Hello Readers! As always thank you so so much for reading this story, without you, there'd be no story! Reviews, comments, questions, fan art, fav/follows are always appreciated. Now that the semester is over, hopefully my updating will be a little more regular.

Love,

Hunny xoxo

To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...

- Hamlet

The morning light glitters off the fresh blanket of snow over the forest, giving a certain warmth to the frozen woods. Jane sits with her knees pulled up to her chest at the center of the Bifrost etchings.

Do I believe Loki? Jane shakes her head No, of course not.

But Jane remembers his words: "What makes you think you have a choice?" Was it true that Asgard was in peril, and that's why Thor did not come himself. Jane's mind swims the amount of questions her and Loki's conversation had brought up.

Why now? Why not when she was suffering in a London hospital. Or before then. Before Thor's enemies has killed Darcy and Eric then nearly killed Jane herself. Jane cringes remembering the face Loki had made when she showed him her scar. It was almost…anguished. Could he be faking this concern for her? Was this all a game to him?

Jane hates to admit it, but she knows, at least for the moment, that Loki is right. She doesn't have a choice in whether or not to believe him. The fact of the matter is: Loki is here and offering some sort of answers to the questions that have been haunting Jane for a year. That, she had to believe.

Jane makes her way back to the house and chops a decent amount of wood for the day. She hauls a few logs inside, entering the living room to find Loki making himself comfortable in her high backed chair with her copy of 'Walden'. He'd put back on his tunic, though it was still stained with his blood. Loki sits hunched over the book. His face is hard and strands of his raven hair fall into his eyes, hiding them from Jane.

"Doing some light reading?" Jane asks, throwing the logs into the fireplace and kindling a fire to life. Loki doesn't answer. Jane turns and swipes the sheen of sweat from her forehead. He leans forward, eyes still buried in the book, then clears his throat.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life," Loki pauses and looks up at Jane, then continues, "and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Loki's voice is like a lullabye, almost soothing to Jane. She looks at the fire and rubs her arms.

Loki claps the book shut and looks up at Jane.

"You've underlined that in the text. I was intrigued." Loki explains, standing and placing the book gently on the seat of the chair.

"I don't appreciate you snooping around my house."

"Why did you find it important?" Loki asks, disregarding her. Jane faces the fireplace, watching the flames furiously lick and whip around inside their entrapment.

"Why do you need to know?"

"Humor me." Loki muses. Jane turns to Loki, not looking at him, but down at herself with a somber expression.

"When this happened," Jane says touching her stomach, "When I was lying in a pool of my own blood I realized I didn't want to live my life for anyone else anymore." Jane meets Loki's gaze finding it cold enough to make her shiver.

"Is that why you came out here? To live deliberately?" Loki asks. Jane nods, turning back to the flames.

"Something like that."

"Because you realize you lived your life for the stars, then," Loki watches Jane, "you realized you lived your life for Thor."

Jane whips around at the accusation, fire boiling up inside her throat.

"Don't pretend to know anything about me." She growls.

"So, Foster, did you look in the mirror and see what my brother stole?" Loki's expression hardens and he advances Jane, his tone sharp and enraged. Jane backs against the fireplace, the heat of the flames burning at her legs and spine. She had forgotten how frightening Loki could be.

"Shut up." Jane feels her insides twisting.

"Do you still feel the pain? Does it wake you up at night?" Loki comes closer to Jane and presses his palms against the mantle on either side of her. Jane feels herself grow small in his looming presence, trapped in a cage of his body. Jane glances at the fire pokers but knows they'd never put a scratch on the god.

"What do you know about pain?" Jane hisses. Loki's lip twitches.

"Enough."

"You're full of shit." Jane feels tears brim in her eyes but Loki presses further. Loki's voice turns grim and threatening, those green eyes set into her soul.

"It didn't take me long to notice, you know. Jane Foster is dead, and has been for a very long time."

Jane clenches her jaw, and straightens, though inside she feels herself crumbling like ash. She wouldn't let Loki see, wouldn't dare let him see her fall apart.

"What do you want me to say, Loki?" Before Jane can even react, Loki wheedles his hand underneath her shirt and places his hand on her scar. Jane jumps from the sudden intrusion and at the iciness of Loki's touch.

"Don't touch me!" Jane yelps gripping Loki's wrist but he doesn't yield. He presses his hand against her skin, his face stony.

"Where was he Jane?" he asks. Jane looks up at him, horrified and enraged. She claws at his wrist.

"Get your hands off me," she chokes out.

"Not until you answer. Where was Thor, Jane?" Loki orders. Jane takes a shaky breath, her hands still gripped around Loki's wrist.

"Gone," She whispers. Loki nods.

"Gone." He echoes, finally satisfied. Loki removes his hand from Jane, then backs away.

Jane stands petrified against the fireplace, her hand against her stomach and tears running down her face. She can still feel the chilled handprint against her skin and it makes her nauseous.

"Touch me again, Loki, and I'll kill you."

"And how could you kill me," Loki says, his green eyes frigid, "when you could not even save your friends." He clenches his jaw, a flash a pain crossing his face. As if saying the words hurt him more than it hurt Jane.

Jane releases an inhuman howl of fury, lunging at Loki.

"FUCK YOU!" Jane doesn't recognize her own voice. It roars like thousand flames. Unimaginable heat burns through her, like the heat of a thousand blades slicing through her abdomen, like the heat of a thousand tears coating her face, like all the pain she's ever felt raging through her body all at once.

Flames, real flames, envelop her body. Somehow Jane does not die, but it consumes her all the same. Just like they do in her dreams.

She narrows Loki in her blurring vision and throws a heated cross to his jaw. He dodges Jane, spinning behind her, and grabbing her from behind. His body is cold as frostbite, piercing through her pillar of fire. An icy hand comes to her forehead. Jane thrashes and roars in his grip. Through warped eyes, she can see a blue hand drawn across her waist. She howls in fury.

"I'll kill you." Flames lick up Jane's throat, burning sweet. This rage feels good.

"Sleep," Loki says in a low, calming voice and Jane finds her world entombed in darkness.

Jane wakes up in her bed. At first, she has no memory of fire, no memory of rage. For the first time in a year, Jane awakens with a moment's tranquility.

Then the heat seeps back in, black and thick like tar. Tears slide down her face.

"If it's any consolation, I did not mean what I said." Loki leans against the far wall of Jane's room, his eyes to the floor as if in shame. "I only needed to confirm my theory."

Jane stares blankly at her ceiling. She notices the ever so small cracks and flakes in the paint. She would have to buy paint from the hardware store and fix that. She could fix the whole house. She could get a job in town. How normal it would be, to live with fearing her own mind. But Jane knows this is a fantasy. Normal is a notion as dead as the old Jane.

"You're a scientist, Jane. You should understand." Loki continues. Jane continues to lie motionless, chewing the inside of her lip. Her head swims with dizziness and sorrow. She thought that she had buried all that pain of Eric and Darcy's death but it all came flooding back so articulate as if it had just happened moments ago. That fire. That rage. It was the same from her dreams.

"What's wrong with me?" Jane asks, more to herself than to Loki.

"I think you already know, Jane."

Jane rolls to her side and eases herself slowly upward with a groan. She notices that along with a throbbing headache, she is completely nude.

"Great," She grumbles. Blossoms soot and ash coat her skin, giving her a greyish pallor. Jane would feel embarrassed if she cared enough about Loki's opinion of her. Jane scoots to the edge of the bed, a feeling of pins and needles coursing through her bones. Loki moves to help her stand, but Jane holds him off with a hand.

"Don't." She stands, and gathers a few clothes from her drawers with agonized pace. Her every joint aches with revenant heat like a fever. Loki steps after her as she moves to the doorway.

"Jane."

"I'm going to take a bath," She stops, feeling his cool breath at her spine. "Alone, if you don't mind."

"The Aether-"

"I know, Loki." Jane turns, her eyes swollen and red. "I know it's inside me, and I know it's killing me. I just- I can't deal with this right now."

Jane watches Loki's face. His raven hair is mussed, and the smooth muscles in his jaw clenched.

"I can help you. You don't have to be alone." Loki whispers, a hand resting on Jane's. Loki's hands are soft and cool, not icy like before. It was a soothing feeling and she has the sudden urge to press his hands to her forehead, her chest, her abdomen.

Jane hadn't noticed before but around Loki's wrists are coils of ragged, gnarled scars like those from shackles. Perhaps he did know about pain. His words strike something inside Jane, something unhardened by grief, something untarnished by rage. Something pure.

Jane nods, biting her bottom lip and her chin quivering.

"I don't need help." Jane slips away from Loki and closes the bathroom door behind her.

Jane's bath is scalding yet it doesn't seem to bother her. Her skin doesn't pucker or blush in the heat of the water. Jane submerges herself in the tub, releasing the air from her lungs slowly. She listens to the sound of her heartbeat thunder against her chest, listens to how it echoes in the watery world of the tub. Jane's hands float to the scar at her abdomen, her fingers tracing the etchings of raised skin. It tingles with an odd sensation, not exactly numb, but pins and needles. Most days it burns but the baths, the constantly burning fireplace, it all helps to lessen the pain of the scar.

When Jane comes back downstairs, she finds Loki reassembling the living room. He crouches at her bookcase, carefully placing books back on their shelves.

"I'm going into town for food and fresh clothes for you," Jane says, looking at her hands. Loki places another book then stands, swiping his hands. Scorch marks blacken the spot where Jane was standing just before the fireplace.

"And a rug, I guess." Jane mutters, picking her cuticles.

"Jane," Loki says, drawing her eyes up.

Jane nods and slumps down in her armchair, crossing her arms across her chest. Loki stands across from her at the fireplace, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

"Can you get it out?" Jane asks, looking away from Loki, her eyes transfixed in the fireplace.

"No," Loki says. Jane whips her head to him, anger contouring her face.

"Then why did you say you could help me?"

"Jane, nothing like this has ever happened before. The Aether isn't meant to be contained by a host, much less a mortal one."

"Well now I feel special," Jane growls. "How am I even still alive then?"

Loki purses his lips and shakes his head, making the pit in Janes stomach grow deeper.

"The fact that you have survived this long is a miracle in its own right. Imagine having a nuclear reactor in your chest, Jane. You're-"

"Unstable."

"Precisely."

Jane's fingers tap at her arms, her body overcome with a crawling sensation.

"Am I going to die?" She feels the Aether twist in her gut.

"Yes."

"Comforting," Jane scoffs.

"Only if you don't learn how to control it." Loki says, coming to crouch before Jane. "The Aether seems to want your body alive, not your mind. It needs an empty host."

"So it's a parasite?"

"In a way…" There's a lingering silence between them. Jane wrings her hands together, feeling suddenly very cold and very still like she were dead already.

"What do I do?" Jane's stomach twists in ropes at the thought of asking Loki, Loki, for advice.

"Try not arguing with me so much. That's a start," A small smile touches his lips, either an attempt to raise Jane's spirits or reveal his devious nature Jane is unsure.

"I'm serious, Loki."

Loki nods his head to the door, Jane's eyes follow him.

"I shoveled your truck out of the snow. That should make it easier to get into town."

"The shield…" Jane asks but Loki shakes his head.

"Will hold. Go, Jane. We'll discuss details later, but for the moment, I think I'd prefer fresh clothes and a cup of tea." Loki eases himself off the wall and disappears into the kitchen, leaving Jane hunched over in her chair. His assuredness left her all together unsettled. Jane curses under her breath, rises from the chair, and slams the door behind her. Loki watches from the window as Jane eases herself into her truck, her mouth moving with silent curses as she revs out of the driveway and into the direction of town. He sips a hot cup of Earl Gray, the warmth leaving the beverage as soon as it touches his lips. He sets the now icy drink onto the kitchen counter, eyes lingering on the driveway to make sure Jane did not reappear. When he is sure that Jane is far away, Loki begins his work. He thumbs through books, reading Jane's annotations. He finds no books about the stars that once dazzled her and this worries him. He finds no pictures of family, nor friends. Say for one photograph with a young Jane, and two adults that must have been her mother and father. Her draws host only clothes, and under her pillow is the same knife he had been acquainted with upon his arrival. Everything about this home feels off to Loki, as if were not a home at all but a very elaborate cage that Jane had made for herself. Yet, it's her sketches, the roughly drawn charcoal and darkly shaded pictures, that disturb him the most. Loki found them in a room off the kitchen, piled high with unopened cardboard boxes marked, 'research', which is where she must have hidden all her wonder and curiosity for the stars. There was also an easel with an opened sketchbook, various drawing implements beside it.

Loki peels the pages slowly, eyes shrewd upon the book. They're terrifyingly beautiful in their gruesome detail. They're mostly old memories or reflections of the Wisconsin wilderness. There is a sketch of Eric and Darcy smiling, one of a gut deer carcass among leaves. It's eyes wide, glossy, and dead. There is one of Thor, or at least the way Jane saw Thor. He is larger than life, his eyes somehow sparkling in the way her charcoal captured them. Loki smiles himself looking at the bright expression of Thor, hearing remnants of his own memories in the back of his mind of simpler times. Yet when Loki flips the page, the smile dies on his lips at the image. It's only half a face. An abstract expression of a blood thirsty smile upon full lips and a gaze so sharp Loki feels it biting into his stomach. He knew that look anywhere. Amora. She had kept her promise to Loki and come for Jane, his mortal. Everything in his feels heavy, as if he could sink through the floor and the crust of the earth. How had Jane survived her? Could the Aether have saved her body from whatever carnage Amora had done? How could Thor not have protected Jane, even after Loki had told him… His hands clench into tight fists, his nails digging into the skin of his palms.

Loki isn't sure how long he had been staring at the image but he hears tires crunch against snow and he retreats, a sickening feeling inside him.

Jane returns to find Loki sitting in her chair again with 'Hamlet' in his palms, his eyes pouring over the yellowed pages and a cup of steaming tea on the coffee table. She heaves a bag onto his lap, which he examines with an upturned brow.

Jane brushes past him to visit the dining room with more bags in her arms that she loads onto the table.

"The boots are size 11, the clothes are all mediums but you're thin so they should fit, and I didn't waste money on a jacket for obvious reasons…" she rambles, flying into the kitchen to unload her groceries. Loki pulls out a red toned plaid flannel with a grimace.

"And no, they didn't have anything in green." He hears Jane call from the kitchen. She wouldn't know, but he smiled.

Janes dreams are dark and swirling like a muddied pond. Memories twist into hellish contortions, monsters creeping in the darkened corners of her mind, the line between reality and nightmare blurring ever further together. Loki stands with his hand blanketed over Jane's sweat-slicked forehead in the darkness of her room. She is warm and clammy as if she suffered from a fever. Her body shakes and shivers and he can feel the Aether's fire burning within her. When Loki entered her dreamscape he was unfortunately not shocked by what he found. Things were much worse than he had previously thought.

Loki stands beside Jane, his arms behind his back. Her dream form does not acknowledge his presence but rather accepts him into her world of nightmares as if he had always been a part of them. Perhaps it was true but Loki wouldn't give himself that much credit.

In the dream, Jane stands on Svartalheim wearing the stately robes of Asgard. The sky bleeds with a darkening red light. It fills the air with the coppery scent of blood, thickening the air so much Loki could almost taste it. Jane shudders.

"It's coming!" she whispers, turning from the descending red light and running past Loki.

"What's coming, Jane?" He follows after her, the world shifting into a consuming darkness. Loki is familiar with the logic of dreams, how they jumped and lurched into memories and fantasy and nightmare alike. Janes, though, hers were vivid and explicit in their fear. It hung in the air. Perhaps that was the smell.

Now, they stood in a what appeared to be a darkened kitchen that opened into a quaint dining room. It isn't Janes cottage, no, this must have been her London apartment. Where Jane should have been for the past year. Silvery-red moonlight streams through an open window and the air sings with violence. Loki can see two bloodied and unrecognizeable bodies of Eric and Darcy but that's not what sickens him. Loki sees Jane lies on the floor, a figure standing over her. Jane's stomach bleeds like an open, bloody smile and Loki realizes this is the memory of her near-fatal wound.

"Jane who is it?" Loki growls. His own stomach turns as he watches the blood pool around her.

"Help me," she whispers faintly, but she doesn't ask Loki. Instead, her eyes pleadingly looking past Loki at the storm clouds that gather outside the window. She pleads for Thor. The Thor that never came for his mortal.

"Jane who did this?" Loki begs. AS if on cue, the figure standing over Jane turns. It's a woman, her eyes a poisonous green, her lips ruby red and upturned into an innocent grin.

"Darling…" it purrs. Blood drips from a curved blade of the Valkyries. Jane stands, her hand at her bleeding, open wound, eyes turning as red as the light filtering in through the thin curtains.

"I'll kill you!" she screams in a voice made of flames. As she lunges at the figure of Amora, it dissipates, and Janes falls through to the floor.

The dream shifts again into complete darkness. The space is small and cramped, the air musty and dry. Loki sits crouched before a child. She is small and wiry, her knees pulled up to her chest with chestnut hair and wide, puffy eyes. She sniffs. There is a small light at the floor, like the slit of light bleeding through the bottom of a door. Loki realizes the two sit in closet of sorts and that before them is a red door and Loki isn't sure if it had been there the whole time or if he just now noticed it. The sound of two adults is close but muffled as it comes through the door. The argument is inaudible but the tone is clearly hostile.

"They never stop fighting," Jane sobs, her head buried in her knees. Loki aches to reach out and hold her, to give her comfort of some kind. "She's never coming back…" the child-Jane cries again. Could it be the two adults in the picture? The mother and father?

Loki reaches out to touch Jane only to see that she is not a child anymore but the same woman in a goddess-like gown, standing in the ruins of a dead world on Svartelheim. Her eyes are made of embers as they reflect the red light.

"It's here." Jane says but it is not her voice. It's different, darker, violent.

Loki squints, a burning ring filling his ears. Jane screams and erupts into a pillar of flames, just as she did in her living room. Except this time, it consumes her entire body turning flesh into ash. Loki hears her name being cried over and over again, and realizes it's his own voice calling out to her, trying to reach her as her body turns into nothing more than smoke floating away in the wind.

When Jane awakens with her heart thrumming against her ribs, her hand clutching it as if it were about to beat right out of her chest. She feels a strange presence, a company she doesn't recognize only to remember the god sleeping just down the hall from her. Jane sighs. Her brain feels soupy, but she thinks she heard him calling her name. Perhaps it was just the revenant screams of her nightmare. Jane presses her fingers against her eyelids until she sees stars, reality seeping back in. What would his help mean? What did controlling the Aether actually entail? Could Loki be tricking her? Questions buzz in the fogginess of her mind, the sudden craving for a stiff cup of coffee the only reason Jane rouses herself from her warm sheets.