun baby and bring it back to Asgard?"

"The latter," Loki said, so stiffly that for one unguarded moment Val was tempted to take pity and offer him a swig after all. "More or less."

"Sure. Why not." Val took a couple huge swigs, figuring she was drinking for two, or maybe even for three. Then she did take pity, less because he deserved it and more because they were still in a spot they needed out of, and changed the subject. "Can you fight like that, do you know?"

"--Like what?"

"Not blue. Just, the big part. Does things to your balance."

"And you'd know this from experience?"

He was always doing that. Could make the nosiest question sound like a natural extension of the conversation. Usually she'd tell him to knock it off, or knock him around a bit if they were sparring (which was where a lot of the nosy questions happened in the first place, probably because he liked getting knocked around). But this particular nosy question was aimed in a particularly stupid direction, so instead she said, "Yeah. Not personally, but. You think Valkyries stopped training just because they got knocked up?"

Loki's color changed, a little. Jotun flush, making his cheeks a darker blue for a moment. Weird; wasn't really the way his face worked when he was being himself. Took a second to dig out the reason, not much longer to decide she wasn't up for reassuring him that it hadn't been a jab. Maybe it had been, a little. Probably had. "I didn't stop --"

"Yeah, you did. You were hiding it. It happens." It had been more than just the sparring, which had stopped when they were still months away from Earth. The fucking had stopped around the same time. Val had been pissed about it, mostly because she could never seem to find him to make him at least admit that they were done. After a while of catching no more than the occasional glance at him outside of council meetings (which he attended as an illusion of himself, vanishing the moment anyone asked him anything he didn't like), it turned out no one had seen him in person for a while. He'd done a runner, who knew exactly when, and by the time Heimdall had finally spotted him, it turned out he'd gotten himself snatched. And now they were here and everything she'd thought she knew about the situation had been turned right on its fucking head, to the point where talking about Valkyries somehow seemed like the less stupid option. "Plenty of them kept training right up until they dropped. I delivered a few babies myself, right there on the sparring grounds."

"Sounds inconvenient."

"More like fortunate," Val said. At Loki's blank look, she added, "There was magic in the stones there. Something old. Strong. There was never a boy birthed there, or a girl who didn't grow up to be a Valkyrie. We weren't all born there, but the ones who were, always knew what they would be." And now she'd said too much, and the way she knew it was that the booze suddenly wasn't enough to keep her from aching in a way that'd stick for a while. "Anyway. You can't fight like that. Not if you haven't been keeping it up. And I'm guessing your magic isn't working either, or you wouldn't look like that. So when that door opens, you're going to stay out of the way."

"I suppose," Loki said. He was looking at her straight-on, where before he'd been glancing at her from the side, like if he wasn't looking at her then she couldn't be looking at him.

"Not to say you shouldn't sneak through the door, if you get the chance. Your magic would come back then, right? If it's the runes holding you back."

"That would be convenient, wouldn't it," said Loki drily. "But no. Runes are for witches."

He raised his arm, which hadn't been at any of the right angles before for Val to notice the bracelet around his wrist. Silver-colored, sturdy, not flashy enough to be the kind of thing he'd wear on purpose.

"You should've said so before," she said, and reached for it, thinking that soon they could be out of this place, and on their way back, and then she'd have things to think about that weren't Loki and his problems.

She tried to pull the bracelet apart. Tugged it from a few different directions, at a couple places that might've been a seam, if you squinted. No joy.

"Magic bracelet."

"So it would seem," Loki said. He might as well have said 'no shit.'

"Any idea how to get it open?"

He sighed, the most put-upon sound imaginable. "It requires blood."

"Yours? I could arrange that."

"That of someone who cares deeply for the wearer."

"Huh," said Val, who'd been starting to care, once, but had changed her mind when he changed the rules. "Well, count me out."

*

Val kept drinking. Loki kept looking, and pretending not to look, and being awkward about looking.

Val looked right back. He really didn't seem all that different, once you got used to the blue, and the eyes, and the gut (or to those things being part of Loki, if they were all basically normal in other contexts). He didn't look that different, but he also did, and it didn't have much to do with the obvious bits. He looked tired. Thinner around the face, too. Didn't look great on him. They'd all been bone-weary at times on the Statesman --they'd all been bone-weary at all times on the Statesman --but there'd always been a sense of satisfaction beneath it, somewhere. Didn't seem like there was anything like that going on for him now. If there had been, it would have been visible. No matter what was going on with Loki, it showed on his face if you paid even the slightest attention. All that was showing there now was a haggardness that didn't suit him at all.

Val had tucked away a little of everything into this hidden pocket or that one. Never knew what you'd need on a mission. Now she pulled out a nutrition bar--nasty stuff, but it had gotten them through the months it had taken to get the shipboard greenhouse up and running--and tossed it at him.

"Thank you," he said, and made a face but not protest as he peeled the foil back and took a bite.

"You're welcome," Val said drily. "Your highness."

"Do you really think it'll be days?" Loki asked when he was finished. He was already perking up, more alert than he'd been before. That was good, probably, even if it meant he was going to be more annoying now. "I really do feel I've been here long enough already."

Weeks, at least. That was how long it had been since Heimdall had come to see her about him. The prince had gotten himself into trouble. Someone had to go pull him out of it. Better her than Thor; better yet for her to go as quietly as possible, lest the king insist on coming with her when he was needed so much more at home.

She shrugged. "Depends. Could be less. Could be a lot more. Depends how much they care if we die in here."

"--I see."

" Do they care? You worth anything alive?"

Meaning, were they holding him for someone. It seemed pretty likely, considering the emptiness of the rest of the ship. Bounty hunters expecting a large payout could go a long way toward explaining that.

Loki's face did things. Val wanted to know the answer to this, so she paid attention. Wasn't hard to see the lies he considered, one and discarded, another and that one too, before he settled on, "From what I've managed to overhear, it seems someone on a nearby planet is in the market for a magical newborn. The source hardly matters, but a safe birth must, I suppose."

"Yeah? You'd think they'd have fed you better, if that was it."

"Perhaps I overheard wrongly," said Loki smoothly, in a way that couldn't have made it clearer that he had a really good idea what he'd been locked up for, but would try to talk his way around you for hours rather than just admit it. It made him a great person to have on diplomatic missions, but a really annoying one to try to shake down when you got back and found something missing. "It's not as if I could have asked them to repeat themselves. Eavesdropping, remember?"

"Uh-huh." Val tried to think how worried she wanted to be. Not that much, really. She could last a long damned time. Jotuns weren't known for laying down and dying, either. Besides, bounty hunters didn't usually bother locking people up when they were worth the same amount dead. "Remind me not to ask you anything else."

"But I'm always so eager to help," said Loki, sounding too damned cheerful about it. He really must have been hungry.

Val waved her bottle at him, or more accurately at the new roundish part of him. "Don't guess you're eager to tell me how that happened," she said, not because it was fraught but because it wasn't, at least not for her. 

"--Not particularly."

Which left them about out of subjects. Hopefully that door would open soon. Val was itching for something to hit.

*

The gas hissed in a few hours later, billowing down from the intake vent by the ceiling.

"Get down," Val said. Yellow. What did yellow usually do? She couldn't remember, but knocking them out seemed likely. Probably wouldn't do it as fast on a Jotun as it would for most people. It definitely wouldn't for a Valkyrie (unless it was an aphrodisiac, in which case it'd work faster. Didn't seem likely). "Cover your mouth and nose. Forget the other plan--when the door opens, get through it, fast as you can."

It wasn't Plan A, which had been 'hang back until I tell you it's safe.' It wasn't Plan B, which would have been 'pretend to be dead, then stab/hit the fuck out of them.' It was the kind of plan you came up with when the only other option was to get knocked out and taken wherever your captors wanted to take you.

"We could pretend to have succumbed to the--" Loki started.

"No," Val said, already crouched as low to the floor as she could go. On the cot there was a bit of thin cloth, probably meant to be a blanket; as she spoke, she tore two rags off it, poured booze over them. "We don't know how strong it is, or what it does. Prioritize getting out."

Maybe Loki's eyes were already burning, too, or maybe it had been a token protest. Instead of arguing, he took the booze-soaked rag she offered him, pressed it to cover his nose and mouth. 

He couldn't go as low as she could, not with that belly of his in the way, and it showed; by the time the first crack opened in the wall, he was coughing, little hacks that said he was taking in more of the gas than he should be. Not that there was much to be done about it in the seconds it'd take for the wall to finish opening.

Val didn't let it finish. She blew through the first moment it was wide enough to take her. Hit the person on the other end hard, first with her shoulder and then with her blade. Someone made a sound, a stupid low grunt, but she didn't look to see why. She was too busy turning to the next figure, counting how many there were, one two three four five including the one she'd slammed into, and they had blasters, every one, of all the stupid fucking things, ranged weapons in close quarters to a Valkyrie--

She hit the second figure with her sword as she slammed the heel of her boot into the third, then sliced at the fourth and the fifth, who were having the sense to try to back up but not the time or the speed to get back far enough. They must have figured that much out, too, because instead of trying to rush out the far door, they approached her again, blasters raised.

Out of the corner of her eye, something blue was moving by the floor, still within the range of fire, but outside of the most probable concentration of it--and, more importantly, away from the door. It was enough information for Val to lunge at the approaching guards, grab them each as their blasters went off, and fling them into the secret cell, before grabbing the ones lying on the floor and tossing them in after. For the quickest second, she wasn't sure she'd got the timing right; but then the wall creaked closed again, all its occupants too dazed or pinned or dead to rush back out in time.

And then she was alone with Loki, who was still on his hands and knees on the floor. Not passed out, but not too far from it, either, from the looks of it.

It wasn't a big deal, or shouldn't have been. But things were fuzzy, whatever yellow she'd breathed in starting to overcome the clarity of the fight. Everything was black around the edges.

Val couldn't afford to be knocked out. Not in enemy territory. Not without knowing if they'd called in reinforcement, or if they'd been the same or different guards than the ones she'd taken care of on her way in.

"Time to go," she said, and leaned down to help Loki to his feet.

*

There weren't any bodies to stumble on, out there in the hall. Just some clinking, what must have been the chains she'd used on the guards, who must have gotten untied and come after her again. Could have been embarrassing, that they'd managed it; in practice, it was more of a relief, not having anyone else to contend with.

She managed not to let the chains trip her up; having things underfoot when you were a little sloshed and a lot gassed wasn't that much harder than taking prisoners when you were a lot sloshed, and she'd had plenty of practice with that. Would even have counted as easy, even, if it hadn't been for Loki.

They were past the chains soon enough, and then it was just figuring out which way to turn at each juncture. There were plenty of those on a ship like this, and no signs to guide the way--not that she'd have been able to read them anyway, with that black fuzz closing in. Had to hope she was remembering right, that was all. Had to let instinct guide her, the way it had dozens of times when she was a hell of a lot more fucked up than this. The difference was in the kind of fuzziness it was, that was all.

Right at this juncture, left at the next, straight at the third one, Loki dragging her down to the left all the while. They came to an airlock. There must have been half a dozen of those on a ship this size, but this one took her credentials, and when they stumbled through it together, the air inside smelled right, or at least better.

Up to the infirmary they went, Val all but carrying Loki by now. She dropped him off on the exam table, then pivoted to start rummaging through nearby drawers. It'd been a while since she'd done an inventory, so finding the right syringes took a minute. Squinting at them through the fuzz to be sure they were the right ones took another minute or two.

She hadn't done a lot in the way of injections, before. Thankfully, everything they had was pretty simple. Stick it where a muscle was in your arm, then press the plunger. So she did that, herself first. By the time she turned to Loki, the black edges were already on their way out. She stabbed him with the other needle without a problem.

She'd no more than set the second needle to the side before Loki was sitting up, so quickly and with eyes so wide that for a second it looked like he was about to have some kind of freakout. Val braced for holding him back, not loving the idea of grappling with a pregnant Jotun who might or might not have activated that skin thing they did--but then he stilled, at least enough to see that it was her.

"Better?" she asked.

"I suppose." Loki looked around the infirmary, in a way that somehow managed to make it really clear that he wasn't looking in a certain other place.

"The antidote wouldn't have hurt it," Val said, because they'd taken that into account when stocking the place, on the off chance anyone got knocked up on the way to Earth. Then, because slavers and the like weren't usually keen on kneeing their profit margins in the balls: "The other thing probably didn't, either."

Loki grimaced. He still wasn't looking at her, which was fine by Val, since she didn't particularly want to see what he thought about the next thing anyway. She pulled out a knife from where it was strapped against her back, used it to nick a little cut in the meat of her arm, just above her wrist. With her other hand she grabbed Loki's arm, the one with the bracelet thing on it. It was done with by the time he looked back around, eyes almost as wide as they'd been before as the pale flush overtook him, leaving him looking the way she remembered.

"Don't get any ideas," Val said. "I'm a Valkyrie, remember? We care about everything we fight about."

She didn't want to hear what he thought about that. Didn't particularly want to see if he'd picked up on any of the things she hadn't said about it. How she hadn't recognized what it was, when she'd used to know everything there was to know about the kinds of power-dampening objects out there. She had a ship to fly, and it didn't leave a lot of room for thinking about how no one would have dared come up with something like that, never mind used it, back when there were more Valkyries than just the one.  So instead of waiting to find out what he'd have to say, she headed for the cockpit, taking a bracing swig out of her bottle on the way.

She didn't even realize she was still holding the fucking bracelet until she was most of the way there. 

*

Val wasn't anywhere near drunk enough by the time Loki caught up with her. She'd detached them from the other ship, run through all the scans and other checks to make sure no one had been onboard while she was out. She'd finished all that, was in the middle of figuring out their heading when he came up behind her and said, "Have you called them yet?"

No prizes for guessing who he meant, Val figured. "That part's up next."

"Ah. Well, perhaps you would consider...reconsidering."

Val swiveled the captain's chair to look at him. Took him in fleetingly, the glance at him she hadn't gotten back in the infirmary. He looked different, now that he was back to being himself. He looked good, despite having lost at least a stone when he ought to have been gaining. Some people dulled with pregnancy, but others brightened. Apparently Loki was in the latter group. 

Or maybe he was just that glad not to be locked up in a cell anymore.

"Reconsider what, again?" she asked. "Don't you have bigger concerns than whether or not I tattle on you to your brother?"

"It's no one else's concern," Loki said. "But it's also not about that."

"Yeah? What is it about, then?"

"Well, we haven't even discussed where we ought to go now that we're free," he said, sliding easily into the co-pilot's chair. "There's really no reason for us to go to Midgard. At least, not right away. Remember how we used to talk about where else we might go, if we ever were to have the chance?"

They had done that. It had gotten to be something of a tradition, after a while: Attend stupid council meeting, while drinking. Get out of it, do a bit more drinking. Work out what was left of the irritation by knocking Loki around in the sparring ring (or fucking him on the floor of it, or whatever). At some point, retreat to bed and spend the time until someone fell asleep bullshitting about how they were definitely going to take off with the ship in the morning. 

There were days when what happened after council meetings had been the only thing keeping Val from doing that last bit for real. It hadn't been that she didn't want to be there so much as it had been that there was no way she could be there without some kind of outlet.

"That offer's expired," she said now. "But, look. I'm not going to drag you back to Earth if you don't want to go. You want dropped off somewhere?"

"--That would be delightful, yes."

Hard to say why he suddenly looked put out. Not Val's problem, not anymore, and she wasn't going to take it on as if it were. "All right. You name the planet, we can make a stop there. As long as it's not out of the way."

"I admit I don't understand," Loki said, a burst of words after a few more seconds of glaring. "Why did you come here, if not to bring me back?"

"--To get you off the fucking slave ship you were on. Why is that confusing?"

"I just thought," Loki said. "It doesn't matter."

Which meant it actually did, whatever it was. Val wondered what her chances were of getting through the next few days without having to hear about it. Bad, probably.

"Look," she said. "You're the one who fucked off. I just pulled your ass out of the fire. Let's leave it at that."

"--You're angry with me." Loki said it with a certain amount of astonishment, like it had somehow never occurred to him that she might be.

"Is that supposed to be a revelation, or something?"

It must have been for him, which must have been why he kept talking. "What for? Not just because you had to come all this way, surely. You should really be thanking me. Haven't you been wanting to get away for a while?"

"Not as much as you, apparently," Val said. If it hadn't been for how big he was--he'd kept the belly when he turned back, though he must have been using illusions to hide it for at least his last few weeks on the Statesman--she'd have knocked him around a bit, or more than a bit, until it stopped pissing her off that he didn't mind it. Wasn't an option this time. Even if she hit in what ought to be the safe places, she couldn't guarantee he'd take his falls properly. Maybe that was why she said, "Do you know how long it's been since I had to go to the Gatekeeper and make secret plans about one of Odin's kids?"

"A century or so?" Loki guessed, with a sharp, greedy expression Val couldn't have missed if she'd been falling-down drunk.

"Nowhere near long enough," Val said, because that wasn't a trap she was about to walk into no matter how worked up she got. "You really think I wanted to do it all over again? Not bloody likely. You'd better just be glad I found you in a cage instead of blowing up planets or something." Little flinch from him. Huh, that had hit home. Maybe that bit hadn't been a metaphor, either, in his play. "So no. Not really happy to be here right now. Your highness."

She hadn't walked into his trap, but she'd still said too much. She could feel it, and that was going to be a problem. First she'd started drinking not to feel it, then she'd got busy not to feel it, and even though she was technically drunk right now it wasn't enough. Give it a few minutes and she wasn't going to be busy anymore, either, because none of the activities that had used to be on the table were, anymore.

"Well," said Loki stiffly after a moment. "I am sorry for the inconvenience. If that helps."

Hard to say if he meant it, or if he was just saying it. Harder to say if he would try to stab her about it shortly. You never could tell with Loki, even if everyone claimed he'd mellowed.

"Good. Am I dropping you off somewhere, or not?"

But somewhere in the middle of the question, Loki went stiffer. He was looking past her now, eyes widening at something over her shoulder.

Could have been a trick. Probably wasn't; whatever else there was to say about Loki, they'd been past the cheap tricks by the time he'd gone. Val turned to look, hand braced to grab him if they weren't as past the bullshit as she'd thought.

Maybe they were, maybe they weren't, but in the top right corner of the viewscreen there was a ship, bearing down on them fast. It was bigger than theirs by a lot. About half a dozen times bigger than the Statesman, even. It was blue and white and sort of shimmering, reflecting the light of thousands of stars. It would have been a better sight if it hadn't been for its guns, which there were about a dozen of, all bigger than all of theirs put together.

"Huh," Val said.

"I've never seen that ship before," said Loki faintly. "It can't be coming for me."

"You sure?"

"Very."

"Ever do anything to piss off the Jotuns?"

"--What does that have to do with anything?" Loki hedged.

Val'd heard things had fallen apart between Asgard and Jotunheim, sometime after she left. She hadn't figured they'd fallen apart enough that a prince of Asgard wouldn't know this (especially if he also happened to actually be a Jotun, himself). "That's a Jotun ship, for starters. And it's not passing us."

Where before it had looked as if it might consider avoiding them by half a mile or so, now it was both slowing down and changing course, so that it was now definitely coming straight toward them instead of appearing to be thinking about it. A panel toward the front spiraled open, sending out a beam of light. It enveloped their ship, held it, casting everything in the cockpit in blue. The temperature dropped instantly, far enough down that their breath was visible in the air.

"Now they have us in a holding beam," she said.

"I gathered as much, thank you."

Then, they were left waiting. No answer no matter how many inquiries Val sent the Jotun ship through the communications panel--and she sent a lot of them, those first few minutes. 

Typical, really. Jotun ships might be fast, but everything else about them was slow. Hard to say if it was because people from a planet of ice were accustomed to pacing themselves in the cold, or if they just knew what waiting could do to people. A little column A, a little column B, probably.

"So, what did you do to them?" Val asked, giving up the inquiries for now. Next up, they could have checked the ship's internal defenses--but this wasn't the sort of ship that was set up with booby traps in case they were boarded. It was intended to be manned, in that sort of case. There were way too many holes for just two people to fill all of them, even if she was a Valkyrie and he was a damned good fighter in his own right, and also a sorcerer. There wasn't much left to do but hope for a talk before the fighting could get started. And before that talk started, she was going to need information.

"Nothing recent," Loki said. More hedging.

"Define recent."

"Nothing within the last few years. Really, so much has happened since. It truly feels as if it might have been centuries ago."

"So it was really bad, then, and may as well have happened yesterday," Val said. "You think they're going to want to kill you on sight, or drag it out for a while?"

Loki's face did a couple things, but before he was able to say anything, the viewscreen sputtered, and a group of four or five Jotuns appeared on it, each bigger and pissier looking than the last.

"We have your ship in our grasp, Odinson," said the biggest, pissiest one. "Now we will board you and take back what is ours. If you wish to avoid destruction, you will pass it into our hands without attempt as deception. If not, then we will gladly pull it from your corpse."

Before either of them could even think to respond, the screen blacked out again. So, Jotuns still tended to the dramatic when it came to diplomacy. Val'd always been able to appreciate that about them, before. Less because of the drama and more because they at least got right to the point of things.

"Well, they clearly can't be reasoned with," said Loki, already fidgeting toward the doorway. "Perhaps they won't notice if we take the shuttle and fly it away. Slowly. Unobtrusively. What do you say?"

"They'll notice."

"What makes you so certain? They're not all that bright, in my admittedly limited experience."

"They're from a realm of snow and ice. Anything that moves in stillness, they're going to notice. And we're in space."

"Space, yes," Loki said. "Where literally everything is in motion."

Even if that was technically true, it was a stupid point for him to make right now--but Val wasn't about to follow him down that path. Not when he'd known exactly where this conversation was headed, and was trying to get out of it without her noticing.

"What do you have?" she said.

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not saying we have to give it to them. But I need to know what it is. So you'd better tell me, unless you want me to wash my hands of you the second they board."

"You wouldn't," Loki said, not desperately, or slyly, but so absently it could only have come from certainty.

"I've done it plenty of times before," Val said. If there'd been time, she'd have wondered what he saw that she didn't, if he could be that fucking sure about her. "Don't get comfortable. And don't lie to me. What do you have?"

Loki looked at her. Long, searching look, not that different from the one he'd given her a lot in the first few weeks of their flight to Earth, before they'd started fucking. This time, though, he didn't try to kiss her. This time, his hands did something, and a glowing blue cube appeared between them, pulsing with an energy that had the hairs on Val's arms standing on end.

"--The fuck," she said.

"This is the Tesseract," Loki said.

"I know it's the fucking Tesseract. I have eyes. But what are you doing with it? Wait, was that in your play, too?"

"It featured prominently in the second act," Loki said. "I knew you didn't watch it."

"I used to watch that, though," Val said, pointing out the cube so he wouldn't have any plausible deniability about what she was talking about. "There were always a handful of us with no other duty than to watch over Odin's vault. The Tesseract was about the only thing in it that mattered. It was centuries before he replaced us with the Destroyer."

It had been a boring fucking duty, standing about the Vault all day every day, waiting for more nothing to happen. Isolated, too--you missed a lot when you weren't going out on missions. Stuff you didn't get caught up on out on the sparring fields or in the aftermath of feast days, because those were no more than glancing conversations with your sisters, hardly anything above surface level. She'd emerged from that duty to find that things had gotten weird, hostile in a way they hadn't been before. There'd been about a century of weirdness, topped off by a hellish year where everything had fallen apart and then exploded.

If Loki'd picked up on any of that, he hid it well for once. "Odin had it tucked away on Midgard for a good long while. It ended up back in the vault recently. I felt it was my duty to retrieve it, in case our people ever had need of it again."

"Apparently the Jotuns have a need for it." A few thousand years ago, Asgard might even have lent it to them, depending what they'd wanted it for. But that had been before Val's time as a Valkyrie, very probably before her time among the living. Her Asgard had never been like that, even before the weirdness. Judging by the expression on Loki's face, he wouldn't be up for it, either. Still, though: "You could let them borrow it."

He couldn't have looked more put off about that suggestion if she'd said they ought to try baking Xilaphian pecans into something again, never mind how sick they'd made literally everyone the first time around. 

"Or even sell it to them," Val went on, because someone had to be practical when they were this kind of outnumbered. "I'm sure they have something useful to give in trade."

Honestly, it was kind of a shame that Loki hadn't coughed it up a few other times, when everyone had been hungry, or thirsty, or just plain cold. They could have actually fixed the environmental systems with whatever they could have gotten for it. Val was starting to be even more annoyed with him, and she'd started out this whole venture being annoyed as fuck anyway.

Then she saw the look on his face.

"I can't," he said.

"That's a warship," Val said, because it was a sure thing Loki didn't know that, either. "Two of us against a thousand of them isn't going to end well for us."

Loki did something else with his hands, which left them empty again. Like that was all it was going to take to make her forget about it. "I cannot release the Tesseract to anyone. Not now. Not yet."

"Why the fuck not?"

You could always tell when Loki had decided to lie. It'd pass right across his face. Sometimes for a fraction of a second and sometimes for a few, if it was more elaborate or he had a lot of bullshit to choose from. Val expected to see the lie on his face now--but for a second or two, all these seemed to be was an agony of indecision, before it smoothed into something else.

"I've been pregnant before," he said, with a sort of casual significance that probably wasn't doing what he wanted it to do, unless what he wanted to do was flag that this was desperately important to him, and he was nearly as desperate for her not to pick up on it. "On Midgard. When I had possession of the Tesseract for--unimportant reasons."

"Uh-huh. And?"

"And then it was taken from me. Shortly thereafter, I wasn't pregnant anymore."

"So what you're trying to say is the Tesseract knocked you up?"

"Twice," said Loki. "Not that the first time mattered."

Well, that explained the desperation, come seemingly out of nowhere. Val'd seen Loki pregnant; she hadn't had the chance before to think about what he felt about it. Kind of weird to think about him feeling any sort of way about it. Even weirder to suddenly know the general theme of the feelings; to understand that he wanted it, for whatever reason he did.

"And this one does matter," she said, because the contortions Loki's face was going into now were enough to make it clear that he couldn't or wouldn't come out and admit it. "And if you hand it off, the same thing could happen again."

Stiff nod from him. Didn't really go with the casualness from before. Looked like all the answer she was going to get.

Well, if the past year hadn't proved anything else, at least she'd already known nothing could ever be fucking simple.

"Right, then," said Val. "We'll find another way, in that case."

Loki visibly relaxed, in a way that made Val realize just how tense he'd been through the rest of it. One of his hands had come to rest on his belly at some point, one of those pregnant people caresses that seemed somehow both entirely natural and entirely alien seeing as he was the one doing it. The second she clocked it, though, he snatched his hand away, then said, as stiffly as before, "Thank you."

*

"Is there a reason we can't use the Tesseract to get out of here?" Val asked a minute later, figuring there probably was, but that it'd be worth the loss of the ship if there wasn't. 

Loki didn't startle, exactly, but he did get even stiller, and his voice was careful as he answered. "Other than that Thor would attempt to take it from me the moment we arrived?"

"Didn't say we had to go there," Val pointed out.

"Ah." Maybe Loki was about to try to talk circles around her, but mostly he just looked unhappy to be talking about it at all. "It takes a great deal of concentration to corral its power without any sort of harnessing object."

"Yeah, and?"

"My concentration has been fragmented for quite some time."

"No shit."

"I--no, it's not that. The fragmentation occurred when Asgard burned. So unless Jotuns gestate for a year and a half..."

The dawning suspicion might have been hilarious, if it hadn't been so annoying that he was trying to hide things right now. 

"They don't," Val said, with a sudden flash of understanding of what he must be trying to hide now. All the pieces were there, just waiting to be picked up if you'd spent enough time around Loki to have the knack for him. "Here, I'll help you out: Whatever illusion spell Odin used to hide your Jotun-ness, it went up with Gungnir. So you've been spending half your time, all the time, making sure you don't randomly turn blue."

Loki was staring at her. Not saying anything. Looking just devastated enough for her to be sure she had it right.

"Doesn't explain why you can't get over it for the few minutes it'd take, though," Val said, all out of patience, mostly because there was a red light flashing on the communications console, and what that one meant was that the Jotuns wanted to talk again. 

"I'm not actually sure when it happened," Loki said. "Or ceased to happen, as it were. It may have been when the Tesseract was removed from my possession, or my vicinity. Or it may have been when Thor used it to transport me back to Asgard. It was all so--I don't recall precisely when I noticed the absence. As I said, it didn't matter."

He'd said that part a couple times now, which was about how much Loki needed to repeat anything to give the impression that it wasn't as true as he wanted you to think.

"Great." Val was pretty sure this was the way Thor had felt during all those council meetings when he'd suggested that Loki made his life hard (in those exact words, usually). Though really, the stuff Loki had pulled on the Statesman hadn't been anywhere near this level of serious. A lot of it had actually been pretty funny. "You got any better ideas?"

Loki perked up, the way he always did whenever someone asked his actual opinion. "Well," he said. "We could present them with a fake, then flee before it's discovered."

"If you think they won't recognize an Infinity Stone that really isn't one within five seconds--"

Wasn't Loki who cut her off. The Jotuns must have got tired of waiting for them, and had forced the connection through. In the same moment the screen crackled back to life, there was a jolt, a feeling anyone who'd been on either end of an unwanted boarding would recognize.

"Even now, my warriors board your vessel," said the Jotun at the head of the pack. "I would suggest you take the honorable path, and return to us what is ours. Otherwise we will not hesitate to take it."

"--Perhaps we can come to an arrangement," Loki said. Not as smoothly as he'd said the same thing, any number of other times.

"Yeah. Let's make a deal," Val said. Making deals wasn't really a Valkyrie type of thing. Or at least it hadn't been. But times changed, apparently. "Don't worry, we'll give it to you." Panicked look from Loki; she kept going before he could interrupt and send this discussion even more downhill. "But not right now. Let us keep it for, say--" Glance at Loki, gauging. Trying to remember if Jotuns went any longer than the usual, trying to decide how close he looked. "A month. Two at the outside. Then we'll be done, and you can have it. Yours, free and clear, and you won't even have to fight us to get it."

Jotuns weren't that impressed by sorcerers or Valkyries, as a general rule. At least they hadn't been in her day. But things changed more than they stayed the same, and the Jotun on the screen looked thoughtful. But then his face twisted into something else, a confusion that seemed weird considering how clear the terms had been.

"What use can you have for the Jewel of Jotunheim?" he asked, in a deep, dark voice that gave you the impression of a treacherous patch of ice. "Out here, in the void of space? For a month or longer?"

Val could have cut the connection. Should have, probably. Wasn't what you'd call good enough at diplomacy to think about it. So when she whirled on Loki, everyone else saw it.

"Do you have that, too?" she demanded.

"--Have what, again?"

"The Casket. Of Ancient Winters. You got it?"

"I don't see what that has to do with--"

"They don't want the first thing. They want the Casket, that actually belongs to them. That's apparently gone missing. You have it, right?"

"He has it," said the Jotun. "The Odinson is as talented a thief as his father ever was. But what is this 'first thing' you speak of, I wonder?"

"...We'll get back to you," said Val, and reached over and cut the connection.

"I didn't take it from them," Loki complained, like the distinction was somehow important at this point. "That was Odin. I merely liberated it, lest it be lost to the flames as well."

"Uh-huh. Well, you're giving it back."

There was some stomping and clanging from down the hall. Seemed the Jotuns were in a bit of a hurry, for them.

"Very well," said Loki.

Between his hands appeared something else. It radiated blue, and cold, even from where Val was standing. It radiated both so strongly that the blue was already traveling up Loki's hands again.

"Do they know you're one of them?" Val asked, though she was pretty sure she knew the answer. None of Jotuns she'd ever known would have been able to resist the taunt. There'd been nothing to say the commander knew anything other than that he'd caught a prince of Asgard with his pants down, out in the middle of nowhere and all alone.

"I'd really prefer they didn't."

*

The Casket was damned heavy, and even colder than it looked. Colder than the beam from the Jotuns ship, even. Val'd have worried about getting frostbite, but the old protections had seemed to be there in a few tight spots during the Statesman's journey, and still seemed to be there now. It was enough to make you wonder about Odin's priorities, or at least wonder if he'd cared less about hiding things by the time Loki had come around.

They met the Jotun delegation in the corridor nearest the bay where the ships were connected. The initial group had retreated back to their own ship after Val called their leader back; they'd agreed to do things in a more official fashion, which at least made everyone a little more likely to survive the meeting. Jotuns were usually honorable, when it came to agreements and such; they were just resentful of the necessity. Tended to like to stab things first, then worry about the rest. Loki's heritage was seeming less and less surprising, the more Val thought of it.

"Right, so," she said, when everybody had come to a halt at a fairly safe distance from each other. "We're going to give this to you, and then you're going to go away."

There was probably a prettier way to say it, judging by the scoffing sound Loki made, which, in a departure from the way these things usually went, wasn't followed up by him taking over (which had been half the idea in the past, honestly; Val hated the talking parts of missions. The more talking other people did while she did some drinking about it, the better). Way back when, there would have been an official way to say it, which would have been a whole lot more flowery. But she was out of practice, and no one on the Statesmen had had that the energy to come up with new shit to memorize.

"Yes," said the commander, solemn and half again the size of the junior Jotuns under his command, every one of whom was glowering at them. "You give up all claim to the Jewel of Jotunheim, now and evermore. In return, we will leave your vessel, and will destroy neither you nor it--this despite the Odinson's previous crimes against Jotunheim, which we do not pardon. Do you agree?"

There wasn't a pretty way to answer that, not now, not ever. There were two possible answers, or maybe only the one. "We do."

"Good," said the Jotun. 

He stepped forward. Val did, too. When they were close enough, he leaned down--way down--and took the Casket from her. Later, Val would think it had been a weird feeling, giving up a burden she'd had for only a few minutes. Giving up burdens wasn't really the sort of thing Valkyries did a lot of. But before that thought could occur to her, the other Jotuns turned to go back to their ship. Their commander turned halfway, then smiled, not in any friendly way.

"I never thought I would live to see a Valkyrie once more," he said. "Between this and the fall of Asgard--ah, the wonders of the age. Though you appear to be a young Valkyrie, one who wouldn't recall such times. It's a pity--we might have shared our memories, otherwise."

"Come to think of it, you do look young for your age," Loki said sweetly, as the far door shuttered closed behind the Jotun commander's great blue back.

"--Shitfuck," said Val, who was having way too much of a fucking moment to worry about more evidence getting added to Loki's pile.

"What?"

If it had gone right, everything should have started warming up almost as soon as the Jotuns were back on their own ship. Instead, it had started getting even colder, so much so that the frosting creeping along the walls was visibly growing and thickening. And the ship was starting to shake, a harsh juddering that called up all sorts of memories.

"Better find something to hold onto," Val said, the moment before they began went into a spin.

*

Crash landing was the sort of thing that was overwhelming in the moment, and that you didn't really process very well in the moments after. There was too much noise and movement and chaos, none of it anything that you could do anything about until it was over. When everything was still again, and mostly quiet, and you and your sisters (or you and the idiotic prince you'd spent a lot of time fucking, not all that long of a while ago) could go about assessing how badly fucked you were.

But there was a step between crashing and assessing. That step was where they were now. Val sat on top of some rocks and plants prickly enough to irritate, but not prickly enough to make her move. Loki was beside her, on top of a large, flat, non-prickly stone. The air was dry and hot, the low hills around them full of thousands more rocks and prickly plants, no potential for shade anywhere outside of the shadow they were in.

They stayed there until things stopped spinning; until sweat was swimming down Val's back, the dust of the desert was in her throat, the burn of that world's large orange sun on all the parts of her skin that were bared to it, the memory of one extreme beaten away by the advent of another.

"What's the damage, do you think?" she asked, more of an instinct than anything else, before she remembered she wasn't with anyone who would know, anyway.

"I'm well enough," said Loki, who was already looking a lot more cooked than she was, but must have had more of an Asgardian constitution than a Jotun one considering how he wasn't actually a puddle on the ground. "Considering the circumstances. I suppose."

Val'd already figured that much from eyeing him for the last however long they'd been sitting there. He was at least as banged up than she was, but though she'd caught him wincing, he hadn't done it for any of the motions that would have had her eyeing his melon-stomach instead.

"To the ship," she clarified, and didn't wait for him to answer, since the question hadn't really been meant for him. Instead, she got up, and hobbled toward the open gangplank a lot more painfully than she'd hobbled out of it.

"Where are you going?"

But he didn't follow her, at least not at first. That was good. It was one of those moments with way too many ghosts in it for Val to want anyone else around. 

When Val got to the cockpit, she leaned against the edge of the doorway and took a swig out of her bottle (which was also, thank fuck, unbreakable). It wasn't bracing enough, so she took a second, and then a few more after that, and then put the bottle up and went to work.

By the time she heard his dragging steps on the metal planks of the hallway, she was elbow-deep in wires, and either the booze--so fucking bad; she should've had Loki immortalize something at least a couple notches better when she'd had the chance--or the work had gotten the ghosts to at least stand back a bit.

"--What did they do to it?" Loki asked a minute after the thumping stopped, presumably having taken in the damage, the console's guts sprayed from where Val was sitting nearly to the doorway, wherever she'd happened to toss them.

"Didn't have to do anything more, actually," Val said. "Any ship that can't take a little cold won't be spaceworthy long, but when ice melts..."

"I see," Loki said, and went on to prove he didn't. "So they stranded us here to die. That's clever, I suppose."

"Nah. If they'd wanted to kill us, they'd have done it. If they'd even wanted us to stay here, they'd have blown up our engines. This, though? This is them slowing us down. So they can get back with the Casket without us catching them along the way."

"And you're so sure of this because?"

Val ripped out another few waterlogged wires, hooked in the spares from the kit she'd pulled out from under the captain's chair. As she worked, she made sure to focus on what her hands were doing instead of what was coming out of her mouth. The booze helped with that, making it so she couldn't do both, and had to squint through to the one that meant survival. "Used to happen to us a lot. Everyone always figured it'd be worse on them if they killed us. So they'd slow us down as best they could, then do a runner."

"Did that ever actually work?"

"Sometimes. Other times, not so much. Depended what kind of mood Hela was in, mostly. What she was set on that day. She was as likely to send us in the next direction as she was to send us after whoever knocked us down. And without a blood debt to settle, we'd do as we were told. Then, at least."

"I see," Loki said, in that way that meant he really didn't, and also more or less knew that, but didn't have anything helpful or even anything stupid to say. Then, after a pause where she thought he might leave her to everything that was trying to crawl its way up, he said, "Do you require assistance?"

Val really didn't. But she discovered, abruptly, that company might not be the worst thing. "Get me the thing out of the other thing," she said, gesturing at the kit, which was just out of arm's reach.

To her surprise, he actually did it, though it him took a few tries before he pulled out the tool she'd wanted. Not that that was surprising; Loki didn't know that much more about the workings of ships than his brother did. It was kind of amazing either of them could drive one (neither all that well, honestly).

She kept working, and he stayed to hand her things, and the more the haze wore off, the more those other times came back to her. She'd always had her sisters with her, however briefly she'd been hobbled. Different ones each time, usually--they'd stopped being trusted long before the first whispers of rebellion had started, Hela as quick to suspicion as she was to change her mind--but after the first couple times it had always been the same thing, the same mood. Not a lot they could do about it, and no need to rush; they'd never been hit by anyone that important, because any real threat would have just killed them. So, while there hadn't been any lazing about, there also hadn't been any killing themselves to get spaceworthy. They'd done the work, but they'd talked while they'd done it. They'd laughed. Fucked, too, plenty of times. They'd been bright spots, there among the uncertainty of those years and decades. At least, they had been before things got really bad, and every delay became an emergency around the same time every moment they found themselves unmonitored became a moment they could talk through plans.

And now Val alone was here, on some stupid planet she might or might not been stranded on at some point a thousand years ago. Her sisters were all gone, rotted into dust where they'd fallen or burned into ash upon the sea; she didn't know which, because she hadn't been there. And now she was here, again, and the only thing stopping her from knowing that nothing had really changed was telling Hela's adopted brother, who'd turned out to be just as much of an arse as she'd thought he was on Sakaar, to hand her another thing.

*

It took the better part of a day and night to get the ship going. By the time the engines rumbled into life, they were both covered in engine grease, despite Loki having kept his distance the entire time they were in the engine room itself. Shockingly, he hadn't tried to talk his way out of helping even after he figured out they were going to be going for a while. Or maybe it wasn't that surprising; it wasn't like she'd never seen him work before. It was just that he did more ducking it, usually.

As the engine rumbled on, so did everything else. The lights flashed on. The environmental systems hummed into life behind the walls. There came a distant sort of slurping sound as the extra moisture in the air was pulled somewhere more useful. 

They moved out into the lounge, where there was a long window taking up one wall, giving them a view of the stars that would soon seem a whole lot closer.

"First shower's mine," Val said, before Loki could try to claim it and she had to knock him around to get her turn. "Since I did all the work."

Loki looked at her. Spread his hands in a 'look how gravid I am' sort of gesture. 

Val didn't bother trying to stare him down. She was too tired for all that. Just turned around and headed for the shower capsule, with the goal of not being sober anymore by the time she got there.

"Val," Loki called after her. "Hold on a moment. Can we talk?"

There were reasons Val'd thought all that nonsense of his play was a metaphor. One was the way he and Thor resembled each other, sometimes. It was never any huge thing. Just something you got a glimmer of when Thor was being cheeky, or Loki was being sincere instead of just trying to pretend to be sincere. It was there now, and it was the only reason she stopped after glancing back at him.

"What?"

"It's not that I don't want to return to Earth with you. It's just--do you really believe the Jotuns to be the greatest of my enemies?"

"I figured they were the enemies that found you," Val said, feeling like she'd made it clear enough that he didn't have to come all the way that it wasn't her job to point that out yet again. "Somehow not shocked you'd have buckets of them, though."

"That's not what I'm trying to--will you just listen?" Beneath the sincerity was something else, a little wilder than anything he'd shown her before. He looked out the window again, for long enough that Val would have gone for her shower anyway if she hadn't started to be interested despite herself. Finally, still looking out, he said, "For a time, I was in the employ of the Mad Titan."

"Oh, yeah?"

"I didn't exit it on what you'd call glowing terms."

"All right," Val said, and waited for the rest, the part that was supposed to be so worrisome. But he didn't say anything else, for long enough that she finally figured out he wasn't going to. "Wait, is that it? You're joking, right?"

"Isn't that enough?"

"Not so much. Considering he's dead."

Now Loki did look at her, eyes wide in a kind of shock he wasn't a nearly good enough actor to fake. "He--what? Are you sure?"

"Yeah. Happened a couple years back. When you were futzing around being Odin, probably. Before you got to Sakaar, anyway."

"...Do you know what happened?" asked Loki faintly.

If it had been anyone else, she probably wouldn't have. But little as she'd cared about it at the time, it had apparently been a big damned deal, the only thing anyone wanted to talk about until she'd found Hulk a few weeks later. "Got shanked by one of his daughters, is what I heard."

"I," said Loki, even more faintly. "Which one?"

"Fucked if I know."

Loki dropped into one of the plush chairs facing the view. Not a fast drop. More of a slow, fumbling one. He stared at the window, face blank, though there was no telling whether he was actually seeing either the pinpoints of light or the blackness between them on the other side of the glass.

Val gave it a second to find out if she was going to go get her shower now and leave him to it. Then she sat next to him, instead--the chairs were just wide enough for two--and took a good, long, burning swig from her bottle, jostling him with her shoulder as she did. She peered at him, considered the way his face was looking, as if something vital had just shifted from underneath his feet. Not something that had been good for him, but something that had been a sort of foundation, regardless. Hard to say what sort of foundation, at least not without sifting through metaphors that hadn't been, that she barely remembered anyway.

"Here," she said, shoving the bottle at him, just like she must have done a hundred other times after a hundred other long, shitty days.

"Eugh." Loki made a face, and waved the bottle away.

"More for me, then," Val said, and took another swig, just as long and burning as the first. Stared out at the stars, all the unknown and vaguely familiar constellations. "You got any other enemies after you?"

"Plenty," said Loki wryly. "I'm exceedingly skilled in the art of being disliked."

"No kidding. But are any of them major enough players for the rest of us to be concerned with?"

"Most likely not."

"Any of them major enough for you to be concerned with if they caught you by yourself?"

Snorting little laugh from him. So that was a no. Either that or overconfidence. Probably that second thing, considering he'd been in captivity just yesterday, and absolutely none of it had had to do with the concern he'd thought he had.

"Well, there you go."

"I suppose." Loki looked at her, now serious and intent. Not too unlike the way he had used to look at her in their first few weeks aboard the Statesmen, before she'd finally gotten sick of being stared at, and challenged him to a sparring match. Then she'd gotten sick of the way he smirked at the end of each one, the same expression whether she won or he did, and that's when the rest of it had started. And that was why she wasn't expecting it when, instead of any of the usual kinds of things he came up with when looking at her like that, he said, "Where would you go, if you could go anywhere? To raise a child, I mean."

It was enough to bring her up. It was one thing to know Loki was about to pop out a kid, even to know that he wanted it. Something else entirely to think about him thinking about raising a kid, planning for one.

"Dunno," Val said, thanking everything there was that it wasn't actually something she was ever going to have to deal with; that the magic she'd had them use, so long ago, was as permanent as the Realm Eternal hadn't been. "Asgard, definitely. Not the old one. The Earth one."

"Oh, naturally."

"No, really. If I were you, about to pop out a kid, that's where I'd want to be. It's safe. It's clean. You'd have all the help you could want. And plenty of people are busy having kids, so yours'd have plenty of them to run around with."

"None of theirs will be Jotun," he pointed out. "So I hardly think--"

"They accepted Korg. He's made out of rock. Fuck's sake," said Val harshly, seeing all the places where someone else might've tried to be careful with him, and not having any more inclination for doing that than she ever had before. Seeing, too, how it must have been for him before he'd rabbited--keeping the secret as it grew inside him, probably getting more and more paranoid, and more and more sure that he'd have to run. "Why wouldn't they accept some little prince or princess of Asgard? Especially considering your kid could have their kids' heads off their shoulders later, if it came to that. They'll be falling all over themselves to curry favor. It'll be disgusting, honestly."

"You think so?"

"Yeah. Your other options are all stupid. Go anywhere else, you'll always have to be looking over your shoulder. You won't know anyone, so you won't be able to trust anyone--not for a long time, anyway. It'll be exhausting. And having a kid means you're already going to be exhausted no matter how much help you have."

"I suppose I could consider it," Loki said, clearly not so much of a capitulation as it was something else. It was there, that stupid little smirk. "Seeing as you're so insistent."

"I'm good either way," said Val.

"Are you really?"

What happened next was the product of too many days not that different from this one, probably. Long ones full of whatever kind of stressful work, followed by some combination of drinking and venting and sparring and fucking, depending on the kind of energy to be had at end of them. All of which had been over for months, but must have happened enough times before then that a part of her thought it was still going on. He was starting to get to her in a different way, one that pissed her off even more now than it had back then. They'd been there, done that, it had been better than it'd had the right to be, and he'd gotten weird about everything and it had been over.

Except now Val knew what was up with him, and knew it hadn't been any of the expected things. Hadn't been him trying to make her chase him, though she had. Hadn't been any sort of attempt at a long con, either, which had seemed like an outside possibility with him. And now it was just him, and her. It didn't feel any different from all the times they'd needed an escape together from the chaos of the Statesman , and claimed their little muscle ship needed a day or two's 'maintenance work' in order to get it.

"Yeah," Val said, and grabbed him by his stupid pointy chin and kissed him.

For all his smugness, the kissing part of things always seemed to come as a surprise to Loki. It seemed to come as one now. He went still, for a second, then kissed her back with the heat that always came as a surprise to her. He was always trying to be a mystery, when it came to other things, but when it came to this, he didn't seem to have much of a problem with frankness.

Val was a Valkyrie, or had been, once; there wasn't much she responded to more than a partner having feelings, whether he was having them about her knocking him around, or having them about getting naked together. She'd been surprised how well they fit together, those first few times; now she was just surprised that they still fit, at least on her end, taking her from interested to aching in moments, just from this.

Normally, she'd have swung around and straddled his lap, liking the feel of him enjoying her on top, bringing them into a good hard fucking without a lot of other fuss. She started to do the same this time, only to discover that melon stomach of his in the way. Changed things. Not in a bad way. Gave her an excuse to touch it, feel the round firmness of it beneath her hand--and feel Loki's surprise again, presenting in the way he went still for another moment, his face drawing back from hers. The way he looked at her could have been the beginning of panic, or a question; she answered one, or quieted the other, by kissing him again, with some extra feeling of her own behind it.

The kiss deepened again, but once he was kissing her back, it wasn't the part Val was focused on. No, what she wanted was that belly of his, which seemed even bigger up close than it had just looking at it. Her hands together didn't span it; and it wasn't long before it happened, a faint quiver beneath her hands one moment, more of a firm push the next, proof of what it held inside.

This time, Loki's surprise didn't come as one, and Val paid it little attention. She was too busy lifting up his shirt--which was made up of a soft, stretchy fabric, not at all like his usual armor--enough to slip her hands in under the edge of it. Then she had him in her hands, the full round globe of him, warmer than she'd expected, and not as smooth, stretchmarks that rippled beneath her fingers.

Now Loki had stopped kissing her again, probably not out of whatever uncertainty had been there before. He was breathing harshly, in that way Val knew by now, and in a voice a notch rougher than his usual, he said, "I'm beginning to think you prefer me this way."

"Who says I don't?" said Val, who'd had an idea of how good he looked, like this, but hadn't known what it was doing for her until they'd gotten here. "You missed out with all your hiding, and running."

"Oh, I'm beginning to be aware."

Val'd been so focused on the hugeness of him, she'd barely noticed where his hands were, working at an awkward angle to unfasten her pants. Now he started tugging down on them. She'd have helped, if she'd been able to drag her hands away from where they were. He managed it without her eventually, and the first she realized of just how wet she was was when he reached between her thighs, fingers slipping between her lips and then into her as smoothly as they ever had before. He stroked her lightly inside for a few moments, thumb coming to brush against her clit; then, sensing her impatience, or seeing it on her face, he started driving his fingers in and out of her. The angle was wrong for the kind of fingerfucking she liked, and so she started moving, riding his fingers. Wasn't long until they were both gasping, and she was close to--

"Wait," she said. "Hold up a second."

Loki's fingers slipped out of her, trailing wetness down the inside of her thigh. He didn't quite manage to look disgruntled as he said, red-face and out of breath, "All right, what's wrong with it?"

Nothing had been, except that when he'd started hiding, they'd stopped fucking (well, other than the time he'd eaten her out in the hallway, a day or two before the last time anyone could verify him being there physically. Val still hadn't decided if she was more pissed at him for the offer, or at herself for taking him up on it). Val liked his fingers well enough, liked his mouth even more; but, reaching beneath his belly and into the front of his (also stretchy) trousers, she thought she'd missed his prick a bit more than either of the other things. She'd thought she hadn't missed it at all, or had told herself that, but wrapping her fingers around it was enough to make an extra gust of wetness as her inner muscles clenched. It was almost enough to make her come. As for Loki, he let out a groan that wasn't that far off from the sound he sometimes made on his way over.

"Think you can manage on your knees?" Val asked, because between his belly and the height of the couch, their options were either that or her bent over the back of it--and she had no intention of her hands being anywhere other than where they were now, while he fucked her.

"You may have to help me up, after," said Loki, who was surprisingly truthful when he was about to get laid, unlike just about every other time.

Together, they got Loki's trousers down, and Val's down enough for one foot to be free of its pantsleg. Then Loki got on his knees--Val had to help him down, too--and after some fidgety adjustments, Val helped him guide the tip of his prick to where they both wanted it. He pressed inside her, and the first thing Val thought was that she really had missed this; and the second thing she thought was that it was a damned good thing she was already so close, because it was clear from the look on his face and the sound he made when he slipped it in that he wasn't going to last long.

Then he was fucking into her, if not quite as hard as she like, then hard enough to be really fucking good after months of nothing, and she wasn't thinking about much at all except for how good it did feel, and the firm rippled mound under her hands. In the end it wasn't more than a minute or maybe two before she came, inner muscles clenching around his hard prick. Must've been what did it for him, or what he'd been waiting on, because he came right after.

When they both had enough breath back to manage it, she helped him up just enough for him to collapse beside her.

"Well," said Loki. "That was certainly--"

"Shut up about it," Val advised, knowing that the last thing she wanted to do after fucking Loki was hear him talk about it. That first thing was great, but the second one had a habit of sounding like he was trying to fit it into some kind of story.

They sat there for a minute, looking out the window or glancing at each other, until the whole thing far enough behind them that it started to feel stupid to Val to just be sitting there with her pants down, thinking about how someone was going to have to clean the chair off later, again.

Val got up, pulled her pants back up. "First shower's still mine."

"By all means," said Loki, with the sort of wicked smirk Val didn't really mind that much, so long as it came within half an hour or so of the orgasm he was smirking about.

Val'd gotten almost to the door when something hit her. She hadn't known it before that moment, at least not consciously; then she did.

"Listen," she said.

Loki must have caught the seriousness in her voice; the smirk faded, so quickly it might never have been there at all. "Yes?"

"Next time you decide to do a runner, fucking invite me."

Whatever else had been in Loki's expression before, it faded now, into the smile that always came as a surprise when it was on him. "Of course."

*

Two weeks later

As of the last couple days, Val had started to think they were going to make it back before Loki had the baby. 

As of right now, though, she figured the odds were about even. He'd stopped wanting to eat sometime yesterday, had been distracted all today so far. He'd complained about his back a couple times, and had run off to piss about five times as often as he had been before now. That second one was pretty impressive, considering how often he'd been getting up to piss before now. 

With the signs had come more ghosts, made up of all those other times Val had watched someone pacing around whenever they weren't rushing off to the latrine, hand pressed to the lower part of their back. That distant, worried look on their face, whether they were looking out onto the golden spires of Asgard, or looking through a ship's window out at the stars. 

There was something to be seen on the other side of that window, finally, though it wasn't their destination. Big planet, at least as far as this system went, with huge rings around it. Val's tried to tell Loki a thing or two about it, considering he hadn't been with them to see it, the first time she'd come this way; but he hadn't seemed to hear her, too focused on what was clearly going on with him.

As for Val, she wasn't in what you'd call the best mood. Mostly because seeing someone walk around who was clearly in labor but wouldn't admit it was a sign that you ought to stop drinking if you gave a shit what happened next. Babies weren't like fights; you couldn't go dropping them or falling off things and still win. You needed completely steady hands, never mind what it cost you to get them. That wasn't even getting into the other damage you could manage to do to someone who was trying to push one out, if your head and everything else wasn't all the way clear.

Though, it might not come to that, because Loki was once again, avoiding her. He'd spent the last couple weeks hovering like he thought she was the one who might take off on him; but now that something was clearly happening, he kept finding excuses to go hide again. 

He slipped away so quickly each time that it took a few of them for Val to manage to get between him and the doorway he wanted.

"Look, Loki," she said.

"Look, what?"

Just like him, to be difficult right when she was trying to offer help. "I can help you, if it's started."

Flash of panic, further back than his emotions and things usually were. That pretty much clinched it, but of course it wasn't surprising when he said, snidely, "You seem to be the one jumping at shadows today."

Then he sidled past her, almost as snidely.

The Val of a year ago would have said it wasn't her problem, and gone back to drinking. Scrapper 142 would never have taken Loki on as a problem to begin with. Wouldn't have offered to help. Wouldn't have stopped drinking before the offer. Wouldn't have come looking for him in the first place, when there was no booze money to be had in the whole thing.

The Val of now shrugged, sat down on the chair they'd fucked on a few times in the last couple weeks and a whole hell of a lot of other times before that. Loki'd come back through in a little while, unless he was too offended by her question. Chances were he wasn't; he was more the kind to try to stab you than avoid you, if he was pissed off. Hiding, she had decided, was about him feeling vulnerable. That he was feeling vulnerable in this situation was probably the most normal thing he'd done that she knew of.

Maybe twenty minutes after he'd gone running off in the first place, he showed back up. Casual, like he hadn't gone running off in the first place; only there was still a sort of stress to him, a worry line that seemed to stretch, taut, from one end of his body to the other. It was in his eyes, too: not even worry, really, but something even more basic and primal.

"I don't suppose you know how far we are from our destination," he said.

"We're getting close," Val said. The planet with the rings was behind them now. They might or might not see one of the others, depending on where they were positioned around their sun. "Do you want me to call a healer out?"

It would halve the time, at least, since the Wakandan princess who'd designed much of the station had also designed sleek silver shuttles that could go between the station and the planet's surface. No reason they couldn't have come out this way, too. Val might even have tried one to go get Loki with, if they hadn't been so damned tiny.

"I'd rather have--no. That's not necessary."

"You'd rather have who?" Val asked. "If it's Thor, I can arrange that."

"No," Loki said, so quickly and with such alarm that it must have been true. "I don't want Thor here."

That didn't leave a lot of other options, considering there was almost no one Loki was close with. At least that Val knew of. 

"Well, if you don't want the healers, I'm what you've got," Val said. "You should stop running off every time you have a labor pain, by the way."

It wasn't a guess so much as a confirmation of what she'd figured out once she thought back and did the math. He'd been slipping away at progressively shorter intervals as the day went on. And this time, instead of a sneering denial, Loki must've been tired enough to give a short nod. 

Well, at least he wasn't going to do a song and dance about how what was happening wasn't. Val went on: "I haven't actually got any midwife training. What I do have might be a couple thousand years out of date. If you're not good with that, you'd better say something before this goes a lot further. There won't always be time to change your mind."

"Thousands of years? Are you certain it's been quite that long?" Loki asked--not like he was expecting her to walk into the hundredth obvious trap, but wryly, as if they were sharing something. A joke, an understanding, even a moment.

Between the two of them, Val was the one who actually knew the power of the moments that were coming. Between the two of them, she was the one who'd experienced them before. The one who'd been with other Valkyries, even the occasional other lover, out on the sparring fields of the Asgard that had once been. Sunless light beating down, a rush of blood and other things over her hands, before they were filled with something else. She might have been in that Asgard again, for a moment. Then the moment was gone, and she was there with Loki, not the first person she'd ever helped through a birth, but the first in a good long time.

"Right. So," Val said, shaking it off, almost surprised at how readily it went; but there was something to be said for the way you could focus when there was something you had to do. When you were all there was, and there was no one else to step in. Wasn't a feeling she'd had often, back when she had her sisters; maybe that was why it worked so well these days. "First thing. You're probably going to want to be a Jotun for this."

"I'm capable of maintaining my concentration through any measure of pain," lied Loki, about a thousand times more obviously than usual, which was saying something.

"Sure you are. But are you capable of that and maintaining a cunt?" Val knew for a fact he didn't have one in his normal form. Or at least he hadn't as of a couple days ago. From the way he was staring at her, whiter and a hell of a lot unhappier than he'd been before she asked, it was a safe bet that hadn't changed. "It's going to be necessary for this. Considering I've got no training at all in cutting people open in a way that leaves them breathing after."

"I," Loki said, then tensed up. Grabbed for Val's arm, gripped it in a vise that would normally have had her responding violently, no matter how pregnant he was. Now, though, she just watched him, waiting for it to pass. He flickered to blue once, twice, then stayed there, the vise growing cooler than she recalled his touch being before. After a minute, it was over, leaving him panting and wild-eyed, and he snatched his hand away. "I didn't mean to—" he said, then his eyes went wider. "You're not frostbitten."

He hadn't really talked about any of it over the last couple weeks, anymore than he'd talked much about the baby. But what little he had said had left Val wondering how bad Asgard's relationship with Jotunheim had really gotten by the time he and Thor had come along. This wasn't really changing the impression that it must have been pretty damned bad, if he didn't even know the most basic things.

"It doesn't work like that," she said, looking down at the patch of skin he was staring at, that he'd been latched onto before. It was a little redder than the rest of her, but otherwise fine. "The skin thing is for fighting. It'd come out on its own if you felt threatened enough, probably, but mostly it has to be activated on purpose."

"What makes you so certain I won't feel threatened enough as this inane process continues?"

"You'll be all right," said Val, nearly certain of this, even if she was less certain of the next thing. "Anyway, I can take it. I'm a Valkyrie, remember?"

"Oh, I've never been in the slightest danger of forgetting."

*

But over the next few hours, Val was the one who couldn't seem to forget. It was as if the two worlds were right next to each other: the past and the present, entwined in a way they hadn't been before, either because nothing that had happened on their journey had ever come this close, or because she hadn't been what you'd call sober for a damned long time.

Then there came a moment. Not the powerful moment that was on its way now, unstoppable and unforgiving, the final push of new life come screaming into the world; this was a different, quieter one. It happened when Loki's contractions were very close to each other, just a few minutes between each one. The fear in his eyes had grown, the way it always did with everyone.

Val remembered what she'd used to say to her sisters and past lovers, there in the shadow of Asgard's spires. 'Don't be afraid,' she'd say, the very first thing, followed by all sorts of stuff about how the work they were doing was only adding to Asgard's glory. Rot she'd kept repeating long after she should have, because up until that last battle she'd still believed there was a way back in.

She didn't anymore, and yet. And yet.

"Look at that," she said, the next time Loki lay back, panting and covered in a thin sheen of sweat.

His gaze followed hers, the view now facing them from out the window. What had started as a speck in the top right corner had become a lot clearer over the course of his last few contractions. "Midgard," he said. "Is that--"

"Yeah."

Barely visible yet, a gleam of gold, like sunlight glancing off a blade. Val wondered if they'd finished the station yet. She wondered if it looked as glorious as it had been intended to: a single strip of ribbon, looped around in a symbol that meant infinity to the Midgardians. Maybe they'd had to change the design, after she'd left. Maybe they'd even abandoned it altogether. Something inside her insisted they hadn't, but something there had used to think the Realm Eternal would last forever, too.

Loki grunted, another contraction.

'Don't be afraid,' Val would have said, once. 'Behold the might of Asgard, and your own place in it.'

Now, she waited til Loki's contraction was up. Then, for reasons she'd never be really sure of, later, she said, "Fifty years. Maybe as many as sixty. Depends how many I lost in the haze. I wasn't really counting."

"I knew it," Loki said, too tired or too occupied to look smug about it, the way she'd always figured he would--though there was a spark of interest in his eyes anyway. "I'm sorry."

No one else had picked up on the implications of Val's extended stay on Sakaar, where time moved so weirdly. Sometimes weeks went by there that seemed like moments on the outside; but usually, what you got was the other way around, so that what felt like a day there was weeks literally everywhere else, and what felt like years was actually the centuries marching by.

Val'd never mentioned it to anyone else. Half a century sounded like an enormous chunk of lifetime to most people. No one would have understood why the distinction mattered, or why having been out of Asgard for fifty years instead of well over a millennium meant everything was still raw instead of having long since scabbed over. By the time she'd reunited with people who would have understood that part, her Asgard had grown into a mostly-forgotten myth, one no one who hadn't been there would have really grasped. The closest she might have gotten to understanding before was Heimdall, who had lived it with her--but even he had changed unimaginably from the Gatekeeper she'd once known, now farther away from their old allyship than the years either of them had lived before it.

Why Loki should be the one she admitted it to, when he'd been so obnoxious about guessing, and hadn't even been born when she'd done her runner--that was anyone's guess.

"It's fine," she said, which it wasn't; but it was, somehow, better than it had been before the Statesmen, before she and Loki had begun to lean on each other. If that was what all that had been, after all.

"If we're being honest, I must admit I'm not entirely certain it's not yours."

Now there was something Val wasn't at all capable of dealing with right now. Asshole had to know it, too. Unfortunately, she couldn't hit him right now even more than she'd spent the last couple weeks not being able to hit him. Instead, she said, "You should save your breath. It's laboring time, not confessional time."

"Yes, but," said Loki, and didn't let out anything more but some grunting pants for the next forty or fifty seconds.

When that one was over, Val looked out the window again. They were close enough now to see that the station had in fact been finished. It looked almost exactly like Loki's original design, the one his illusion had presented at the last council meeting he'd shown up to. Looked a thousand times better than it had on paper, which had already been pretty good. None of the scaffolding that had been there when Val had left. And the lights were on, enough of them that she could be certain of what her heart had only been guessing at before: that their people were there, living on a New Asgard that shared almost nothing with the old outside of Val herself.

A minute later, they were a minute closer. The station now filled up half the window. They could be docking in another few minutes, assuming Val was free to go and take care of it.

Which, when another contraction hit him, right on top of the last, Val figured she actually might be.

Almost there.