A/N: Thanks to Audreyii_fic, who insidiously planted this damn idea on Tumblr. Post Thor: The Dark World. Was supposed to be a light-hearted one, until it wasn't. *cringes*
A small finger jabs hard into the small, printed e-receipt in front of her. It's pink, square, and full of hearts…and it makes Jane Foster recoil instantly.
"Be there. Eight o'clock. The Bare Experience."
Jane chokes on her morning brew, then dabs at the strain on her pristine white blouse in annoyance. The slosh of hot coffee actually hurts, providing the best and most unpleasant wake-up call than any alarm could do.
Now she's got a crap load of questions too early for a Monday morning and her intern already has the wrong ball rolling.
No.
Maybe it's best not to know. Nip this thing in the bud before Darcy got excited and roped everyone into a scheme that somehow always had Jane in an unintended starring role with disastrous consequences.
"Darcy, I've no idea what you've done, but the only thing I want to be there for is the energy converter that—"
"But you threw out the non-functioning part last Friday."
Ugh. So she did. And had promptly forgotten all about it after an equation, a gourmet chocolate bar and a cheesy '80s flick stole her interest for the rest of the weekend.
The pink monstrosity gets waved in her face again.
"So, as I was saying," Darcy drawls and rubs a finger suggestively over a red heart on the slip of paper, "you need to get out there."
"Out where?"
"The Bare Experience."
"It's a strip joint," Jane says flatly and closes her eyes, thinking about the black opaqueness that the silver energy converter had begun to acquire thanks to her frequent handling of the device.
"Not anymore," Darcy tells her smugly. "Thor threw his hammer through it and destroyed the joint completely, remember? That finally gave the management an excuse to rebuild it into a perfectly respectable restaurant. In fact, Thor accomplished everything that the council didn't manage to achieve in twenty years. Maybe he should run for the Senate, but only if they can get over his muscly—"
She ignores the flicker of regret at the mention of Thor. "Whatever you're planning, it's a bad idea."
"Speed-dating."
"No. Remember the last time you pulled that prank with David, the truck's carburettor and my mattress?"
"Food. Some small talk."
"Or the time you tried setting me up with a Thor-wannabe stalker?"
"Just five minutes of your time per person. Think about it—"
Jane feels a headache coming on. "No."
"—an hour later and you could meet the guy of your dreams without even needing to get up from your table."
There aren't enough stars in the universe to get out of this. "And you signed me up."
"I know! It's great, isn't it?"
oOo
The Bare Experience isn't the run-down dingy hut of half-dressed women and drunk men that Jane remembers. The fashionable interior looks as though it had been lifted entirely from a celebrity-owned Swiss chalet and the soft, welcoming candlelight manages to trim the hard edges off the restaurant's sleazy history.
The large pink banner (with hearts) above the main entrance spoils it all, dashing away the bit of enthusiasm she's tried to muster up on the way here.
Join us for our inaugural launch. Experience 'The Bare Experience' for singles. *No strippers (male or female) allowed.
With a grimace, she approaches the group that has already congregated around a large, long table and checks-in with the harried-looking manager who looks better suited to running a strip joint than a legitimate restaurant organising a speed-dating event.
Twelve women, twelve men.
"You're number 8," the manager (or Boyd, as his tag says) tells her without preamble, his rheumy eyes already on the door behind which the single men are hiding. "We'll be moving counter-clockwise, from your right. It's like musical chairs. But unlike musical chairs, there'll be no one left without a seat. But the men will do the work and the moving. All you have to do is sit back and relax," he chortles-snorts at his own joke and waggles his brows.
Jane gets assigned to somewhere in the middle of the table and reluctantly strikes up a conversation next to another woman whose palpable excitement makes the hair on her own neck stand. It seems wrong to admit that she's only here to appease her intern when the other women are acting as though they've won the lottery of a lifetime.
The food gets served on silver platters just as twelve men strut into the dining room.
Number one takes his seat opposite her shuffles his feet a little shyly and it takes Jane all of her allotted five minutes to explain that astrophysicists aren't morons who write the horoscopes for Cosmopolitan or any other girly magazine that hits the shelves monthly. Or that interstellar planetary bodies really aren't fashionable phrases coined by the Kardashians.
Number two is a fellow scientist with a nervous tick in his eye and an alarming penchant for downing bourbon every time he mentions his mother or his work. On the too-much-information part, he'd also blurted out that he likes spanking, cuffs and bisexual partners when the mood struck.
Number three is a lovely divorcee, conservative but decent-looking in a boxy business suit that had seen better days. He's just…so boring, which is saying something, because Darcy probably finds her one of the most boring people in the world.
Number four only believes in eating local produce, bathing once a week and looks like Jesus Christ on a budget.
Number five has a straggly beard—and not the fashionable kind that graces the walkways these days—and smells of a peculiar mix Bengay and petrol.
Jane's never more thankful for the militant screech of Boyd's whistle and his stopwatch. She takes a large gulp from her glass of vintage Chardonnay and wonders if Darcy can call for a refund if she walked out...now.
By the time bachelor number six rolls around, she doesn't bother to even look up from her food — a lobster ravioli with roasted lamb and pumpkin, which happens to be surprisingly delicious.
Six turns out to be a washout too, just like five, four, three, two and one. When he starts droning on about the private pétanque league (she wonders if that is a euphemism for something else?) that his weird friends are going to set up on the East Coast early next year, Jane starts to imagine her hands around his neck, squeezing hard.
9:32 pm.
Six stumbles onto the next seat, helped along by the giggling woman on her right and a slim, pale hand that belongs to a face she never thought she'd ever see...again.
Oh no.
No, no, no—
"Jane Foster."
She swallows hard. "Loki."
But where she expects to see a pale, angular face full of inarticulate secrets when he'd last crouched over her in the acrid sands of Svartalfheim, the blessing of hindsight simply gives her the bald truth in the cold light of day: a half-god dressed as spiffily as the next Wall Street guy, whose malicious brittleness is overlaid so smoothly with an otherworldly counsel that she cannot hope to understand.
The months after the Convergence had been a relentless tide of comings and goings, a breathless scientific journey through Stark labs and the wilds of Scandinavia…and finally, back to the dusty, mundane quiet of Puente Antiguo where it'd all begun. With intern and her intern's intern, who was doing a passable stand in for Erik.
And Jane couldn't be happier.
She'd given a thought (or two) to Loki's inexplicable actions on that Dark World, even mourned a little for what he'd done back then. Like before, she had never proclaimed to understand the mindset of a raging god-turned-prisoner-turned-imposter and she wouldn't start now. It had taken a little longer to scrub Thor from her head, but she'd made her peace with knowing that the dysfunctional family from the other side of Yggdrasil would be better off wreaking their havoc in other realms without her in the centre of the action.
But the strange, strange pull that accompanies his presence isn't diminished at all. It tilts her stable, ordered universe on its axis and sets it rolling into the filaments of the stardust she'd never been able to rub out of her eyes.
The ridiculousness of the situation doesn't detract from the fact that that demi-god is sitting across her in the flesh, patiently waiting for the list of questions she has come up with to ask her dates.
Jane stifles the urge to laugh. The questions ache to be asked—Why are you here? What's up in the realms? What trouble have you gotten Thor into?—but all that she stutters out is—
"—Why…?"
He flicks his eyes towards the very-expensive looking watch, as though he is counting the minutes.
"Two minutes more, my dear Jane."
It's then that she realises she'd just spent the past three gaping in silence.
"Why, Loki?"
For once, he doesn't bother to mince his words. "Perhaps it is because you have something that I want. You, Dr. Foster."
No more games. She'd been played the fool enough, endured the wise-cracks and the mind games that people and creatures delighted in. Perhaps he knows that too.
"So tell me."
The shock of looking into his sly green eyes doesn't measure up to the shock when he gently takes her wrists and runs his fingers down the slight indentations of her veins.
A brief, incandescent flash of red races along her skin at the contact, a delicious ripple of power snaking through her from head to toe.
"Enough of this foolishness," he urges in a conspiratorial whisper. "What an injustice it would be if you'd never recognised how…special you've become."
She snatches her hands back as though burnt by his touch. Just like that, that veil of doubt and confusion lifts, whipped back into hiding under the Silvertongue's cloak of deceit.
"What are you talking about—?"
He smiles pleasantly. "We shall need another date, Jane Foster."
In a blink of an eye, bachelor number seven slides into his empty seat.
She glances at the clock in disbelief.
9:32 pm.
Just a figment of her imagination, then. Delayed PTSD, maybe. Hallucination caused by candlelight.
Except for the tingling in her wrists and the mocking look in that dim corner which she cannot ignore.