A/N: When I said before that the next chapter would be out on Wednesday, what I actually meant was Tuesday. I forgot the month started on a Sunday. So the last part will be posted on Thursday instead.

I know that after this one, you're all going to want it ASAP anyway.

Enjoy!

For the next few weeks, Jane is so happy, she cannot fathom the idea that she was ever anything but. That there was ever a time when her soul wasn't filled with this flourishing euphoria is laughable to her. Surely her life was a dream until now. Never before has she felt so alive, so real and tangible. Maybe she thought she felt it before Loki and all that they had shared, but no, she'd been blind back then, blind and foolish. Now that she know what love was like—real love, not kid stuff—her eyes are open and she will never close them again.

Her final week of school she spends in the library. All her credits are completed, her grades trouncing all but those of the super genius kids. She can do what she wants until graduation, and what she wants is to know everything she can about the world Loki lives in. She wants to see what he sees and hear what he hears. That need to understand that has always been inside of her has grown beyond what she thought she knew of herself, and now, the sky's the limit.

She's already talked to Loki about meeting in person. Maybe she'll be the one to make it happen.

On the outside, their conversations haven't changed. They still call on each other at random (if more regular) intervals and they talk from dawn to dusk about whatever is on their minds. Sometimes, Jane wants to hear about Loki's family and what kind of work being a prince entails. Other times, Loki wants to understand the mortals' fascination with effeminate men who sing and dance, and why those girls Jane occasionally deigns to spend time with insist on summoning banshees with the volume of their screeches.

There is a difference, though. One that Jane can sense, if not hear, in every word they say. He's more open with her; the times that she can feel his joy or his pain are no longer happy accidents. It makes their conversations easier, lighter perhaps. They can be speaking about a subject mundane or deadly serious, and to Jane's ears, it might as well be nothing more than, 'I love you most.' 'No, I love you most.'

A week goes by, and then another. They don't have any more shared dreams in this time, but Jane has enough of her own to cover for them.

On the third week, he interrupts Jane's dream of standing on the roof of the school building in her soiled prom dress. The roof becomes an Asgardian style suite, while Jane's dress becomes air. Sometime later, they rest in a golden glow, and Jane snuggles into Loki's chest. He feels so warm and solid that it'll be jarring when she wakes up in her bedroom like he was never there at all.

She draws little circles in his skin, and listens to him tell her that they won't be having more meetings like this for a while.

"Why not?" she moans, playfully grinding him.

He growls and gives her behind a squeeze, but doesn't flip them other the way she'd hoped he would.

"It cannot be helped," he says. "Vanaheim has long been a friend of Asgard. It is our honor to stand at their side whenever war rages across the land. I'm afraid that I will need to focus my energies on the preparations."

"What about your brother?" Jane asks. Loki grimaces, as he has the few other times Jane brought up Thor. She doesn't know why he would. She may not know Thor, but from what Loki tells her, he seems like a pretty good guy.

"He is a skilled warrior and brilliant in battle," Loki allows, "but he lacks subtlety. He would much rather run screaming headfirst into battle than stand back and come up with a plan first. The only reason he hasn't been killed a thousand times over is his wielding of Mjolnir. Trust me when I say that he would be lost without my tactical skill."

"Have you ever tried to teach him?" Jane asked.

Loki looked at her as though she'd just told the world's funniest joke. "Have you ever tried to teach a songbird how to swim?"

"No, that's impossible."

"There you go."

"Okay, you've got to be exaggerating."

"You don't know Thor."

Loki's hands roam, and as his fingers pinch her nipples, Jane loses all desire to talk or think about anything else. That had to be exactly what he wanted.

"Now," he says huskily, "we have the rest of the night to enjoy before I must leave you. I don't intend to end it with idle conversation."

They end it with moans and screams instead.

Eventually, they reach a compromise.

Loki refuses to budge on the dream sharing. It uses too much energy and made it harder to avoid accidental connections. The last thing Loki wanted was for Jane to wake up one morning on the battlefield watching him slit an insurgent's throat through his eyes.

They would make contact only in their waking hours, once a week as long as Loki did not have to rush into battle at a moment's notice.

'That could very well happen,' he tells her, and if he thinks that's going to dissuade her from seeking him out, he's got another thing coming.

'So, what's going on?'

'Jane, this might not be the best time.'

'Are you going off to fight again?'

'No…'

'Are you currently in danger?'

'Not precisely.'

'Meaning…'

'Meaning that I shall live another day, however I might not do it with my sanity intact.'

Loki glances around the bar, where Thor and the others celebrate their most recent quelling of their rebellious foes. Said victory decimated roughly thirty percent of the enemy's forces by the estimation of their scouts. That leaves seventy percent still to come. Loki doesn't see what there is to celebrate.

He especially doesn't see cause for everyone to pour ale all over his and Thor's heads, just because they were the ones to lead the attack. Another five men now decide it's appropriate to ambush him and drench him as a unit. While they clap his back and laugh themselves into drunken oblivion, Loki releases a sigh.

'I take it back. Forgive me, Jane, but I believe I will be drowned tonight by my own men.'

He doesn't find that a very amusing thought, but she does, and when her laughter becomes his, the men take it as invitation to repeat the act. He is blinded by the length and thickness of his hair, and he thinks not for the first time that maybe it is high time to cut it just a little. That would please Mother, if nothing else.

'I'm happy to provide you entertainment,' he says dryly. It's the only dry thing about him by now.

Her girlish laugh tapers off where the masculine guffaws of Loki's comrades only grow. He does what he can to focus on the former.

'Don't worry about it,' she says. 'I'll tell you what, once this whole war of yours is over, we'll have another dream, and I'll provide the entertainment.'

He likes the sound of that. He likes it very much.

'You have a deal, my lady,' he says.

He can't wait to see her again.

"Jane, can I talk to you?"

Jane grabs an apple from the fruit bowl and takes a bite. The lukewarm juices aren't as sweet as they would be freshly picked, but she's hungry, so she'll take it.

"Yeah, Mom?" she says.

Her mother is a small woman, and the only adult Jane knows who can meet her eyes. Sometimes, her extended family jokingly laments that she didn't take after her six-foot-nothing father in the height department. Jane can't say she disagrees.

Where her mother is small, she is also decidedly meek. Little things frighten her, like people yelling at her on the job or Jane's father coming home late from work on Friday nights. She always makes a certain face, white with puckered lips that disappear into her mouth. She's not quite making that face now, but Jane can see the beginnings of it.

"I heard you laughing upstairs in your room," her mom says.

Jane blinks.

"I was just reading a funny book," she lies with ease. Loki has taught her much about that.

"It sounded like you were talking to someone."

Jane shakes her head. "No, I just had the TV on. You probably heard that."

"You turn on the TV when you're reading?"

"Sometimes."

Maybe she hasn't learned as much as she thinks. Her mother turns an analytic eye on Jane that makes her cough and fidget. Meek as Mrs. Joanna Foster may be, a mother is still a mother.

"Jane, I heard you talking. You're talking to someone named Loki, and this isn't the first time either."

And now Jane wants nothing more than to kick herself in the head and sink into the floor forever. How stupid did she have to be not to think, when she was living in a house with two other people who happened to be her parents, that they wouldn't walk by her door at least a few times while she and Loki were locked in some intense discussion, and wonder what the hell their daughter could be doing in there talking to herself. She should have just kept it all in her mind and never laughed out loud at one of his jokes.

Knowing that she needs to answer, lest her silence and staring with her mouth open gives her mom even more of the wrong idea, Jane feigns a look of understanding and makes a sound of relief.

"Oh, that's what you heard," she says, forcing her shoulders to loosen. "Yeah, Loki's a kid from school. I worked with him on a school project a few months ago, and sometimes we talk on the phone."

"You were on the phone," her mother says.

"Yeah, sorry if we've been tying up the line. He's a really interesting guy, Loki. Sometimes I think I can talk to him for hours."

She tries to wear a dreamy face. Maybe if her mother thinks she has a crush on the guy, she'll drop the suspicious act and go into 'girl bonding' mode where she tries to get Jane to dress up and wear more make-up and tell her absolutely everythingabout the boy.

That doesn't happen.

"You haven't tied up the line," her mother says with a sad look on her face. "If anything, the hour long call I made to the electric company while you were in your room talking to Loki did."

This is why Jane needs a cell phone. All the other kids have one, so she should, too. She knocked over one measly stereo system when she was nine and now her parents think she can't be trusted around electronics.

What happens next is too blurred for Jane to remember later. With her head slowly but surely starting to throb, she makes an excuse and heads for the door. She takes the car keys with her.

She drives (they let her learn to drive but she still can't have a goddamn cell phone). She thinks about calling Loki as she's heading down Main Street to the busy part of the city, but Loki told her he was marching straight into battle when he let her go. Their enemies launched a surprise attack on the tavern, and now Loki has a horde of inebriated troops to coordinate. Better that she leaves him alone for now.

Better for him, that is. Not better for her.

Everywhere Loki looks, people are dying. A lot of those people are his, but he must give them credit where it is due. Even in their drunken state, those who fall only do so after taking ten foes with them.

He himself has the highest body count, second only to Thor. That's to be expected.

A man is attempting to perform a sneak attack. Clearly he hasn't heard of Loki's reputation as a trickster with no equal. That, or he is simply an arrogant fool with delusions of grandeur. Either way, he is dead with a dagger embedded in his throat before he's had a chance to strike.

It allows the other man, the one Loki somehow missed, to run up with a club that sinks into Loki's stomach and winds him. He is distracted for all of ten seconds, and then the attacker joins his partner.

Their blood spreads over his blade and he cleans it with a spell. He goes back into the fray with Thor at his back, the two of them an unbeatable team, and he shuts out everything that is not on the battlefield, including the sense of dread that burrows itself into the pit of his stomach.

In the back of his mind, he knows something has just gone horribly wrong.

Jane's been driving for longer than she knows, and now she's in an unfamiliar part of town, and her parents are going to kill her when she gets home. If she gets home.

She's spent the time coming up with a new cover story. Loki is still a boy from school who Jane has a huge crush on. She might even be in love with him (Jane smiles wryly), but she gets so nervous that sometimes she rehearses conversations between them so that she'll know what to say when they meet. It's really nothing out of the ordinary, is it?

Jane turns on a corner that she might kind of know, drives down a block she definitely knows… and then lurches back at sudden, raging pain like she's been kicked in the gut.

Loki is her first thought, as one hand falls off the wheel, and she skids into the path of an oncoming minivan.

Then she is spinning, and something is screeching, and pain is coming from all different directions, and Jane's last thought is that her parents are going to kill her for wrecking the car.

Jane wakes up to white light. She's probably not the first person to mistake a hospital room for heaven.

The pain in her stomach is gone, but her arms and legs and head and chest hurt enough to make up for the loss.

Her mother and father are outside, talking to a doctor. Her mother casts a glance into the room and their eyes meet.

Her mother screams.

Her father has to wait for her to stop crying and let Jane go. Then he holds her like he did when she was five and scared of the dark.

"You gave us quite a scare, little lady," he says. She was five the last time he called her that, too.

When all the tears have been shed and hugs and kisses exchanged, the doctor enters the room with a stethoscope and a clipboard. He introduces himself as Dr. Evans, and he tells Jane that she's been unconscious for thirty six hours. She was lucky to have been hit on the passenger's side (and he assures her that the woman in the other car is safe and uninjured). It means that she's escaped with her life, and a few cuts and bruises, not to mention a compound fracture of her right arm. She won't be doing any writing for the next few months.

She's in the hospital for the rest of the week, and she doesn't hear from Loki, but that's not unusual. She hardly thinks about him at all, in fact, until the day she is to be released, when a new doctor comes to her room with her mother in tow.

"Hi Jane," he says. "I'm Dr. Morgan. Your mother wanted me to come and talk to you."

He holds out a hand and Jane shakes, but there's something about this doctor she doesn't like. Call in a gut instinct.

"Are you a physical therapist?" she asks. Dr. Evans hadsuggested that she see one.

Dr. Morgan chuckles. "Well, I am a therapist, but not that kind."

"I don't understand," Jane says, but the look on her mother's face tells her everything she needs to know already.

"It's just that I heard you've been talking to people who… might not really be there."

He seems to have been looking for a delicate way to phrase that, and if so, he's failed spectacularly.

"I can't see why that would be," Jane says with a smile.

"Jane, please don't do that," her mother says. "You were calling his name in your sleep!"

Jane freezes. "Wha-what name? Whose name?"

"Loki's," her mother says. She comes into the room and sits at the side of her bed, taking her hand. Jane is too stunned to pull away. "Ever since you woke up, and even before, you keep calling out to him. One night, I… I asked you who he was, and you told me that he spoke to you in your head?"

She sounds disgusted on the last word, like she's secretly lamenting that her brilliant daughter with so many prospects as turned into a nutcase, and that alone sends Jane over the edge.

"Mom, you've got to be kidding me!" She nearly jumps out of bed, but her ankle still hurts like hell. "You actually think something I said while I was half-asleep means anything? What kind of answers were you expecting?"

"But Jane, this has been going on for years. You think we haven't heard it?" Now her mother is getting upset, and she never gets upset like this. "Jane, you're my daughter and I love you more than anything in the world. If something is wrong-"

"Nothing is wrong!"

"Then who is Loki?"

"He's…" they're both staring at her, waiting for an answer that she can't give, and the longer they stare, the more those two pairs of eyes look like two thousand pairs. Her throat has closed up, and her head is spinning, and she can hear her mother asking, in a resigned tone of voice, if they can make it a three pm appointment instead of four.

Loki sits in his tent at the dawn of a new day. There is a battle on the horizon. This war has been more intense and bloody than he ever could've imagined. In this brief moment of reverie, it's the perfect time for him to call out to Jane. He would've ages ago, he might've even broken his vow and taken her to the world of his unconscious mind yet again.

He doesn't because of what he's just woken up from: a dream of such vividness that it is second only to the dreams they share.

In it, his Jane is in one of her moving contraptions. She calls it a car. He calls it clunky and primitive, not to mention dangerous.

Yes, it's very dangerous.

It's so dangerous, that when Jane doubles over in pain that they share, she immediately collides with another vehicle, and she spins across the street into a tree that her 'car' half uproots. While Loki sits aside the action, a red and white box shaped vehicle comes screaming down the road. Two men issue forth and pry open the door of Jane's vehicle.

Loki has lived half his life on the battlefield. He has seen more men die in more bizarre ways than he can count, but he is not prepared to see Jane ripped free from what could easily have been her grave. There's a gash on the side of her head and another on her neck. Her head lolls from one side to the other. Loki wants to cry out, but his voice doesn't work here. He can only watch, a powerless ghost, as his love is loaded into the box and carried away.

And it's all his fault.

He wakes up knowing it. This only happened because he called her in the middle of that party, right before the insurgents crashed through the doors. In that moment of senseless boredom, he had let his better judgment slip, and he had connected with her, and then he hadn't had the time to probably break away before the battle started fresh.

That dream is reality. He needs but one brush into the stream of her thoughts to know it.

She's hurt now because of him.

She almost died because of him.

It's been a long time since Loki has felt regret like this, but if anything has come of it, it's that he knows more than ever the true extent of their bond.

Thor calls him out into the open, and Loki comes, where he would have just shooed the oaf away on a better day. Other will watch him, and whisper among themselves of how the second prince looks dead to the world, uncaring of what happens outside the confines of his mind. He looks like he's held all the light of the realm in his hands, only to have them ripped away in an instant. That's what they'll say.

And Loki will not listen. He never has before. He'll carry on until the fighting is over, without Jane Foster to rouse him in the worst of times. He won't contact her one more time no matter what is to come, and he'll hope that she understands it was all for her.

On his honor, he will not hurt her again.

The first time Jane meets with Dr. Morgan, he doesn't talk about Loki.

He asks how her day has been and how she feels about graduating. He asks about her friends and the boy in her math class whose offer for a date she rejected. She answers questions about college and what she plans to do with her life. He sounds impressed when she talks about astrophysics, like he's finally seeing her as an intelligent being rather than an experiment to pick apart.

Jane still leaves the meeting feeling like she's been babied.

He asks about Loki on the second meeting, and Jane is ready for him.

"Look, it's true that I talk to Loki sometimes," she tells him, "but it's not what you think. Loki is… I talk to him when I'm bored or frustrated, or no one else is around and I need to vent. It's motivating for me to talk to Loki. He's like, you know, an extension of myself or something like that. I feel more confident after I've spilled all my problems to him, you know what I mean?"

When he asks why she didn't tell her mother that, Jane winces (he's very blunt, this guy). She asks him to look at where they are now. Her mother would have wanted her committed if she just blurted out the truth. She's just the type to overreact is all.

Dr. Morgan doesn't believe her.

He says that he does, but Jane knows that he doesn't. It's in his eyes. The eyes say so much more than the mouth does. Another thing she's learned from Loki.

He prescribes her sleeping pills. Jane folds up the prescription slip and keeps it in her hand until she's out of his office. Then it goes in the waste bin.

The next time they meet, he has more questions.

When did she start talking to Loki?

Where did she come up with the name Loki?

Is she familiar with the mythology behind the name Loki?

Did she create Loki because she was lonely as a child?

Does she crave companionship but not know how to seek it out in the real world, and so she retreats into fantasy where no one can judge her?

Does she really understand that Loki is not real and just a figment of her imagination?

Jane goes home that day and wants to punch a wall until her other arm breaks. She can't even throw herself on the bed properly because she might break the cast. She buries her head in her pillow, releasing in a scream all the frustration that she'd rather take out on Dr. Morgan's fat, pretentious head.

When she's all done and tired out, Jane rolls onto her good side, her broken arm jutted out in her cast. It's been signed by a bunch of people she barely knows.

She looks at the clock and then the calendar. It's marked May 22nd, but it's actually May 28th. She should start marking the dates again. She needs to be in the mood for it first.

Right now, the only date she cares about is two weeks ago. That was the last time the two of them spoke, and Loki ended it abruptly when his party was ambushed.

It's about time she found out how that fight ended.

'Loki,' Jane calls to him, sitting up with her back against the pillow and her head on the wall. 'Loki, can you hear me?'

She closes her eyes and searches for him. He's taken his time before to answer, but his presence is always so powerful, like her feet tingling after they've fallen asleep. She can't feel that right now, but he has to still be around.

'Loki, I know you're probably in the middle of something right now, but the last few weeks have been pure hell. You won't believe what my mom is making me do right now, all because she heard us talking, and she thinks…'

Jane's eyes open of their own accord, and she stares blankly at her wall and the posters that have changed from actors and boy bands to the make-up of the stars and the Andromeda Galaxy. Her small TV in the corner is turned off, her father is at work, and her mother went out ten minutes ago for groceries. Everything is so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, but it doesn't hold a candle to the silence Jane hears in her mind.

Loki has never taken this long to answer her before.

'Are you there?' she asks, sitting up a little straighter. No answer. "Are you there?"

She's been trying not to speak to him out loud anymore, that's what got her in trouble. She just needs to hear him right now, whatever it takes. He'll know it's serious if she calls him like this.

"Loki, where are you?" she looks around the room, as if he's just hiding in her closet or under the bed "Come on, this isn't funny."

He must think it is, because he's still not answering, and Jane is feeling increasingly like a child again, jumping at shadows and crying in the dark, when even the moon couldn't guide her.

"Look, if you're busy, that's okay. We can talk another time, but can you please talk to me? Just tell me you're there, and I'll be okay. Loki, please! Please say something!"

He never does.

The battles rage. The blood spills red. The death toll rises.

Loki feels it acutely in the air. They've just buried another soldier. Loki knew this one personally. He was a good man, if not terribly bright. He didn't deserve to die, though he had died well. Somewhere in the heart of the forest, their foes are mourning fifty where they mourn one.

The insurgents will be felled any day now. Their numbers are dwindling, their morale is shattered. They should have known not to take on a friend of Asgard. Where the enemy falls, Asgard rises. Thor is confident that surrender will come any day now, but his assurances do little to appease Loki.

In all the time that's gone by, he hasn't allowed himself to rest. Even now, he's going over new battle plans to be discussed with Thor and their generals later. When he's done with that, he might consider past battles and any missteps that he wouldn't want repeated. There aren't bound to be many, but one can never be sure.

Anything is better than letting his mind wander, because it will inevitably wander back to Jane. If he thinks about Jane, he'll wonder how she is now, how her healing is going. He'll wonder if perhaps he should open the channels for just a moment, just to let her know that he's thinking of her. Part of him thinks he should do it to explain why he closed off from her in the first place. He knows it wasn't fair of him to retreat without explanation.

Yet every time he thinks he'll give in, he remembers her lifeblood seeping out her wounds as she sat perilously close to the edge of Valhalla. If not that, another horn will blow, calling their armies once more into battle. As Loki rushes with Thor to the head of fray, he'll push Jane out of mind, far enough that he almost does forget her.

The war is going to end any day now. Everyone is sure of it. Then he'll have her back, and when he does, he'll never let go again.

Jane sees Dr. Morgan three more times before she stops.

Since Loki disappeared, the doctor seems less willing to pull punches with her. His questions become steadily more intrusive, and in one desperate moment after a particularly bad session, Jane wonders if Dr. Morgan is secretly some kind of wizard who broke her connection to Loki and is using their meetings for some indirect evil gloating.

Their final session starts with him asking outright if she's spoken to Loki recently.

"No," she answers. She doesn't feel like putting on a show for him today. "Seems like he's abandoned me."

It's been five weeks and six days since she last heard from Loki.

"Are you sure Loki abandoned you and not the other way around?"

Where she doesn't want to play, she also doesn't want to hear psychobabble. Next he's going to start some spiel about Jane gaining maturity by letting go of her 'childhood fantasy' and what a good step this is for her emotional development and how she should be so proud of herself. Way to go, Jane!

"I never said I wanted him gone, you know."

Dr. Morgan winces. He coughs into his hand. He's done this so many times now that Jane is going to have a lifelong distrust of anyone who clears their throat when it's time to get serious.

"Well, Jane, I… can understand how letting go of certain habits can be difficult, especially when you've lived with them for as long as you have-"

Here it comes. Any second now…

"-but this is a positive thing-"

And there it is.

"-this shows how much you've improved since we started meeting. It shows growth and a willingness to get out into the real world. You're a young woman with her whole life ahead of her. It's time for you to let go of your fantasies and find real, tangible people to know and love you-"

Jane gets up and walks out the door. It's a purely reflexive action that she is not going to regret when she gets home and tells her mother in no uncertain terms that she's done with therapy.

She goes to her room, passed the calendar she has yet to change, and drops on the bed with her now loosely bandaged arm out. It's become routine for her. Whenever she feels tired, no matter what time it is, she goes straight to bed, she gets herself comfortable, she closes her eyes, and she says his name once.

"Loki?"

He never answers.

Every night, her voice gets softer.

Last night, it was a quarter past one. She'd been up late finishing a book. In the dead of night, when the sky is its darkest, she could always count on his voice to calm her. She said his name, and hoped against hope that tonight was the night he returned. She could rip him a new one for taking so long to come back, and then she can meet him in their dream world and show him how much she's missed him.

All she heard was silence.

And in that silence, where she's started to forget the rumble of his laugh and the warmth of his touch, a horrible thought struck her.

What if Dr. Morgan is right?

Loki's room is exactly as he left it. It should be. He spelled the door to open for none but him when he left all those weeks ago.

Magic wards off the dust that comes from disuse and keeps his room cleaner than any maid could, but Loki is in no place to admire his cleanliness.

A spell mutes the euphoria of victory that permeates the realm. Loki removes his outer layer of armor with a thought. It's become heavy and cumbersome over the last month and a half. Now that the war is won, he'd be happy to spend the rest of the century in loose pants and a tunic, reading books and talking to Jane.

Valhalla above, how he has missed his Jane.

He's waited for just the right moment. She'll be getting ready for bed right now if he remembers correctly. How will it be for her to just be settling in for a good night's rest, only to hear his voice speaking her name?

He expects her to be angry with him. He can handle whatever she throws at him. Even if she chooses to ignore him for a few weeks more as punishment, he will take it. As long as she is still his.

Loki settles down on his bed (it feels wonderful after so many nights with straw blankets). He closes his eyes and reaches for her.

It's been four months, one week, and two days since Jane heard his voice.

Her cast has come off, and she's relearned how to write in near immaculate cursive (she still flubs on capital letters every now and then).

She's moved into her new dorm room. Her roommate is a party girl who likes to drag her to bars and parties. Jane met a guy there and went on one date. She's still thinking about calling him back, but she probably won't.

Her mother calls every other day, but it's clear in her voice that she wants to call more often. She wasn't happy about Jane dropping therapy, but the lack of one-sided conversations behind closed doors may have appeased her somewhat. Jane's room was a very quiet place in the weeks before she left.

She barely thinks about Loki anymore. When she does, her heart clenches, but less and less so every day.

She's gotten heavy into her studies. In the first semester alone, she topped all her science courses. Graduate school seems less and less like a distant future; Jane's professors expect big things from her. It's good to remember that she's a woman of science. A logical woman, who must think logically at all times.

It doesn't escape her notice that Loki vanished right when she started seeing Dr. Morgan. She hates to turn to psychobabble herself, but she can't help wondering if being forced to confront the issue from an outside point of view may have revealed a truth she wasn't ready to accept, that she really did have to get out more and form real relationships, because the only one she cared about existed in her head.

If it was all your head then how do you explain seeing through his eyes? She'll ask herself.

There's a lot of things that explain it, she answers. She could have dreamed all of that up like she did those times they were… together. Sure, they were vivid dreams, but she would certainly not be the first teenage girl to have a steamy sex dreams about a gorgeous stranger.

But Loki's not a stranger, her other side will say, sounding more desperate to hold on by the second. He's real.

And then Jane will ask herself how she knows that.

It works well for her, being logical for a change. She's almost completely forgotten the way he made her feel.

'The way you thought he made you feel,' she amends quickly.

On a cold evening just before mid-terms, Jane returns early from one of Carly's wild house parties. Her roommate is expected back around five or six sometime tomorrow, so Jane has the whole place to herself to finish up her paper for Advanced Physics, and maybe even get some sleep.

Her side of the room is a mess of textbooks and loose-leaf paper covered in notes. Jane grabs a few that look relevant and sets them beside the notebook where the rough draft of her paper takes up the first twenty two pages. She turns to page twenty three, pen in hand and new ideas for her closing paragraph forming.

'Jane.'

She drops the pen.

'Jane, are you there?'

It's his voice. She'd know it anywhere. His voice rings in her ears like a bell, like he's really right there next to her and always has been.

'Jane?'

She wonders if he can feel her heart pounding, or her stomach dropping.

She doesn't want to think about that because of what it acknowledges. Everything she's tried to convince herself of, all the walls made of common sense that she's erected over herself.

'Jane?'

They're crumbling.

'Jane, answer me.'

"No."

The sound of her voice shocks even her. It breaks through the ice that's crawling up her back, ice that feels secondary. Any second now, she's going to scream.

'What…?'

Jane's body seizes up. She can no longer breathe as everything comes to her in a whirlwind. She goes back to the first time he stopped answering her, the fear that she felt. Frustration comes next. What kind of sick joke was he playing on her, leaving her now when she needed him most?

From frustration comes more fear. It's been far too long. If this was a joke, he should have stopped by now.

Fear becomes anger. If he wants to give her the silent treatment, fine. Two can play that came.

Anger is steady for many weeks, days that mesh into an interchangeable mold. Her anger dulls it's sharpened blade. It falls somewhere deep inside and becomes fear again.

Fear.

Anger.

Frustration.

It all surrounds betrayal.

And now here he is again, like he only just spoke to her yesterday. Like these last few months have been nothing to him.

"Go away," Jane says in her strongest voice. "You're not real."

Her chest hurts.

His chest hurts.

No, her chest hurts.

'Jane… what are you saying?'

Jane's healed arm shoots out and knocks over everything on the table.

"YOU'RE NOT REAL!" she screams at nothing at all. "You're not real, and I never want to speak to you again. JUST GO AWAY!"

She picks up the closest thing to her, a pillow. She throws it at the wall and it bounces off, landing on the bed. Jane goes after it, releasing into it everything she's had pent up inside of her for four months, one week, and two days, until she can't release anymore and she falls asleep from exhaustion.

Loki feels as though he's been torn asunder. Thousands of men who wanted nothing more than his blood on their blade never cut him like she has.

Jane's words run around his skull, creating an indenture. Her rage is like a slap in the face, one he knows deep down that he deserves.

He knows not what's happened to her while he's been absent, only that he has underestimated the toll it would take on her. If he'd known that she would be so angry as to reject him outright, he would have listened all those times he said, 'Just once. Just this one time while the air is quiet.'

But it doesn't matter now. It's just fine if she doesn't want to talk to him again. So says the side of him that has remained a petulant child for over a thousand years. If she doesn't want to talk to him, he won't waste his time trying to make her. He's already spent too much on that silly little mortal girl anyway.

He quite suddenly wants to rest. He withdraws from her mind as far as he can, as the last visages of her consciousness take their form at the base of his eyes.

They cry themselves to sleep that night as one.