corusc

Summary: Steve Rogers has a tough time with time.

• • • • •

He comes to with a jolt. For a split second he thinks he's got caught up in the dream again, hasn't quite managed the escape. The split second feels like he's wearing an extra suit on top of his suit that just happens to be two sizes too small, but sensation returns like a fire, the seams burn up, and he's loosed into reality. Sound comes back to him with concussive force, in units you gauge in explosions and screams, the same as smell, sizzling metal and flesh. On the heels of the roiling, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach his skin comes back alive all at once and Steve reels from the weight of the dust and the grit and the dried sweat caking his uniform, sealing him stiff. The joints he can manage to work are liquid with blood. He scrabbles, bare-handed, against hot rough concrete, falls down onto something unyielding and sharp. He stays there, cocooned in the sensation of everything, even pain, giving way. His mouth fills; it comes up through his nose; a thin sluice from out the corner seeps down his jaw to pool behind his ear. This much is different from the dream.

It can't be a dream, Steve thinks. I've only got the one.

The next moment finds him coming to with a jolt, broken-winded, clutching at the smooth hard edge of his shield, a voice shouting in the earpiece hanging by a thread from his cowl, pushed down, choking tight. Steve hacks and pulls the material forward with a numb finger, coughs it out, eyes watering, until he can breathe again.

"Fine, I'm fine," Steve wheezes. He reaches out to steady himself against the side of a wall. The wooden slats splinter apart under his hand before he can get the jerking under control and Steve offers up a silent apology to whoever owns it before noticing that he's climbing out of a man-shaped hole in a building he apparently just crashed into. He can hear feet thudding as the people inside run out, shouting, and shakes his head to try to clear it. He must have hit it harder than he'd thought. Steve remembers the sounding of the alarm, the debrief on the way to the hangar, the aerial deploy, Thor's brother raising his arms and raising his voice—

Loki has his arms raised only a dozen feet away, his head craned up. Steve looks on dumbly as something invisible strikes Loki down in the next instant. Loki crumples into a heap, his spear clattering on the ground beside him. Steve can hear Tony's blasters zeroing in on their location, a shout, loud but incoherent, and multiple voices on the com. Steve stumbles to Loki and turns him over onto his back. The golden armor has been ripped apart and his clothes are rapidly soaking through and his face is gray.

"You died," Steve says.

"Yes I know, we do this all the time," Loki says in vague irritation. His face is going slack and he's got that vacant look Steve would know very well even if he hadn't just seen it less than an hour ago. Loki starts to say something but pauses to hack up dark clots of blood, doesn't even try to keep it from dirtying Steve's uniform. Just like before, except that he adds, "It's early. Huh," looking confused. Steve doesn't know if Loki has a soul, but whatever it is that animates him is on its way out. No matter what comes before, the door's final closing is always quiet and Loki's end is no exception, but it's all wrong. It's happened before and it's happening again. Steve sits back on his heels, confounded. The dream—had it been a dream?—is still fresh on his mind and stretched tight over his skull.

"Shit," Tony says as he lands. "Tell me he's playing possum." He looks behind his shoulder. "Hey Thor, I don't think you should come any closer."

Thor doesn't stop walking towards them. Tony visibly tenses when he reaches them but the raw grief on Thor's face is cut through with uncertainty, and when he meets Steve's eyes, his eyes widen and his expression settles into grim.

Steve looks down at the lifeless body on the ground and back at Thor. "We received word Loki was here. He died from something we couldn't see, and we were going to—we were on our way back to New York," Steve says. "You were going to take your brother's body back, and then the alarm..."

"We're in Newfoundland," Tony says, sounding worried. "Did you hit your head? It looked like Loki got you pretty good from where I—" Tony stops to look at Thor, his body language telegraphing flight, or at least a leap back, but Thor doesn't make any move, stays silent. Tony shifts from one foot to another as Clint comes into view.

"And Bruce? Did Natasha get in touch?" Steve asks. Clint and Tony exchange a look.

"He's still keeping a low profile, we haven't heard from him in a few. Tasha's back at base," Clint answers, on edge. "You okay?"

"Loki died," Steve says, trying to wrap his head around the situation.

Clint reaches for his com. "Yeah. I'll call it in."

Steve shakes his head. "No, he died, and Thor was going to go back to Asgard right away, but we convinced him to come back with us to New York, and then all the alarms went off because of some sort of atmospheric disturbance. We had to land. And—" They were on the ground after making an emergency landing, next to a turnpike, still miles out from New York. Natasha had said that she and Bruce were on their way, soon. People were streaming out of their cars, taking photographs with their phones. Clint contacted highway patrol and the team was doing their best to keep people from swarming over the jet in curiosity when the storm brewed up, when everyone and everything started to fall, left and right. His team died one by one, and he fell, and then. Steve flinches at the vividness of the memory.

He doesn't need to look to notice that Clint's stance has shifted and that the tiny sounds that Tony's armor is making means that he's optimizing the angle for firing his hand blasters. Steve looks at Thor, whose gaze drops down to Loki's lifeless form. Thor's eyes shutter and his jaw clenches.

"He was trying to summon something before he...." Thor closes his eyes, opens them. "I am not deeply versed in the craft, so I cannot say if he failed or succeeded, or something else entirely. But he must have something to do with this."

"Okay?" Tony says. "Thor, I'm sorry your brother is dead, kind of, but you and Steve are weirding me out."

"This just happened. Less than an hour ago," Steve tells him.

"How come we don't remember, but you do, and Thor?" Clint asks.

"Time is different for us," Thor replies, and refuses to say anything more, going over to sit next to Loki and lay a hand over his eyes. He doesn't need to say 'gods' for them to get the message; he sounds like Loki did when he was looking up at Steve, bewildered by the finality of it all.

"I hit him with my shield just as he was doing that incantation thing," Steve recalls, squeezing his hands into fists and then shaking them out, trying to figure it out. "It didn't connect, but I felt something."

"You went flying into that post office, it was pretty spectacular," Tony says. "Sure looked like you connected."

"Come in and let's talk," Director Fury's voice says over the open com. Steve pulls his cowl back over his head and taps his earpiece. "Understood. Natasha?"

"Hey, Cap."

"Can you find Bruce? Tell him it's urgent."

"You got it."

Clint leads the way to where he landed the jet, just at the edge of the town. It's a small fishing community by the coast with buildings weathered by the wind and the sea. Some of the townspeople trickle out of hiding, cautious and afraid. Steve was the one who had assured them that everything was okay the last time, but he's too shaken to say anything this time and Tony's the one who takes the lead, a touch too jovial but the right amount of bright for people to crowd around. They shake his hand and take pictures. Clint does his best to keep Tony from going too off-script but Steve can tell he's distracted. Thor pulls off his cape and carefully wraps up his brother's body, carries him to the aircraft. Steve has seen Thor lift giants and toss trucks out of his way without straining, but he's pale and weary now, his steps heavy and unsure as though he's walking on a planet not theirs, being exhausted by gravity of a different magnitude.

When they've gotten the clearance and are in the air, Steve waves at Clint to shut the com down for a bit. Clint taps a couple of keys that probably means that he's giving SHIELD a heads-up about the radio silence. Clint switches on the autopilot and swings out of his seat to lean against it, arms crossed. They have a protocol for everything, Steve thinks. But not this.

"A storm came up, but it was more than a storm," Steve says. "We had to land, and then everything started to break apart. People were just—everybody died. I died. Then the next thing I know, I'm waking up. To where I was not even an hour ago."

"Maybe you were having a hallucination of some kind," Clint says.

Steve shakes his head. "Thor, do you remember this?"

"Let us off of this vessel," Thor says quietly. "I am taking Loki home."

"Thor—"

"My father will surely know of a way to set this to rights," Thor says. "We must return to Asgard. Before that storm hits."

Steve looks at Thor, Loki's bloodied head cradled on his lap, Thor's drawn, haunted face. He nods curtly. It can't be any worse than what's happened. He doesn't want to see them dying, not again. Clint is unhappy with the decision but takes the controls and has a short, heated exchange with headquarters about keeping the jet's overrides deactivated. Tony stays silent through it all, keeping his faceplate down, thinking.

Clint finds a clearing in a mountainous, uninhabited stretch of Maine, and Thor sets Loki down and calls for Heimdall, the guardian of Asgard's gates. Steve has only seen a couple of video clips of the Bifrost in action, the flaring lights making it almost impossible to make out. He knows it’s supposed to be a bridge but can't imagine how it must really look, how the spectacular colors he glimpsed on the screen can possibly exist. He wishes that a happier occasion were giving him the opportunity to see it close-up.

Dark clouds gather and a pinpoint of light flashes in the center of the sky. Steve frowns. It was instantaneous on the footage, the camera barely capturing movement even at hundredths of a second, but this light grows slowly, like a lamp being gradually turned up. It bends and streaks sideways, outlining a jagged curve. The end of the ray disappears and the rest of the line, still curving, fizzles audibly.

Thor throws up an arm to shield his eyes. "Something is very wrong."

"Oh, I don't know," Tony comments, and is thrown into the air when the ground buckles. He flies out of the chasm that's just opened up and catches Clint by the arm before he's swallowed up. Steve grabs Thor by the hand before he can plunge down after Loki's body. The earthquake doesn't stop and lightning bolts rip across the sky. Tony throws Clint into a tall larch and slams into the two of them, carrying them into the tree. Even though it's slowly toppling, it's still the most stable place in their near vicinity.

"Space-time being majorly screwy isn't so bad," Tony says. He boosts himself closer to the branch Steve is hanging onto and says, "Time loop," and goes tumbling when the tree shrieks across the clearing, when an immense wind tosses it up.

"How do we stop it?" Steve yells. The rocks and dirt flying around them makes it impossible for him to track Tony or find Clint and Thor. Tony switches from the external speakers to the com.

"Don't know! But we'll probably get another ch—"

There's a sickening crunch on the other end and the connection deteriorates into static. Steve shuts his eyes and tries to keep his grip on his shield. He's airborne now, hitting trees indiscriminately as he's flung around by the tornado-level winds. Clint's voice crackles in his ear. "It's like this everywhere, last radio contact with SHIELD confirms—"

The line goes silent and something hits his head, hard, and everything goes dark. He comes to with a jolt and it's a clear morning again, a couple of wispy clouds in the blue sky, seagull cries faint on the wind. His shoved-down cowl is choking him and a voice shouts from his earpiece and he's making a mess of the post office while pulling himself out of the ruined wall.

Loki has his arms raised only a dozen feet away, his head craned up. Something invisible strikes him down in the next instant and Loki crumples into a heap and his spear clatters to the ground. The shouts and the sound of Tony's blasters fade into the background as Steve runs to Loki, pushes him over onto his back.

"Loki! Listen—"

"I don't have to listen to you," Loki coughs out, annoyed. "Wretched insect." He hacks up blood all over Steve's uniform and sinks back into the ground with a confused look on his face.

"You're dying, I mean, you've already died—"

"Yes I know, we do this all the time," Loki says in confused irritation and coughs again. His eyes glaze over and his labored breathing quickens and comes to a stop. Steve grits his teeth. Tony lands beside them.

"Shit," Tony says, and Steve snaps, "He's not playing around. He's dead."

Tony pauses. He looks behind him. "Hey Thor, I don't think you," he starts to say, then ducks as Thor flies in to land in their midst.

"I was sure that it would work, somehow," Thor says, visibly upset. "We must try again. Perhaps if—"

Steve climbs to his feet and holds up a hand, even though he really feels like curling up in a dark corner somewhere so that he can just shake where no one else can see. "There's no guarantee that the same thing won't happen. We need to meet up with the rest of the team and," he says, and puts a hand on Thor's shoulder to calm him down, "and get Dr. Foster and SHIELD and anyone else who knows this stuff working on it, on the double, and figure this out before we try anything else."

Tony exchanges a glance with Clint when he comes up to where they're standing. Tony clears his throat.

"I really hate to be the one pointing this out, Thor, but your brother appears to be kind of...."

Thor strikes Steve's hand away. "If I can return to Asgard, bring aid, undo whatever magic Loki has wrought—"

"But if it doesn't work we'll be wasting our time," Steve says. He points at Tony. "Time loops. What do you know about them?" He turns back to Thor. "We don't even know how long this is supposed to last. If it will last."

"Sorry, I'm a Fruit Loops type of guy," Tony says. Steve glares. Tony flips his faceplate up and glares right back. "Are we not going to talk about, you know," he says, stabbing a finger at the ground in front of them. He makes an incredulous face. "Time loops?"

"You're the one who said it," Steve says.

"Um, no, I didn't."

Clint takes the opportunity to poke Loki's prone body in the shoulder with his bow.

"Just making sure," he says when Thor levels a frightening glare at him.

"You did say it," Steve says, then has to try explaining the situation to a disbelieving Tony and Clint.

"So what are we going to do about it?" Clint asks. "Sounds like we don't have enough time to go back to New York. Or do much of anything."

"We need to get everyone who knows something about—weird weather, magic, anything like that, to look at what Loki was doing," Steve says. He can't keep the frustration from his voice. If things go the way they did last time, they only have about an hour. Steve calls up what he remembers from the endless folders full of briefing logs that amounts to his leisure reading nowadays. "Dr. Foster is in Greenland, right?"

"I can set up a satellite feed, no problem," Tony says. "But what's the data we're sending? I wish Bruce were here."

Steve looks down at Loki. "He could help us."

"Doesn't look like he's home," Clint dryly says.

"Next time. If there's a next time," Steve says, and clasps Thor's shoulder. "I'll try."

Thor nods heavily. While Tony and Clint are busy refitting the jet to serve as a field station, Steve goes to convince the townspeople to evacuate the area, even though Clint's last words from the last time ring in his ears. There has to be something they can do to prevent that from happening. They get in touch with SHIELD, ask Natasha to find Bruce so that they can get his input, and they set up a video feed to the research facility where Jane Foster and Erik Selvig are currently working.

Dr. Foster's face lights up when she sees Thor, but her delight turns into shock when she learns of Loki's death. Steve feels a pang, low in his gut. He tells himself he wouldn't want Peggy to have to go through something like this, even though the truth is that he couldn't bear to see anyone from his life before this way, to reunite only for destruction to tear them away. The real truth is that some days, he feels like he could. Dr. Foster's hands come up over her mouth. "Oh. Thor. I'm so sorry. What- what happened?"

Dr. Selvig's mouth settles into a grim line. "What was it?"

"Perhaps a summoning gone awry. It was like nothing I have seen before," Thor answers. Steve moves into the camera's line of sight to introduce himself and tells them what's happened so far. Both scientists become troubled when they describe how the light of the Bifrost had bent across the sky.

Without preamble, Dr. Foster moves off screen. There's a sharp yelp and a wooden chair skidding across a smooth floor, a violent rustling of paper and another voice.

"Are you really talking to Captain Bodacious Bod?"

"Not now, Darcy. No wait, can you grab me those green files? And we need a printout of seven-six-four-six dash four-four-six."

Tony mouths 'Captain Bodacious Bod,' at him and Clint turns his head away, shoulders shaking just a tad. Steve ignores them. You would think they weren't in the middle of dealing with a crisis of apocalyptic proportions. Steve's fairly sure that this reaction of his is well on its way to turning into a reflex.

"We're just starting to get some odd readings," Dr. Foster says, reappearing. The picture on the screen fuzzes as though on cue. Her next words come across garbled, and the screen deteriorates into erratic waves of green and blue light. Thor slams his fist against the pilot's seat, bending the headrest support.

"Easy!" Steve says. "I think they're still okay. Can we get a landline? Maybe that would keep working longer?"

Tony agrees with him and they all move to the semi-wrecked post office, the largest public building closest to their location, carrying heavy plastic cases. Tony patches the connection through the building's old PA system and hooks up an impromptu speaker on their end so that everyone can talk to each other. With Clint's help he next opens a line to SHIELD headquarters, and the next few minutes is dense with information. Once they've got the basics, there's not much that Steve can contribute, so he goes outside to pace and secure the perimeter. The most dangerous thing he comes across his short patrol is a wary tortoiseshell cat, but many of the locals still haven't left. Steve spends precious minutes reassuring them—everything is all right, but please stay inside—and rushes back to the post office. Inside, the cozy lobby resembles a mad scientist's lab, with bundles of wires crawling across the floor and up the walls.

"The phone's stopped working," Clint says as Steve enters. He gestures at the blank portable screens set up around the front counter. "We've lost all contact. Was it like this last time?"

Steve looks up at the clock. It's a digital display with bold red numbers, and Steve has to take a moment to remind himself that this is how it is now. "We didn't try running out the clock on the ground," he answers. "I don't know what's going to happen."

"Natasha is on her way with Bruce," Clint informs him, maybe as a consolation.

"Is there anything we can do?"

"Before everything shorted out, we decided that we don't have the kind of instruments that can detect the kind of thing you're talking about," Tony says. He's shed the armor so that he can maneuver. His hands are covered in scratches. Tony glances up at the clock, too. Only minutes to go, if Steve is right. "You're not giving us much wriggle room."

"Then we plan for the next loop," Thor says. He takes Steve by the shoulders. "You must keep him from death."

"How come the two of you remember this, and we don't?" Clint asks.

Thor's shoulders slump. He lets go of Steve to pace up and down the lobby. "This is not unfamiliar, merely different. Shorter. Time for us... I do not know how it should be said." Involuntarily his eyes travel to Loki's body, laid on a bench and covered with his red cape, as if expecting Loki to sit up and condescend to them with an explanation.

Tony gives Thor a flat look. "That is actually the most disturbing thing I've heard anyone say so far."

"If you know, then Loki does, too," Steve says to Thor. "If he could stay alive long enough to realize it. He might help us."

"Right," Clint says. "Still doesn't explain how you know."

"I don't," Steve replies. "Maybe when I hit Loki with my shield, something happened to make me remember." He rubs his face. "Let's just try it," he says, and Clint lets out a sigh, but says nothing more. The ground starts to rumble, and he goes to look out the window. Violet clouds are gathering above. Streaks of lightning flash across their underbelly. He ducks back in.

Tony climbs back into his suit, Thor hefts Mjolnir and looks lost, and Clint shoulders his bow and bounces on his feet. "This it?"

"I'm sorry," Steve says, tasting bile.

Clint shoots him a friendly smile and shrugs. "Better luck next time."

The earth crashes up around them and everything goes to hell and Steve jolts awake. The sky is blue and the air clean. He doesn't quite pull free from the wall in time, and has to watch Loki slipping away again. He swears and punches the ground and tries to get through to him anyway.

"Listen, Loki, you can't die."

"Do you imagine that the river stops for a leaf?" Loki says, annoyed, addled. "We do this all the time."

"That's the problem! Do you understand what's happening?"

Loki coughs blood all over his uniform and looks up, dazed. "It's," he begins to say, and coughs violently again before seizing up and going still, eyes open. Steve stands up in frustration and disgust and brings everyone up to speed after apologizing to Thor. They get a little further along this time. Jane Foster sends them a copy of her observations from the past week, her assistant gets in a wink—Steve is flattered, he really is, even though he'll never admit to it as long as Tony and Clint are being a couple of knuckleheads—and Erik Selvig shares what he knows about interstellar gateways before the electricity goes dead. They even manage to get a few words in with Natasha en route to Bruce's hideout in northwestern Vermont, but too soon the clouds boil up again, the ground breaks into pieces, and Steve's world goes dark. Every time, he's just a split second too late, and he's getting tired of trying to explain. The world goes dark, again and again. Steve jolts awake.

He pulls himself up and finally just throws his shield, not needing to look, and when Loki jerks back to get out of the way, Steve launches himself at Loki with all he's got, knocking him out of the path of whatever it is that has been striking him down.

They roll to a stop and Steve looks up at Loki's face, elated; Loki thanks him by stabbing him through the heart.

Steve comes to again, choking on a curse, inhales the salt air, immediately pushes off against the side of the post office, throws his shield, saves Loki, gets stabbed, wakes up, throws his shield, saves Loki, and yells, "Do you imagine that the river stops for a leaf!"

Loki blinks once, and stabbing him through the heart, says, "What?"

The next time, Steve gets up, changes the shield's trajectory, tackles Loki to the ground, kicks free, hits the ground with his back, and catches the blade of the spear with a hand just inches from his heart.

"Listen!" Steve yells. It's stupid, he knows better, but this one thing never fails to make him afraid; at the very least his hand is going to be destroyed for hours at this rate, if he had hours left. His stomach lurches. His grip on the blade is slipping and fuck, that's bone it's slicing through, but he gasps and says, "Do you realize—"

Loki opens his mouth as if to say something, and then changes his mind. He grins.

Steve's field of vision turns red.

"You piece of sh—"

Loki bears down on the spear and twists the haft, pain explodes in his chest, everything goes dark, and the next time he wakes up, Steve angles the trajectory of the shield so that it returns to him, then goes barreling into Loki at full speed to whip his shield across Loki's jaw, as hard as he can, knocks him down.

"Hulk!"

"Wait!" Loki says, holding his hands up and cringing.

Steve kicks the spear out of reach and grabs Loki by the throat and pulls him up. "You knew! This entire time!"

Steve knows Loki can knock his hand away as easily as swatting a fly, but he only rolls his shoulders.

"It was just that we were having so much fun," he says.

Steve shoves him back. He's shaking too badly to speak. The workers trickling out of the post office take one look at his face and quickly walk the other way down the deserted road. Tony lands beside him, blasters held out, and tenses.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm not okay," Steve grinds out. Tony keeps his weapons trained on Loki and says, "Uh huh. Hey, Thor—"

Steve turns, bringing his shield up on instinct, and stumbles back, not prepared for Thor to sweep him up, shield and all, in a crushing hug.

"This must stop," Thor says, his eyes bright with unshed tears. He sets Steve back on his feet and shakes him lightly by the shoulders at arm's length. "I tried to reach you and the others, those times that you— I will not stand for this," he says, as he pushes past Steve and takes a swing.

Loki sidesteps the punch and circles around to the other side of their group, a tiny bit unsteady on his feet, stopping when he feels the point of Clint's arrow pressed against the back of his neck.

"What, watch me kill your pets over and over again?" Loki says. He grins at Steve. "Thank you for that."

Steve steps into Thor's path and holds him back. He's a little surprised that he can keep them there. Thor is trembling. Once he knows Thor isn't going to try attacking Loki again, he steps back and turns around to face him.

"You're pathetic," Steve says. "You couldn't even do that on your own.

"The effect is all that matters," Loki says.

"Cap, what's going on?" Clint asks, keeping his bow on Loki but taking several steps back, out of reach.

"We're stuck in a time loop and it's Loki's fault," Steve answers. "Talk."

Loki makes his way over to the side of the post office and leans against it. "I'd rather not," he says. His color is off. Steve sees the blood seeping through Loki's coat.

"He does not survive you long," Thor tells Steve. His expression is haggard. "I fear. . ."

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose. "Loki," he says, eyes screwed shut, "will you help us."

Loki coughs wetly. "Why should I? I'm having a wonderful time."

"I don't believe this is your plan at all," Steve says. "I think you screwed up."

Loki sighs as he slides down, leaving a streak. "In the end it always works out. Thor is a crybaby, did you know? Just wait and you'll see."

"That's rich, coming from you," Tony mutters next to Steve. He flips his helmet open and raises an eyebrow. "Time loop?"

"We've had this conversation more than a few times," Steve says, and explains.

"So now what?"

"We have to talk to Jane Foster, and Erik Selvig, and Bruce somehow," Steve says, and then deflates. He suddenly wishes, ridiculously, that he were acquainted with more scientists, wonders what Dr. Erskine would have to say about all this. "But I really don't know if that will change anything."

"I just asked Natasha to pick him up and meet us here. She'll probably have some ideas, too," Clint says encouragingly. He doesn't need to add that he's already made a report to Nick Fury. Steve just nods. He helps Thor carry Loki into the building while Clint gets out the word to the townspeople to evacuate. Steve helps to haul plastic case after plastic case into the post office. Thor has no luck getting Loki to talk, but it almost doesn't matter; Loki expires soon after they move him inside.

Director Fury and Agent Hill back at HQ send them everything they have on gate phenomena before the signal cuts off, and Thor's friends in Greenland do the best that they can with the material, talking Tony through models over the phone, but the loop resets again. Steve adjusts the angle of his shield to make Loki rear back differently, throws him against the wooden building, barks at the post office workers to clear the area. It doesn't make him feel any better. Yelling at Clint makes him feel like an asshole and yelling at Tony just makes things worse, if that was even possible (it is in fact possible). Thor's reproachful look is bad enough but it's really Loki's hilarity that snaps Steve out of the haze of anger; the next time that he saves Loki from immediate death, he just takes it out on a hapless nearby shrub, apologizes to everybody and the shrub, and silently helps Tony convert the old post office building into a science lab.

Clint is sitting on top of the counter, bow held loosely on his lap. He hasn't taken his eyes off Loki, who's been sitting slumped and bleeding on one of the benches in the lobby, since they entered. Clint goes along with Steve's explanation every time, at least on the surface. If he thinks Steve has gone insane, he doesn't show it, the kind of guy who prefers taking notes and saving up his questions.

Tony patches Dr. Foster and Dr. Selvig through, and when their voices float over the PA, the animosity coming off of Loki is nearly palpable. He murmurs something under his breath that only Thor hears, things go flying and Steve is trying to break them up with limited success when Dr. Foster whistles sharply, making the speakers shriek.

"You don't like me, I don't like you, so let's just agree to hate each other and work together on this," she says.

"I'll die before I help you," Loki snarls.

"Next time you should just stab him in the face, a lot," Clint suggests to Steve. "Wish I could help."

Steve pulls Thor off of Loki and sighs. "I appreciate the sentiment, Agent Barton," he says. He pauses. "Wait a minute."

According to the digital clock on the wall, they should be hearing the ground rumbling already, but all he hears are the seagulls and the breeze.

"Is the loop getting longer?" he asks Thor, who frowns.

"I am not sure," he replies.

"What did you just say?" Dr. Selvig asks over the intercom.

Steve tries to think back. "I think we might be going longer between resets."

There's a rustling of paper and a furious clicking of keys on the other end of the line.

"If the loop is expanding, then it's not actually stable. That could be good, but it's probably bad," Dr. Foster says. "Captain, or Thor, one of you, do you remember when exactly everything ended the last few times?"

They shake their heads. There's a silence, and Steve says out loud, "No ma'am. Sorry."

"Haha, Captain America called you ma'am."

"Zip it. Anyway, if we can calculate the rate at wh—"

The connection splutters. Steve slams a palm down on the counter.

"Hey, no, it's okay, okay," Tony says. "I think I might have something."

Steve is overcome with a surge of hope.

"But I want to run it by Bruce first," Tony adds, but has the decency to look penitent when Steve decides to bury his head in his hands.

"You just want to sound cool in front of the ladies," Clint says.

"I want to impress Thor's science-y girlfriend, so?" Tony says. Thor breaks off from glaring at Loki and narrows his eyes at Tony. Loki's not dead yet—Steve can see his lip curling. Tony smiles, all charm, and claps Steve on the shoulder.

"Here's the plan. Just go mobile next time, set it all up on the jet, don't worry about the storm and go as fast as you can so we can meet Natasha and Bruce halfway," he tells Steve. "Don't forget to bring Surly."

"Just stab him in the face a few times first," Clint calls out. Tony nods vigorously. Steve props his head up. Hawkeye and Iron Man agreeing on something. It's a miracle.

"The two of you remember Greenland's file numbers, right? And Fury's passcodes for the uplinks. Give Jarvis the parameters and abracadabra, skeleton key. That'll save us a few minutes."

Steve nods. "Yeah, okay." He would feel better with his entire team around on the one hand; he's dreading having to see them all hurt on the other. For him, the serum means that even the worst knocks to his head don't leave anything permanent behind. No one even knows if he will die, the way that everybody else does, anyway. There's no scar tissue on his heart. Steve can't even quantify damage the way that everyone else does; normal is a country that's long disappeared. Finding himself repeating the end of world, seeing people he knows from this new era die, only to come back, unchanged, unaware, makes him sick to his stomach. It frightens him to death, but death isn't letting him off the hook. It's supremely unfair and it doesn't matter. Steve just keeps having the same conversations over and over again. Thor says it's all the same to him but he's wearing down even though he looks fine on the outside. Even Loki stops fighting.

They keep having the same conversations. With the help of Thor's incredible memory, Steve painstakingly keeps track of the hypotheses and conclusions that the others come up with, parrots it back to them. The loop is elastic only up to a certain point, Dr. Selvig suggests. Like a rubber band. That's emanating from the initial event—Loki's initial mischief, they presume, though Loki himself remains unforthcoming. What happens if the rubber band snaps, no one knows, and no one wants to wait around to find out.

The scientists in Greenland along with Tony—and Bruce and Natasha, the times when they can be reached, piece together a plan to augment the jet's scanning capabilities and track the phenomena, using Steve and Thor's original observations of the disastrous attempt to call the Bifrost as a guide.

The first time they meet up with Natasha and Bruce—not too far from the clearing where they had tried to activate the Bifrost, although Steve tries not to think about that—he nearly cries and just manages to blink everything away at the last second. Steve spends the following couple of minutes sniffing continuously and wondering why there is not a single handkerchief in his many belt pockets.

Bruce tolerates the hug from Tony, who is obviously thinking, why not, and turns to look around at the rest of the group. A too-long moment passes before Steve awkwardly offers him a handshake. Thor solemnly follows suit. Clint just waves once from the pilot's seat, not to be distracted from a hostile discussion with Agent Hill about satellite network protocols and aircraft control overrides.

"I was just having a sundae," Bruce says in the same tone he uses for phrases like "Yes, I also think that this is a bomb." Steve has never been more glad to see him or Natasha, who walks in after him through the open hangar doors, a computer tablet tucked into the crook of one arm.

"We tuned all our sensors to the frequencies you sent over, but we're not getting anything," she says, and nods at Bruce.

"That's actually cause for concern. There's always background noise, something," Bruce says. He pushes his glasses up his nose. "So. . . we have some kind of space-time event that's isolated itself into a pattern."

"A repeating pattern," Steve says.

"Did Foster or Selvig have anything new for us before you lost them?" Natasha asks. She glances at Loki, who pointedly ignores her in favor of staring at his drawn-up knees and coughing blood.

"They think the event is supposed to be growing at an exponential rate, but it's being checked by some kind of negative feedback," Tony says.

Steve looks at Loki. "Every time. You said or did something different."

"If that is how your feeble mind can make sense of it, yes," Loki says, not lifting his eyes.

"What were you trying to do?" Steve asks. Loki sneers and doesn't answer. Tony goes directly to the point. "What's the solution?"

"What's your question?" Loki asks in turn. Tony holds up his right arm and charges it up.

"This, times two," he says over the blaster's whine. "Maybe multiply it by a factor of rockets in your face."

In response, Loki lunges for Tony at the same time Tony brings his other arm up. Steve breaks them up before they tear the ship apart. It always turns really ugly when they manage to get to each other. Tony stomps off to invent something and Loki curls up into a ball and doesn't stop coughing. Thor sadly shakes his head and Steve finds that he has nothing to say. Natasha looks up from her computer as the ground begins to rumble.

"What does it mean when we say 'supposed to be growing at an exponential rate'?" she asks, calm. "Wouldn't that eventually work out so that we're fine? More or less."

Tony's suit powers up to full. The sound reverberates off the walls of the ship. Crashes and thunder echo from the outside. "Or. It's building up to something."

"Like a countdown, but in reverse," Bruce says.

"That's clever. Like fish," Loki says out of the blue, delirious.

They all look at him.

"It's a bad thing," Steve says.

"You are correct," Bruce says. They only have a few seconds more, and then it ends but not before the Hulk reaches Steve in a blind fury, and then Steve wakes up again, a scream stuck in his throat. He stays there for the first time. He hears Loki die, Tony land, Clint walk up and ask him what's wrong. He sits up when Thor comes to sit next to him, while the other two Avengers look on in bafflement.

"It is a vile thing, this," Thor says tiredly. "Death that leads only to death." His voice grows pained. "And worse, that which you suffer. But I cannot help but feel it yet a perverse privilege, to live and die beside you, my friends—"

"Too many times," Steve says.

"More than once," Thor says. "I never dreamed that I would be more than a single lifetime with you all."

"This isn't much of a life."

"It distresses you more, I know."

Steve can't help the shiver.

"Our shared days are not long. The span of a breath. But I am, truly," Thor says, standing and offering Steve his hand, "grateful. For every moment."

Steve lets Thor help him up and dusts himself off and holsters his shield.

"Well, that was a bizarre and touching conversation," Tony says.

"You guys should get a room next time," Clint says. "By the way—looks like Loki's dead."

Steve allows himself a sigh and debriefs them. The loop repeats and repeats. Steve thinks they're getting close, but even with the frankly astonishing advances that they make, what Bruce terms a countdown weighs on his mind. He jolts awake and the world ends and Steve wakes up and more than once Tony says to him, "I believe you, because there's no way you turned into an engineering genius overnight. No offense."

"None taken," Steve tells him, and it's always true. In any case, becoming a genius overnight doesn't seem much of a stretch when compared to going from skinny Steve Rogers to Captain America. If he could go back—. Those times that turn out spectacularly bad, he thinks up things he would do if he just could. He always comes back to the alley where he found a chewed-up yellow pencil back when he was seven, where the neighborhood boys were going to break his wrists but didn't get to. He'd tell him, I'm a soldier now, a killer now. The Bucky he knew back then wouldn't have been impressed. He would have told him: You gotta dream bigger. You've got good hands. I bet you could learn to draw most anything.

Steve wakes up and the fantasy of finally getting to go home rots; that's fine. But if his most cherished memories turn bitter, his heart will break, and he's afraid he's not going to last. He can't even go forward anymore; time keeps traveling in all the wrong directions. It worries Steve that this entire mess is giving him odd ideas.

"It's not good to stop believing that you'll die someday," he says during one of the better loops. Loki is only half-dead as opposed to dead, meaning Thor is only brooding most of the time instead of being devastated all of the time. They sustain a long and productive conversation with Erik Selvig and Jane Foster and even Dr. Foster's assistant, Darcy. They manage to meet up with Natasha and Bruce and commandeer the necessary resources from SHIELD without aggravating Nick Fury's herniated disk even once.

"Maybe if you're a soldier," Tony says, humming. He pauses in the middle of weaving together a veritable sculpture of wires in colors Mondrian might have picked out.

"Oh. You're actually worried about something like that. How many times, did you say?"

"A lot," Steve replies. He honestly cannot remember how many times, now, that he's gone through the loop. "Thor's upset because we keep dying terrible and meaningless deaths, not because time is repeating itself," he says. And even then, he thinks.

"That's freaky," Tony says. "But also nice of him. These magic aliens."

"You're kind of a magician I think, though, with all of this," Steve says, and then can't help but smile a little at Tony's absolutely scandalized face.

"You better take that back, Captain Spanglypants," Tony says. He gives Steve a suspicious look. "You'd tell me if I was reusing the same jokes, right?"

"Of course," Steve lies with a straight face. Tony rolls his eyes, not buying it.

Steve takes up the thread with Natasha in the next loop, out of earshot of Tony and Bruce constructing a transmitter in the middle of the woods of New Hampshire while Thor helps Clint strip the jet for parts. Loki's body, covered with Thor's cape, looks small laid out next to them in the tall grass.

"If you're immortal, maybe you just don't perceive any qualitative difference between hours and years," Natasha says.

"Even years can mean nothing, huh."

Natasha shrugs. "Flip it around. Maybe to them what happens in a matter of minutes is just as significant as what happens over a century. It's weird, but they're aliens."

"That's plenty weird."

"I would only worry about it insofar as they act like us," Natasha advises, matter-of-fact. "Humans are weird, too."

"That's true," Steve says. He wonders if Bruce is going to drop the ratchet on Tony again, but figures it's not worth mentioning since he's still in his armor. The silence stretches.

"Anyway, yes," Natasha affirms, it seems to Steve, mostly out of professional courtesy and not pity. "Clint ranks higher on the scale though, if that makes you feel any better."

"I'm not even going to ask about Tony," Steve says. He squints at Natasha, not quite daring.

"I'm not weird," Natasha states pleasantly.

Steve nods in complete and total agreement and hurries back to help Thor and Clint with the jet and tell Tony and Bruce what they told him they were going to do to make this work, though his conversations with Bruce remain slightly awkward even pinned to a seemingly endless loop. Steve doesn't quite know how he should feel about Bruce Banner, about where their differences lie, where the faultlines diverge. They never seem to have much to say to one another, not even when they have all the time that time gone mad affords.

"Rage blackouts, huh," Bruce says, crouched at the base of the transmitter he and Tony have been putting together for a very long time by Steve's reckoning.

"Yeah, some of those," Steve says. "Just lately. Any tips?"

Bruce shrugs. "Not really. Haven't gotten tired of being angry yet, I guess."

"I'm tired," Steve admits.

"You won't give up though, will you?"

Steve grinds his palms into his eyes. "I don't think I know how."

"You shouldn't say things like that," Bruce admonishes gently. "This world is nothing if not a relentless teacher."

Steve lets his hands fall. He raises his head and climbs to his feet. "Thanks for the pep talk, Doc," he says, sincere.

Bruce adjusts his glasses. "Anytime, Cap."

The immeasurable storm hits, everything blacks out, Steve wakes up.

They're pushing four hours now and the extra hours make a huge difference in terms of their planning, but the dire feeling in Steve's middle gets proportionately worse as the loop stretches on. The memory of the part where he watches everyone else die and the memory of the part when he dies keep inching closer to the real thing. In desperation he tries to get the dying Loki to talk, and even when Loki stays utterly silent he must be making some kind of impression because, one time, Loki is there one moment and gone the next. Steve blinks dully at the empty space, covered with a thin greasy film that smells and looks like blood and sheens over him and the interior of the jet. Thor thinks it might have been teleportation, but is too upset to go into just how or why. Loki doesn't try teleporting again after that, doesn't even pretend to be having a good time, and in the end, it's not Steve's talent for persistence that moves them along, it's Loki's loathing of ennui.

Steve jolts awake and climbs out of the wall of the post office and helps evacuate the town and brings everyone up to speed. He gets everyone talking with one another and started on cobbling together a device in the middle of New England's verdant woods that can take stock of the phenomenon. Steve is taking a break from frantically towing materials for Bruce and Tony to use and helping them up to the point where he helped them to the last time and just getting in their way after that. He finishes for the time being and sits next to where Loki is lying down, covered in darkening blood and Thor's vermillion cape. From just beyond what used to be the jet's hangar doors, Thor looks at them dejectedly before continuing on his way, tugging a beam out of Steve's line of sight.

Even nearly dead, Loki doesn't so much sprawl over the floor of the gutted jet as puddle over it like the spoiled prince that he is, or was. The story Thor had told him—only once—still saddens Steve.

"I'm bored," Loki suddenly says.

"Then make yourself useful and shut up," Steve says.

"There is only so much pain the situation permits my brother and I am bored," Loki says. He reminds Steve of a rat near death from hunger. There's a roaring in his ears and when the sound dies down he's holding Loki up by the throat against what remains of the ship, but Loki doesn't resist; the gray cast to his face doesn't change into contempt or anger or fear or anything.

"How can you do this? Do you see what you're doing?"

"I don't really care about that," Loki replies, despondent. Steve doesn't know whether to laugh, or cry, or do both. He settles on half-heartedly shaking Loki and letting him drop to the floor.

"You ought to let Clint stab you in the eye with an arrow," he says just for the sake of saying it, for the uncomplicated satisfaction of spite, predictable in all its parts and processes, honey to instant ash. Loki stares into the air for several seconds before mumbling that he might as well. To Steve's surprise, in the next handful of loops when he saves him, Loki goes for Clint and gets an arrow in the eye, and each time Clint shudders as he recoils because Loki doesn't scream, doesn't speak, just stares blankly. On the third loop Steve throws his shield, knocks Loki down, gets the spear in his shoulder but doesn't let go. Thor has to grab Loki by the scruff and Steve by the front of his bloodied uniform so that he can pull them apart.

"Stop this. Help us," Thor pleads, taking Loki by the shoulders, heedless of the blood starting to soak his brother from collarbone to navel.

"It's not my doing, but his," Loki says. Steve goes very still.

"Stop. Lying," Thor says.

Steve searches Loki's face. "Because of me?"

Thor throws Loki to the ground. The workers filing out of the post office scream a little and hurry down the street. Thor turns to Steve. "Do not listen to him."

Steve stares past Thor. His chest constricts. "Is it because of me?"

"Hold your tongue," Thor tells Loki without looking at him. "Or I will rip it out."

Loki just smiles. He doesn't obey, naturally, but he doesn't answer Steve, either; instead he asks, "How long did the cold lough keep you? Perhaps that's how long we'll wheel along together."

Steve's insides roil. He repeats his question. Loki's eyes slide over to Thor and then back to Steve. "A worm like you?" he says, full of contempt. He purses his lips as if to spit, but starts coughing instead.

Tony approaches them on foot, Clint covering him from the rear. They're asking him what's going on, but Steve barely hears what they're saying. The world is tipping slantwise but he's still the same. The horizon line cuts across and it's all that he can fathom, the ship twinned on the surface of the sea just before the impact that leaves him just the pelagial for a coffin and nothing else, not even the simplicity of dirt or the memory of the pain that burrows in from every direction, of shattered bones and shredded muscles trying to knit themselves together on the inside, torn-up skin trying to pull itself together on the outside. His body healing faster than the water could freeze but not being able move his limbs right or push past the metal trapping him under, fight water so cold that it burned as it saturated his lungs. His last memory from before is of being cut open by fire, not ice.

Dr. Erskine told him it wouldn't be easy. Steve's memory of the words now knell like a curse but drives the darkness away—that's what he has left, why the past abounds, how the future can be borne: shadows to see them by, the pale solace of the voices of people who believed that they saw something in him, helped him see it for himself, made him true.

"There's more than one."

Tony's hand waving in front of his face halts. Tony's puzzled face replaces the hand. "More than one what?"

Steve ignores him and pulls himself up using Tony's arm as an anchor. "This is more than one loop that we're in," he says, accusatory. "Otherwise I would be waking up to the moment I hit you with the shield the first time."

Thor's expression clears by a fraction. "Tell us what you have been doing," he says to Loki in a calm and even voice. At its core there's something more fraught than the cold that Steve is carrying around. Both Clint and Tony tense up, not understanding what is happening. Steve gives them the bare-bones account and has them set up all the necessary lines of communication from the previous loops. Loki feigns boredom and coughs loudly and purposefully gets blood everywhere. Even after all this time, Steve still can't quite read him. When they're in the air and en route to meet up with Natasha and Bruce, Loki finally talks.

"I learned of a fish. I wished to catch it. It proved to be poor sport."

"Fishing?" Tony exclaims, appalled. "This is a new low, even for you."

Loki doesn't seem to have it in him to pretend that he's having any fun at this point. He prevaricates only as a formality, and Steve and the others learn that Loki's attempt at snaring this interstellar phenomenon as it passed through their solar system went awry when Steve interfered with the summoning by way of his shield—the original sequence of events that also resulted in the destruction of the world due to the throes of the fish, but was reactivated when Loki tried to mitigate the damage. It was his intention to redo the sequence, Loki claimed, but he had inadvertently tethered the sequence they're experiencing now to what he calls the seed. And Steve's feeling proves correct; it's not going to last.

"Because this decrepit planet cannot sustain the force of—"

"The rubber band."

"—the reverb," Loki says, glaring.

"So it was my fault," Steve says.

"Loki shouldn't have been fishing here in the first place," Tony says in indignation. Steve is not quite sure if Tony is affronted by the fishing or Loki or both.

"What does this fish do?" Clint asks.

"It is not really a fish, but I must give it some name so that your puerile brains can comprehend what I was trying to attain," Loki says disdainfully between coughs. "It can be caught, and harnessed, and will give its master limited control over his immediate environs of time and space."

"You would be able to teleport."

"Very good, Odinson. I see you did not sleep through all of Allfather's lessons."

"You did teleport, before," Steve says, narrowing his eyes.

Loki shudders delicately. "Once is enough. No weir may contain it. I have been trying, you know. To undo our prison," Loki says. He waves a stained palm in Steve's face.

"That's a lot of blood shed when we could have been helping each other," Steve says, nauseated. "You are a real bastard."

"The perils of refinement. As if any of you could understand."

"I know you think we're all revolting," Steve says with a snort.

"I find you quite terrifying, Captain," Loki says with a sneer, prompting a full-scale argument; Steve is a little mortified that others in his team feel so strongly about defending his honor. Dr. Foster's voice cuts through the hubbub. "You are such an ass."

Loki coughs extra obnoxiously.

They have close to seven hours—six—five—and Loki is full of ideas now that he has decided that it would be entertaining to actively get in their way. What's scary is that at certain points, Steve would swear that Loki and the other scientists are speaking the same language.

"If we could turn the fish inside out while turning the universe out for a loop—"

"Ah. Bahamut," Bruce says, phoning in from Natasha's plane. "The celestial fish as big as the universe."

"Close. Levered and winnowed, you see?"

"Oh yeah. More torque," Tony says.

"No, Tony," Bruce says at the same time that Dr. Foster says, "Well..."

Dr. Selvig breaks in. "We are somehow centered and centripetal. Then what we need to do is move ourselves to the edge of the flywheel—"

"Set it in motion! Escape velocity!" Dr. Foster says. The sound of a high five being exchanged comes through the intercom, and then a second high five as Darcy says, "Take that, time loop!"

"And cut it," Loki says from where he is lying on his side, bleeding and sweating but this time somehow still composed and amused. "That might restore the flow."

"I really hope so," Steve says.

"Strap in," Clint says, taking them down. "Last stop."

On the ground somewhere between Newfoundland and New York, they land at the same time Natasha's ship comes to a rest on the ground, and set up the latest iteration of the transmitter, a sleek needle eons removed from the rickety pile of wires and girders Tony and Bruce had first built.

"You, or rather we, are going round and round inside the reverb," Dr. Foster says. "We'll borrow the Bifrost's gestalt to leapfrog us over. I'm sending you Eric's calculations for the angles—" She taps some keys on her side and from the only machine that's still intact inside the jet, a printer, a document lands in the receiving tray just as the whole thing splutters to a stop. Tony contemplates the piece of paper. "I could just kiss you, Drs. Foster and Selvig."

"I'll allow for error, Mr. Stark, not harassment," she says. "Hey, Thor, good lu—"

"Yes'm," Tony says, and shuts down the static-filled connection.

"Good riddance," Loki says, too tired to sound properly malicious. He looks nervous for the first time Steve can remember.

"All the SHIELD satellites are a-go," Natasha says. "Ready?"

Steve tightly grips the straps on his shield and nods. "Thor, you're up."

Taking a deep breath, Thor raises Mjolnir and calls for the bridge to appear. The jagged line of the Bifrost curves around what they now know to be the inner shell of the time loop, what Loki calls the imprint of the fish that shrouds the planet. They're going to try to channel the energy from the Bifrost through the transmitter in concert with Mjolnir and decouple the bonds that keep the loop closed. The transmitter soundlessly kicks into full gear and the Bifrost slowly divides into innumerous strands and haloes of light, like a silkworm cocoon or a spider's egg dissolving in water. One of the strands descends on the hammer like a snowflake falling.

The ground begins to wave.

"This is it!" Steve shouts, going down in spite of his best efforts. "Take cover and—"

Loki lurches upright and reaches out to claw a hand into the transmitter. The Bifrost blossoms all at once, instantaneously netting the sky. Loki grins, bloodless and triumphant. "You are all. So. Simple!"

"Loki! Have you gone mad?" Thor cries.

"Too easy," Clint mutters as he hangs on for dear life.

"Sorry to bust in on your relationship drama, but we've got a situation here!" Tony yells, clinging to a massive slab of earth that's rising up.

Steve closes his eyes, just for a moment, and then scrambles up, leaps over the small mountain of rocks and dirt suddenly in his way and runs towards the transmitter. He throws his shield and this time it connects and finds his arm on the ricochet back, ripping through the spindrifts of pure energy tumbling down from the bridge. The rip bends and he's falling down a funnel made of luminescent strands that look like the transmitter made perfect and whole in ideas only, without recourse to matter. The outlines of the other Avengers percolate through the circular wall of light that demarcates the center from the rest of time's wheel. Steve's shield comes to a perpendicular rest against a line no different from something he could draw, if he were to be made infinite. Maybe the next time he wakes up, Steve thinks.

"A fish of a crucible, a crucible of a fish. Everywhere is the center," Loki says from the other side. A smear of blood mars his jaw. "I told you. Refining."

Ah, Steve thinks, feeling resigned and out of fashion. Here of all places is something he knows deep down in his marrow, doesn't need to have anyone explain, alchemy. "I don't believe that you planned it like this. Getting yourself stuck."

"I have you to thank for that," Loki says with genuine displeasure. "A germ that does not know its place in time. But as you have seen, I have managed."

"Seems like a whole lot of trouble for nothing, teleportation."

Loki's eyes widen and he throws back his head with a guffaw. "Even Thor could do that if he would only learn to apply himself, as I did that first untimely day," he says. "I am after a prize far greater. Don't you want to go back?"

Steve freezes. "What?"

"I aim to traverse oceans, not streams. Transform the glaciers into cataracts or the rapids into sweet-tempered eddies. Depositing you back in what should have been yours would be child's play. I know you miss them. Your family, friends," Loki says, the last sentence brittle.

All around them, reality lies in tatters. There's only a single line, made of all the other lines, to keep it together. "What will happen to them?"

"It will not concern you."

"You mean everything would still fall apart."

"Long after you are dead. You lose nothing."

Steve contemplates the line. It's not a really line at all, he realizes. Loki's face twists. "Don't," he says, low. "You don't know anything."

"Don't worry," Steve says, pushing the edge of his shield into the line-that-is-not, making a cut in the circle,  "I know this."

The light flares and holds steady even as everything else breaks apart, like a carbide lamp giving form to the dark. Its edge sweeps by them in the kind of line that makes for a perfect circle, a broad arc, something like a lychgate hung over the entire Earth. The ground crumbles around them and the overwhelming sound starts to extinguish them, one by one. Steve grabs Loki by the arm as they go catapulting into an abyss.

"Let go!"

"Not leaving anyone behind, not even someone like you!"

"You don't even like it here!" Loki yells.

"It won't always be like that," Steve yells back. It's not Loki who needs convincing. "I'll see what's so great about it!"

"Not before you break," Loki hisses. "I'll see you shatter."

"Even if you live forever, I don't think you will," Steve says, and then there's no more sound, nothing at all but light, neither warm nor cold. The impossibly bright light grows and consumes them. It looks like the light that reflected off his Ma's favorite darning needle and the marigold glow from the old lamp on the sideboard, like the shine of all those things he saw from the lumpy bolster on the floor scrubbed to an inch of its life. The light glimmers into a crescendo of sound. It's something like alchemy; maybe some dream that he forgot. It's some song he first heard on the radio when he was a tot and doesn't recall until his mother hums it, kneading dough at their kitchen table early one Sunday morning, when the dawn is clearing the skyline.

Steve wakes up. He closes his eyes and opens them again and rolls to one side with a groan and bumps into Loki, flat on his back and still coughing, but as if he has a cold, not death at his door. Out the corner of an eye Steve sees Loki wiping his mouth, momentarily disconcerted when there's no blood. He looks at the back of his hand thoughtfully. When he sees Steve looking, he glares.

"Now the river is every which way again," Loki putters. "What a waste." He grimaces in pain and stands up. He plants a heel on Steve's chest—by accident while trying to find his balance, then as though he had meant to from the beginning—and presses down. His left hand twitches for a spear that isn't there. Steve looks; it's on the far side of the street, below the straight wooden slats of the wall of the post office. The workers on the inside peer out at them from the windows.

"You fouled my plan."

"I think, you got it wrong the first time," Steve counters. He doesn't bring his hands up, keeps them at his sides. "I think I, just fixed it for you."

A slow smile spreads over Loki's face. He doesn't deny it, but the smile turns cruel. "Do you want a reward? Go on, then. Ask of me anything."

Steve doesn't really need to think it over. "Please leave, and don't come back," he says.

Loki's fake smile melts into a look of pure ire, and then he's gone. Steve listens to Tony headed in his direction. He's still gazing up at the blue sky when Tony drops Clint before landing a few feet away.

"Are you okay? It looked like Loki got you pretty good from where I was." Tony surveys the line of buildings behind the post office. "Which way did he go? How did he do that?"

"You went flying," Clint says when he makes his way over, more impressed than worried. "Good job on that last hit."

"Can we get Natasha to bring Bruce in?" Steve asks out loud.

Tony's cheerful expression turns into a mild scowl. "No one's bothering Bruce if he doesn't want to be bothered."

"Nope," Steve says, agreeing. "Tell him we're having an ice cream social and that he is cordially invited."

"Uh huh... did you hit your head by any chance? How many blasters am I holding up? Do you know where we are?"

"No one told me Hell would be beautiful," Steve says, mostly to himself.

"Should've paid more attention in art history class, Cap," Tony says, not missing a beat. He lifts open his helmet and looks down, troubled, defiant. "It's all we've got."

Steve eases up into a sitting position and reaches for his shield. "Yeah," he says. He sees Thor ambling towards them and waves.

"You sure you're okay?" Clint asks.

"I'm okay," Steve replies, rising to his feet. "Get everyone together and I'll tell you all about it."

Steve's story would be fantastic and unbelievable, even with Thor's corroboration, except for the fact that he's apparently turned into some kind of science wunderkind—Steve secretly thinks it's more trouble than its worth, geometry is all he really needs—and the fact that his remarks help Jane Foster and Erik Selvig, bemusedly making themselves available for a conference call, make readings of the atmosphere that SHIELD immediately deems top secret at the level, Natasha says later, that Maria Hill has nicknamed 'eyes only with extremely extreme prejudice, emphasis on the extremely.'

That particular debriefing is like a spring breeze and Steve says so; he lets everyone know that they should debrief more often. He wouldn't mind it at all if the meeting ran over a few hours, what are a few hours? And the paperwork is, in point of fact, lovely. Amazing, even. Thor has to practically carry him out of the conference room so that they can go back to the tower for some well-deserved ice cream.

"Cap. That is messed up," Clint says, wearing dark circles under his eyes from sparring with Agent Hill over their motions to revamp Avengers-related flight protocols.

Steve doesn't look up from the form that he's filling out in full appreciation of the sheer variety that SHIELD command uses in its day-to-day operations. He feels as though he's been washed and wrung clean of all worry and he's going to bask in the illusion for a little while. He enjoys his newfound peace with paperwork, doesn't even mind that it is likely temporary. He's enjoying the euphoria.

"Thanks for not giving up," Natasha says.

Steve shakes his head. "Couldn't have done it without the rest of you."

"So Loki can teleport now. That's great," Bruce says morosely.

Tony commiserates. "Time for me to destroy all my dear diaries."

Steve is horrified. "Oh, don't do that."

Tony puts on the blank expression that means he is under no circumstance going to burst into peals of laughter, but for once Steve doesn't mind it at all.

"Stop being a jerk," Natasha tells Tony.

"Hey, who is in charge of the frozen treats here? That's right."

"It was worth fighting for," Steve says to his spoon. He looks up from making steady progress on his second bowl to see his team looking distraught in varying degrees and Tony looking like he might almost cry. Steve hastily ushers in the subject of his newfound brilliance, sort of, at particle physics.

Thor determinedly heaps Steve's bowl with scoop after scoop of ice cream at the end of his mini-lecture. "It was you who kept us from despairing. Thank you."

"Don't mention it," Steve says, wry, hearing 'gods' unspoken again.

"It wasn't all bad," Thor humbly says. When Steve makes a face Thor just smiles, kind. Always after the goodbye for you, Steve thinks. You look at us and we're already gone. What Natasha had said, so long ago now, comes to mind. Maybe we're always here, he thinks. Thor smiles at him as if he knows what he's thinking, sad only a little, joyful only a little, inexorable and not of this world.

"We are always coming to an end," Thor confides. "A place and a time where all make merry, where only sorrow sleeps."

"Some of us might be headed to different places, big guy," Steve says, rueful.

"Nevertheless," Thor stubbornly says.

In the dream that doesn't change, he wakes up and everything is new. If his strange and terrible luck holds up, he might even end up living forever. When he next opens his eyes everything might just be new. He knows that, and even though he knows that, he knows that he's still going to get back up. His eyes will open. All this and all that and in the end he's still that same stupid kid from Brooklyn. Steve laughs and it's a good sound, like the lost world and this world all beautiful light and beautiful sound, unbroken and soft.

"But sure," he says. "You can save me a seat."

• • • • •

End