Notes: In which we come to the end, with further nods to Being Human canon, especially some of the specifics of character, as we do. Part of the dialogue in the beginning of the chapter has been adapted from the show.

This is quite a short chapter, but for pacing reasons I didn't want to roll it into the previous one. Thanks to everyone who's been reading, I hope you've enjoyed it!

Warnings: For language.

Chapter Twenty-Four

"What's that?" Annie asked, her voice choked and breathless.

It was a door. A perfectly ordinary-looking wooden door- really quite pretty, as these things went, with a shining brass knob and panels of stained glass through which light glowed.

Loki- staring at first with blank incomprehension, and then dawning horror- felt his heart first lurch and then actually stop beating. He did not feel it start again.

George and Mitchell both seemed to be struck dumb, and Annie went very still. After a moment, she gently extricated herself from Loki's suddenly nerveless grasp, and sat down abruptly on the edge of the sofa. Scamp, in turn, sat on Annie's feet, pressing against her as if to defend against whatever was on the other side of the door.

"Oh my God," Annie said softly, staring at the door. "It's here."

"So that's it," George said, his voice shaky. "That's... death."

Annie was wide-eyed as she looked up at her friends. "Do I... do I pack?"

"No," Mitchell said softly, his eyes also pinned to the door. "I mean... I don't think so. I think you just go as you are."

"What is it, on the other side?" George asked, his eyes beginning to overflow. "Is it something good? Or... something else?"

"It is something good," Loki assured them, his voice dismal, as he walked over to sit on the other end of the sofa. Seeing the others looking at him, he forced his lips to twitch into a smile and pointed out, "How could it not be?"

Annie looked at him, then turned back at the door. Her face twisted in anguished indecision as she pressed her clenched hands to her mouth. After a moment she dropped them and blurted,

"Oh- fucking hell!"

George, eyes streaming, made a flappy gesture and said reproachfully, "Eugh... you might want to have different last words."

"I don't- Do I have to go?" Annie asked plaintively. She looked around at the others. "Do I?"

Mitchell spread his hands helplessly. "It was your unfinished business. That's why you were still here. And now it's- "

"Finished," Loki said dully. "It was your reason for staying, and now it is complete."

Once, lifetimes ago, Annie had looked up into his eyes, had spoken of having a purpose to keep her in the mortal world. She had said to him, "I've sometimes wondered if it was you."

It had been a beautiful thought, but it had never been true. He should have known it could not be true: it was not a purpose, but something unfinished in her life that kept her here. Loki had not been of importance to her in life, had not even known her, and so he could not be the reason she stayed.

Annie's cheeks were wet and her eyes stunned as she looked at her friends. Mitchell was firmly self-controlled, although his dark eyes were heartbroken. George was weeping openly. Loki-

Loki wanted to fall to his knees and howl. He was not sure why he had not yet done so. His heart- which had so recently been at peace- felt almost as it had in those days before his fall to madness: filling his entire chest, choking him, burning and aching until he did not think he could stand it.

The difference, this time, was that he had no impulse to relieve his feelings by destruction. He knew it would not help. Crying would not either, probably, but it felt like a better option.

"Loki?" Annie said softly. She was looking at him as if for direction, for help in making her decision.

She would stay, if I asked her.

The thought passed through his mind, was recognized- in a brief flash of longing- as truth, and then rejected with loathing. He was a repulsively selfish being, but he was not quite as bad as all that. Not yet.

Not anymore. Not to Annie.

"You must- " There was something lodged in his throat, something with sharp corners, and he could hardly force words past it- "You must do what is right for you, Annie." He gathered all the self-control he could muster, and smiled at her. She frowned at him, not fooled, and so he abandoned the smile to speak plainly: "The business of your life is... You have settled it. You have no need to remain. You have, once and for all, dealt with Owen."

"Yes," Annie said, sounding dazed. Loki started to wring his hands together, stopped himself. Instead, he waited in silence to hear what she would say.

After a moment she stood, turned toward the door, and repeated, "I've dealt with Owen." Shook her head as though dazed, and said quietly, "That was it. All the things I've done since I died: fighting vampires, helping the Avengers, straightening things out with my family…" She turned and looked at Loki. "You… All that, and it turns out the whole reason I stayed here was to have it out with Owen."

She fell silent, stared at the door for what seemed to be a very long time, and then looked around at her friends, her expression unreadable. It chilled Loki to his bones, to look at Annie and have no idea what she was thinking.

Annie pressed her hands to her mouth again. Then, with sudden violence, she burst out,

"Fucking Owen."

Loki and Mitchell flinched in surprise, while George frankly jumped and let out a startled little shriek.

Giving no sign at all she had noticed their reaction, Annie went on passionately,

"That git- he controlled my life, then he ended my life, and now he gets to take my afterlife, too? So he gets everything? As if he's more important than, than the Avengers, or my family, or my friends, or- "

Once more, her eyes fell on Loki. He gazed back at her with who-knew-what expression of stunned surprise, trying to fight down the hope that bubbled up in his chest.

Annie made a violent pushing-away gesture and went raging on, "No. He's not taking one more thing from me. My life, and my family, and the family I might have had- that's all he gets. He can't take you away from me, too. He's not that important to me. He doesn't deserve to be that important to me."

Mitchell, who after all knew more about death than all of them put together, even Loki- had caused souls to pass over, or ghosts to appear, for nearly a hundred years- stirred uneasily.

"I think you should think a minute..." he began- and was ruthlessly overruled by polite, sweet, deferential Annie.

"That's what this means, you know," she said furiously. "It means that Owen- or anyway something to do with Owen- was more important to me in life than anything else. Well, that's not true anymore. That ended when my life did. He's not the centre of my existence now. I refuse to let him be." She turned to the door, as if it- or someone on the other side of it- could hear her. "Do you hear me? I refuse. He's not my reason for being, he's nothing to me. I've learned different, I've learned better, and he does not get to take one more thing away from me. I'm not going. Not now, and not like this. I'm not going."

There was a long moment in which no one spoke, and Loki was sure nobody breathed, either. Well- he did not, at least.

And then the light on the other side of the door began to intensify, until it was glowing so brightly that Loki had to close his eyes against it.

When he opened them again, he was looking at a book case. The door was gone.

Loki lurched to his feet with a kind of sobbing gasp of incredulous relief. A moment later he had been knocked stumbling backward and sat down again, hard. It was not so much the armful of Annie that did it- being hardly corporeal even to him, she did not weigh very much. No, it was George, landing on both of them and enfolding them in his arms, that did the trick.

Mitchell had remained on his feet, and was staring at the book case where the door had been. He looked torn between joy and apprehension as he turned to the pile on the sofa.

"There may be consequences," he warned, in a voice that was not quite steady.

"There are always consequences," Loki pointed out. "To everything." Mitchell nodded, Annie held out one hand, and a moment later the four friends- and Scamp- were piled up together on the sofa like a litter of kittens.

~oOo~

It was early Sunday afternoon before Loki got around to washing away the runes. As it turned out, doing so left such obvious clean patches on the old paint that Loki pulled the furniture away from the walls and got down to doing a really thorough job scrubbing them.

This was not a one-sorcerer job. Neither George nor Mitchell was terribly pleased at spending his Sunday at such a task.

"Couldn't you just leave them until we want to use them again?" George suggested.

"No," Loki told him. "They would fade, or rub off over time, and that would compromise their ability to conduct magic. Which would certainly affect the spell, so all sorts of peculiar things might result. We will be better served to apply them freshly any time we need them."

"And we won't need them often," Annie said, from her seat on the sofa where she was cuddling the kittens in an attempt to placate them- they had been terribly affronted, the night before, even after Loki had let them out of his bed chamber, and they still seemed rather cross and clingy. Loki wondered whether it was possible for a pet to inherit the ability to hold a grudge from its owner.

George, who had no such skill, smiled at Annie. "We can put them back as often as you'd like."

"I don't see why we can't just take them off with magic," Mitchell complained, wincing in disgust as he reached above his head to scrub and water ran from the sponge in his hand down into his armpit.

"We?" Loki repeated, his eyebrows climbing. Mitchell grinned and flicked water at him from the sponge. Loki flicked back, and then answered the real question: "The problem with using magic for a purpose such as this is, it can result in layers of conflicting spells being left behind, and sooner or later something unexpected is sure to happen." He gave the others a moment to consider exactly what "something unexpected" might be in this context, and then went on, "Since these markings can easily- " From his position standing on a chair, George uttered a rude sound. Loki ignored it and went on, "- be cleaned away without magic, it is safer to do it this way."

"So you always used to clean up your own chicken entrails? Very tidy, for a prince," teased Mitchell, who surely knew Loki had no inclination to use such materials in any spell- quite apart from the mess, the sort of spell that called for sacrifice, animal or otherwise, was considered dark magic on Asgard, and (that last week notwithstanding) Loki had not ever actually been a dark sorcerer.

"Yes," Loki said drily. "And feathers, too."

"Speaking of which," George said thoughtfully, "I was thinking of chicken pie for tea." Loki laughed and went back to his scrubbing, but Mitchell made a noise of agreement.

"We have leeks and mushrooms," said Annie, who for a person who could not eat still took a keen interest in kitchen matters. "Someone's going to have to go buy some chicken, though. And soon, if it's going to be ready in time."

"I will do so when we are finished here," Loki offered. "Perhaps you would accompany me?"

"I'd love to," Annie replied with a smile. "And- I just thought of something- " She gently scooted the kittens from her lap and went into the kitchen. There was a sound, as of someone ruffling through recipe books. After a moment she returned, waving a piece of paper. "My mother gave me her recipe, when I moved in with Owen. I made it once and he hated it."

"I foresee it becoming our favourite dish," Loki predicted, leaning over her shoulder to peek at the recipe.

"I was just thinking the same thing," Mitchell agreed, while George- who could only see the back of the sheet of paper- loyally remarked that it looked delicious.

Annie smiled at her housemates. "I'll stick it to the fridge with a magnet, so it's easy to find later."

"Wonderful," Loki agreed, smiling back at her. He had just crawled behind the television stand when someone knocked on the door.

Loki crawled back out, dropped the sponge into the bucket, and went to investigate- the door was unlocked at this time of day, but no one in the household was inclined to simply call, "Come in" to an unknown visitor. It had been some time since they had any trouble with hostile vampires, but even so it was wise to know who one was inviting into one's home.

"Thor!" Loki exclaimed in surprise, pulling the door open wider and stepping aside to admit his brother. "How good to see you!" He was not sure what exactly Thor was doing here, but that did not mean he was not glad to see him.

"Thor!" Mitchell called. "You can help us make our chicken pie!"

"Ooh, right," George exclaimed, clearly remembering the apple pie. Loki, remembering something himself, bolted up the stairs to his room. He came dashing back down a moment later.

"I forgot to bring this to you, before," he explained to Thor, holding out a strip of red and black. Thor took it with a smile, and then a look of confusion.

"What is it?" he asked, examining the carefully knotted threads.

"It is... I made it," Loki explained, beginning to feel rather silly. "It is- "

"Is that a friendship bracelet?" Annie demanded.

"Um," said Loki. "Well, yes. Some of the children were making them, and they showed me- "

Thor looked at the bracelet, then at the ones Loki was wearing, and smiled.

"Thank you, brother. It is beautiful."

Even Loki considered "beautiful" to be rather a stretch, but he was pleased Thor seemed to like it.

"I thought you could keep it with- wherever you keep the collar with the bell," he suggested. "It really would not be practical to wear with your armour."

"Perhaps not," Thor admitted. "And I would hate for something to happen to it, in a battle."

Better the bracelet than his brother, in Loki's opinion, but never mind.

"Have you come to visit?" he asked, trying to find a polite way of asking what Thor was doing here. "It is not that we are not delighted- " he added hastily.

"I have just been in Asgard," Thor explained. "After I left Jane and her friends, I returned home, and- " He looked very puzzled. "And when I arrived in Heimdall's Observatory, he asked me to return here, and carry a message for him."

"A message?" Loki asked, blankly. "What do you mean, a message? Has he seen something he feels I should know about?"

Thor made a large shrug of confusion, and replied, "Actually, it is a message for Annie." He turned to her. "He says that you have his pledge. Does that make sense to you?"

Annie smiled. "It does. Can you tell him thank you very much, when you go back? And can you stay and have tea with us this afternoon?"

Thor smiled in his turn. "I would be delighted." He looked around at the lounge. "And if you have need of me, perhaps I could help with your cleaning?"

~oOo~

When the lounge was clean, and Thor had heard of the confrontation with Owen and congratulated Annie appropriately, she and Loki left him making pastry while George and Mitchell cut up vegetables, and ventured out to purchase chicken and other groceries.

"We should probably get a cafetiere at some point," Annie remarked, as they entered the store, "and real coffee, for when Thor visits. He's too polite to complain, but I'm always sorry we only have instant coffee for him."

"Well, if we see one, we shall purchase it," Loki replied, touching his fingertips to his ear as he spoke, so as to give onlookers the impression he used a hands-free communication device.

They rounded the end of a row of shelves, and nearly collided with a familiar figure.

"Nina!" Loki exclaimed, steadying her basket as well as his own. "I am terribly sorry- "

"No, no, it was nobody's fault," Nina replied, perfectly nicely. "I hope you weren't carrying eggs or anything breakable."

"Fortunately, no," Loki replied with a smile. He was about to utter a further pleasantry when Nina looked past him and added,

"Hello again, Annie. It's nice to see you."

Annie's eyes went wide and startled. Fortunately, at just that moment a young man with a laden shopping cart came along and tried to squeeze past Annie and Loki down the aisle.

"Excuse me, miss," he murmured, and Annie stepped quickly out of the way with a- rather dazed- word of apology.

Luckily, Nina was on her way home to make biscuits for a book club gathering and could not linger. Even more luckily, she seemed too preoccupied with her list of required ingredients to notice Annie's manner as she said good afternoon, repeating that it was nice to see them both, and went away.

Fortunately, Annie had not sheltered a silver-tongued deceiver all this time without learning from him. She had need of such skills as they navigated the store, what with the humans around them smiling in passing, or excusing themselves as they reached past her, or simply behaving in general as though she was an attractive young woman they wished to acknowledge.

It really was fortunate Loki had made a list, or they might have left without half the items they had come to purchase, including the chicken. Once out of the store, Annie turned to Loki and spoke in an undertone.

"They can see me. Why can they see me?"

"I have no idea," Loki admitted, equally bewildered. And then something occurred to him. "Only... Annie, do you recall the night you remembered what Owen had done?" Suddenly grim, Annie nodded. "Well, when I...when I came to your room to speak to you... you were so distressed, and felt so low... Annie, it was as though you had become insubstantial, even to me. I could see through you- " He paused, remembering that horrible feeling, of imagining Annie would vanish like smoke.

Annie shivered. "I remember how I felt. Like I was... nothing."

Loki hastened to return to the point. "Yes. You felt like you were nothing, that Owen could have done such things to you. In spite of everything you have done for the world, for the Avengers, for your friends, there were still things... things that affected only you, that still hurt you and made you feel diminished. And now- now, you have settled them, as well as you can. You have made peace with your family. You have banished Owen, and, and sent away the door. You have made claim to that which is yours, so that no one can take it away without your leave. And perhaps that is what has caused- " He gestured, to her and to everything.

Annie looked stunned. "Mitchell said there would be consequences."

"He did," Loki agreed. "I confess, these were not the consequences I had in mind."

"No," Annie agreed. She glanced at him, and he knew they were both thinking the same thing: there would probably be other, less pleasant ones.

But still...

"As it is," he said thoughtfully, "it seems that, were I to kiss you right now, passing humans would see only a couple displaying excessive affection in public, as opposed to a lone madman making a spectacle of himself. Does it seem so to you?"

Annie's eyes lit up with mischief. "I think the only way to find out is to conduct an experiment."

"Indeed," Loki replied, as he leaned closer. "I think Tony and Jane would approve of our dedication to scientific- " The rest of his remark was lost as Annie caught him by the front of his jacket and pulled him toward her.

Jane and Tony really would have been proud of them.

After a long moment, Annie released him. Loki glanced around. "Hmm. Our theory seems to be upheld."

"So it does," Annie agreed. "I think it's time we went home and shared the results with the rest of the team."

"As you wish," Loki replied, picking up the bag of shopping. Annie took his other hand quite openly, and together they set off toward the pink house.

END

Note: Annie's visibility and behaviour here is mostly taken from Being Human canon: she refused on several occasions to cross over, and eventually became quite famous within the ghost world for that reason. I've left her invisible throughout the series so far, but in fact depending on her frame of mind she can be visible to humans, and I thought this was a good time to go there.

In the series, Annie's door first appeared when she got "closure" on Owen: he went mad after their encounter, and turned himself in to the police for "protection" against the monsters he feared would hunt him. Given what's happened in this series so far, and in this story, I preferred to make Annie's fate more a matter of Annie's own actions, and subject to Annie's own choices.

Thank you to everyone who read this! You are all much appreciated!