My 666-follower giveaway fic for @shine-of-asgard, which I originally intended to be between 1000 and 2000 words, is now more than 7000 words… and I still have one part left. This is even worse than the time my 2500-word giveaway fic for @darklittlestories came out at 5200. Length limits are seriously not my thing.

Part I, Part II

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Thor was beginning to think he
might be happy in Midgard. Not yet, of course; not while the news of his
father’s death and his mother’s rejection was still so fresh, not while he
could still feel the ache in his muscles from straining to lift Mjölnir, in
vain. But someday. He would court Jane slowly, as befit a lady of her standing
and education. Selvig, who seemed to stand in place of a father for her (he
called himself her “advisor,” which seemed odd considering that she held no
political power) had given his implicit permission.

So it came as a complete surprise
when Lady Darcy called from the front room of the Midgardians’ strange abode,
“Thor? There’s someone here for you… she says she’s your mother?”

Thor’s hesitant spark of hope was
instantly smothered. What could she be here for, but to let him feel the full
measure of her fury and disappointment?

He emerged from the room where he
had been reading one of Jane’s texts of Midgardian physics (a wondrously
bizarre way of viewing the world) with his head bowed, bracing himself against
the onslaught. But when he dared to raise his eyes, Frigga’s expression seemed
wrong; it was worry, not anger, that creased her brow and tightened her lips.

“Mother, I did not expect to see
you,” he said cautiously.

“Thor, my son,” she said, her
voice thick, and rushed forward to embrace him.

“Mother, I don’t understand… I
thought you blamed me for Father’s death, had forbidden me to return…”

Frigga drew back with a look of
consternation. “Who told you that?”

“Loki. He came here to see me,
two days ago now.”

Frigga shook her head frantically,
a hand straying toward her mouth. “No, Thor, your father is still alive, though
he did succumb to the Odinsleep after putting it off for so long. But Eir and I
have had to wake him before his strength was fully restored.”

“What? Why? Why would Loki lie to
me? Mother, what has happened at home?”

Frigga closed her eyes and took a
deep breath before she answered, and how had Thor not noticed the redness
around her eyes? “Loki is… missing. No one has seen him for two days. Which
might not be a cause for alarm, except that…”

“…he was King while Father was
Sleeping. And Heimdall has seen nothing?”

“Nothing of Loki, no. He has
known for some time that Loki can conceal himself when he wishes, but we
assumed it was only some foolish love-affair he wanted to keep secret… But what
he has seen is even more troubling.
Jötunheim is awake again, showing an energy and rebuilding at a pace that can
only mean…”

“…the Casket,” Thor filled in.
“Where is it?”

“Not in the Vault. We looked,
General Tyr and I, and it seemed to be there. But on a hunch, I shielded my
hand and tried to touch it, and it vanished. An illusion.”

Thor’s mind insisted there was
only one way to put together the information he was receiving, but his heart
refused its verdict. “They must have captured Loki, forced him to call off the
Destroyer…”

“Oh, Thor…” Frigga’s voice
cracked. “You must speak with your father. Call Mjölnir and we shall go at
once.”

“Mjölnir? But I could not lift her…”

“Your father has lifted the
banishment. This is too important, and we need you.”

Thor raised his hand and reached
out for his weapon… and she answered. After a few moments he realized that he
needed to go outside so that the hammer would not come crashing through the
glass doors.

Having Mjölnir back in his hand
comforted him… but the worry he felt for Loki was too sharp and pressing for
even her presence to offer much relief. He bade his Midgardian friends a
hurried farewell, thanked them for their help and hospitality, promised to come
visit them when he could. Then, with Mjölnir’s aid, he and Frigga flew back to
the Bifröst site, she called to Heimdall, and in scarcely an instant they were
back in the Observatory… in the place where, barely four days ago, his world
had fallen apart.

Horses were waiting for them on
the bridge. Thor was still wearing the Midgardian clothing Jane had lent him;
after fumbling a bit, he tied Mjölnir to the belt loop of his jeans so that he
could mount.

The time they spent traveling
passed at once too swiftly to recall and too slowly to bear. At last Frigga led
him into the chamber where Odin had Slept. He was still reclining in the great
golden bed cushioned with furs, drinking some revitalizing potion from a silver
goblet at his bedside.

Thor knelt by his father’s bed
and took his hand, feeling the dormant strength beneath the fragile papery
skin. “I am sorry, Father. Sorry for my defiance, my arrogance… tell me how I
can help my brother.”

There was pity in Odin’s gaze
when he said, “I don’t need you to help him. I need you to stop him.”

The words chilled Thor to the
spine like the wind in Jötunheim. He carefully withdrew his hands from his
father’s, stood and backed away a few steps. “I don’t understand.”

“Thor, we should have told you,
we should have told you both,” Frigga said; if his mother were not usually so
dignified and composed, he might have called it an outburst.

“Should have told me what.” His
fear settled like a block of ice in his stomach, radiating cold through all his
limbs.

“Loki is not our son by birth,”
Odin said, his voice too calm, too neutral. “I found him as a baby in
Jötunheim, at the end of the war. He was born too small, so Laufey—his
father—left him to die.”

Thor could not believe what he
was hearing. “That’s impossible. Loki is not a Frost Giant. He looks no
different than any of us…” He stopped. But Loki did look different from
everyone in his family; Thor had even teased him about it—the dark hair, the
long nose, the lean build—and jokingly called him an Elven changeling.

“He’s a shapeshifter; it’s a rare
trait among Jötnar, but not unheard of. He shifted to an Aesir form as soon as
I picked him up, sensing a possible provider. And he stayed that way until…
something happened during your idiotic excursion to Jötunheim. He went down to
the Vault to try holding the Casket; I saw what he was doing and went to stop
him, and he confronted me.” Odin’s eye clouded for a moment, as he drifted into
troubling memory. “That was when I fell into the Sleep. He was angry,
irrational…”

“How
could he not be angry?” Thor interjected.

“He would be dead
if not for me!” Odin snapped, and lying there in his nightgown wrapped in furs
he seemed more like a querulous old man than he ever had before. “But how
did he repay me? He stole the Casket and took it right back to Laufey.”

“Laufey is dead,”
Frigga put in, her voice brittle. “Heimdall has seen that too. There was some
sort of power struggle with his sons…”

“Maybe Loki
betrayed that father, too. Better to have the viper in someone else’s nest…”

“Loki isn’t a
viper,” Thor said through gritted teeth.

“Blood will out,”
Odin said as if he hadn’t heard, his eye burning into Thor’s. “I should have
known. The boy was always a liar and a sneak…”

“Odin!” Frigga
cried, anguished. “He’s our son!”

“Not anymore.” Odin’s
pronouncement carried the weight of a disowning.

“He’s still my brother,”
Thor said with quiet vehemence.

“You can believe
that all you want, but you’ll still fight him when he comes with a Jötun army
to assail Asgard.”

“He won’t,” Thor
insisted.

“You think
returning their greatest weapon to them will be the end of it? No, Thor; he has
chosen a side and it isn’t ours.”

Odin was half
right. When the Jötun army came to Agard, Loki wasn’t with them. But it was
plain that they had an insider’s knowledge of the palace, the city, the land.
They destroyed hidden stores of food so that the city would not be able to
withstand a siege; they blockaded the entrances to a secret fortress in the
mountains so that the people could not take refuge there and raided caches of
weapons so that the populace could not take up arms. To their credit, Thor
thought, it seemed that they tried to minimize civilian casualties: the aim was
to humiliate Agard’s rulers, not to make enemies of its people.

Odin sent an emissary under a
white flag to the camp the Jötnar had established in the mountains, bearing a
missive that read, “Odin All-Father
demands that you turn over the traitor Loki Laufeyson.” The emissary
returned, frightened but unharmed, with a reply, written in large letters on
his white flag: “Odin Father of Lies does
not seem to be in a position to demand much of anything. The traitor Loki
Laufeyson conveys his warmest regards to Frigga All-Mother and invites her to
send a message when she wishes to discuss terms of surrender. She has the word
of King Helblindi that she shall not come to harm. Jötunheim has no quarrel
with Vanaheim, but remembers ancient alliances before the Realms submitted to
Asgard’s tyranny.”

Odin was furious; Frigga said
nothing. He did not even ask whether she planned to take Loki up on his offer.
Thor thought that might be a mistake. Once his parents might have thought and
acted as one… but Frigga had been quiet and distant since Odin had disowned
Loki. Thor realized that it would not surprise him if she acted on her own
contrary to Odin’s wishes—not only as Queen of Asgard, jointly responsible for
the Realm’s well-being, but as All-Mother of the Nine Realms and a princess of
Vanaheim.

As Thor led skirmishes against
the Jötnar, he wondered always if he would encounter Loki: he looked for a
shorter, slighter figure among the hulking giants; he half expected at every
moment to come face to face with his brother, to confront that face he knew
better even than his own… but would it be icy blue, now, the crystal-green eyes
turned to red? Would he know his brother in such a guise, by anything else but
his stature?

He asked Heimdall at every
opportunity for news of Loki. He was no longer concealing himself; he was in
Jötunheim, contributing his magical skill to its rebuilding with the aid of the
Casket. Meanwhile, the Jötun army laid siege to Asgard, and Thor knew that
Asgard could not long hold out. Odin stubbornly insisted that he would not
yield; Frigga grew ever more quiet and distant. Thor wondered how long it would
be before she accepted the invitation to negotiate a surrender.

Four months after the invasion of
Asgard, the stalemate was disrupted when Heimdall brought news to the royal
family: a Jötun force had invaded the northern reaches of Midgard, near the
site of their incursion more than a thousand years before. Loki was at its
head.

“I must go,” Thor told his
parents, and neither of them disputed it.

He assembled a cadre of his
most trusted warriors: Hogun, Volstagg, Fandral, and the Lady Sif, along with a
handful of the Einherjar he knew best. He asked Heimdall to locate an Agent
Philip, son of Coul, who might be able to rally Midgard’s own forces to her
defense; Heimdall told him that Coulson and a contingent of Midgardian warriors
were already in the region where Loki and his soldiers had arrived.

So Heimdall sent Thor and his
chosen companions to the far north of Midgard. In many ways, Thor thought, it
was like the desert where he had first landed: barren of vegetation as far
as he could see, with only the stark beauty of mountain crags rising from the
empty expanse, the harsh dry air cut through by winds that roared and shrieked
like berserkers that scented blood.

The Jötnar were at the edge of
the land, where the ice met the sea. Coulson was there with his Midgardian
agents, clad in their strange black cloth armor over the bulky layers that
protected them from the cold. Two strange warriors were with them, one in a
suit of red and gold metal armor that wholly enclosed his body, another in
lighter red and blue armor with a silver star on his chest and on his
blue-and-red shield.

“Nice to see you again, Dr.
Blake… or is it Thor?” Coulson greeted him.

Thor skipped over the
pleasantries. “We are here to aid you in defeating the Frost Giants. Tell us
what we must do.”

“I think you might have come to
the wrong party,” said a muffled voice from the red and gold armor.

“I don’t understand.”

“Thor, allow me to present Mr.
Tony Stark,” Coulson said, gesturing to the man in the metal armor. “And Captain
Steven Rogers.” The blue-and-red warrior nodded. “And your friends are…?”

“Lady Sif and the Warriors Three:
Volstagg, Fandral, and Hogun.”

“Well, it’s a pleasure to meet
you all, but it’s actually looking like defeating won’t be necessary,” Coulson
explained with his usual understated equanimity. “Director Fury is waiting for
confirmation from the World Security Council and the UN, but it appears we’re
going to be able to come to an arrangement.”

“An arrangement with those—” Monsters, he had been about to say. But
Loki was one of them; he always had been. “With those invaders?” he finished
lamely.

“They describe themselves as immigrants
seeking a better life,” said the warrior with the shield, Captain Rogers. His
voice was stern, almost accusing.

“Is that what they are?” Volstagg
scoffed, and Fandral laughed. Thor held up a hand to silence them.

“They said their homeworld was
devastated by war a thousand years ago and deprived of the resources to rebuild.
By your world, interestingly enough,” Coulson added mildly. “They’re just now
starting to restore their own planet, but it will take some time for their
society and economy to recover. Some of them think they’d fare better here.”

“And so they might,” Thor
acknowledged. “But what of the Midgardians… the humans who live here now?”

Stark made an exaggerated show of
looking around, swiveling his helmeted head while its expression remained
frozen. “Are there some I didn’t know about?”

“Not right here,” Sif interjected impatiently. “In your Realm.”

“The government of Norway seems
quite amenable to the arrangement,” Coulson said. “As are the governments of
Greenland and Denmark. They’ll have to put it to a vote in their respective
parliaments, of course, and maybe even a referendum, but a military response
doesn’t seem to be on the horizon.”

“What is the nature of this ‘arrangement’?”
Hogun asked, matching Coulson’s imperturbable neutrality.

“As you may be aware, Earth’s
climate has been dangerously warming due to unfortunate energy-capture practices…”

“That’s a really euphemistic way
of saying ‘human stupidity,’” Stark put in.

“…and the
Jötnar have offered us a way to protect the Earth from some of the effects of
that warming. Or maybe even reverse it entirely.”

“They want to settle
on the glaciers and ice sheets of the Arctic and Antarctic,” Captain Rogers explained,
seeming annoyed by Coulson’s vagueness. “No one lives there anyway.”

“That is blatant
penguin erasure,” said Stark, puzzlingly.

“Don’t forget
polar bears,” Coulson added, deadpan as ever.

“No people live on the glaciers and ice
sheets. They’ve assured us that they have only peaceful intentions toward the
surrounding populations. They’ll trade, of course, but respect human territorial
sovereignty.”

The Asgardians
exchanged skeptical glances; Volstagg even snorted aloud, and Thor glared at
him.

“And in return
they’ll use their magic Casket prevent the ice from melting,” Rogers finished,
with a glare of his own.

“It’s not magic,
it’s energy transfer,” Stark muttered.

“It’s really a
win-win solution for everyone,” Coulson said. “They’ll get an environment that
works for them, protect the local ecosystems, and stop sea level rise. Hunting
and fishing rights will have to be worked out, but in light of the benefits…”

“I
must warn you that the promises of Jötnar cannot be trusted,” Thor said.

“Funny,
that’s exactly what they said about you Asgardians,” Coulson replied, neutral
as ever.

Sif growled
low in her throat; Thor wasn’t sure it was voluntary. “Was there a man among
them who was smaller than the rest—about my height?”

“Yes,
the one who spoke to us on their behalf was just the size of a tall human. The
others seemed not to speak any human languages. I wondered if they choose their
ambassadors to avoid intimidating the locals.”

“No,”
Thor said sharply. “He is the only one of his size, or one of very few; the
Jötnar kill the rest at birth. He grew up in Asgard, so he is the only one who has
knowledge of the All-Tongue. That is why he was their spokesman.”

“That
and the ‘silver tongue,’” Fandral contributed. “He can be very persuasive.”

“You
seem to know this guy pretty well,” said Rogers, sounding suspicious.

“He
was raised as my brother.” A knot seemed to form in Thor’s throat even as he
said it, and he half-choked on the last word.

“Wow,
this is some real George R. R. Martin shit,” Stark commented. He muttered
something to himself; Thor thought he made out the word “fucking,” but he
couldn’t be sure. Coulson gave Stark a reproving look.

“If
you have a way to send him a message… would you tell him that his brother
wishes to speak with him? That I have no desire to fight him, only to talk.”

“Of
course, we can do that,” Coulson replied graciously.

“And I thought I’d been to some awkward family
reunions,” said Stark.

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Note: Yeah, I thought the conversation between Thor and Loki deserved its own part. I hope it won’t get too much longer…