RATING: M
GENRE: Post Thor 2 Canon Divergence AU, Dark, Drama
WARNING: Infidelity
SUMMARY: This is his domain, and she's trespassed it. Intentionally.
A/N: Written for the prompt from l-o-k-i-hiddleston (aka Anonymous Companion): "Loki finds Jane looking in his section of the royal library."
DANGER AHEAD
She feels him. As soon as she steps foot in the vast room. Before he announces his presence. He's larger than life, like his brother. A deity. (An advanced being, her scientific mind corrects.) But where the golden son of Asgard is like the sun—bright, warm, open—the dark prince is a creeping black fog. Cold. Serpentine. Dangerous.
She doesn't look for him. He'll find her if it amuses him. (It often does.) Instead, she heads for the familiar stacks where the books are shelved on astronomy, on travel through the stars and gateways to other realms. Wide and varied beyond her not-so-limited imagination. Each page in this section is a dream from another life. Thousands upon thousands.
But her once unrestrained enthusiasm has languished, tempered by time. By experience. By obligation.
She likes to come here, though. To remember when the universe was more unknown than known. Before progressive civilizations were revealed to be rife with greed, with warmongering, with an unquenchable lust for power. Before each alien species proved just how very human they were.
She tangles her thoughts in what-ifs. What if a banished prince had never fallen from the heavens. What if a blood feud hadn't found its way to Earth.
What if she had never felt the burning, potent touch of the Æther.
She imagines her life without these significant alterations. Would she still be in the desert, fine-tuning her equipment, chasing after ribbons of light in the night sky? Still the bizarre researcher wasting her genius?
She smiles wistfully. The woman she is now seems innumerable leagues from that astrophysicist. With hopes as abandoned as these ancient tomes.
Perhaps it's that prick of regret which has her returning here when she knows nothing good will come of it.
She drags a hand across a dozen books, choosing one at random, taking it with her to an overstuffed chair. It has the air of age, of ancient fingerprints pressed into its leather cover, into its sepia pages. She deciphers the angular runes—a skill she acquired years ago. Reis Gjennom Brukket Lyset. Journey (or Travel) Through Fractured Light. This, she suspects as she leafs through diagrams and equations mixed with lore, is how he knows the secret passageways. He dismantled the theory behind the Bifröst, examined it upside down and backwards until he recognized the ingredients where they combined in accidental convergence in nature.
Exactly what she would have done.
The ease of this comparison—her, a bright-eyed scientist, to him, a force of destruction—should bother her. It doesn't. Not anymore.
She hasn't forgiven him his multitude of sins. (Not consciously.) But she no longer views them through the tint of outrage and loathing; rather she recalls his misdeeds with dissociation. As mere facts recorded for historical purposes. Hatred is a badge too heavy, too draining to wear close to her heart indefinitely.
(Why hasn't he shown himself yet?)
She reads without retaining a single phrase. She doesn't thirst for knowledge. Not today. The book is merely an accessory in this guise of nonchalance. The artifice is pointless, of course. She's learned the futility in attempting to deceive the self-proclaimed God of Deception.
Then again, he tells her she's getting better at it.
Lying.
That, too, doesn't bother her as it should.
She exhales, long and thin, careful to keep her sigh silent. He likes her impatience, savors it like a finely aged wine. She's long held the belief that somewhere in his broken youth he learned to thrive with the bitter dregs of attention offered him. Veiled intolerance. Contempt. Ridicule. These give him life, purpose. They are his exacting delineation of self, and he craves them in the way a healthy being craves love and acceptance.
She thinks about him too much lately. She excuses too much.
She doesn't care.
There it is. The almost imperceptible drop in temperature when he is near. The tinge of his wintery scent. (She's become attuned to these harbingers of his arrival.) She waits a heartbeat and another before looking up. Because this is their ritual. This façade of disinterest.
He leans against the shelves, a book resting open in the palm of his hand as he drags a finger across his tongue before turning a page. She studies him, envious of his ability to affect an air of casual indifference so flawlessly. He must have a tell, an infinitesimal chink in his meticulously crafted mask. She searches for it each time, and each time her endeavor proves fruitless.
"Jane Foster," he says without a glance in her direction.
She's never cared to do a comparative analysis of how her name sounds on the lips of others, but it is different when he says it. Weighted with unspoken intention. What that intention is, she doesn't know.
She shouldn't want to know.
"Loki," she returns, equally dispassionate. Who will blink first? (Her, most likely.)
Another lick of his finger. Another page turn before: "Does my brother know you're here?"
She doesn't flinch at the question. It's simply another line in this scripted dialogue. She rises, re-shelves the volume she borrowed, and then looks at him. "Does it matter?"
The corner of his mouth turns up in a whisper of a smile. It's not a crack in his veneer. He wants her to see it—his amusement at the ambivalent defiance in her words. "And what brings you to this…vaulted hall of knowledge today?"
She turns away from him, slides her fingers along the spines of a dozen tomes, selects another without thought. "Spectroscopy."
His hand is over hers, pressing the book back into place. "Liar."
He steps back, a fan of chills transuding down her back in his wake, and she refuses to ask when revulsion had denatured into enticement.
Eyes closed, breath stretched taut in her chest, she says a single word: "Muspelheim."
His laugh is short, dry, quiet. As if he knows that this, too, is a lie—but he doesn't challenge her again. Because giving voice to the truth will shatter the glass-blown moment between them.
With a languid flick of his wrist, flames begin to lap at the corners of the shelves, leaching across the stacks until she stands in the center of a firestorm, roaring, crackling. She's not afraid; this is an illusion despite the heat that makes her skin glisten with sweat. (Oh god, it's so hot.) His mirages are not wispy two-dimensional images but visions that consume all of her senses. Touch, taste, scent, and sound as well as sight. She doesn't want to know whether the trick is external or if he's inside her mind, manipulating the currents between her neurons.
The library gives way to a broken landscape of obsidian. Steam blows upward in vaporous charcoal and tangerine puffs from chasms in the ground. No, not steam. Things. Beings. Indistinct and corporeal at once. They gather in a dance, frenetic in one blink, passive the next. Music comes from everywhere— the hiss of boiling air, the snap of fiery embers, the moan of shifting earth.
"Hátíð Elda," Loki murmurs. Festival of Flame.
Wonder awakens from its long hibernation and flutters in her stomach as he leads her through the throng of specters. They take many forms from simple humanoid shapes to figures so alien she cannot fully process what she is witnessing. Their eyes, however, remain the same. White so pure, so radiant that she cannot stare directly at them.
Loki draws a line from her shoulder to her wrist with the back of his fingers, and she becomes one of the gaseous Eldjötnar. She feels naked without the inhibition of skin and bones; she feels free. Flying apart and remade over and again as her molecules collide, solidify, evaporate. She is fire and smoke, heat and hunger. Exhilaration. She wants to laugh, and for a second, lungs and larynx solidify in her hazy center, emitting a stuttered rumble.
Loki grins before he, too, becomes a blazing mist, undulating, spinning with the crowd until she can no longer distinguish him from the others. She isn't bothered by his apparent desertion of her. When it suits him, he'll find her again. (He always does.)
Instead, she revels in forging new limbs, in casting off the reserved, austere woman that her years in Asgard have molded her into. She is reborn curious, awestruck, unfettered. Jane of old. Soaring within the currents of air swirling among the hordes of flaming apparitions.
She mingles with them, gasps when her subatomic particles brush against another's. (Or she would gasp if this form drew breath.) Nonlinear thoughts, images, emotions sweep over and through her with each caress. Some shy away from her, an imposter, but more want to know the odd tang of her foreignness, just as she savors their exotic passions.
Hours, days, months pass before she senses him again. Her malevolent benefactor. His fire burns too cold, too dark, and she shouldn't want to touch it, to taste it, to understand his hopes, his schemes. His pain, his triumphs. He is no friend of hers. Of Thor's. He never will be.
And yet—
He makes the choice for her, bears down on her like a phantom intent on possession. He fills her with a thousand years of blinding joys, of crippling sorrows. His relentless drive for knowledge, for cunning. He shows her every act of mischief, innocent and malicious. He suffocates her with his poisonous jealousy, his blackened need to tear down and reconstruct things—people—in his likeness. He consumes and consumes and consumes and is still as empty as the space between the stars.
She wrenches away from this pernicious communion, sucks in a shuddering breath when she is thrown from the illusion. Cool air pebbles her sweat-slicked skin with gooseflesh. He stands before her, once more the Jotunn-turned-Aesir demigod. Panting. Wearing a grin that borders on madness as his gaze makes an unhurried perusal of her body, clad only in a thin shift. (When had she taken off her gown?) He advances on her, removing vest and tunic to match her state of undress.
As a scientist (lapsed), she should have predicted this outcome to her dangerous little experiment. The indications were always there. When the dungeons no longer had any hold on him, he could have fled—should have fled. But he remains in the Realm Eternal, pretends at reformation for Thor's sake.
He's never pretended for her.
Every minute he tolerated her presence, her tentative attempts at conversation (to know him, to accept him because he's Thor's beloved brother—she told herself), every illusion he wove to sate her inquisitiveness were steps on a path he mapped out long before. Just as he led her so subtly from the library to her private chambers under the guise of her "visit" to Muspelheim.
He has her against the wall, her legs around his waist, long fingers sliding beneath the bunched hem of her shift. His mouth hovers over hers as he murmurs, "Tell me to stop."
She closes her eyes, grasps at any semblance of courage to make him leave. This is a line she never consciously believed she would cross, though it has begun to plague her dreams, her waking thoughts.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated but needs to be seen…
"Run back to my brother," he says, hands inching higher on her thighs, "and cower behind your little charade of morality."
The air has become too thick between them.
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face…
"Tell me to stop, Jane." His voice is soft, but not unaffected. More than his hips pressing into hers, the sound of his lust splintering at the edge of his smooth baritone is what unmakes her.
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
She pulls him down to her, and he smiles against her lips before he takes with his silver tongue the spoils of his gambit. She lets him leave a searing trail from her mouth to behind her ear to her collarbone. She lets him peel off the last of her clothing, lets him carry her to the bed where she doesn't shed a tear when he sends her over the precipice the first time. She weeps silently after the second—when he falls with her.
She lets him hold her to his chest as he spins a new lie for her: that it's common for a queen to take a consort. (She knows better, knows of his late mother's transparent fidelity.) He will be hers, he says. And she will let him, even though he tipped his hand during their brief joining as Eldjötnar.
Because Thor loves her, but he only offers her what she's never wanted. Not crowns, not titles, not a realm to rule by his side. Not immortality. She is only a pawn to Loki, but he gives her what she needs—a sojourn with the young researcher she was once. The last vestige of her humanity.
The cost isn't her soul. (He's taken that already.) The cost is the future heir to the throne of Asgard. A child who comes from his loins rather than the rightful king's. But he won't require it of her yet.
So begins the next round in their perverse game.
And this time, she has the advantage.
~FIN~
A/N: Thank you so much for reading this dark thing. If you want to share your thoughts, I'd love to hear them!