Broken Pieces

In which Jane and Loki have cut a swathe through the multiverse and chaos was left in their wake...

The companion to "Broken Things" - read that first. Reads as a series of one-shots. Lokane.

Then...

A flash of light fills the room even as Jane gasps against Loki's mouth. His hand has found its way under the cotton of her t-shirt, and his fingers are digging into the bare skin of her side with something like blind need. Her own arms are tangled around him, one hand gripping his armour to pull him closer while the other curls possessively around the back of his neck. They alone have escaped the boundaries of worlds, shouldn't they at least be allowed to have an uninterrupted moment to themselves?

"Jane!" the voice booms into the small space. There is a second during which their fingers curl and clench with something other than need and then their lips part from each other and they drag their unwilling gazes to the room's newest occupant.

"Loki?" Thor gasps, Mjolnir falling from his grasp and through the floorboards with a resounding crash.

Jane meets Loki's gaze and relishes the way their mouths curl into mirroring smirks. "Shall we?" he whispers.

"Why not?" she replies, leaning her forehead against his. She doesn't even think twice about the fact that they're leaving behind a Thor who has just witnessed his girlfriend and his supposedly-dead brother in a heated make-out session. She doesn't really care.

They're doing them all a favour, really.

- (Broken Things Chapter 20)

Now...

The First Piece: The Kitchen Needed Remodelling Anyway

Darcy is firmly of the opinion that everything is wrong. Everything is very, very wrong. Like, cataclysmically wrong. Like, Ragnarok wrong.

So it's fitting, really, that the blame for all of it sits squarely on Loki. Or maybe the Poetic Edda was just a very dressed-up version of prophecy. She could see that. She could really see that, actually. They got the part about Loki being a trickster right, after all.

She so owes Erik a big, fat apology. Like, the serious crow-eating sort of apology she usually saves for her father whenever he brings up the fact that she's spent five years pursuing a degree in political science while doing an internship in what-the-hell and still isn't anywhere close to having her Bachelor's degree. Yeah. That kind of apology.

Darcy chews a hangnail while she watches the meltdown that is Jane post-magical-reappearance-Loki pace a hole in the floor of their London flat. She looks like hell. Her t-shirt is wrinkled, her hair is a matted tangle, and her expression borders on stricken. She still looks better than Erik, who has apparently shrunk a few inches and turned a permanent, ashen shade of grey. Intern Ian has taking to fluttering in and out of the doorway to the kitchen in an unending loop of making tea and serving it and removing the cold, still-filled cups. No one wants tea. His British brain apparently refuses to accept this. It makes her cold heart feel oddly warm. But she doesn't really want to smile in the face of Jane's crisis. It seems selfish or something.

"What do I do?" Jane cries, wringing her hands for the eighty-millionth time. "Thor didn't say anything. He just stood there and blinked and then L..." The poor girl can't even say the guy's name. She just freezes with the word on her lips and blinks helplessly a few times. She opens her mouth once or twice before words begin to come out again. "He just disappeared. And then Thor flew out the window."

There is more to this story. Jane admitted the whole thing to her when she and Ian got home to find Jane curled up in the fetal position on the kitchen floor. Before Erik got back. Since Erik got back, this shortened, edited version is all she's committed to. In repeat. Like she's trying to convince herself that it is the whole story. Except that Loki randomly appearing in the kitchen wouldn't cause Thor to just fly off without a word or turn Jane into the Amazing Meltdown Woman.

Darcy folds her arms and leans against the couch. From the corner of her eye, she watches Ian skirt around the gaping hole that now allows them to peer into the flat below them. And the one below that. And into the basement. Goddamn meow-meow.

"Breath, Jane," Darcy says finally. "Clearly, Erik was right" - he looks up at her with eyes that almost seem to stare through her - "And Loki put some kind of spell-whammy on you. That explains the headache and the weirdness you put us all through."

"I don't remember any of that," Jane says in a whimper. She's said this before too. Shortly after relating the fact that what she does remember begins with a close-up of Loki's creepy-intense green eyes. While straddling him as he sits on one of their kitchen chairs.

She still kinda wants to laugh. Because Jane is so the type to get stuck between two brothers. Even if its two adopted brothers who are also gods. Even if one is a murdering, insane psychopath who fakes his own death on a regular basis. Darcy considers this for a moment. Nope, she thinks, Jane is the type especially in these cases. Its the unassuming mousy brown hair, she swears. Or the science. Always with the science.

"I still don't know what to do." And Jane is back to the totally unhelpful hand-wringing. "What if I've somehow caused an inter-realm political situation? What if..."

Aside from the brief moment Erik stared through her, he hasn't really shifted his gaze from Jane. His dilated pupils track her as she paces forward and back across the floor. He's a brilliant scientist guy too, and, in Darcy's opinion, he's taking way too long to ask the obvious questions here. "Why" - he begins in a shaky sort of voice - "Would Loki being in our kitchen cause a political situation?"

Darcy follows Erik's gaze to Jane's face. She's apparently frozen like a deer in headlights. "Uh," she stutters, "I'm... uh. I was... that is..."

Darcy rolls her eyes. "She was in a compromising situation. She thinks Thor might have thought she was, like, with Loki."

Erik's mouth becomes a thin, hard line and a twitch seems to have developed in his left eye. "What was so compromising?"

Jane blinks helplessly. She turns her head to Darcy.

Darcy sighs. She hates it when she has to be the adult in the room. "It doesn't matter," she announces. "What matters is that Thor might have thought Jane knew Loki was alive. He's probably feeling all betrayed or something. He has no idea that she was the victim here." She takes a deep breath. "And we haven't exactly seen Thor when he's feeling really angry."

Erik's expression is impassive, but one of his kinda old, wrinkly hands is balling up into a fist. "If he hurt you..." he begins, addressing Jane.

"No," Jane says a moment too fast, "I mean, he pushed me off... a chair. But I'm fine. I'm not... hurt." She's blinking all fast and furious and her eyes are a bit shiny. She's got some serious issue-feels going on in her head. Darcy gets it in an awkward kind of way. She's never actually seen this Loki up close, but she's seen the footage from New York. She's seen Thor's friends. Best she can tell, Loki is about as attractive as tall, dark, and handsome gets. Plus he has magic. Which is like science. Which is like pheromones for Jane. And seeing as how there's probably no lower blow a brother can inflict than stealing his brother's girlfriend, Jane is probably screwed. And literal gods know she could use it.

Darcy coughs back her laugh. All the eyes in the room turn back to her. "Nothing," she says, "Just a tickle in my throat."

"Here!" Ian exclaims, eagerly hurtling over the hole in the floor to hand her a steaming cup of tea.

"Thanks," she replies awkwardly. She accepts the cup by its handle, her fingers pinched around it in distaste. This relationship might be doomed after all. She hates this Earl Grey crap.

It's been days, and if the news reports are anything to go by, Thor has, in fact, not lost it on anybody. There's been no unnatural increase in lightning storms. There have been no muscle-bound gods landing on their balcony in rage-fits fuelled by jealousy or betrayal. There has been nothing.

Jane figures he's gone back to Asgard. Probably to deal with the crap that is his brother not actually being dead. Darcy wishes him luck with that. At the same time, she really wishes he'd just come back and get things set straight with Jane. Because she's been nothing but a nervous wreck.

Darcy is pouring herself a bowl of the sugary-goodness she calls cereal when Jane appears wraith-like behind her shoulder. "Darcy?" she asks before her presence has been fully processed. Darcy jumps and the cereal scatters across the table, rolling on down to the floor. A few stray pieces travel as far as their remodelled kitchen hole, disappearing into the abyss of apartment below.

"Good god, Jane!" she exclaims. "Now its raining Coco Pops on Mrs. Barlow!"

Jane looks at her as if kitchen messes are the least of her problems (which they probably are) and continues in the weirdly small voice she's been using lately, "Can I talk to you? Just for a minute?"

Darcy rolls her eyes. She's been waiting for this. "Yes, Jane," she says with exaggerated exasperation, "We can definitely talk. I've been wanting to talk. I've been waiting to talk. Because you are seriously in need of the talking."

Jane blinks uncertainly at her. "I am?" she whispers in a haunted tone that matches the shiftiness in her eyes.

"Yes," Darcy replies firmly, "You are."

She watches Jane sit shakily onto one of their kitchen chairs. She throws an extra glance or two at it as she approaches, as if sure that something (or someone) will magically appear there. A very literal fear, Darcy supposes. She'll make excuses for a friend.

"I..." Jane begins with a syllable that she leaves hanging in the air between them.

Darcy watches her uncritically, waiting for Jane to spit out the words. This is a surprisingly common problem for her, these sentences and ideas that are left hanging in mid-air as a new thought takes its place. This isn't quite that though. This is Jane uncertain. Jane without words at all.

"You... what?" she prompts finally. There are a lot of places Jane could go with this one, after all.

Jane gives her another shifty-eyed look. She curls up a little smaller in the chair. "Ican'tstopthinkingaboutLoki."

Darcy blinks. It takes her a moment to translate the string of syllables that poured out of Jane's mouth into actual words. She blinks again once she does.

And then she smiles. One of the sly ones she saved up for Jane whenever there was a cute guy around and she was totally hung up on her science and the thought of Thor. Because she totally called this. Didn't she? Didn't she call this? Her smile breaks into a grin.

Jane stares at her helplessly. "You're smiling? You're seriously smiling? What the hell is smile-y about this? This is... this is wrong. This is very, very, very wrong." Her words have a vehemence behind them that makes Darcy's smile just that much wider.

She doesn't look at Jane as she tips her Coco Pops into her bowl. "Methinks the lady doth protest too much," she quotes without looking up. She sets the box back on the table, reaching for the milk carton next, and pouring that into her bowl too. She grabs her spoon and shoves a big spoonful into her mouth before she lifts her eyes to Jane.

Jane stares at her incredulously. "Are you actually suggesting..." she trails off again, her eyes drifting somewhere to the side to stare at empty space.

"I'm suggesting that you like like him, yeah," Darcy says, shoving another spoonful of cereal into her mouth. "I mean, I don't think you realized it, like, at all, but when you got back from that dark world adventure thingy, every other thing was, 'Loki did this' and 'Loki did that' and 'Thor's hand was really gone until Loki somehow fixed it' and," she takes another bite, "You get the idea."

For whatever reason, Jane has turned very pale and is still staring into the far corner of the kitchen with a stricken expression. "I was – I am – curious about... how magic works." Her voice is a bit on the quiet side.

Darcy snorts. "Jane, the only reason you're into Thor is because he's from space. This guy is from space and has magic. It doesn't a take a genius to see where that fascination will end up."

Jane's gaze doesn't waver from the corner as she makes a strangely strangled noise. "You don't think I'm horrible?" she whispers without looking at her.

"Jane," Darcy begins with a sigh, "It doesn't matter what anyone thinks – not even what I think. You're a crazy, genius science person. I really doubt that you're supposed to waste your life worrying about that kinda crap. You're supposed to unravel the secrets of the universe and stuff. You're, like, above that sort of crap. Morality smorality." Darcy blinks. "Hey, do you think we could make s'mores later? I'd promise to clean the microwave after."

Jane is silent.

Darcy sighs. "Okay, so I will actually clean the microwave after. Happy now?"

Jane still doesn't answer.

Darcy drags her spoon across the bottom of her bowl, collecting the last few drops of chocolate-flavoured milk. "Fine, be lost in Lala-land. You know I still love you, boss lady."

In retrospect, Darcy wonders if "morality smorality" was actually the best advice she'd ever given. It seems a little... grey. Now that she thinks about it anyway. Perhaps Jane could do better than a psychopathic, would-be warlord. Then again, she can't imagine that Jane would actually let anyone get away with that kind of thing and still put out.

In any case, she can't say she's all that surprised that Jane left. She'd have packed a bag in a hurry if a sexy space-god wanted to take her sightseeing through all of time and space after all. It's a little Doctor Who, you know?

And who could resist that kind of offer?

Seriously.

Why can't this kind of thing happen to her?

a/n: So I kinda said I might do this. The one shot what-ifs of each world left behind in Broken Things. Expect a much lighter tone in these. Also, I apologize for any errors - these are just for fun so are totally unbeta-ed.