Chapter Three:
Your feedback continues to be amazing! This fic remains very fun for me to write, and I hope as fun for you to read; please enjoy the latest installment.
Be warned: this chapter is pretty dark. Loki is turning out to be more vicious than I planned, but he seems to write his own dialogue, so I'll let him do his thing. He's definitely the darkest villain I've written, but there's a reason for it, I promise you.
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Jane was getting very tired of waking up like this, with a pounding headache from either being drugged or knocked out. She felt her forehead with the tips of two fingers, and yes, she was going to have a sizeable lump on her right temple. Her vision blurred as she straightened, no matter how carefully she tried to move, and she wondered if she might have a concussion.
Her groan of pain was soundless, still, and she gritted her teeth. Just adding insult to injury, he hadn't removed the silencing spell he'd put on her yesterday. Jane rested her elbows on her knees, and cradled her head in both hands. She breathed deeply and tried not to cry; no matter how overwhelming everything seemed, she had to stay strong.
No one was going to come and help her, so she would have do what she could on her own.
"You are remarkably resilient, Miss Foster," his smooth voice, at least, did not add to the pounding in her head, softly as he spoke. But her shoulders tightened automatically as she heard it, and all her muscles cramped in anticipation—a rabbit's anticipation of fight or flight.
"Especially considering one of your size," he went on, and she distinguished movement creeping up on her from the corner of her shadowed eyes. "The Skrull you…" and here he chuckled, "managed to incapacitate was none too happy with you. I thought the blow would put you under for the day, at least…yet here you are, up after a mere two hours."
Jane raised her head and looked at him. The expression on his face caught her by surprise. It was almost as if—
"I must say,"
As if—
"I am impressed."
Oh, hell no.
He actually did seem impressed with her. What on earth did that mean? Jane couldn't decide whether to be more or less nervous. The way he was smiling at her certainly did not make her comfortable. She dropped her head to her palms once again, rubbed her fingers lightly over the bruise, and straightened up.
If she could be brave in the face of the Skrull—whom she knew wanted to kill her—she could be brave in the face of Loki—who only might want to kill her. Jane wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that particular slice of encouragement.
Her smile must have showed, because Loki's face creased in confusion.
"And now you smile at me? You are full of surprises."
Jane just stared at him, head cocked to one side.
"Oh, that's right," he drawled, snapping his fingers as though the thought had only just occurred to him, "you still can't speak, can you?" He sauntered towards her, smiling wider as she had to crane her neck back to keep track of his eyes. His hand hovered just above her right temple, fingers twitching towards the bruise. She had to use all her willpower to keep from flinching back from his grasp, but he did not touch her.
The pain from her forehead melted away like the skim of ice that drips away in a March thaw.
"Let's remedy that, shall we?"
A quick pulse of green light, and Jane felt as though someone had just connected a circuit in her vocal chords. She drew a quick breath and actually heard the flow of air; she could speak again.
Loki backed away, watching her face as intently as she had studied his. Jane breathed again, and looked away, touching her throat with one hand and her forehead with the other. A deep shudder of relief ran through her, shaking her shoulders and making her heart surge—she could feel the pulse pounding in her ears—but she did not speak.
"Well, Miss Foster? No longer dumb," she could hear the sneer in the word, "so what means this silence? Stubborn, hmm? No…annoyed."
He laughed. "Do you think to impress me with this show of defiance? Or punish me by withholding your pearls of wisdom? You cannot be so foolish."
Jane looked at him again, and could not help the smirk that played around the corner of her mouth. One of her eyebrows quirked upwards as she looked away again. Bluster he might, but the fact that she wasn't bombarding him with abuse was an annoyance; she was not playing according to his rules.
She knew that this couldn't end well, but if she was going to die, she might as well truly amaze the smug bastard first.
Her suspicions were confirmed. An invisible hand grasped her jaw and swung her face back towards his. She gasped, more from shock than pain—the grip was surprisingly light—but the expression on his face made her shiver with stomach-churning fear.
His green eyes were wider than she had ever seen; the entire white was visible around the jade irises, and his dark brows furrowed together above them. His teeth were bared and completely feral; she would not have been surprised if he'd lunged forward to claw at her face with his clenched hands.
"I gave you your voice, Miss Foster," like a mad dog he snarled, "therefore…speak."
Jane spoke.
"What do you want me to say?" her voice was less defiant and more shaky than she would have liked, but there were extenuating circumstances, "What do you want from me?"
The question seemed to diffuse some of his anger. He dropped his hand and the hold on her jaw vanished. She did not dare look away again—much less smile—and she felt no relief when some of the anger smoothed from his brow.
The anger faded, but the capricious madness was not gone.
"How should I know?" he said, smiling. "I hardly know how you did it, after all."
"How I did what? What did I do?"
He dropped onto the sofa across from her and slung his arms over the backrest, looking for all the world like a frat boy about to crack open a can of beer. His smile was only slightly more natural as he went on:
"How you changed my arrogant, careless, condescending, oblivious Neanderthal of a brother. In a mere three days. When, for centuries uncounted—by your measure, at least—he has remained the same."
Jane could not stop the sudden tears that prickled the corners of her eyes when his words conjured the beautiful, smiling, comforting image of Thor. What she wouldn't give to see him here now! She swallowed, hard, and pushed the image away. He wasn't here. There was only her.
And him. And he was waiting on her answer.
"I…" she tried again, "I don't know."
"Your erudition is astounding," his voice was drier than the desert, "but I wonder if you might venture a guess?"
Oddly enough, this was a question that Jane had often considered, since her encounter with the god. She had thought of his arrogant attitude when he first arrived—they will suffice—and contrasted that with his willingness to die for them—you are safe—just before he left. She had wondered the same thing, wondered what had caused that shift.
Like the good scientist she was, she had considered all sorts of variables. The shock of being in a new environment, the disapproval of his father, the loss of his powers…hell, she had even considered the huge number of tiny things—like Poptarts, pancakes, and coffee—that might have gone so far in opening Thor's mind to the smaller lives around him that he had never taken into account.
But even in the safety of her own mind, she had rarely had the guts to think that it might have been her, something about her—her desire to learn, her restless questions—that might have altered him, might have gentled him. And though men before had told Jane that she was beautiful, she never thought that it was any special beauty of face or feature that made Thor kiss her the way he had.
The sheer number of variables had made any definitive conclusion impossible. Jane really had no idea.
She realized that she had still not answered the question. Loki had not spoken, however; merely looked at her from beneath lowered eyelids and waited for her to gather her thoughts. The silence and sheer consideration in his gaze sent a shockwave through her.
For whatever reason, Loki really wanted to know. And if he really wanted this information from her…that gave Jane some leverage.
Her brain whirled, throwing together strategies and analyzing possible outcomes. Despite still shivering when she thought of the unknown limits of his power and the madness that enabled him to wield it to its fullest, she had to try.
"I'll tell you," she said, slowly, weighing each word, "if you answer some of my questions in return."
He smiled, opening his eyes wide again. "The time for negotiations was before you acknowledged your complete ignorance about my brother's surprising shift. I'm afraid you are—to use the human expression—shit out of luck."
Something snapped inside of Jane. She laughed. Her body released its tension and collapsed against the sofa back, and she put her hands over her face and laughed some more. After about thirty seconds, her laughter faded to chuckles; she pressed her fingertips over her eyes and took a deep breath.
When she looked up, Loki had not moved. A smile played around his mouth, but he did not seem any more upset than he usually did. He cocked his head at her and gestured with an open palm—please, continue.
"That's not bad," Jane said, still feeling her lips tremble with suppressed giggles, "do you have a tutor on Midgardian idioms, or something?"
"You surely do not think I would be careless enough to attempt the conquest of a world I did not thoroughly understand, do you?" He smiled wider. "I was in this realm long before my brother made his reappearance; I know more about the customs and countries of your Earth than you do yourself, my dear Jane."
The endearment turned her blood cold, and the smile dropped from her face.
"For the most part, I have found your race to be barbaric, ignorant, backwards, and ineffective in self-governance. You will not do what is necessary in most cases to ensure the survival of your best, and seem intent on preserving what is most pathetic among you. And yet…there is enough that is worthwhile here that I do not want to merely destroy you."
His eyes fixed on hers and the expression on his face approached something like lucidity.
"I am going to save you from yourselves."
Jane could barely breathe. She felt pinned by the weight of his gaze, spread open like a butterfly to be dissected.
"You may find some relief to know, Miss Foster," he continued, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees, "that despite wanting to kill you—wanting to kill you very badly, too—I have seen enough worth in you to spare your life."
Jane swallowed, and her hands shook, but with relief or dread she could not tell. His eyes were too intense, and for a wild, terrifying moment she thought he might bridge that small gap between them…
"And my friends?" Her voice was strained in her throat, but she spoke without tears. "Clint, Natasha, Tony, Pepper? Have you found it," she let her anger take over and spat out the word, "worthwhile to spare their lives too?"
"Ah," he said, sitting back, smiling gently, "I thought we might return to that topic at some point. Tell you what, Miss Foster," he smiled, "you tell me what I want to know, and I will tell you what you want to know. Tell me," he continued quietly, "why my brother changed. Why after a mere three days with you and your pathetic species," his voice was dark with malice, "he returned to Asgard, so much more worthy to assume the throne?"
"I'm a scientist," Jane began, slowly, "and one of the first rules of science is that correlation doesn't imply causation. I can give you my hypotheses, and I can tell you my suspicions, but Thor is the only one who can tell you the truth."
"Very good, Miss Foster," he replied, "much better than your first attempt. Please, do share your thoughts with me."
The word "share" sounded wrong coming from his lips, but Jane tamped down on her feelings of dread and tried to organize her thoughts. She folded her hands, stared down at her interlaced fingers, and began to speak.
"Thor was banished from his home and thrown into a situation that he had no understanding of. The last time he had been to Midgard, he was a god; now, we do not believe in thunder gods…" she paused, and without looking up, "or gods of mischief."
"He was without his powers, and for the first time, he knew what it was like to be at the mercy of others. Even I," she chuckled, "managed to get the better of him, once or twice. And when he tried to use only physical force—which had always worked for him before—to regain his birthright, it didn't work."
There was no motion or sound in the room. Loki did not shift in the slightest, or even seem to breathe.
"Every single one of his deeply-held beliefs about how the world should work was challenged. He was a prince, and became a vagrant; he was strong, and no longer had any power; was once beyond reproach, and now everyone doubted him."
Jane swallowed. She had left out any personal notes, but knew that Loki would not be satisfied until he knew how she played into the equation.
"But I…I was willing to believe him. Even though sometimes I thought he was crazy…" she shook her head, "there was something about him that I trusted. And the idea that he might know about the things I have worked all my life to understand," her voice swelled with longing, "I had to at least try to believe him."
"He fell in love with you," Loki's voice was heavy with a swirl of emotions—she could distinguish disgust, derision, and wonder in equal measure—and he continued, "because you took him in like a wounded baby bird."
Jane's head jerked up, and she met Loki's cruelly twisted lips with narrowed eyes. "It sounds like you think we humans aren't the only pathetic creatures in the universe," she snapped, "and if you think that's all there was to it, you don't understand your brother at all."
"He is not my brother," the last three words dropped like stones from his mouth, "and he never was."
"Whatever," Jane brushed that off, "you two were raised together and have known each other since you were babies; you've fought together and bled together…if that doesn't make you brothers, what the hell would?"
He stared at her as though she had started speaking a foreign language. Jane looked back down at her clenched hands and continued.
"Thor had to rethink his entire life," she said, shaking her head, "He went from knowing just where he fit in to not even understanding the fundamental aspects of the world he thought he would have to call home. Maybe at first he clung to me because I could take care of him—but that wasn't the reason he…" she could not even say the words.
Speaking the word "love" in Loki's presence, especially when the thought of having Thor's love meant so much to her, was sacrilege.
"I believed in him," she concluded, "without knowing for sure that he was a god and a prince and a hero…I only knew that he was a man…a man that I could trust, and fall asleep beside, and would have given my life for. He fell in love with me because I was in love with him. With him, alone…not the prince or the god or the hero. I was in love with Thor."
The simple clarity of her words was like a stream of pure water, cleansing all her dark thoughts and confusion. For all her months of analysis, she suddenly knew that this was as close to the truth as she was ever going to get.
The thought made her sigh softly. Would she even survive to ask Thor how close she had come to guessing his thoughts?
She heard Loki swallow and shift in his seat. He did not speak, and Jane decided not to say another word; she had said her piece, and it was up to him to accept it or not, as he chose.
She heard him chuckle, but the emotion behind the sound was not mirth.
"It makes sense that the mindless adoration of an ignorant child would be what finally conquered the heart of that oaf,"
Jane looked up, met his eyes without fear, and spoke with absolute surety.
"If you really believe that, then you don't know him. And you certainly don't know me."
The smile on his face faded, and his eyes went slowly cold. Still, she did not look away; she knew that she was right, and he was wrong, and she was going to sit there and stare at him until he looked away this time.
But of course, Loki cheated. Though she had only known him for less than forty-eight hours, she was starting to suspect that Loki always cheated.
He slapped her. She had no time to register the motion of his arm before pain exploded across her jaw and cheek and her chin smashed into her right shoulder. The sudden shock of it brought a rush of adrenaline; her cheeks flushed and her eyes clouded over with tears. She closed her eyes and clamped her lips down against the sobs that wanted to bubble up.
"What I do not know, Miss Foster," he hissed, "is immaterial. What you should concern yourself with is what I do know. The whereabouts of your friends, for one thing."
Jane took another moment to compose herself but it did no good; two tears slipped free of her control and ran down her cheeks as she opened her eyes. He stared at the tracks of them on her skin and the smile he gave was so truly pleased that she had to close her eyes again.
"Where are they?" she whispered. "Have you hurt them?"
"Here. And yes."
She bit down on the inside of her lip so hard that her jaw hurt. "May I see them?"
"Of course. I would not be near so discourteous as to think of keeping you apart."
Jane trembled. Torture was something that she could imagine—in her heroic fantasies, that is—withstanding, but in reality…she tasted blood in her mouth and the pain helped clear the veil of panic descending on her. She opened her eyes.
"Stand up, Miss Foster,"
She ignored his offered hand—she couldn't think of anything more impossible than putting her hands on him—and stood up on weak-kneed legs. She felt his gaze on the top of her head like a physical weight. Before she could blink, her left arm was folded under his, and though he was smaller than his brother, she felt the iron strength of his grip and knew that nothing she could do would make him let go.
It was terrible, but she was also shamefully glad of the support. Adrenaline, pain, exhaustion, and fear were combining in a nearly overwhelming cocktail wreaking havoc in her system, and though Jane had never done it before, she somehow knew that she was close to passing out. Didn't everyone say that you saw black spots before fainting? There they were, dancing before her eyes like giant, horrible flies crawling at the edges of her vision.
She wanted to be sick.
"Please do pull yourself together, my dear," the scorn in his voice made her want to slap him, this time, "after all," he walked and she trotted to keep up with his long legs, "we are going to see your beloved friends. Isn't that what you were so valiantly attempting to do just this morning, after all? To fly in like a valkyrie and save your brave warriors?"
"That was the general idea," Jane said, focusing on moving the tired muscles of her legs, "But I suppose that Jarvis, like Pepper, was just an illusion?" The idea of Loki, disguised as her friend, laughing at her feeble efforts to free herself was sickening, but Jane tried to be more angry at Loki than ashamed at herself.
"No indeed," he said smoothly, gesturing her politely into the elevator and pressing the button for the second subbasement, "you managed to resurrect the AI. It may gratify you to know that no one put in that room succeeded in doing the same thing, save your talented Mr. Stark."
"I'll bet that Tony almost escaped, didn't he?" Jane said, smiling as she thought of her reckless, genius friend, "I'll bet he made it past most of the Skrulls and nearly got Pepper out."
"Your intelligence continues to amaze and astound," Loki replied. He leaned close enough for his breath to stir the flyaway hairs at her temple, and continued in a whisper "but he paid dearly for it."
Jane did not speak for the rest of their descent, although Loki continued on for another few minutes, describing in nauseating detail the punishments he'd seen fit to deal to Tony for his near-escape success.
The elevator's chime rang gently as they reached their destination, and Loki's grip was just as inexorable as he pulled her from the elevator car.
"You would not think that being beaten on the soles of your feet would hurt quite so much, would you? But I guarantee it is one of the most painful punishments possible…in the realm of blunt-force trauma, that is."
The black flies swarming in front of Jane's eyes clustered into a single, buzzing mass, and she stumbled, her free hand slamming to the ground as she tried to catch herself. Loki did not let her other arm go, and her elbow and shoulder cracked painfully at the joints. She did not make a sound; she just pressed her forehead into the cold tile beneath her and focused on her breathing.
In…and out. In…and out.
She whispered to the floor. "Come on, Jane. Stand up. Get up."
For once, Loki seemed to be in no rush, though he did not let go of her hand. He could have easily jerked her to her feet or merely dragged her along—he had more than enough strength—but he merely stood, and held her, while she scraped herself up off the floor.
When Jane was standing, he continued down the hallway, at a pace slightly more manageable for her shorter legs. She had just enough strength to keep her spinning head from resting on his arm; he might force her into contact with him, but she would not touch him voluntarily.
"You need not worry, Jane," his voice was soft, and almost comforting, "I have no intention of harming you. Even your Mr. Stark…once he had given me what I wanted, I healed him. He has nothing but the memory of his pains, now. And he was the most resilient; all the others gave me what I needed long before. They did not suffer nearly as much, I promise you."
Jane really did think he was trying to soothe her.
"And I likewise promise, that if you do as I wish, I will not harm you in the least."
She could barely find her voice. "What do you want me to do?"
He did not answer. He stopped in front of a large pair of very solid doors and waved his hand. The locks snapped open, and the two doors—which looked so heavy as to only be opened with some sort of power source—eased apart.
The laboratory inside was absolutely state-of-the-art. Jane recognized where they were at once, having made it like her home for the weeks she was in New York, working on the final plans for the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and collaborating with Tony Stark.
"I will let your friend explain," Loki let Jane go and she grasped at the edge of a table to take her weight, "and bid you farewell."
His smile, she was sure, would haunt her in her dreams tonight.
"As always, Miss Foster," he said, backing out through the closing doors, "it was a true pleasure."
Jane put both hands against the surface of the table and let out a shaky sob. She pressed a hand against her mouth to muffle the noise; if he came back in the room, she was sure that she would scream. The tears flowed freely now, hot over her fingers, and she sobbed again, pressing both hands against her mouth until she could barely breathe.
"Oh, sweetheart," Tony's weary voice came from the back of the lab, "are you all right?"