Chapter Eight - When All Other Lights Go Out

Chapter Eight
When All Other Lights Go Out

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When Thor returned to the dungeons, he found Loki pacing furiously back and forth across the length of his cell. One arm was tucked behind his back, pressed tight against his body, hand clenched into a white-knuckled fist that only emphasized the raw scrapes and bloodstains marring the pale skin. Loki's other hand was raised to his mouth. Tiny rivulets of crimson trickled over his fingers to soak into the hem of his dusty-green sleeve. It took Thor a moment to realize his little brother was biting down on the middle knuckle of his index finger hard enough to draw blood. Loki's head was bent, eyes squeezed shut. Thor paused several paces from the glass when he heard Loki muttering to himself.

"Who was it? I don't know,　älskling, I don't know, but I'll find out. I won't let them do this to you. It's all right. It's all right. There's still time. I promise you that I'll make them pay for what they did to you. I'll make them pay, Thea. For you…for Sophie." Loki made it to the far side of the cell, whirled around, and started across the room again. "I had no choice," the prince added. "Forgive me, I had no choice. I…I…" Loki suddenly jerked to a halt, bringing both hands up to clutch at his temples. Eyes snapping open in a blaze of cerulean, he snarled, "What is that hideous sound? What　is　it? Where is it coming from? It can't be…can't…no!"

Those half-glazed eyes spotted Thor. The knotted brows slowly relaxed. The snarl faded from Loki's face as the strangely mazarine gaze fixated on the three pieces of paper in the crown prince's hand. In three swift strides, Loki was pressing himself against the glass, uncaring of the fresh blood left by his hands.

"You found them!" Loki rasped. He sucked in a sharp breath through his clenched teeth, his entire body seeming to yearn toward the drawings. "Give them to me, Thor!" When the older prince didn't move, Loki yelled, "Give them to me!"

"First you must answer my questions," Thor said softly. He motioned to the guard for his customary chair. It was brought and Thor took his seat, glancing between the topmost sketch—the one of Loki and the girl watching television on the couch—and his little brother, pressed hard against the enchanted window. "Who is the woman in these drawings?"

Loki jerked back as if Thor had bared a serpent's fangs at him. "You　looked　at them?"

He sighed, exasperated. "Rather difficult not to, don't you think, Brother?" Holding up the topmost drawing so Loki could see it, the crown prince reiterated, "Who is this woman?"

Green eyes lanced with that bizarre electric blue flicked to the drawing, and a look of such intense longing twisted the pale features that unease churned in Thor's belly. Loki's eyes traced the delicate lines of the sketch like a loving caress. The thin black brows rose and the pale lips parted, turning the foster prince's expression into one of abject pleading…yet Thor was certain his brother wasn't directing that gaze at him, but at the girl in the picture. Loki's slender shoulders rose and fell sharply as he took a quick breath, then let it out. He closed his eyes and let his forehead thump gently against the glass.

"This is Thea, isn't it?" A shudder rippled through Loki at the sound of his brother saying the name. Thor leaned back in his chair and asked, careful to keep his voice gentle, "What is this drawing of, Brother?"

Another shudder shook Loki's frame. "A Midgardian entertainment called a movie," he replied, voice bitter with defeat. "Tangled, it is called…about a girl imprisoned in a tower who finds her freedom. Give it back to me."

"How do you know of this…movie?" Thor needed to know. He sincerely doubted the Chitauri were in the habit of offering their prisoners entertainment of any kind, and Loki didn't seem the type to fritter away his time watching foolish Midgardian entertainment when he had an invasion to plan. Another chink in the story, the prince thought, along with Coulson's murder, Thea's bags, and Sophie's identity.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Loki replied in a whisper.

"Try me," Thor commanded, voice sharper than he'd intended.

Loki's eyes suddenly chilled, frosting over with the same cold hatred Thor had seen so many times before. The crown prince didn't look away from his foster brother's gaze, but held it until a smirk curved Loki's thin lips. Then the infuriating brat slowly shook his head.

"Loki—"

Thor cut himself off. Clearly his brother was attempting to bait him…but why? So he would destroy the precious drawings? That　was　what the disguised Frost Giant did with them himself, after all. The Asgardian wouldn't fall for that little ploy. Instead, he went to the second drawing, of Thea spinning amidst the crashing ocean waves. He held it up so his brother could see it plainly.

"And this?" Thor demanded. Loki said nothing, though a shadow passed over his face. "What is this? A memory? When did you and Thea go to the sea, Brother?"

Still Loki didn't speak. He merely sneered at Thor. That sneer stayed fixed in place until Thor lifted the third sketch—an anguished Loki holding an obviously-pregnant Thea before the moonlit window—and raised one eyebrow in silent inquiry.

The change that overtook the green-eyed prince was almost instantaneous. Wide-eyed, he recoiled from the drawing, stepping back from the ensorcelled window with his hands up as if to ward off the image. His throat worked convulsively and what little blood remained in his face drained away. He retreated until his back smacked against the far wall. Then his long legs buckled, sending him sliding to the floor.

"How dare you?" Loki whispered in a voice that shook. "How dare you use my penance as a weapon against me, Odinson?"

Puzzled, swallowing back the first sting of guilt—he hadn't realized Loki would react like this—Thor stood and laid the stack of drawings on the seat of his chair. He approached the cell window cautiously. His little brother trembled on the floor, face haggard with grief. Before Thor could speak, Loki shoved his scraped, bruised, bloodied fingers into his hair and tilted his head back. His lashes made dark crescents against his death-pale cheeks as he drew in a deep breath and let it out. Took another breath, held it, let it out. He didn't open his eyes for several minutes. When he did, the blue tinge to his gaze had disappeared, and he looked a little more like himself again.

"I'd like those back now," Loki said in a soft, even tone that made the hair on Thor's arms prickle. "I need them back, Thor. They need to be burned."

"Why do you always burn them?" He'd asked that question once before, and Loki had rebuffed him with a sarcastic response, but the crown prince didn't think his brother would do so this time. "You mentioned penance. What penance?"

Loki was silent for a time, then he looked away, murmuring, "I promised her I would remember."

"Remember what?" Thor asked gently.

A weak chuckle echoed in the prison cell. "'Weep not for roads untraveled,' she used to tell me. That is a Midgardian song that she liked. She told me to remember the beauty and forget the ugliness. Remember peace and forget pain." Glacial emerald eyes flicked to Thor and Loki's expression turned murderous. "That is the woman you killed, Brother." Closing his eyes once more, Loki sighed and slumped against the wall. "And I am such a weak-willed cretin, I cannot even keep my last vow to her."

Still confused, Thor asked, "But…but what was your vow?"

"To remember her," Loki whispered at last. "To remember her and Sophie, to immortalize them in my memory. To retrace the threads of their lives as they intertwined with mine until they were imprinted within me for eternity. To refuse to forget them as they were."

And Thor remembered his brother earlier that morning, working his illusion.　I'm sorry, Thea, Loki had murmured, staring up at the ceiling after struggling to make the illusion of Sophie younger and younger.　I couldn't do it. I cannot look at her as…as she…I cannot do it. Forgive me.

As they were…

On sudden impulse, Thor asked, "Loki…when was Sophie born? Do you know?"

A tense, feral stillness gripped the other prince. In a voice carefully devoid of any and all emotion, he replied, "Yes."

"When was she born?" He waited, but Loki said nothing. After a few minutes of taut silence, Thor tried to cajole, "Will you not tell me?"

"No."

A beat of silence. "Why not?"

Loki's nostrils flared and wrinkles snarled between his brows. The ice melted from his gaze as he looked at his brother. "It is too soon to tell you. You wouldn't believe me…and if you did, it would hurt you to know."

Thor frowned. "Hurt me? How?" No answer. "Will you not tell me, Brother?" Loki shook his head. "Why not? Isn't that what you want—to hurt me, to make me pay for my sins against Thea and Sophie—"

"Don't say their names as if they are nothing," Loki snapped. "They're　not　nothing! If you knew who they were, you would…" He trailed off, swallowing back whatever he'd intended to say. He shook his head. "You have no idea how to say her name. Their names. You have no idea how to speak of them."

Baffled, the crown prince replied, "I don't understand."

"You say her name as if it is nothing, as if it doesn't sit on the tongue like…" Loki trailed off again, eyes suddenly darting frantically around the room as if searching for something. He straightened slightly. "What is that? What is that sound? It shouldn't be here, where is it coming from?"

This was the third time today, Thor thought, that Loki had claimed to hear something when no audible noise came to his elder brother's ears. Still the prince strained to make out whatever sound his brother might be hearing. There was nothing. "What sound, Loki?"

"That sound! That hideous, wretched sound!" One slender hand came up to press against the pale temple glistening with a sudden sheen of sweat. "Don't you hear it, Thor? Don't you hear it? That　sound…I can scarcely bear it.　Hnn…" Loki pressed the heels of his palms against his temples and hunched his shoulders. Tension quivered through his entire body. His voice rose in pitch as he curled himself into a sort of ball. "It never stops for long. Why does it haunt me? Why　that　sound?"

"Loki, what sound?" Thor demanded. Loki's teeth had sunk into his lip hard enough to reopen the wound he'd chewed there earlier. A thin trickle of crimson spilled down his chin to stain his tunic. "What sound, Brother?"

Loki shook his head as if to shake the sound away. "The crying," he breathed with soft horror. "The crying…the baby crying."

Thor frowned. "What?"

But there was no answer. After several tense minutes of silence while Loki panted for breath and shivered as if in the throes of agony, the tension suddenly faded from the prince's body and he sagged against the wall, hanging his head in obvious exhaustion. When his breathing evened out, he said softly, almost as if to himself, "There is always a baby crying, even where no babe should be. In waking. In sleep. I can hear her wails in my dreams. My nightmares…haunted by the desperate cries of a child in pain. Such cruel suffering…I didn't want…I never meant…why does she haunt me?"

He dropped his head into his hands and simply sat there, shuddering for a time. At last he raised his head and whispered in a voice suffused with pain, "She's dead, Thor. Sophie. My little Sophie…yet she haunts me still. And Thea…I hear her screaming in my dreams. What the Chitauri did to her…to Thea…"

Surtur's blade, Thor thought as horror twisted and coiled in his belly like a serpent. Was that why Loki always looked as if he hadn't slept? Because he heard the woman he loved and the child that Thor was almost certain was hers being tortured and murdered by the Chitauri? Surely Odin could do something for Loki's nightmares…surely…

But the way Loki said the two names told Thor what he'd meant earlier. When Loki said, "Thea," there was such an odd note there. He said her name as if it were the words to a song, a plea to the Creator for strength as well as a prayer of gratitude…a cry of joy and a lamentation. The same with Sophie's name, but there was an undercurrent there too, of pride, of pain, of protectiveness. As if Sophie were a rare and precious treasure that belonged to Loki alone.

"Here, Brother." Letting instinct guide him, Thor moved to the door and slid the drawings beneath it. The　seiðr　allowed the pages through, as they possessed no magic and could not be used as weapons or as a means of escape.

Loki scrambled for the sketches, snatching them up to press to his chest. Before Thor could say anything, Loki stalked to the fire and cast the first two drawings into the flames. He paused only for the third. Trembling fingertips lightly traced over the woman in the window, followed by Loki's shadowed jade eyes, before the prince cast that drawing into the fire as well. The paper browned and curled, charring around the edges. Blackness spread across the pages as they crinkled and burned. The scent of smoke and burning paper filled the air. Loki never took his eyes off the sketches until they were nothing but char and ash.

"Why do you burn them?" Thor asked again, because there was something more than this "penance" Loki spoke of. The penance was why he drew them in the first place, but why burn them? Unless they were his offering to Thea's ghost, like the letters his foster brother often wrote. "Tell me."

"I despise them," was the astonishing reply. "I cannot bear them to be in the world…when Thea and Sophie are not." Loki sighed. "Will you not leave me in peace, Thor?"

"I brought your drawings back," the prince reminded his little brother. "You promised me more of your story. I cannot help you convince Odin if you do not tell me the entirety of it, and if we cannot convince him, your vengeance will slip through your fingers."

Loki said nothing, merely watched the flames. Then he turned and strode to the wall, where he sank down and sat tailor-fashion upon the floor, resting his back against the cold, pale stones. Another sigh escaped him as he leaned his head back and closed his eyes. If not for the raw knuckles, bloodied fingers, chewed lip, and the dark circles beneath Loki's eyes—so stark against his sickly pallor—Thor might have thought Loki was merely resting his eyes or something, instead of readying himself for some fierce battle with the past, as Thor knew him to be doing.

When his brother spoke again, it was not what Thor expected. It had nothing to do with Thea, Sophie, or the Chitauri, though it did concern the past—a distant past, just before Loki had first betrayed them all.

"Do you remember when Víðarr came home from his coming-of-age quest with a bride?"

Golden brows rose nearly to Thor's hairline. "I…do. Yes. Why?"

"Tell me about it," Loki requested softly without opening his eyes. "What do you remember?"

"Surely　you　remember it better than I," Thor protested. After all, Víðarr had come home just after the beginning of Thor's exile, before things had gone truly mad.

His little brother shook his head. "Please, Brother—tell me of our sister-in-law."

Utterly confused, Thor settled himself back in his chair. Crossing his legs at the ankle, he folded his arms across his broad chest and tried to remember as much as he could. "Víðarr went to retrieve a lost relic, stolen by Surtur himself, from Muspelheim. On his way, he had to stop in Vanaheim. There he met Bellalyse, one of the common-born Vanir—though rather an uncommonly beautiful one—and they fell in love. They stole away from Vanaheim in secret because her father wanted her to marry the blacksmith or some such, who was a brute and a scoundrel. Sometime between when they left and when Víðarr returned home with her, he gave her one of the Golden Apples of Iðunn and they were wed."

Which would have been a bit trickier politically, Thor thought to himself, if Bellalyse had been a nobleman's daughter instead of the daughter of a herdsman. But once a non-Æsir was given one of Iðunn's Golden Apples—the source of the Æsir's strength, longevity, and power—they were bound to the giver as a spouse. That was all it took to wed an Asgardian, really—simply one bite, offered by someone of the opposite gender who was not already wed, and so long as the eater was not already wed, and so long as they both possessed the knowledge that a bite from the Apple would bind the eater to the Æsir as a spouse.

There was more to the wedding ceremony if both partners were Asgardian, but the　seiðr　involved meant that no witnesses were needed (convenient for young lovers with disapproving parents), though it was considered customary to invite both families if possible. Bellalyse had known all of this when she'd accompanied the fourth prince of the House of Odin on his quest, and yet gone with Víðarr gladly, knowing her family would not be pleased.

"I've always been fond of Bellalyse," Loki murmured. Thor dragged himself out of his reverie to focus once more on his little brother, who still sat with his eyes closed, smiling faintly now, though there was such weariness to the expression that it made Thor tired just to look at it. "She was always so very kind to me during your exile. Never acted as if I might turn her wine into a goblet of snakes, for instance."

"You can hardly blame that servant for being afraid of you doing such after you　did　it to him, Loki," Thor reminded him, shaking his head in exasperation. "That was a waste of good wine, as well."

Loki chuckled and shook his head. "A little mischief never hurt anyone. A good trick now and then is good for the blood."

"I've told you the story," Thor replied, refusing to be drawn into a debate about mischief; Loki had long since moved　past　mischief when he sent the Destroyer to Midgard; the crown prince still couldn't be sure if he believed his brother's supposed reasoning for why he'd done so. Instead, he said, "Now you owe me the tale you promised me."

Several moments passed in silence broken only by the snap and crackle of torches and the fire in his brother's hearth. Finally Loki nodded. Ebony strands of hair fell across his brow and eyes, masking the emotion in his gaze. Did Loki dread telling more, Thor wondered?

"Very well," the adopted prince said softly. "Where did we leave off?"

Though Thor suspected Loki knew very well where they'd left off in his story, Thor replied, "Thea had widened the crack in the wall so you could see her face, and she could see you."

"Ah," Loki murmured. "Yes. My first glimpse of a friendly face in many moons…"

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"Hi, there," Thea said brightly.

A shadow swept across her cheek and temple, and Loki realized she was brushing the hair back from her grimy face. Her gray-blue eyes sparkled almost obscenely with her triumph in widening out the crack so they could glimpse each other. Loki wondered how she'd even known the crack was there in the first place. Had she dug her fingers into mortar and stone in vain attempt to draw closer to the voice on the other side of the wall?

Thea peered at him, angling her face as if she were trying to see something difficult to make out. She shifted again, pressing her eye socket to the crack—more like a small hole, now—in order to see better. But this cut off the light from her little torch, plunging Loki once more into darkness. A low sound of protest strangled in his throat as the dark pressed in against him, bearing down like a hellhound intent on the kill.

"Hang on a second," Thea muttered, pulling back, and the blessed light came back, though it was muted as she angled the glow away from the hole. What was she doing? When would the light return fully? There was that rustling sound, the　zzzzz　Loki had heard earlier, and the clatter of hard objects jouncing against each other. "I will find it…now. Or not. How about now? No. Okay, I just had them, where did they go? Seriously. You cannot hide from me, flashlights, I know where you live. Where are you? Wait a minute…" There was a sharp sound of exultation, followed by the full return of the light. "Here, take this," Thea said, thrusting something through the hole.

It slid with a harsh grating sound and fell onto Loki's leg. His hand closed around it convulsively. It was smooth and hard, but didn't quite feel like metal. Perhaps two inches long, it seemed to have a slim circular handle that took up the majority of its length. A wider circular piece at the end had a flat, glass-like piece about the size of a small coin in the center, though Loki couldn't make out the details of the contraption. When he ran his fingertip along the side of the wider part, something slid beneath his touch with a soft clicking sound. When he pushed at it again, a vivid beam of nearly-blinding light erupted from the wide end and shot up toward the ceiling.

He shut his eyes hastily, waiting for the same ache that had lanced his eyes before when Thea had flashed her own small light to dissipate. When it finally faded, he opened one eye cautiously, then the second. Blinking hard to clear the spots from his vision, he let his eyes adjust.

Among other things, the luminous beam illuminated most of Loki's body. He grimaced. He'd known instinctively what he looked like, but to see it…he'd fallen far from the elegant battle-armor he'd worn when he'd made the greatest mistake of his life and let himself fall from the Bifröst. His armor was gone, leaving him in only ripped trousers of soft black leather and a tattered green tunic spattered with old bloodstains and grime. The flesh that showed through the torn fabric, crusted blood, and filth was pale as a corpse. No sun for six months would do that to a man, he supposed.

Swinging the beam around his cell allowed him to fully appreciate its squalor for the first time. No cot or pallet, only hard stone floor and walls; no lights at all, as he'd already determined by feel six months previous; a hole in the floor to serve as a privy—with a lid, thank heavens, to keep in the stench—in the far corner; a spigot sticking out of the wall where water would trickle sometimes when he was at his most desperate; a very small vent near the ceiling to circulate air so he didn't stifle to death; the metal door that opened at random to let in his torturers so they could beat him with merciless fists before dragging him out into the corridor by his limp arms and his hair; the one-way swinging slot in the bottom of the door where the Chitauri shoved in plates of prison slop, but that he couldn't push out to get even a breath of fresher air or dimmest light; and nothing else. No windows, no hinges on the inside of the door, no blanket or pillow, no amenities or anything.

"Oh, bleh," Thea mumbled from her side of the wall. Loki immediately zeroed in on her voice again; she sounded distracted. He peered through the hole in the wall and saw the vague shadow of her against the far wall of her own cell as she swung her own beam of light around the small room. Strange—her cell appeared to be a little bigger than his own. Or perhaps it was simply that she was smaller. Was she smaller? "This place is a box. I'm starting to miss my old dorm at school."

"Dorm?" Loki asked.

Her head whipped toward him; he could see the ripple of her hair, a moving shadow that suddenly brought to mind something he'd thought of many times since his imprisonment—women. He hadn't seen a woman, or had one, in six months. Hadn't had one gentle word, one sweet touch. Hadn't felt the caress of a woman's fingertips against his brow, or tasted petal-soft lips, or touched the silk of her hair. Loki suddenly wondered what color Thea's hair was.

"Yeah," the girl said. He could see her crawling back to the wall they shared. The beam of light danced crazily around the room as she moved toward him. "When I was younger—up until I graduated college—I went to a boarding school. We slept in dorms. It always bugged me because I had to share a room with three other girls, and we all had our problems, you know? Hard to sleep when your roommate's throwing things around the room in her sleep with her mind, or screaming from a nightmare and shattering the windows. Though to be honest, I probably wasn't the easiest roommate to be around, either. Until I got a handle on my powers, things were a bit…tense." She settled with a sigh back into place against the wall. "Say, you don't have a problem with me being a mutant, do you?"

"What is a…mutant?" He imagined a pair of eyes in the back of the girl's head, or horns under her hair, or perhaps extra fingers, or tentacles on her belly. He'd seen such things in other realms.

"It means I have special powers," Thea replied cautiously. "How do you not know that? Mutants are like, the big controversy right now. Whether we have the right to go to school and hold jobs and stuff. Apparently my friend Kitty—one of my old roommates—is one of our spokespeople now because some big-shot senator mentioned how she could walk through walls in a Congress meeting and everybody flipped out. It made the news about eight months ago."

"I am not from Midgard."

There was a pause, as if she were mulling something over, then the girl said, "Wait…are you an alien?"

"That is the Midgardian word for it, I believe." He didn't tell her he was a god. She wouldn't believe him, and he certainly didn't feel very godly right now. Besides, though humans had worshipped Asgardians as gods at one point, it had never been the aim of the Æsir to be treated so—merely a consequence of their power being witnessed by the simple Midgardians who'd lacked any other explanation for such might.

Thea gasped. "You're kidding. Oh, my gosh, my mom will freak when I get home. I can tell her I met an alien, too. And that he was nice. My mom has this phobia about aliens 'cause she saw this movie. Anyway, I'm babbling because I'm freaking out because I've been kidnapped—again! Only by evil aliens this time, apparently."

He didn't have the heart to tell her that she would never get home, never see her mother or tell her that the girl had met a "nice alien." Nice. She thought he was nice? She didn't know him. Didn't know what he was capable of. No one in Asgard would consider him "nice." This girl was almost sweet in her naïveté.

Then something she said struck him anew. "You have been held captive before?"

She made an aggravated sort of growling sound. "Yeah, when I was a senior in high school. My school was attacked by these guys, I don't know what they wanted other than to kidnap us. Most of us got out, but this freshman kid I'd been mentoring, helping him with his powers, I had to go find him and we ended up getting caught. One of our teachers saved him, but I ended up getting rounded up with everyone else who got captured. Our teachers came and got us, though."

"Why did they want the children at your school?" Not that it mattered to him, really, but he wanted to hear her explanation. She had a unique way of speaking. Clearly Midgardian, but there was a lightness to it that seemed to push back the darkness almost as well as the tiny Midgardian torch she'd given him.

"Probably," Thea replied sourly, "for the exact same reason these Chitauri want us—for our powers. You　do　have powers, right? Because if you don't then I'm wondering why they kidnapped you."

Oh, he had powers. Seiðr was his life's blood, it seemed, but he couldn't use it in the shape he was in. Not enough to do anything important, at any rate. He was too malnourished, too dehydrated, too badly hurt, too weak. "I do," Loki mumbled. "But I cannot use them."

"Yeah," she sighed. "Me, either. The jerks. When Phil finds me, he is going to rip these guys to pieces. Him and his boss. His boss is kinda scary, but you know what? I'm banking on scary being a good thing right now. My mom's probably frantic," Thea added softly, a slight waver in her voice. "Jeez. And my brothers are probably going crazy."

The words pricked at his interest while raking across his heart. Brothers. Suddenly Loki thought of Thor: built like a grizzly bear, affable as an old dog, with his leonine looks and good humor, with his loyalty. Víðarr, still so besotted with his beautiful bride, Bellalyse that he hadn't been concerned at all about Thor, the coming war, Odin's prolonged sleep. Hermod and Balder, still not of age, both princes idolizing their older brothers. Tyr, with his temper and dark looks so like Loki's. Loki had idolized　him　as a child.

"You have brothers?" Loki asked, swallowing back salt and grief. He'd been such a fool. Even if Odin had rejected him, had never truly loved him as a father, he'd still had Thor, Víðarr, Balder, and Hermod. Even Tyr, though Tyr had always been cold toward his brothers since being passed over for the throne. He'd had Frigga. Why had he let go of his father's staff?

"Yeah, five brothers and two sisters," she replied. "Two younger sisters, one older brother, three younger brothers, and my twin, Theodore, who's an hour older than me, but we still like to argue about who's older just to be ridiculous sometimes. Everyone calls him Theo, though, because everyone calls me Thea."

"Is that a nickname?"

"Short for Althea, but that's my so-called real mom's name, so I shortened it to Thea when I was kid because I'd always thought it was prettier than Althea."

Why had his heart suddenly sped up? "Your…real mother?" She hesitated, as if unsure she wanted to answer his question, so Loki added, "I mean no disrespect, but I would like to understand you better." Anything, so long as she kept talking.

"My dad—my biological dad—left my mom when she got pregnant with me. That's when he told her that he was a mutant, so Theo and I would probably be mutants, too, and he didn't want to bring anymore mutants into the world the way it was. My biological mom…freaked out. She hadn't known my dad was a mutant. When Theo and I were born, she dumped us on the steps of a local cathedral with a letter to the archdeacon explaining everything. Theo and I got adopted when we were two by my mom and her husband.

"When our oldest brother, who's also adopted, developed mutant powers when I was five or six, my mom's husband turned psycho. Said he couldn't handle having a real freak living in his house. Like the rest of us were hypothetical freaks or something. He put my brother in the hospital," she added bitterly. "So my mom divorced his ass and took us to New York, enrolled my brother in this special school for mutants where they could learn to control their powers. Theo and I ended up there, too, when we got old enough. That's how my mom met Phil. He was checking the place out for his job and she was there for a parent-teacher meeting for me."

He couldn't think about this girl's story any longer. Couldn't think about how she, too, had been abandoned as a baby at a temple where anything could have happened to her, where she could have died, and all because she wasn't what her parents wanted her to be, and how she was taken in by another family, as he had been. Too much, they had too much in common. He couldn't afford to think of what Odin had revealed that day in the Treasure Room about Loki's history. He had to think of something else.

"Tell me about your mother," Loki said, grasping for straws. "What does she look like? What does she do? What is her trade?"

"She's beautiful," Thea said wistfully. "I wish I looked like her. Blond, but she keeps her hair short 'cause she doesn't want to look like Rapunzel or whatever. Except she looks like Tinkerbelle instead when she wears green. I tried to tell her, but…anyway. Blue eyes, like mine, but they don't have any gray in them like mine do. She's a musician. Plays the piano and the cello. What about you? Do you have any family?"

After a long pause, Loki whispered, "No. They…no, I do not." He would never see his family again. Better to resign himself to that fact now, before it could be used against him further.

"Oh. I'm sorry." There was an awkward silence in the conversation, then suddenly Thea said, "Hey, come here for a second. Flash your light so I can see your face." Curious, he did as she asked. Her eyes widened as they peered through the hole in the wall. "Wow."

Loki blinked. "What?"

"Don't take this the wrong way or anything, 'cause I know this is sort of coming out of nowhere, but you have the most beautiful green eyes I have　ever　seen." When Loki only stared at her, unsure if he'd heard her correctly, she laughed a little self-consciously. "And I totally just made this awkward, didn't I? Sorry. Comes from being around teenagers, day in and day out. Sometimes I just say whatever's in my head. Sorry. So…you're an alien. You wouldn't happen to be from Mars, would you? Because that would be really cool. My students will flip when I get home if I tell them I met a Martian. Please, please　tell me you're from Mars and I will love you forever."

And somehow, though he didn't know where it came, Loki actually laughed.