janesfoster asked: psst you should totally do a lokane prompt based off loki's whole "This day, the next, a hundred years, it's nothing! It's a heartbeat. You'll never be ready. The only woman whose love you prized will be snatched from you." but you know, in regards to loki instead of thor lol

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At first, it was like watching a train wreck. It was a tragedy happening right before his eyes, and yet he found himself captivated and unable to look away.

Everyone knew Jane Foster did not belong in Asgard, and no one more keenly than the woman herself. There was no way the relationship between herself and Asgard's beloved prince could work. Not with the weight of the court against her, as well as the suspicions of the people, and the general dislike the king felt for her. Not with her frail human body an ever-present reminder of herhumanness between her and the rest of their world, let alone between her and Thor himself. It could never work out.

And yet they tried.

Thor lobbied and pled, raged and stormed. He found a few friends in the court, those who became tentative acquaintances with Jane, and even managed to win the approval of their queen mother, but still, they were doomed. Everyone could see it. What love they had for each other seemed the palest of shadows in comparison to the burning of the public opinion, and Loki could not help but revel in watching them slowly crack under the pressure of it.

At first, that was the only reason he watched them - her. He liked seeing her shoulders tense when she walked by a group of whispering ladies. He enjoyed hearing her sharply whispered arguments with Thor from just outside the hall. He truly relished the way Jane snapped and snarled when she thought she was alone. Jane was never alone, though. Not really. What was a prince to do, when he was as much of an outcast as she? At least for the moment, she was more interesting than the library.

As time went on, Loki found that perhaps it wasn't just her laughably hopeless situation that attracted him to her. It was also her cleverness. He wouldn't call her a genius (he was a genius, after all), but she was quick, and her enthusiasm for knowledge made up for what she lacked in raw intellect. She spent hours by herself (as far as she knew) in the observatory, poring over parchments and star charts, moving the grand telescope from one galaxy to another. Sometimes books would appear on the tables when she wasn't looking, but she never questioned it. Her thirst for knowledge overrode everything else - even her relationship with Thor.

In some ways, it won her points with the staff and the scholars, but in others it alienated her further from the rest of the court. What was the mortal doing, they whispered, up there all by herself day and night?

Loki had only ever actually spoken to her twice. Once, upon her arrival in Asgard, when they were introduced, and another time when she accidentally stumbled into his private observatory, before he began his constant watch. They weren't exactly riveting conversations, nor were they anything more than a scant minute long when put together, but even with just that, he knew she would be entertaining.

He never anticipated that she would be consuming.

It started out as a game. He liked watching his brother suffer, and by association, her suffer, and then he grew curious about her intelligence. That quickly slid into a desire to pick apart that mortal brain of hers, to understand where that burning desire for the stars and the universe came from. He should have stopped there.

There had to be a reason Thor found her so desirable, after all. Looking back, he should have been more careful. He should have known that she would trap him like she trapped his pseudo-brother. But even if he had known, would it have stopped him? Probably not.

He had enough sense to know that what he was doing would be considered wrong, and that there were other ways to go about seducing a woman (ones that were far less painful for him, certainly), but he couldn't stop himself. He could no more stop watching her than he could stop breathing.

He liked to sit next to her when she read at his favorite table in the library, silently leaning closer to feel the heat of her proximity and smell the perfume of her hair. He enjoyed listening to her soft voice mutter and moan in her sleep. And he truly relished when she began to subconsciously react to his presence, her body relaxing when he stood behind her in the hallways, her teeth easing off her lip when he ghosted a hand over hers on the page of a book. Thor was put off when she was deep in her studies, always distracting her and ruining her concentration, but when he was near, she seemed to focus more acutely, and he felt as though he could teach her everything in the cosmos without ever having to say a word.

When she dozed late at night in the observatory, he uncloaked himself and stroked her hair, his lips pressed lightly against her ear as he whispered sweet nothings (and a few choice things he would do to her soon enough). He even kissed her once, when she was deeply asleep in a plush chair by the fire, which only made him more sure of who she belonged to.

Thor didn't understand her. Thor couldn't love her like she needed. Thor would never take her to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, or make her weep with desire in bed. Thor could not understand her passion. Thor could never possess that wild spirit of hers.

He could.

He would.

Jane was his. She could never marry Thor (did she even really want to? He had his doubts), but she could belong to him in ways that she could not even imagine. In return for her love, he would show her the universe. He would give her the stars to wear as jewelry, and make her the queen of a thousand worlds. For her love, he would give her everything he was. He could trust her with that fragile, black thing that was his heart. He knew it. She was the one. The only one. They were the same. They shared a fire within themselves that could never be stamped out. No one else would understand.

One day, she cut herself on a piece of metal in the observatory. It wasn't a dangerous thing, only a thin line across her palm, but it wept her scarlet blood in a way that startled him. Her pretty cream skin did not heal like he expected it to. He watched her curse and press a cloth over the wound, a scowl on her face, and waited for her to pull it away, revealing a healing scar. But it didn't heal. It continued to bleed.

He followed her back to her chambers, where he watched her bandage it with her little toolkit. He watched, and he waited. But it did not heal. Not for weeks, anyway. By the time it was finally scabbing over, he knew that he had vastly miscalculated.

She was mortal. Jane was mortal, and she could not heal herself properly. He had never seen skin close so slowly as that, and it scared him to the bone. How was he supposed to show her the stars when she was so frail? How could he spend a lifetime watching her smile and snarl and moan if her body could not take care of itself?

Jane would die, he realized. She would die and leave him. Just like everyone else. She would leave him with nothing in the blink of an eye. The only woman he could ever love would disappear from this world like she had never even existed

He could not allow that.

He would have her, body, mind, and soul until the end of his life, and nothing less than that. He was owed that, at least, for all the crimes against him.

Loki left the apple for her on top of her stack of books in the observatory, knowing she had not had supper that night. It looked ordinary enough and she was blind and deaf to magic (for now). She did not know what she was biting into as she read over another star chart that night.

Her teeth breaking the skin of the fruit rang in his mind like wedding bells, and for the first time, he unveiled himself.

"I don't think we've ever had a proper conversation before, Lady Jane," he murmured from the chair beside her, voice low with deep satisfaction, "I'd like to rectify that."