A/N: This was written as part of the LokaneDeckTheHalls exchange on tumblr for Janinam. As always, it wound up ridiculously long, and since the third part wound up twice as long as the first two parts, I decided to say 'fuck it' and post them while I'm editing the third part. That will be up on Friday, right after part two, which will be up Wednesday.
This story is based on the film, In Your Eyes, which I haven't seen, but it was recommended to me on Netflix, so I looked it up and I thought the premise would make a good Lokane fic.
Enjoy!
On a cool summer day at the end of the school year, twelve year old Jane Foster goes to the park and plays softball with the neighbor kids. It's the first time she's ever done so.
She gets a hit on her first go at bat, a lucky shot. She breaks into a run, passing first and second base. She's about to reach home when she falls to the ground, clutches her stomach, and screams.
Later on, when she's lying in a hospital bed and the pain has left as swiftly and inexplicably as it came, she will describe it to the doctor as like a thousand knifes plunging into her gut all at once.
She will leave the hospital with a clean bill of health, never knowing of the man in another, higher realm, bedridden himself after taking a blade to the stomach.
Loki Odinson just wanted a quiet day to himself, in his favorite chair in his favorite wing of the library, catching up on some light reading. He gets precious few days like that ever since he crossed over into adulthood. Now he has responsibilities and Thor dragging him along on hunting trips, and all sorts of nonsense like that.
He wakes up that morning feeling strange, like there's a cloud in his head and a lump in his throat, but he ignores it. That's a mistake.
By the end of the day, he can hardly move. His head is throbbing, and it's hard to breathe. A chill runs through his body, no matter how he bundles himself in his winter cloak or how many heating spells his casts over himself and his chambers. It's enough that a maid come to make his bed nearly passes out. While those he is inclined to call friends laugh at his supposed weakness, Loki has no choice but to wait his ailment out. It takes three days, but at the dawning of the fourth, the cold has left him, and his airways are free.
And he hasn't a clue of the now fourteen year old girl on Midgard, who just spent the last three days in bed with a one hundred and two degree fever.
Jane is sixteen years old when they first share a dream; he is one thousand and thirty three.
They don't normally sleep at the same time. Jane finds herself walking through a garden more beautiful than any she's ever seen in her life. Her grandmother once told her about the Garden of Eden, where all life on the planet first began. If there was ever such a thing, this would have to be it. She admires a bunch of flowers, deep red in color. She's never seen flowers like this before. They smell heavenly.
Then he's right behind her.
"Who are you?" he asks. "What are you doing here?"
She isn't cowed, like he must have thought she'd be. She's too entranced by their surroundings to be intimidated.
"It's my dream," she says, speaking to a man who would look more in place on the cover of a magazine, in a sharp suit with smoldering eyes.
"Your dream? I must disagree," the man says. "How my mind ever conjured up a little spit of a girl like you, I will never know."
Jane laughs at the gall of him. Little? She is not little. Being short and sixteen does not 'little' make, thank you.
"Yeah, well, how I ever imagined someone as rude and handsome as you, I'll never know."
She puts on a hard face to mask the embarrassment.
Did she just say handsome?
She wasn't supposed to say that.
Think it, sure. She'd think it all she wanted (and she'd be thinking in a lot in the coming years), but saying it out loud?
He hadn't heard that, had he?
Maybe he missed it.
His lips curled into a grin that one could only describe as devilish.
So yeah, he'd heard it all right.
"My dear," he says. He has a silky voice. "It is truly a shame that you will cease to exist once wakefulness reaches me. You seem enjoyably fierce for such a little thing."
There he goes again calling her little. Boy, he's lucky he's not real, or Jane would really give him an earful.
"Likewise," she says.
Then she feels a certain softness creeping up her legs. The garden is replaced with the backs of her eyelids, tinted orange by the sunlight streaming through her window. She's sad to have left the dream behind, and that garden. Maybe even that man and his attitude, too.
She rolls over in bed, on top of one of the childhood toys she hasn't quite let go of yet. On her back, she opens her eyes. A grand golden ceiling held up by massive pillars greets her, and there is no way any of that came from her bedroom.
For a long time, she stares at it, though it's probably less time than she thinks. She's pinched her wrists and hands, but she's not waking up. That ceiling, and the room that it shields from the elements, remain clear, solid, and real.
She closes her eyes again, a last ditch effort. She opens them, and she wants to cry out with relief when her white, cracked ceiling appears, and her ajar door with that Johnny Depp poster taped up is at the bottom of her vision.
She sits up, rubbing a head that feels like it's been run over.
'That was so weird,' she thinks.
'I must agree.'
Jane jumps. She almost screams, biting the palm of her hand instead. Her chest heaves, and there's a distinct and foreign buzzing that runs down the length of both ears.
'Please have better control over your emotions. I believe I just scared the life out of a handmaiden.'
'Wha- wha- what the hell is going on?'
She thinks it, where she should have spoken it. Somehow, it feels right to do it this way.
'I wish I had an answer, but I'm afraid I'd have to do some research into the matter first. Might I assume that you are a tangible being and not just a fragment of a dream that hasn't ended?'
The way he sounds, Jane would think he's from a hundred years ago. He's certainly a good speaker, with all his big words and the way they flow together. She almost thinks she isn't real for a moment. She has to check and make sure she feels the wool of her blankets against her skin to be sure.
"Yeah," she says out loud. Then she shakes her head. 'Yes, I'm real. Are you real?'
His laughter is rich, if subdued.
'I am quite real, and if I may, something has to be done about all that clutter in your chambers.'
Jane blinks. She looks around at the books strewn about and the full clothing bin she has yet to take down to the laundry room.
'It's not that bad,' she thinks, not bothering to wonder why she's defending herself to what has to be a hallucination.
'I beg to differ. I could never live with such discourse. I'd surely lose my mind.'
'Well, some people don't have bedrooms the size of football fields, okay?' she answers smartly.
And then she feels his confusion. She feels it.
'What is a football field?'
Jane sits there, contemplating one of the strangest questions she's ever received in her life, asked in the most bizarre of fashions. There is only one thing she can think to say, in that awkward, stilted way she gets whenever she meets someone new.
'I'm Jane.' She closes her eyes. If she does, she might see that room again, or that garden, or him.
'It's… nice to meet you,' he doesn't sound any more assured than she does. 'I am Loki.'
"Loki," she repeats it to herself out loud, testing it on her tongue. It's a name she knows from just one place, but that has to be a coincidence.
She brushes the notion aside and holds out her hand. Why she is doing it, she cannot say. It's not like she can shake hands with a voice in her head. It's just this feeling she has that she can't shake. If he can see what she's doing, and understand what it means…
She closes her fingers around the air, leaving space for where a hand would be.
'Nice to meet you, too.'
They talk more.
They talk a lot actually.
At first, their conversations are sporadic, no rhyme or reason to them. He doesn't always feel what she feels, and she doesn't always think what he thinks. Sometimes, he'll take a blow to the head in a training session, and she'll know nothing about it until he tells her days later. Other times, she'll get a paper cut from turning a page too sharply, and he'll wince in pain and rub salves all over his healthy finger until the stinging stops. Sometimes, he'll spend the day angry for no reason and snapping at everyone, only to find that she just got a mediocre grade on her history test and she's in her monthly course at the same time.
He does a lot of reading about what could be happening to them, and so does she. He searches ancient magical tomes while she scans scientific articles out of library books and internet searches. Sometimes, they read of beings with extra senses; people who can speak without talking and see without looking. Jane's books call them psychics. Loki's call them seers. Neither of them believes in that sort of thing.
He thinks Jane will give up first, in those times where he gets flashes of her powerful thirst for knowledge (secretly, he's impressed by it). She's still mortal, and mortals are notoriously lazy and fickle.
In fact, he is the one who throws up his hands, though one would be hard pressed to make him admit to it. He reads every relevant book in the library—and some less so once he gets desperate. He experiments, he tries a mind-blocking spell that she never notices. He makes offhand comments on shared consciousness to Odin and Frigga at dinner, only for them to laugh with him at the absurdity of such a thing.
His understanding of magic is why he's forced to give in. Magic has been with him since the day he was born, and he knows it more intimately than he's ever known another person. Frigga taught him much, but he would never have gotten where he is without natural talent.
This is not magic.
Whatever this is, it's something Loki has never seen before.
While she reads stories of twins feeling each other's pain while living hundreds of miles apart, he lays in bed, not even out of his armor yet, and he listens to her breath and make a sound like humming when she reads something of interest.
As the year wanes, and Jane begins putting the books on metaphysics away, he finds himself taking time out of his daily schedule to close his eyes and call her name.
'Jane…'
(Or sometimes, she'll call him.)
'Hey, Loki, I'm kind of busy right now doing homework. Can we talk later?'
'What is the subject? Perhaps I can assist.'
'I doubt it. It's English. Do people in your realm know anything about earth literature?'
He'd told her previously that he was from Asgard, and she'd laughed at him. Asgard is just a myth, she said. Just because his name was Loki didn't mean he could trick her. Then he took her on a tour of the palace halls, and the garden outside where they'd first met (she'd been beside herself with glee that it was a real place). He let her sit in on a session with those few Asgardians who had an appreciation for magic, and by the time he was turning flowers into pigs and showing one excitable young man the proper why to make a book float across the room, he didn't sense from her an ounce of skepticism.
Now he receives questions. So many questions. More than he can count. Everything from the nature of his abilities to the origin of Asgard's advanced technology. She has to know it all.
It's her inquisitive nature more than anything else that keeps them coming back. He leaves the channels open for her whenever she wants another peek into his life, and she does the same for him.
'We are aware of that which deserves our awareness, and that includes a few works derived from your people,' he tells her.
'No offense, but that all sounds a little pretentious.'
'I would call it knowing what we like, and not settling for anything less than what suits our refined tastes.'
'So you're saying you're pretentious.'
He smiles, and he feels her smile, too. He likes that feeling.
'Tell me the book, Jane.'
Now he feels her rolling her eyes, and also he likes that. There are few things he feels from Jane that he doesn't like.
'It's Macbeth. You guys have Shakespeare up there in Asgard?'
'As a matter of fact, the All Father is a longstanding lover of the Bard's work, and I myself find he makes for good reading.'
'You're telling me you can understand this stuff?'
He thinks for a moment her shock and awe might be feigned, but Jane is not that good of an actor (in fact, she's terrible).
'Which part are you on?'
He hears her flipping through pages.
'I guess Lady Macbeth is having some kind of mental breakdown. She's saying something about a spot, and-'
'Ah, yes. Say no more. You are reading the part in which the Lady's underlying guilt over her role in the death of the king finally catches up to her in the form of sleepwalking.'
He talks about the book, one he's never liked so much before now, and she takes notes and makes an occasional comment. When she's done, he feels relief borne from the end of a hard day's work resonate from her.
'Is that all?' he asks.
'For tonight it is. Thanks, Loki. You're the best.'
'Does that mean you're no longer trying to be rid of me?'
An empty silence follows. Empty in the sense that Loki can feel nothing from her. It's as if she's completely withdrawn and left him in the cold, but before he can wonder what she's hiding, she returns, and her presence makes his skin tingle.
'I never wanted to get rid of you,' she says.
It's not always fun and games.
Loki tunes in on a regular day in Asgard's autumn, when the skies are dim and the air is warm. He knows not what the weather will be on Midgard, only based on what Jane tells him. Today, it must be the coldest of winter days. He brushes the surface of the ocean that is Jane's mind, and he feels as though he's been dunked in ice water.
He recognizes her turmoil, and his own heart clenches in fearful anticipation. As always, he ignores how weak he becomes in the face of a mortal.
'Jane?' he calls out, and she doesn't respond. "Jane?" He speaks out loud; sometimes, that hits her harder.
Then he feels her, like a feather against a stone wall, but still clear as day. Years have gone by, and he'd know her anywhere.
'Hi, Loki,' she says, sounding the way he imagines a wilting flower would if it could speak. 'Sorry for ignoring you. I've had a rough day.'
'Oh really?' he says, like he doesn't care nearly as much as he does. 'Do tell.'
She's quiet for a long time, and if he didn't still feel her mind there next to his, he'd think he's lost her again.
Finally, he hears:
'Ryan Lively.'
Ah. So that's it.
Ryan Lively is the boy who holds Jane's heart. There was one other boy before him who fizzled out in a week, and maybe another one before that. Loki never bothers to commit their names to memory. He only knows Ryan Lively because Jane talks about him almost as much as she does the sky. This boy has such powerful sway over her, for someone she has yet to confess to. For his part, Loki wonders if Ryan Lively is not really a sorcerer out to ensnare Jane and steal her virtue. He said so once, and her response was to laugh and call him 'paranoid.' Loki remains unconvinced.
'What happened?' he asks.
He feels a ripple, and knows it to be a sob that just broke through.
'I- I- saw him today… c-coming out of the locker room. He was making out with Angelina Marconi.'
There's another name Loki knows, if more vaguely. Angelina Marconi is a girl who thinks intelligence should be mocked and physical beauty is the only standard by which one should be judged. The distaste Loki feels for her, he wishes he could transfer to Jane. He's told her many times that someone like that is unworthy of her time and focus.
(In a way, he's happy this has happened. He has a reason now to say the same of Ryan.)
'I guess I understand why he'd like her and not me,' she says. 'I mean, he was always nice to me, and I thought we were becoming friends, but maybe that was all we were meant to be. I can't exactly compete with Angelina.'
'And why not?' Loki asks.
'Well, because she's tall and blonde and she looks like a playboy model, and I'm a short stick.'
He comes very close to laughing out loud. It stops in his throat and he swallows it back with much difficulty.
'A stick, Jane? You are certainly not a piece of wood.'
He feels her go red with embarrassment.
'You know what I mean!'
'Yes, I do,' he admits, and he lies back on his bed and he closes his eyes. 'Jane, please go to your mirror and let me see you. The full length one.'
'Why should I do that?'
'Because I asked you to.'
She grumbles and groans, but she does as he asks. Loki waits for the moment to align his vision with hers. He's more sensitive to this than she is, he's found. Someday, he'll have to teach her to look through his eyes as well as he does hers.
He waits for the buzz of her right up against him, and then he opens his eyes. His room has disappeared. It's Jane's room now. He sees her rumpled blue sheets and the stuffed toys. The faded glow in the dark stars on the ceiling and the wall full of books.
This is the first time he's seen her in quite a while. She's grown since the last time, in age if not in body. Though she is small, she carries with her a grace that many of her kind lack even in their twilight years. Her clothes do not flatter her body, but her eyes are weighed with depth that none of those little boys she fancies deserve to look upon.
'There you are,' he says, in the same soothing voice his mother used to calm his nightmares with. 'I can honestly tell you, Jane, that you are more lovely and desirable than all the Angelina Marconis in the Nine Realms.'
And he means it.
The next time he sees her in that mirror, it's a much happier occasion, at least for her..
'It took me forever to find this dress,' she says, swishing the skirts around to show off the matching shoes.
'It's beautiful,' Loki says, but he finds that he could care less about her footwear. He's more interested in the tightness of the bodice, how it fits around her small, flat waist and pushes up her breasts. This last birthday, she took her final step from girlhood to womanhood. Though she remains petite, she turns heads wherever she goes (or she would if she dressed like this every day), and Angelina Marconi can't hold a candle to her— not that she ever could.
In the two years since that fool of a boy, whose name Loki can't be bothered to recall, Jane has been through a few more 'crushes' (as she calls them) and had one boy court her long enough that she calls it a relationship. Loki calls it a glorified friendship; that boy never even tried to kiss her.
Now comes the night of her 'senior prom,' which she only cares to go to because Gavin Dickerson has asked her, and there isn't a single girl at school who wouldn't want to be in her place (Loki wishes one of them was).
'You know, this prom business sounds terribly foolish,' he says, as he has said so many times over the last few weeks that he can no longer count them all.
'I know, it is pretty stupid,' Jane agrees. 'That's why I didn't bother with the junior prom.'
Loki nods. He remembers that night. Instead of dancing to grinding non-music and drinking lukewarm beverages, she walked around town and told him all about the sights and the sounds and the people. She ended the evening in the park, where she told him about the stars. He's never told her how much he enjoyed that night. He didn't care one bit for what she was telling him, it was just to hear her speak.
'I'm thinking Gavin and I will only stick around for an hour or so. Then we can go hang out with my friends at the anti-prom, or just take some time for ourselves.'
He doesn't like the sound of that.
'You mean alone? Just the two of you?'
'Well, yeah, what else?'
She's so casual about it, he could break something.
'I actually meant to bring that up,' she goes on to say. 'I know that you like to look in on me when I'm out doing, you know, stuff like this.'
'Social activities, you mean.'
'Yeah, that's it. I know you like to do that sometimes, but I was kind of hoping… if you could maybe… I mean, if I'm going to be alone with Gavin…'
'You're asking me to stay away for the night,' Loki says.
She winces.
'You make it sound so harsh,' she says.
It feels harsh.
'Don't worry, I understand and I agree with you,' Loki says, the words alone ripping at his chest. 'This is your night to spend with your beau and I have no right to intrude. On my honor, you will not see hide nor hair of me for the rest of the night.'
Loki keeps his word, though most would attest that he's not very honorable at all.
He spends the night with Thor and his oafish friends. If nothing else, they are good for distractions. The boisterous pleasure they take in their pursuit of more ale and loose women is tedious at best, but at least he can't hear himself think when they're around.
He tries to interest himself in a story Thor tells about a hunt the two of them went on as boys. He actually enjoys telling his portion of the tale, in which Thor gets himself caught in the den of a bilgesnipe and needs Loki to remove the eggs from inside his pants.
It's when everyone (Thor included) has burst into uproarious laughter over the horrible rashes they had the next day that Loki doubles over in pain.
He falls from his seat, clutching his stomach as something plants itself into his gut over and over again. His ears are ringing, so loud that they might rip themselves apart. His eyes fog, but still he sees Thor bending over him, fearing that his brother has been poisoned, or worse.
"Loki?" he hears, as if an echo. "Brother, what is it? What ails you?"
Thor reaches out a hand.
Loki feels like he's floating, like someone else is in control of his body. He throws Thor away from him, all the way to the other end of the hall. He moves with energy and force that is alien to him.
"DON'T YOU TOUCH ME, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"
And then it's gone, and everyone is staring at him, and Thor is picking himself up and rubbing sawdust out of his hair, and Loki couldn't care less about any of that. He only cares about one thing.
'Jane.'
He feels pain first. It engulfs him.
He feels Jane next. It's an odd sort of disconnect he makes between the Jane he knows and the one she is now. He could force his way into her vision if he wants (he's never done it before, but he knows that he could), but that sort of breach in trust when she is in such a state of turmoil is beyond even him.
'Jane, what happened? Are you all right?'
That's a stupid question. Of course she's not all right. This woman makes a fool out of him with everything she does. Now she's drying her tears, the ones she's been channeling to him without either of them realizing. Loki presses the side of one finger to his face and it comes back glistening.
'Loki…'
He's never before heard his name spoken like that.
'Jane, tell me what happened to you.'
Then he puts the world on mute. It's simple magic that dulls his keen senses to everything outside his own mind. The pattering of feet of maids and courtiers straying too close to his rooms, the roars and jeers of foot soldiers outside as they practice their forms, the subtle hum of magic that follows him automatically. He wants none of it, no obstructions, only her.
She's getting control of her breathing. She no longer sounds like she's been strangled, but right now, he has no greater fear than what caused her to sound like that in the first place. He has an idea, one born perhaps from that paranoia Jane once accused him of, but deep in his gut, he knows that's not what it is, and so he is not at all surprised by the name that slips from her mind to his.
'Gavin.'
That boy will suffer.
'What did he do, Jane?'
She hiccups.
'He… we left early, like I said. He told me he booked a room, and we could order some snacks. He's always been so sweet, I didn't think anything of it… when we got there, he started coming on to me, but I said no, and then he got angry and…'
She goes quiet. What happened next needs no explanation, because it's an obvious ending, and Loki remembers what he felt before. His hand rests on his stomach. It no longer hurts, but it is starting to churn.
'I got away.'
Loki releases a breath.
'Did he hurt you at all?'
'He uh… he knocked me on my stomach. He tried to kick me, but I tripped him.'
He almost smiles, and pride filters in through fire.
'Then I got up and ran. I don't think I stopped running until I got home just now. Lucky my parents went out for the night. I wouldn't know how to explain this to them. It's hard enough having to tell you.'
'Why would telling me be hard?' he asks.
She gives a hollow laugh. 'Loki, this connection we have, whatever it is, it goes both ways, you know. I feel how angry you are.'
Angry? That is a gross understatement. What Loki is feeling right now has spelled the end of entire armies. It has brought men to their knees and sucked the life from their bodies.
'Please, don't get yourself worked up over me, I'll be fine,' she says.
'How can you say that?'
'Well, I'm still a little shaken up, but that doesn't mean-'
'No, Jane, what I mean is, how can you ask me not to worry about you?'
She answers with silence. He hears her suck back a fresh batch of tears that sting his eyes, and he fists the sheets as shivers run through their bodies. At times like this, she comes in so powerfully that it's as if she's in the room with him, and wrapping her solid form around him until they are completely entwined.
'I just wish I could go back in time and do this whole night over again,' she says. If he tries to look through her eyes, he sees only the white of her wall. 'If I could tell myself what was going to happen and spare myself all of this… I just- why is it so hard to find a good guy? My mom did, and my grandma did. All my friends did, too. Is it just me? Am I cursed or something?'
'You're not cursed,' he says, for lack of anything better. Knowing her, she'll appreciate the effort.
'Maybe I'm just meant to be alone,' she says. 'I always feel most at home when I'm researching, and I have yet to meet a guy who really understands or cares about this stuff as much as I do.'
'I don't think anyone could care as much as you.'
A sparkle of warmth flits across so fast that he could have missed it if he had even one distraction.
'That's sweet of you, Loki,' she says, and then she sighs audibly. 'I don't know what I'd do without you.'
Loki's chest swells in ways it never has before. He cares not for the waves of mortification that accompany the confession (she hadn't said that to him, she'd thought it to herself, or tried to anyway), or the fear and trepidation born of his own mind and body, that urges him to back away now before he falls in too deep. The thoughts he is thinking, has been thinking for some time, can only spell ruin for the both of them. If he had any common decency, he'd never entertain them at all.
He spends the night doing just that, long after Jane has wiped her eyes and succumbed to sleep. It is as it was before: he has no honor.
He waits a week. Seven days and seven nights.
He wanted to do it that very night, when she fell gently away from him and dreamed the peaceful dreams of a still innocent mind.
Yes, in her own way, she is still so innocent. That's why he has to take this slowly.
When the seventh day has died, he rests on his back in his bed. Her slow, light breath tickles his ears. She mumbles every now and then, words that are not words. Whatever they are, they sound happy. She is having a good dream that is about to get much better.
Without hesitation, Loki dives in.
Jane is on a beach, walking against the sunset with sand between her toes. Some part of her brain that cannot function in this state would remind her that she lives over a hundred miles away from a beach, and that it takes forever to pick granules out of her toenails. She should spare herself the imaginary trouble and dream up a pair of flip-flops.
Her dream world shakes and expands, becoming more than a dream.
'He's here,' a voice says, one she cannot be sure is of her own making (that's one of the downsides of having a telepathic connection to someone).
Jane turns around, feeling him at her back though he casts no shadow. He's not exactly dressed for the beach, she notes. He's at least gotten rid of that armor for now. Clothed in a dark green tunic and loose fitting pants, with pitch black hair that he has cut short, he's like a drop of ink on a canvas.
"You ever wonder why we don't do this more often?" she asks.
"This?"
"This dream sharing thing," Jane says. "I mean, isn't it nice to be able to talk face to face?"
She alternates pointing to herself and to Loki, brushing the tunic once or twice. She keeps going back for another feel, discreetly as she can. Whatever that material is, it feels delightful. She thinks he doesn't notice, but he might just be being polite and not saying anything.
His eyes on her are intense and focused, like she's the only person in the world to him. Jane once sneaked a peek at her mother's stash of trashy romance novels and scoffed at the bloated portrayal of the male leads and their 'burning eyes' and 'aching need.' Those phrases don't seem so stupid now.
"Jane," he says, his voice hoarse. He takes one step. "I know why you haven't found a man worthy of you."
His movement is unexpected. Jane's fingers brushed his tunic, only to then be pressed into his stomach. She snatched them away, not before noting the hard lines of his muscles. Her body tingles and her eyes linger at the base of his neck, which that unlaced collar does nothing to hide.
She should have dreamed of a ski resort. It's getting much too warm on this beach.
"You know why…" she stops. She doesn't know why she's repeating his words, or what she can say that comes straight from her and what she is feeling. She doesn't know anything except for how close he is, too close, but she can't pull away.
"I do," he says. "And you do, too."
Her lips parted, sucking in air to fuel the pounding of her heart. Then his lips meet hers, gentle at first, but with a ferocity that is the final nail in the coffin to whatever doubts remained within Jane of who and what he was.
He was Loki, the voice in her head. Her confidante. Her best friend.
And the only man she's ever loved.
Their kiss may last forever, or it may last just a few seconds. In a dream, it's all the same. Before Jane knows it, they're rolling in the sand, which starts to feel more like bed sheets.
"I want you to know how I feel for you," Loki murmurs while trailing fiery kisses from her throat to her ear. "I want to show you, but we can stop now if you're not ready."
Jane knows he really means it. He'll be a monster if she lets him, but only if she lets him. She knows him well enough at this point. She trusts him. And she wants this more than he could ever know.
She tells him not in words, but in the way she grinds into him and paws at his shirt. It seems tighter on him since she last checked. The stupid thing just won't come off.
Loki chuckles at her eagerness, and when the shirt evaporates with the rest of their clothes, Jane isn't sure if she can chalk it up to magic or just dreams logic. For once, she couldn't care less.
"I love you," she says. She pants it again and again while he's taking her, and he always answers in kind.
"I love you, too, my Jane."
Yes, she is his Jane, and he is her Loki. They are for each other, and Jane will never fear a life of loneliness, with only her books and the stars to keep her company again.
Come what may, she'll always have Loki, and he'll always have her. This is how it was meant to be.
