Author's Note: Hi all. This is a weird little fic idea I had in the wake of Infinity War, because I'm pissed at what happened to Loki. Warnings for major character death, violence, and citrus things, though this version will stay within the site guidelines for M-rated material. The smuttier version will be on AO3, when we get there, so read this if you want the cleaner one and that if you don't. Win-win. It's a slow burn, though, so be prepared for mostly plot.

The Runic Edda

Chapter 1: Kaunan

Midgard Date: 06.20.2019
Location: The Reaches of Space

Death comes not easy to the children of Asgard.

Even, as it turns out, the children who are not so much of Asgard.

Loki comes to against a blanket of stars, Thanos and his subordinates long gone from the ship, and presumably the ship itself long destroyed. He's been left for dead—again—and again he utterly fails to die. Not that he wants to expire; it's been a while since that thought crossed his mind. But as it turns out, not dying is a rather painful process, one he isn't eager to repeat. Heedless of his wishes, the Apples and his magic have their effects, and short of worse wounds than a broken neck and being tossed into space by… something, they will always restore him in time.

Time is just the issue now. He knows not how much of it has passed, only that, when he blinks a few times, trying to divine his location by mapping the pinpricks of light around him, it's been long enough to see him drift well clear of where he last remembers being. Well away from the last remnants of Asgard. Though they never held him in any great fondness, he—

It hardly matters now.

As soon as he's upright, Loki does the same thing he does every time he comes unmoored. He tugs up his sleeve, and checks the words. They're still there, in the strange, spidery print of someone who was clearly never practiced in penmanship, still the same night-sky blue.

Honestly, all things considered, that could have gone a lot worse.

Over time, they'd become the truth of his entire life. Whether he'd inadvertently shaped himself around them or whether they'd simply been as much prophesy as Soulmark is hard to say, but through countless scrapes, battles, ill-advised adventures, trials, and a fair few shenanigans, they've always held. Nothing in his life had ever turned out as badly as it could have, even the things that were not far from it. And though everything else is a tangle, in that moment he breathes a little sigh. Whatever Thanos has done, it hasn't destroyed everything. It hasn't destroyed the person who will one day speak those words to him, and the thought is more comfort than it ought to be.

Perhaps it hasn't destroyed his brother, either, but to figure that out, he's going to have to return to Midgard. Gathering his magic to him feels almost like coming home. Perhaps, he thinks, the closest he will come to that feeling any longer.

The grim thought is borne away by the urgency of another: he must find Thor.

Midgard Date: 04.30.2019
Location: Puente Antiguo, New Mexico

Pop-Tarts, red beans, rice, some canned veggies… Darcy huffs softly and pushes a stray strand of hair out of her face, hopping to her feet and picking up the clipboard. Jane's trailer has enough stuff to last them a while food wise—honestly she's mostly worried about gas. Things have been… weird, in the few days since the entire planet had gone sideways. Functioning news media, which is mostly on the internet right now, is calling it The Vanishing, capital letters heavily implied, because all of a sudden like half the people on earth had just… disappeared.

Darcy's seen enough post-apocalyptic movies to know that pandaemonium was sure to follow, and unsurprisingly everything had fallen apart shortly after, mass chaos and panic seizing everyone. Looting and vandalism are everywhere, to say nothing of the physical mess: cars left on the roads with no drivers, entire industries shutting down, the government in a scramble to keep hold of what order it can.

And maybe, if anyone had been confident that they could do anything about it, they'd have been able to keep things moving along while the necessary adjustments went into effect. But unsurprisingly, no one really had any instantaneous mass extinction event backup plans, and with as messy as things have been lately, the U.S. Government at least is dead in the water. For her part, Darcy had immediately grabbed her boss, jumped into the nearest running car, and hightailed it back to the least-urban environment she had any familiarity with: Puente Antiguo. Jane's shiny new research fellowship at the Lick Observatory was just going to have to be on hold until the people in the tights made things go back to the way they were supposed to be.

"Dammit." Darcy pulls in a breath, trying not to let it tremble. She doesn't like to let her thoughts wander too far in that direction. But against her will, her eyes are drawn to her sleeve. She'd pushed it up in the course of her inventory, unwittingly exposing the dull, washed-out verdigris script that up until a few weeks ago had been a brilliant emerald green.

It's such a stupid thing to care about at a time like this. Half the world's population is gone, and apparently some crazy purple giant with delusions of justice and grandeur is the reason, and who knows when or if the superpeople would be able to make it better? Most of the world's remaining population probably have dead marks right now. Darcy had never seen a dead mark before, but she'd heard about them, seen a few depictions in movies. Supposedly they get near to translucent, like a ghost of what they used to be. The description seems exaggerated, looking at hers, because it's still recognizably green, but she can kind of get why people would describe it that way even if it isn't literally true. It feels like something in her has dulled, too, been scraped out of her at just the thought of the cosmic unfairness that was spending so much of her life waiting for the chance to meet the one person in all universe who'd really get her.

Who might even want her. Possibly. The words themselves are—were—kind of ambiguous on that point.

But she can deal with that later. Right now, she has a stressed-out astrophysicist to look after, someone who knows who her soulmate is, and who—despite the most awkward of all breakups—knows he's still out there, alive, and very possibly right in the thick of the danger. Who still loves him like the other half of herself, and distracts herself from thinking about it by working stupid hours and forgetting to do basic human things like eat and sleep.

And Darcy gets it, she does, because she's trying to distract herself, too, only her distraction is looking after Jane, throwing herself into that work—the work of caring for another human being who needs her, and it's almost enough sometimes.

So she pulls out the red beans and rice and sets them down on the counter, taking a pot down from one of the hooks on the walls and filling it partway with water. She'll turn on the tiny burner on Jane's tiny stove in a little while, but first she needs to make sure Jane's where she left her. Checking the box of Wildberry Pop-Tarts, Darcy confirms that they haven't expired—she's not entirely sure Pop-Tarts can expire. But there's a date, and it's in the future, so she opens the box and takes out one of the crinkly silver packages.

Fortunately, Erik's Pinzgauer never left the nearly-abandoned trailer park where Jane left her mobile home, and there's enough gear in it to satisfy Jane's need for work, when added to the smaller instruments she'd insisted they take from Santa Cruz. The eyewateringly-red pickup truck Darcy sort-of stole will work to hook the trailer to when they need to go, as they'll need to eventually if this lasts much longer, but she's not thinking about that either just now.

Jane's pulled several folding chairs out of the Pinz, and looks to be at work assembling… something. Darcy's not stupid; she could probably figure out which of their old pieces of equipment it's supposed to resemble if she bothered to take a closer look at it, but at the moment it doesn't really matter. Jane's hands and brain are busy, and that's what she needs.

"Janey? I brought… foodlike things." Darcy pinches the top of the package between the thumb and forefinger and swings it back and forth. The bright silver catches the light and Jane's attention at the same time, and the diminutive scientist looks up from her work.

Shit, Darcy needs to work harder on getting her to sleep. Those circles under her eyes are dark as bruises, and if the shape wasn't all wrong, it'd look like her boss had been in a fight and taken a matching pair of shiners for the trouble.

Jane blinks. "Are those all we have?" She sounds vaguely perturbed and her mouth pinches. "Sorry, Darcy, I'm not—"

Darcy shakes her head. "Nah, bosslady. There's a few other things in there. No grocery store raids in our future. At least not our near future. I figured you might want a snack, though."

Jane could live on the diet of a latchkey twelve-year-old and still look like a supermodel, which Darcy suspected she had been doing until they met. It was unsurprising she didn't know what was in her own cupboard.

"Oh," Jane says, nodding slightly as though she's not sure it's the right response. "Good then." She's eyeing the Pop-Tarts, though, and Darcy is not about to stand in the way of Voluntary Eating. So she tears the package open, holding it out to Jane, who pinches one of the pastries and tugs it out of the bag, dropping into the nearest camping chair with a sigh that sounds more like exhaustion than relief.

Darcy takes the other Pop-Tart and the other chair, breaking the rectangle in half and biting down. She'd been a latchkey twelve-year-old once. Not like she was gonna turn her nose up at processed sugary goodness, even if she could cook.

"Anything new on the news?" Jane asked around a mouthful of Pop-Tart.

Choosing not to poke fun at the redundancy of the sentence, Darcy shrugs. "Dunno—I've stopped reading. I figured if I saw one more article making wild guesses about which of the Avengers are dead, I'd kinda…"

She doesn't finish the sentence. Jane doesn't need her to. Both of them glance at the crimson script looping over the inside of her forearm, exposed by the t-shirt Darcy had bought her for her last birthday: a plain grey one with SCIENCE RULES scrawled over the front in white letters. Darcy wonders if Bill Nye has disappeared for all of a moment before Jane shifts her arm.

You! What world is this?

Despite herself, Darcy smiles at the memory, pulling in a breath. The air had tasted a lot like this, that night. Shifting her eyes to the horizon, she notes the incoming thunderheads—and damn if that's not a little too on the nose right now. Well, it'll make for a plausible excuse to force Jane inside for a few hours, at least. The storms tend to be spectacular here in the desert, if rare.

She takes another bite of her Pop-Tart, suppressing a strange longing she can't quite name.

"Hey, Darce?" Jane's looking at her now, dark eyes big and wide and vulnerable.

Darcy swallows. "Yeah, Janey?"

"Do you think—" Jane catches herself; shakes her head. "Never mind."

Darcy knows what she means anyway. "I dunno. But no matter what happens… you know I'm gonna be here, right?" It's not much to offer, really—Darcy isn't that much help with the science, or the loneliness. An intern-slash-friend is a poor substitute for a Soulmate, and damn if her heart doesn't twinge a little even thinking about the word. She hasn't told Jane about her mark; her sleeve covers it now and will at least until all of this is settled. If it's ever settled.

"Yeah," Jane says, and it's soft enough that Darcy thinks maybe the reassurance means something after all. "Yeah, I do."

Darcy spends a few more minutes outside with her, long enough for the both of them to finish their Pop-Tarts. Then she crinkles the wrapper loudly and stands up with a huff and a bounce. "Well, back to work, I guess. Dinner in a bit, Janie."

Jane's never really been fond of diminutives. She's spent too much of her life just trying to be taken seriously. But from Darcy, it's affection, and she never has to wonder about whether her former intern takes her seriously anymore. Not after the furious email to the New York Times editorial department that she wasn't supposed to know about.

A tiny smile turns the corner of Jane's mouth, and she leans back into the chair. The magnetometer still needs work, but for the moment the desire to keep busy has abandoned her. Jane knows she's wallowing a little, and knows it's not good for her, but the scientific consensus on the matter is clear: Soulbonds have all kinds of effects on the limbic system, including the well-documented Tergiversation Effect. A different kind of discomfort from Darcy's Sehnsucht Effect, and… reversible. Maybe.

Thor's still alive, after all. Still out there somewhere. And not a day goes by when Jane doesn't wonder what would have been if they'd both tried just a little harder to make things work. Having, as Darcy had once put it, a manic thunder dream god for a counterpart did… complicate things, and honestly Jane prefers everything simple but her astrophysics, because work is intricate and complicated enough on its own.

Slouching down in her chair, she lets the back of her head rest against the edge of the canvas so she can study the sky with nothing but her naked eyes, watching the last light of the day dim and the storm approach. She never sees dark clouds the same way as she used to anymore. Never will again, in all likelihood.

Jane loses track of how much time passes as the storm approaches, lightning lancing between the clouds, lighting the sky with the raw magnificence that will always belong in her head to him, and though her inner feminist finds something deeply objectionable about offering up prayer to someone she needs an equal relationship with, part of her reasons that he's a god, after all, and if there's a chance it could reach him, then she'll take it.

So, feeling a little silly and skeptical, Jane reaches out into the universe and tries to make her heart known over all the space between them.

Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, be safe.

Almost as soon as she's let the thought loose, a bolt of glistening lightning strikes the ground, not twenty feet from the trailer, and Jane yelps, half-jumping, half-falling out of her chair, saved from an ungainly sprawl on the ground by the magnetometer, which she uses to steady herself. She can hear the heavy drum of Darcy's footsteps inside the trailer as she runs to the door, but everything else fades from her awareness, her focus narrowing down to one single spot in front of her.

"Jane."

Though the distance between them is meters, the low rumble of Thor's voice is almost as intimate as if it were inches, and Jane pulls in a sharp breath, her throat constricting. The bond tugs at her, urging her forward a few staggering steps before she's even realized what she's doing, and for all his might Thor is just as trapped by it as she is. He steps forward too, and the distance closes until it's feet, until she can just barely feel what has to be the heat of his body.

And then they both stop. Both cautious. Both, no doubt, mindful of the fact that she is the one who ended what was between them, and she who must lower the wall that has been raised.

What a stupid way of speaking. Ended it. As though a Soulbond can be ignored so easily. Disregarded, abandoned. As though the parting did anything but make her miserable, and every bit as in love with him as she'd been that first heady weekend, here, years ago.

She swallows thickly. "You cut your hair," she says lamely.

Nobel-prize-winning astrophysics phenom, ladies and gentlemen.

And still a blithering idiot in the face of something that can't just be simple.

Thor grimaces slightly, but his eyes don't leave hers. "Not voluntarily." The words are quick, impatient. He doesn't care.

She doesn't care, either. She's just not sure she can say any of the things she does care about. His eyes are too heavy, too intense, the blue of them perfect and clear and almost as pale as the lightning.

"So, uh… I guess I'm making like… triple the food now, huh?" Darcy—wonderful, irreverent Darcy—saves Jane from gaping awkwardness by dint of sheer pluck, leaning out from behind the half-open trailer door and grinning brightly at Thor, one dark eyebrow arched. All of a sudden, the unbearable tension lightens just a little.

Not even Thor can remain entirely serious in the face of that, and he has mercy, too, turning to Darcy and smiling broadly. "I should relish the opportunity to sample whatever Midgardian delicacy you've the inclination to prepare."

Darcy laughs, because he plays his unusual diction up a few notches beyond normal, something he knows delights her. "Well, I can't promise anything fancy, but come on in, big guy. You, too, Jane."

Jane can only nod, smiling thinly at Thor when he holds the door of the trailer open and gestures her up in front of him.

Darcy shovels another spoonful of red beans and rice into her mouth, eyes darting between Jane, barely picking at her food, and Thor, inhaling it like it's the best thing he's ever tasted. And take that, stereotypes—there's not a bit of meat in it, and the viking space prince likes it just fine.

Or maybe he's doing what she's doing and eating so much so he has an excuse not to talk.

It's painfully awkward, here at the tiny kitchen table in the trailer, the three of them packed in so close that one of Darcy's knees is touching Thor's and the other Jane's. Its mostly his fault, since neither of the women takes up much space, but it's not like he can help being huge, so Darcy doesn't hold it against him. He arrived in full armor, but he's at least shed the boots and bracer-thingies now, so it's a little less surreal.

Oh, who the fuck is she kidding? This will never not be surreal, but it's also her life now.

Neither of these two idiots is going to say anything first, Darcy can already tell. As much as she loves the stuffing out of both of them, the actual number of days they've spent together is way out of proportion with the strength of their bond, and she can kind of see where that would be awkward. To just… feel that much stuff for someone who's still a stranger in a lot of ways. She bets it takes a lot of time to get to know a guy who's thousands of years old—or to adjust to interacting with someone who to you is an alien and has a weird way of speaking and thinking and enough brainpower to connect the realms with puny mortal resources.

"So, dude. Not to like, harsh the mellow here or whatever—" Darcy valiantly avoids laughing at her own words, because there isn't any mellow in this room, and she's the only one faking it—"But, uh… it's been a while since we had the first clue what's going on out there." She's glad Thor's alive. Beyond glad. But that doesn't mean the world's not on a precipice right now, doesn't mean there's not still some crazy grape-crush supervillain out there who can apparently just obliterate people without being anywhere near them.

And the truth is she's scared of that, at least as far as she can even process it at all. Some reassurance would go a long way right now.

"Aye," Thor says softly, staring at his plate without quite seeing it. "It is a long tale, Lady Darcy, and little of it amusing." His grip tightens on his fork, and for a moment she worries he'll bend it out of shape. Not very many things on this planet are made for people as strong as he is.

But he tells them. About Ragnarök and Hela, Asgard's destruction and the death of his father. About Dr. Banner and Loki, who was alive and then dead again as soon as it finally seemed like everything was going to be all right. About how he'd planned to bring his people to Earth for refuge. Darcy suppresses a comment about Earth's track record with refugees, because even she can tell it's the wrong thing to say right now, and god-powered refugees that pretty would be a different thing anyway.

About myeuh-myeuh—she's learned how to say it right but prefers her version—and the forge, and his near-miss with Thanos. It's almost too much; even to Darcy who knows what's out there now, it sounds like nothing short of a fairy-tale. But it's not. She can read it off his body language. Thor doesn't look quite defeated, but he's got that resignation to him. His shoulders are slumped, rolled forwards and burdened. The weight he's under is getting to him, and Darcy wishes she had the words for that, because even if she wants to be reassured she can see now that Thor needs it more.

Too bad there's not enough certainty and assurance to go around.

"Tomorrow," Thor says, after the silence sits for a while longer. He scrapes the last of his food into his spoon, chews it mechanically, swallows. "It's the last chance. Those of us who are left—there's a plan, but it has to be tomorrow."

And suddenly, Darcy understands what this is. She reaches over, clapping Thor on the shoulder with what would be too much force for anyone else, but is just enough to be hearty to him. "So I should make something super-fancy for tomorrow night, is what you're saying?"

He smiles, but it's strained. His other hand has shifted under the table; Darcy sees Jane shift just enough that it's easy to tell she's holding it.

"Hey," she says. "You're gonna be fine, dude. We all are. You'll see." She stands, gathering the dishes, but only rinses them and sets them in the sink for now. It's obvious the two of them still have a lot of talking to do—and probably some other stuff. "Jane, I think I'm gonna grab my sleeping bag and camp out in the Pinz tonight, 'kay?"

"You don't have to—" Jane's quick to say the polite thing, but Darcy can read a room and shakes her head, pushing her glasses up her nose.

"No worries, bosslady. It'll be like old times." Thor stands too, and they enfold each other in a hug. He holds a little tighter than is comfortable, but she doesn't complain. Hell, she holds him pretty tightly, too. Thor's her friend, weird as that is, and Darcy's no fool. Despite her words, well… who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Her purple sleeping bag under her arm, she exits the trailer, opening up the back of the van and crawling in. There are a couple pieces of equipment in it, but Darcy's small, and rude enough to move them to the side anyhow. She lays on her stomach, then flops to the side when that gets uncomfortable. Soon, always—damn her body shape.

And because it's the last night she might ever have, she holds her marked arm to her chest and stares at the dull letters until her eyes blur and spill over.

Midgard Date: 05.01.2019
Location: Puente Antiguo, New Mexico

Darcy is woken by a broken wailing sound, and dread fills her heart.

Jane's Soulmark has faded until it's almost invisible against her skin.

The news reports say that The Vanishing has been undone.

Darcy's mark does not return.

Thoughts much appreciated. I'm not new to fanfic, but I'm new to romance-focused writing, and to writing in this fandom. I'll be playing fast and loose with broader 616 canon as well as mythology, but this should ideally be totally or mostly MCU-compliant up to and including Infinity War.