SUMMARY: Jane Foster has found an unlikely ally in the mercurial God of Mischief.
RATING: PG/K+
GENRE: Canon Compliant with Loki (the series)—technically.
SPOILER WARNING: For episode 5, Journey into Mystery

A/N: So, it's my birthday, and I'm having a lot of feelings about the Loki series. I decided that I needed some Lokane in there somewhere. So happy birthday to me.

ALLIES

Jane wakes, blinking away the grit in her eyes. A tall shadow sits at the end of the bed, posture rigid as he tilts his head, listening for something beyond her hearing. She clutches the emerald pendant at her chest, relieved when it pulses faintly.

"Something's happened," murmurs a dry, familiar baritone. Loki glances up at the bulkhead of the cabin, his patrician features drawn in consternation.

She sits up, instinctively pulling the threadbare blanket up to her chin. It's a habit from childhood, when she believed a layer of fabric and batting would protect her from the imaginary monsters in her closet. She's since learned just how very real monsters are.

A dozen questions lodge in her throat, tangled with a thread of fear. Have they been found? Will they have to pack what little belongings they have and abandon the dilapidated submarine that has served as their refuge for so long? She doesn't want to run, not again.

"What is it?" she asks, drawing near to the man—no, demigod—who has become her unlikely ally in this neverending apocalypse.

He's silent for a beat before answering. "Something different."

She rubs at the chills prickling her skin. Different. That word has come to mean dangerous.

It's been months or years—she's not sure which—since she stood in an odd courtroom, accused of the baffling crime of building a successful Einstein-Rosen bridge device "too early." The gavel banged, tried and convicted before Jane could form a single argument in her defense. The sentence was carried out in the next breath when one of the TVA agents jabbed her with a pruning stick.

She woke to a world in a constant state of collapse, a strange man hovering over her with a halo of dark hair framing his handsome face.

He gave her a triumphant smile. "I knew they'd send one of you eventually." He held out a hand to her. "You had better come with me if you want to live, Jane Foster."

She ignored his proffered hand, eyeing him with suspicion. "How do you know my name?"

He let out a soft laugh. "I'll gladly explain everything, however—" he glanced over his shoulder at the angry clouds billowing behind him. Was that purple lightning? "We have more pressing matters at the moment. Namely, survival."

A head emerged from the storm, a gigantic skull made out of obsidian smoke with smoldering red eyes and chomping fangs. Jane took the man's hand and scrambled after him to safety.

She used to try to keep track of the passage of time, tried to count hours and days, but this is a place beyond time. A purgatory for outcasts like her, like him, to scrounge a meager living or succumb to their grisly warden, Alioth.

Jane shakes off the memories. "Different how?" she asks Loki. "Is it another one?"

When an event or pruning is sent to the Void, Alioth often makes short work of the hapless variants who arrive. But a Loki? A Loki nearly always survives. And the more Lokis, the more treacherous this place becomes. Most are a combination of rage and chaos, starving for power. Factions of them fight each other for dominance over their prison.

She asked her Loki once why he never joined their deadly game. He is, after all, cut from the same cloth—cunning and mercurial. He sneered in derision, said his ambitions weren't so pathetically pedestrian. I plan to escape this wasteland, not rule it. That's why I have you. She suspected there was more he left unsaid, but didn't push him. Because he got annoyingly broody when she did.

"I'm not certain," he answers her question, rising from the bed. As he does, his Asgardian armor ripples over his bare chest in a flash of green light.

Jane climbs off the mattress. "I'm going with you." He opens his mouth to protest, but she levels him with a flat look. The truth is she feels safer with him than waiting behind, hoping he won't be caught by the more bloodthirsty versions of himself. "You can't stop me. You know what happened last time you tried."

"Oh, indeed," he agrees with a quiet chuckle. "It is how we ended up in this predicament."

He draws a fingertip over the small mound in her belly. She twines her fingers with his, and his expression becomes a conflict of emotions. Briefly, he looks younger, the hardened veneer—forged by centuries of anger, jealousy, and vengeance—slipping away to reveal a broken boy who has been given an unexpected miracle. A miracle he believes he doesn't deserve but desperately wants, all the same.

In the next beat, the awe, the fear and hope vanish from his pale gaze, and he wears again the mask of a volatile trickster tiptoeing at the edge of madness. Sometimes she wishes he would drop the facade, give her more than a glimpse of the complicated being that hides beneath. But the prospect scares her, too. He's told her who he is, what he's done. He painted the portrait of a villain in graphic detail—and it's an image she can easily believe after her harrowing run-ins with the other versions of him.

And yet, he's never been a villain with her. Even when they stand toe-to-toe, screaming at each other. Even when she let her fist fly after he confessed to stealing her beloved mentor's mind during his invasion of New York. He only rubbed his jaw, huffed a laugh.

I like you, Jane Foster.

He sighs, steps back from her, and flicks a wrist in her direction to conjure armor for her—gear to match his, complete with a set of knives at her side. The pendant she wears is now embedded in her breastplate.

Tapping the glittering jewel, he says, "So you don't forget to which Loki you belong."

Jane rolls her eyes. One time she was nearly fooled by the wrong Loki—the variant who considers himself the "president." Once. The gemstone will only glow for the fallen prince in front of her. Fortunately, most of the other Lokis look nothing like him.

"I don't belong to anyone," she says automatically in the old dance between them, but the words are belied by the unconscious touch of her hand to her growing middle.

He doesn't miss the motion and raises a brow as if to say, "Liar." His fingers curl around her shoulders, and he fixes her with a look that teeters on the verge of being earnest. "Now, Jane Foster, you will stay close to me and not wander off."

For a heartbeat, she has the irrational urge to stick her tongue out at him. Her nerves are making her giddy. She can't remember the last time he's warned her like this. Not since combat practice became a part of their daily routine.

He's afraid, and that terrifies her.

But she swallows back the anxiety bubbling in her stomach and sets her jaw. "Are we going or what?"

The corner of his mouth ticks upward. "Reckless mortal," he murmurs. "My reckless mortal." And then his lips are on hers.

He always kisses her as if she's the only thing that can slake his unending thirst, as if he'll never have the chance to drink her in again. It sets her body alight with electricity—with power. Too soon, he pulls back, head tilting again toward the bulkhead.

"We must hurry." The urgency in his tone sends another wave of chills skittering down Jane's back.

Their boots echo off the deck as they race toward the hatch. Loki climbs out first, dagger in one hand in case one or more of his counterparts lie in wait on the other side. When it's clear, he reaches back to help her through the hole, though she doesn't need it.

Outside, wind whips through the barren landscape, carrying the thunderous bellows of Alioth in its wake. The skies are an infinite lifeless grey beyond the perpetual storm. Loki heads for the nearest crest overlooking the valley where most pruned events arrive—the feasting grounds for the cloud-monster. Loki crouches down, gesturing for her to do the same. He magicks himself a pair of binoculars. She has to nudge him before he creates another pair for her.

Her gaze is drawn to a flash of verdant light. A city is rising from the ground, silver and gold, though it shines dully. At the center is an aged Loki, the one who wears a ridiculous costume made out of a leotard and tights. He's raising his arms high in the sky, laughing maniacally as Alioth opens its gargantuan maw in a booming roar.

"Is he trying to kill himself?" Jane whispers. She's never come across a Loki who doesn't have an exaggerated sense of self-preservation, but maybe the eternal monotony of the Void has finally gotten to this one.

Her Loki grasps her chin, turning her gaze to the right. "Look."

Farther down the valley is one of his doppelgangers holding a woman's hand—another Loki?—as together they throw seidr at the cloud-monster. Alioth consumes old Loki and turns on the pair, but its crimson suddenly winks out, bursting into a brilliant green. A shockwave sends some of the black fog outward, blanketing the Void with dusk. There's a pathway through the storm in front of the pair, though from this angle, Jane can't see what lies beyond.

Her Loki rises, shock rounding his eyes. "They've done it. They've subdued the creature."

A revelation explodes in Jane's mind and she drops the binoculars. "We have to get to the lab! Right now!" Without a backward glance, she shoots off in the direction of the decaying warehouse where they've hidden a makeshift Einstein-Rosen bridge generator.

Loki rescued her for this purpose—so she could build the way out for him, for both of them. It took an inordinate amount of time to scavenge or jury-rig the necessary parts, all while ducking the other Lokis or bands of cannibals. The first and only test had drawn the eye of Alioth, and it was only her Loki's magic that had saved them from being consumed. They've spent an eternity trying to come up with a way to distract or defeat their lethal warden, and Jane isn't going to waste this opportunity.

Loki strides past her on long legs, grabbing her hand as he does. Elation swells alongside the fear in her chest, and she almost laughs. They're going to do it. They're getting out of this horrible hell. After that… She doesn't know. She doesn't care. Freedom is on the horizon.

And so is President Loki.

Jane slides to a stop, air congealing in her lungs. He's pacing in front of the warehouse, looking for a way in. Aside from the tattered suit and golden horns, he's a near perfect replica of the man beside her, chiseled features and dark hair curling at his shoulders. But the eyes, those are different. Devoid of light.

Her Loki squeezes her hand. "Run," he commands in a low voice. "Save yourself and the child."

"I'm not leaving you," she returns, reaching for one of her daggers.

Loki shakes his head with a brittle laugh. "Do you want to know what my nexus event was?"

She frowns at him. "Now?" He wants to tell her this now? When he spent the last several months—years—refusing to give her that tidbit?

His gaze turns soft, watery in the corners. "It was you, Jane," he says. "On the hills of Svartalfheim, I chose you over vengeance, over power and domination." His face hardens. "But you were meant for Thor, and the only role allotted to a Loki is a self-serving foe. And so I shall play on."

The full magnitude of his confession is difficult for Jane to grasp—she never experienced the event he referenced. She'd been removed from the timeline before Odin cast Thor to Earth for his insolence.

"Screw that. Screw the TVA," she hisses, her voice a little shrill. She's not about to go on the lam alone and pregnant with a half-human, half-frost-giant baby. "We're in this together, for better or worse."

The president has stopped pacing. He's finally seen them, and though he cradles one arm to his chest—is he missing a hand?—a blade glints in his other hand, his mouth stretching in a wide, anticipatory smile.

"Are you finished having an existential crisis now?" Jane says, waving a dagger toward the despicable man standing between them and liberation. "Can we take care of him and get off this intergalactic landfill already?"

Her Loki grins that beautiful, feral grin. "As my lady commands." Hand in hers, they charge their enemy.

President Loki doesn't stand a chance.

~FIN~

A/N: Thank you so much for reading! I'd love to know your thoughts! :)