Summary: Five years were long alone and Jane was tired. The Snap took everything, leaving her with nothing but her thoughts and research that had no use to anyone but herself. But one day, Loki suddenly appears in her home, and against her better judgement, she makes the unexpected decision to nurse the Trickster back to health.
Disclaimer: I don't own Thor because if I did I wouldn't have treated Thor and Loki's respective character arcs as dirty and shitty as the Russo Brothers did. All I want are my two boys to live happily but it seems I'm going to have to beat up the Russo Brothers for thEIR BLATANT DISRESPECT OF MY BEAUTIFUL NORSE GODS.
Melancholia, n. Greek
A state of deep wistfulness, misery, and withdrawal.
Melancholia
01
Five years.
Five long years of surviving, simply living every day like it might be her last. Unlike before, there was no Darcy to greet her in the morning and to annoy her for her lack of knowledge on how to use technology, there was no Erik to share a brain that was just as big as hers to talk about new discoveries about the stars.
For Jane, every day was a struggle to wake up, to breathe, to live; she was just...tired. By God, was she exhausted. She wasn't sure how long she could continue going like this, through life the way she was right now.
As Jane dragged herself out of bed and into her kitchen to make herself a cup of coffee, a faint, but familiar pain, raced throughout her body. She sighed with resignation, her sudden grip on the mug causing her knuckles to turn white with her effort not to make a sound. This pain, sadly, signaled the start of her fits. When they first began, right before the Snap, she had been terrified of what it meant. The initial thoughts that ran rampant through her head were reasonable in her opinion – had the Aether somehow returned back to her body? Did it somehow alter her and now was killing her again?
Was she going to die?
But what she hadn't known then that she knew now was that whatever pain she felt would disappear within seconds. Only, they returned within days in a cycle. Although, sometimes she would go weeks without one. There was never truly a pattern – it occurred sporadically throughout her life now.
Over and over and over again.
She no longer knew the exact number – while she never got used to the pain, she was able to adjust her life around it.
Leaning on the counter, Jane took a minute like she always did to let the pain subside, to let the phantom pain run its course. Typically, it went away after a minute, give or take.
But after waiting, the pain remained, getting even stronger.
It did not take Jane long to realize that something was wrong. It continued in a vengeance; with every second that passed, the pain worsened, ultimately forcing her collapse onto the ground, grinding her teeth to prevent a scream to leave her mouth. Through the haze of pain, she knew that screaming bloody murder would do her no good and failed to help her with anything in her current situation.
Excruciating pain continued to flood her system, though, and with her thoughts all over the place, she was left gasping for air, her back now flat against the cabinet.
It hurt so bad – it never hurt like this before.
She wasn't able to stop herself from screaming. As minutes passed and when the pain finally ceased, it left Jane with tears streaks and her throat raw, her body racked with uncontrollable tremors that failed to stop. Although the room was now silent, her quiet sobs made it feel smaller and claustrophobic. Although, the ringing in her ears that was slowly ebbing away gave way for some sense of comfort.
Pulling her knees up to her chest, she wrapped her arms around herself and rested her forehead on the top of her knees, trying to catch her breath and to calm herself. She was unsure how long she found herself in this position, simply trying to wrap her mind around what just happened – because there was always a first for her life, even now it seemed – when she heard it, stopping her in her tracks.
A guttural gasping that was not her own.
In Jane's current position sitting in the kitchen with her back slouched against the cabinet, the island in front of her blocked her line of sight into the living room, where the sound was originating from. While fear had coursed through her body from the fit, now all she could feel was terror – from the Aether residue that to this day she believed remained within her, from the pain that seemed to overcome her, and now from the strange, painful groans that came from in front of her.
What was happening?
There were no coincidences, somehow the Aether – and perhaps the Infinity Stones – had been used once again and whoever was now in her house was tied to it.
It had to be.
With a shaky hand, she forced herself to crawl to the island – she didn't trust herself to stand alone, not yet – and took a deep breath to steel herself. Before she could change her mind, she forced herself to turn her head around the corner – and the moment she did, she nearly fell forward in shock at what – or who – she saw. Keeping her mouth shut and barely breathing, she slammed herself back against the cabinet, screwing her eyes shut with disbelief a moment later.
Impossible, it should be impossible, she thought to herself.
Unfortunately for her, the cabinet did not magically disappear and swallow her into a new dimension, as much as she had hoped and prayed that it would. Instead, her back remained flat against the storage unit, its handle digging into her upper back. Jane knew exactly was she was doing to herself at this moment – she was falling into a panic, causing her thoughts to give her nearly an overload of useless information that she had no need for.
What?
How?
...Why?
Jane ignored everything that was happening around her – her faucet was still running water and her coffee machine beeping. The groaning continued for a few minutes until that too passed, but there was still no movement from the living room. Her house was eerily silent, only the occasional sound from the beeping machine telling her of time's passage. The sole reason she snapped out of whatever stupor she was in was due to the groans of pain beginning again.
This time, she forced herself to crawl towards the man, her eyes never leaving the body on the floor of her living room. She moved forward slowly at first, taking her time in case she had to dart backward to safety until she found herself barely an inch away from him. She hadn't noticed earlier but now as she really looked at him, she heard a gasp leave her mouth.
Although whatever he wore had a mock neck design, it did little to conceal the purples and blues that marred his skin in an uneven circle of thick splotches around his neck – an ugly sight on his unnaturally pale skin. Jane remembered he had been eerily pale from the beginning when she first met him, but there had still been a healthy glow to it. Yet, as she looked at him now, she refused to believe that he had been this pale – he was only half a shade away from blue. To add to her anxiety, the cloak that he laid on was spread all around him with bloodstains splattered across it and his armor.
She hoped that the blood wasn't his, but judging by his current state, she couldn't be sure as to whose it was.
God, she hoped it wasn't his.
"How?" she whispered to herself, remembering exactly what Thor had told her when Thanos had killed half of the universe.
The person before her was...Loki.
But Loki was dead, killed by that psychotic alien. Thor had seen it with his own eyes, he said, and he had been sure that his brother was truly dead this time, that there were no hidden spells and tricks to bring the Norse god back to life. Not to mention, that conversation was five years old, last when she saw the God of Thunder; the first and only time she interacted with the Asgardian after their break up a few months prior to the Snap.
Jane looked down at her hand, the black screen of her phone reflecting an image of herself. She was tempted to call Natasha or Valkyrie but at this thought but she gulped, half-heartedly deciding against it. For once, she refused to be a burden on the remaining Avengers, knowing that they had lost more than she could ever fathom. While she lost those she loved, she knew that they had lost everything. They were the ones to fight Thanos, to try and protect not only Earth but to protect all life, both familiar and alien. She could never imagine the weight of that responsibility, and then only to lose, to know that they failed at preventing the death of trillions and trillions of lives across the Universe.
If she had been one of the Avengers, she would not be able to live with herself.
So Jane knew that calling the Avengers – or what remained of them – was only to be a last resort. Pocketing her phone, she leaned slightly forward, trying to get a closer look at Loki when he gasped for air, his eyes shooting open. For a split second, their eyes met as he held her gaze, somehow freezing her in place. But whatever moment that occurred between them broke when he suddenly jerked his chin upwards, hissing in pain – for her, this triggered a scream and a fall backward.
Bloodshot and dazed with pain, Loki's green eyes were unable to focus on anything but her own as it bore into hers, refusing to break contact once more. He stretched his arm out in a weak attempt to grab her, but she moved further out of his reach and simply watched as his arm fell back to the floor with a loud thud. He then attempted to get up, but the moment he tried any sort of movement off the ground must have caused pain, as the trickster suddenly yelped and arched his back. Within seconds, his eyes rolled back into his head as he fell unconscious, leaving her alone with previously thought to be dead Asgardian.
Her harsh breathing echoed throughout the house as Jane could only gulp, her eyes refusing to leave Loki's body.
This was a dream – this was a dream, it couldn't be happening to her.
01 – End
A/N: I am MAD. As good as Endgame was, the way they treated Thor was horrible. Any sort of character development that Taika Waititi helped create was obviously thrown away by the Russo Brothers like it was NOTHING. Not to mention the fact that Loki is STILL DEAD! Where is his redemption movie/scene? Huh? WHAT SUN SHINED ON THEM AGAIN?
God.
Anyways, to compensate for my sadness here is a little Lokane thing I'm starting. Please forgive me for any errors you may find yourself reading – it's been a fat MINUTE since I last wrote anything worthwhile.
Please review!