A/N: Sorry for the delay in updates. Real life intrudes, as always and it's hard to find time to write!
Chapter 2
The scent of rain is in the air, accompanied by the sudden rush of euphoria so out of place that it jerks her awake. Clarity only sets in as her eyes register the weak sunlight that shafts through the small opening in the curtain, a minute before the alarm clock announces its presence.
Jane kicks off the bed covers with a frown and stumbles dazedly into the bathroom, blinking away the strange floating sensations that seem to have spilled over from that twilit, irrational realm.
What had brought that on?
Logic, as always, tells her in a voice that resembles her supervisor, that exhaustion and adaptation have taken their toll on her body and her mind. Deep-seated intuition, honed from years of allowing her imagination roam free each time her telescope is pointed at the sky, tells her that her encounter with her mystery patient has everything to do with it.
Or does it?
By the time she gets out, there's a slight drizzle in the air that chills the temperature indoors. It blows sideways against the windowpane, succumbing to the force of the harsh winds that whip their way through the pine forest. The sound is like thunder, even with the windows firmly shut.
A sharp knock on her door startles her out of her reverie. Jane jumps a little, cursing loudly as her knee jerks into the sharp edge of the counter, and realises with some chagrin that she's clutching her towel in a death grip as she stares sightlessly into a mirror that's still fogged up from the steam of her recent shower. She gets dressed with a grimace and yanks open the door, only to see a huge pile of boxes that the courier had left outside her room.
They're positioned exactly such that her only route out into the corridor is blocked, leaving her no choice but to sort them out one by one before she can actually leave the place for some semblance of sustenance. The gloomy weather already forgotten, Jane snorts at how wonderfully considerate S.H.I.E.L.D movers have proven themselves to be.
An hour later, slightly sweaty and grumpy from her efforts to settle in, she finally steps out into the corridor in search of food. The oddity of only occupying herself with a sole patient hasn't yet sunk in and she's still undecided if the inordinate amount of time that she'll be spending on his treatment – an in close proximity to a serial killer – leaves her feeling queasy or darkly thrilled.
The hushed quietness that hangs over the whole compound is disconcerting, so unlike the constant stream of activity that bounces off the corridors of the hospital. It takes her a while to navigate her way down to the larger complex that houses her patient and it's only until her feet take her to the door of his cell instead of the canteen that she realises where she really is.
The patient lies unchanged from where he lay since she saw him yesterday, an unmoving, thin lump in the sheets and the mess of wires hooked up to him. No one knows his name so he's their Mr. X, their mystery to solve, their only clue to the string of murders that only implicates him as the perpetrator.
The only difference in the room today is the presence of her virtual computers and the elevated surfaces that she normally uses during a session with a patient.
Jane still fails to fully understand S.H.I.E.L.D.'s intense interest in him. But it obviously isn't her place to know anything beyond plumbing the depths of his subconscious, she reminds herself caustically with a barely-suppressed roll of her eyes. Taking a step forward, she balks in surprise as she nears his bed.
The physical wounds that mar Mr. X's body are still present, but they somehow look lighter, less prominent against his pale skin. Scoffing slightly, she convinces herself that it's a trick of the lighting or even the sheer exhaustion of yesterday's move that must have made her see things that hadn't been there at all before.
A quiet knock – a soft sound of bones against wood – makes her turn to the door.
The man who enters is in a white doctor's coat thrown hastily over blue med scrubs. Another medical officer stands at the threshold of the cell, surprise flitting across his face, all too quickly replaced by a sanguine expression.
He stretches out a hand in greeting, which she takes immediately. Calls himself Trenton Corey, this doctor who'd been assigned to Mr. X before he put in a recommendation for her expertise. Jane finds him easy to like – though he seems a little cagey at times – mostly because of his genial bedside manner that people assume exists in general practitioners. The latter is probably an occupational hazard, given that he works in this cagey compound where secrets overflow out of its walls.
They talk trivia and she realises that it calms her down a little, this small, mundane anchor in the secluded world hemmed in by acres of wilderness and electrified fences.
She's finally shaking the last bits of tension off in her neck when the topic eventually and inevitably veers to the unconscious man on the bed. Sneaking a glance at him, Jane sees that Mr. X's breaths are deep and even, the oxygen mask over his face obscuring most of his features. Beneath it, his face is placid and unmoving. She can't shake the idea that everything they say here are things he can hear and understand. It's a belief that has only strengthened in the years that she had worked to prove that patients in vegetative states largely retain their cognitive abilities to varying degrees.
Jane suddenly finds herself gripping the ledge of the bed until her knuckles whiten.
"He was in a bad state when he was found. Cerebral contusions, severe internal bruising, broken ribs, cracked, femur fracture-", Corey says quietly and shakes his head, not mincing his words he lifts the clipboard from the foot of the bed.
He's oblivious to her sudden discomfort and she swallows hard as she wipes clammy hands on the sides of her jacket.
"Yeah, I've read that," Jane acknowledges.
"To be honest, the fact that he's still alive now is in itself a miracle. More resilient than any other patient I've come across in my years doing this. I've read about sheer willpower keeping a person alive, but this…" He trails off as though bewildered, at a loss for words. "We're probably looking at a very, very long road to recovery and that's still a very optimistic prognosis we can give him."
"Among…us? If there're other doctors here, I've not seen any of them besides you."
Corey laughs shortly. "A small team of medical advisors, residents and nurses, but it's not a permanent number. We come and go according to the terms stipulated in our contracts, but obviously we aren't supposed to discuss it among ourselves. The nurse who has been helping me with this case packed up yesterday."
Jane purses her lips when she hears that. "I see."
Corey shrugs once genially. "That's how it goes around here. Contracts aren't permanent but really, the employees themselves choose to move on to warmer climes, if you get my drift."
Jane nods in understanding. A few hours spent here is enough to convince her of Corey's 'drift'.
Then she takes the clipboard from him and rereads the details of Mr. X's condition. It's all that she knows of him – the man on the bed whose only identity is defined by the long list of injuries that he'd suffered. It occurs to her that they've been talking about Mr. X as a patient whose life is at stake, rather than a serial killer in need of medical help only because the authorities demand it.
But Corey isn't done. He walks over to check on the machines to see that they're functioning correctly – a useless task really, because they do – and then looks at her hesitantly.
"Look, I know everything about this is rather unusual," he continues as his eyes involuntarily wander to the cameras fixed in the corners of the cell.
Jane's gaze follows his, then wanders to the architecture and the interior design of the cell. It hits her then, that the room closely resembles a large interrogation cell, hastily transformed into a hospital ward.
Three walls are visible to the subject, while the fourth mirror-grade acrylic wall conceals the observation panel behind.
"-and I can't imagine that it has been easy to be here two days after I put in my recommendation but-"
"That's alright," she tells him, finally finding her voice. It's best to think of this hiatus as another assignment away from her usual place of work. Then she adds dryly, "For all this trouble, S.H.I.E.L.D. actually offered a lucrative deal."
The look that Corey gives her tells her all that she needs to know.
"Yeah, they certainly do, don't they?"
oOo
The computerised voice announces the completion of the neural lock between the splinter in her arm and in her temple but Jane is barely aware of it as she begins her drift into the hyper-vividness of a landscape that's too sharp, too bright to be real.
The neural interface materialises as a silky black glass sheet rippling tantalisingly beneath her feet and for the first time ever, she stumbles as though walking on water. The gust of wind reeks of ozone, as though produced by the lingering prickles of a lightning storm that have been ravaging the land for a very long time. She tilts her head upwards when she feels searing heat on the back of her neck, seeing the blood-red sun that quickly clips across the sky to dip beneath a rippling horizon of the jagged tips of rocks.
Then the ground bucks beneath her and turns into a flimsy, pearlescent net of sand that dissipates and crumbles beneath her weight. An unseen force hurls her into a sky of dotted with unfamiliar constellations and suddenly, Jane's sliding through a rocky pathway that spits her out onto the same black glass sheet that stretches out as far as she can see.
She's dazed by the immensity of Mr. X's landscape – a world really – shaken by the whirring and whispers that press in from nowhere. What she's seeing is so very unlike the domestic scenes of deserted farmhouses and impossibly high mountains and open oceans that exist in her other patients' subconscious selves.
"-ster…Dr. Foster!"
The screech of metal against metal thrusts her out of the deadly, surreal maze in the short snap of a millisecond. Darkness coalesces into a pinprick of light as reality harshly reasserts its presence. Blinking her eyes open blearily, Jane takes a moment to catch her breath, pushing out the shrill, insistent warning that's coming out as a staccato of loud beeps from the left of her cot. A metre above her, the low hum of the heavily modified, semi-circular MR scanner winds down to the buzz of white noise.
The sound is as familiar to her as the back of her hand; it's the alarm signalling that the inbuilt failsafe had triggered, terminating the connection between her and Mr. X when the crumbling neural link had begun to compromise functional processes in the brain.
But she hadn't even gone deep enough as she should be going. Deep enough so that she sees Mr. X's face – or at least the self he projects – in his own mind. And yet the link between them had already been corrupted by an experience too bizarre to explain even in medical terms.
"Dr. Foster!"
"I'm here," Jane croaks out.
Natasha Romanov's cool tones float out of the room speakers and Jane remembers with a grimace that she has an audience.
"Dr. Foster, your EEG readings are spiking through the chart."
If Romanov is present, perhaps Barton is too, and god knows who else is standing behind that hidden panel.
"Patient's blood pressure and heart rate slowly stabilising," Trenton Corey's voice calls out, distorted slightly by the static that buzzes through the speaker. "Dr. Foster, I could come over and-"
"I'm fine," she hastily reassures the people behind the one-way mirror. "I must have overestimated the frequencies. I'll just redo them again."
Her voice breaks towards the end as she listens to the strange hollow of vibration in her own parched throat. Biting back a groan, Jane sits up slowly on the bed that's set up for her next to Mr. X's own, trying to calm her choppy breathing. Next to the readings detailing neural stimuli and neurological responses, the digital clock blinks 1057 hours in large, red numbers.
Jane stares in disbelief. She'd spent nearly a whole hour in that bizarre place when it'd only felt like a few hair-raising seconds.
With a noisy exhale, she crosses the small space to look at the printouts of Mr. X's stats. Except for the elevated readings that his vitals had registered during their neural connection, he seems perfectly fine now.
"The patient's doing fine," she says more for Corey's benefit than for the S.H.I.E.L.D.'s agents.
Corey's own quiet sigh of relief is audible over the speakers. "You gave us quite a bit of a scare there."
"You and me both, pal," Jane mutters to herself as she rechecks the parameters and the values of the variables on the touchscreen's control panel, keenly feeling the spotlight of attention like a tangible weight pressing insistently into her back. "No pressure at all, Jane."
And she'd thought that this would be relatively stress-free? She'd kick herself later.
The low whine of the machines fills the empty space as she adjusts the strength settings of the neural link on the touchscreen. It glows red, recalculating its imaging parameters as the progress bar rapidly fills up in the corner and snaps her new settings into place. She deliberates a moment, then boosts the level of neurotransmitters in the fluids that run through both her and Mr. X's veins.
"Setting the timer for their connection to last two hours," she says to the observation panel unnecessarily.
A hundred and twenty minutes.
It's an arbitrary figure dependent on the whims of Mr. X's overactive psyche.
"I'm trying one more time," Jane announces out loud as she lies back down on her cot and takes a deep breath.
Down the rabbit hole.
"Go ahead, Dr. Foster," a new voice replies.
It sounds like Clint Barton, but Jane can't be too sure, because she's already plunging headfirst into the abyss.
oOo
The darkness is comforting and painless and it keeps the nightmares at bay, an unmoveable barrier that stops the horror from leaking into his head the insidious way it did the moment Midgard had beckoned an age ago.
Dimly, Loki thinks that he is aware of the pain that still lances his side, but he's drifting out of it easily, floating on the feather-light feeling that cushions everything.
A bright flash of light lances through the black emptiness, thrusting his disoriented self into a memory that harks back many years. Whether it is borne out of the illusive nature of the darkness or of the making of his own mind, he doesn't know. Nor does he have the strength to find out.
If this is truly a dream, Loki thinks that he'll be quite happy to stay in it for an indeterminate period of time.
In his peripheral vision, a slight brunette stands looking at everything that swirls around her. But she doesn't seem to see him. There's a look of awe and wonder on her face as she stumbles and rights herself, an incongruous stain violating this space that he owns. She is dressed in Midgardian garments, the sort that he has become familiar with in his time on Midgard, covered with a long, white coat that hangs to her knees.
He blinks once and she's gone, reappearing a second later as a spectral figure who stumbles in that same black nothingness of glass, sand and fire.
Somehow he knows that she stands at the threshold of his memories, at the shorefront of the ocean of his deepest fears and unspoken desires. The ground is suddenly an undulating snake, as though sensing his confusion and turmoil at her unwelcome presence.
Loki tenses, not liking the sudden intrusion.
With a slight motion of his fingers, he pushes her off the edge of his consciousness and straight into a pathway that is deliberately fashioned as a maze in which she'd get perpetually lost. He feels the heavy weight of his own breath roaring in his ears but also every infinitesimal shift of movement that she makes as she struggles to hold herself upright.
It's a losing battle that she fights. There isn't much more to do except to watch her wink in and out of focus until she disappears completely.
Loki smiles in satisfaction at his handiwork when the pathway ejects her somewhere that's out of sight – and out of mind. Only then does he turn his attention to the domed horizon that slowly cracks open on his right.
The soft, golden light he'd always associated with home dissipates like the morning fog into the familiar spires that inch towards the magnificent sprawl of the stars. With a start, he realises it's the view from the balcony in his personal chambers: the grassy training area that lies the right, and skirting that octagonal field, Frigga's perfumed gardens that follow the coast of the great sea; the gilded apple trees of Idunn shimmering in the distance as they consume the light of the stars.
It's real and yet it is not. Loki wonders if it's a construct of his addled mind.
A dark whisper caresses his wind-bitten cheeks and he knows that the chill he feels is the most tangible of emotions as he floats in a realm between worlds.
Thanos.
The faceless name that rides on that wave of confusion is too familiar, a stain in these hallowed spaces. Instinct makes him flinch in anticipation of tortuous pain but none comes. Instead, there's a void where emotion and sensation reside.
And then he's running, away from the fear and the burn of ice, his footsteps light yet heavy in nothingness, away from the terror that he's ashamed of feeling. To his horror, his strides start to slow, as though he has transitioned from running on air to trudging through the heavy black dirt of Svartalfheim and the thick mud that blankets most of Nidavellir.
The void is an endless circle that runs him ragged.
But where he expects the hollowed out feeling of nothingness, Loki sees instead – with no little amount of shock and annoyance – that same, short, brown-haired woman back in this place he isn't even sure is real.
The surroundings shift again, as though sensing his mood. Shadows meld into the symmetric structures of a plain, empty room where four walls create a claustrophobic space to hem them both in.
There's no hesitation this time when he strides up to her to clamp a hard hand around her neck, positioning himself so that she stays immobile in his grasp.
"Name yourself, fiend," he commands through gritted teeth, taking in the growing panic and terror in her eyes. "Tell me your business in this place."
She's shaking her head in either denial or fear – or maybe both – as he shakes her slightly and repeats his question.
"Uh-I-"
Loki loosens his grip on her throat fractionally, hearing her gasps and wheezes turn into audible sounds.
"Name yourself."
He watches as the woman takes a deep breath and works her throat. "J-Jane. Foster."
"Jane Foster," Loki repeats blankly, his brow furrowing as he searches for something with which to associate that particular name. It would be so easy to snap her neck. A short, easy death. But even that act would be considered a small mercy. Yet it's inexplicable that there is someone here in this place that is quickly becoming his personal nightmare – a woman who looks like she is incapable of doing the smallest creature any harm.
Unless…unless she is yet another one whom he must kill, another insidious, stinking minion couched in the disguise of humanity designed to drive him to madness. And even in this world between worlds, he cannot escape them.
He shoves aside the thread of despair that threatens to halt the magic that's spiking in his core and focuses instead on the woman whose insistent presence cannot be shaken off.
"Your name means nothing to me. Do not even attempt to deny that you are one of them," he intones with an unpleasant smile.
She finally finds her voice. "One of them?"
The clarity that he thought he'd gained out of that chaos is short-lived. "Are you truly incapable of comprehending my statement?"
Loki murmurs the question harshly into her face, his jaw tightening in impatience and annoyance. But it occurs to him as soon as his question is voiced, that Jane Foster's unlikely existence and appearance in this realm suggest that even the boundaries of magic and consciousness are not as concretely fixed as he'd once assumed.
"No, look, I can help yo-"
Riding only on instinct, Loki doesn't bother to wait for her to finish that sentence as he reaches inward to take hold of the threads that are holding up this illusion…and pulls.
Like a dam that caves in, everything of hers quickly saturates the haze of his consciousness, the sharp, crisp flash of her personal memories so overwhelming that the shock of its fullness instantly severs the magical hold he has of her mind.
There is no chronological order is the scenes of her life, merely echoes of memories in bright colours that cannot simply be dismissed by a magical gesture. They are too full of life, too emotional to be carried in the mortal frames of the non-entities he hunts.
If Jane Foster is truly one of them, then all he'd find would be a nonentity of dust and bones, with no significant spark of animated sentience that could ever react with the magic that he has stretched out with.
Loki jerks back with a start, his mouth as dry as dust as he stares at the red fingerprints that have been permanently burned into the stark, pristine white walls. His own. Bloodied with the kills that he'd made.
"Who are you?"
The words are tumbling out of their own accord, spoken in a voice hoarse with disbelief as the room around them crumbles. This is his mind laid out in a land of contradictions and memories – private but not inviolable – and so attuned to the shift of his emotions that the walls are flattening just as his gut clenches in dread and realisation.
Before Jane Foster can answer, the floor beneath them falls through completely. The squealing noise reduces the room into a one-dimensional flat line as he shifts his hand from her throat to grip her wrist to call his knives to him-
The sheer compression of space and time forcibly breaks this tenuous connection and the last thing Loki feels is the dagger's sharp point digging hard into his hand where hers used to be.
oOo
"I'm pretty sure that's what I saw."
Jane rubs at her eyes tiredly. The hour is late and all she wants to do is to hit the bed hard. Judging from the glacial pace of this meeting, it doesn't even look as though the end is anywhere in sight.
Her encountered in Mr. X's Wonderland – as the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents have taken to calling it – had been taken apart, put together and pulled to bits so many times that it's starting to confuse her as well. Throw in the theories of psychoanalysis, pseudo-Freudian and Jungian readings and she's ready to bolt.
"For a whole two hours?" Clint Barton grunts out, his fingers tapping out an unknown rhythm on the wood table.
Jane hears the disbelief in Barton's voice all too clearly.
"Yes," she insists sharply, "Time has no meaning when I'm under."
"But you spoke to him."
"He was disoriented and asked for my name."
"Why did you give it?"
Her sigh is loud enough so that everyone knows what she already thinks of Barton's repetitive line of questioning. They're going in circles and she has already forgotten how many times she'd paraphrased her answer. But now, this meeting feels more like an interrogation than a sitrep that it's supposed to be.
In other circumstances, Jane might have found herself cowering. But the force behind Barton's glare pales in comparison to the shock she'd felt when that cold hand had wrapped itself around her neck Jane finds that she's able to meets Barton's eyes with an unwavering stare of her own rather easily.
"Because I need my patients to trust me."
Her response isn't too much of a hedge, really. Yes, Mr. X's murderous instincts had shown up in a rather spectacular fashion. And he'd looked ready to take her out as his next victim if not for the timely intervention of a crumbling floor. She's thankful that all of it had happened in a virtual world. There hadn't been any time for her to decompress or analyse the events of that first – and eventful – session with Mr. X before Barton and Romanov whisked her out of the cell and into a conference room where she'd spent the last three-and-a-half hours.
Jane doesn't tell them that there had been fear and terror, not when they're looking at her as though she's the only one with the answers to the riddle of the comatose man in that solitary cell. Or that she suspected he has shown himself capable enough of throwing them both out of the neural connection with his manipulations. Neither does she really say that Mr. X had been clad in black and green medieval-looking armour, complete with a green cape and a horned helmet, speaking like a delusional man who's lost in time.
There has to be a load of explanations for his strange get-up. Maybe he's big on cosplay. Sews his own costume. Fashions an alternate identity for himself that over time, he manages to fool himself into believing that's who he is. Feet no longer planted in the real world, making it easy to go down the slippery slope into…murder?
Jane gives herself an inward shake. It's still too soon to play the insanity card.
Natasha Romanov gives Barton a pointed look then turns to her. "Dr. Foster, I know this has been a long, hard day and what you've done seems promising. We're just trying to get our facts straight," she says calmly.
Too calmly for Jane's liking.
"Look, I understand that S.H.I.E.L.D. has staked a lot in this whole procedure. But the mind is a funny place to explore. The fact of the matter is, the experimental nature of this technology makes it more of an art than a science. I'm making small headway, but it's still headway. Each time I go under, I'll need to work towards getting him to trust me, to talk to me. But if the connection in any way endangers his life, this-"
"Let's hope that it won't come to that," Romanov interrupts smoothly.
Jane knows as well as anyone else in the room, that it could and probably would. Instead, she says nothing.
Barton purses his lips until they are nothing but a thin line across his face.
"Understood, Dr. Foster."
Even the short burst of triumph that Jane feels is eclipsed by fatigue. She nods once, stiffly.
"I'll get the official report to you by the end of the day."