34. Beloved
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Jane had fully expected to stare out some latticed window at the stars all night long, to follow the little trails of colour and light through an alien sky with her eyes while trying to follow the threads of cause and effect in her life with her mind. She'd fully expected to be unable to slow her racing thoughts even as she got into an impossibly comfortable, elaborate bed with piles of fluffy pillows and metres of silk-backed furs all around her. Then she blacked out the second her head hit the pillow. That jittery, anxious walk which had carried her further and further away from whatever was going down in the father-son tête-à-tête she'd left behind her had sapped the absolute last drop of her adrenaline.
She slept so soundly, in fact, that it felt as if she'd just laid down when a gentle pressure on her shoulder roused her again. When she peeled open her eyes, there was a woman in a light grey robe standing over her holding a lamp. Made of something that looked like brass, the lamp was moulded into an S shape with a handle and a small platform where a pebble glowed in the centre of a bluish flame. Jane spent a full ten seconds struggling to decide if a burning pebble counted as magic or not before she managed to wrangle her focus and look up at the woman's face.
"Yes?" Her voice was scratchy and thick from sleep and she cleared her throat self-consciously. It was still dark in the room, but the window had been shuttered by a sliding wall and it could be three in the afternoon for all she could tell. "Is it morning?"
The servant shook her head, standing back demurely as Jane sat up. "It is the edge of dawn, Doctor Jane. His Highness the prince bid me summon you before the household wakes."
Which one? Jane wondered instantly, suddenly remembering to be nervous of the answer. She didn't ask, afraid to hesitate in front of the Asgardian, afraid that if Thor had sent her the question would give him more wrong impressions. Or maybe right ones. She wasn't sure which would be worse.
Hurriedly dressed in slightly more simple but still draped and layered green robes, she followed her guide through the palace, tiptoeing in her fancy slippers and thinking that even the rustle of her skirts seemed loud. The woman in grey admitted they were going to the library and Jane found herself dreading needing to face Thor in private, especially not knowing why he'd send someone to get her in secret before the sun was even up and not come himself. He seemed like the type to come himself, prince or no prince.
Jane spent the journey mentally preparing points to argue her case about staying in Asgard, and how to best warn him of the ferocity with which she would go kicking and screaming if it came to that.
She wasn't going to give up.
The echo of her footsteps changed and she gasped as she looked up, taking in that they'd passed into a room which was at least five stories high and probably a mile long. The dozens of huge pillars in parallel rows along the middle of the floor split into buttresses at each level, their arches spreading like a forest canopy to support walkways that ran the whole length of the room, providing access to shelves which stretched upward to the distant ceiling. Each shelf was filled to bursting with scrolls, gold tablets, books and strange glittering rods. Their numbers seemed uncountable, infinite repositories of data stacked in every inch of the massive space. The ceiling itself was some kind of solarium, appearing as if open to the sky and full of floating miniatures showing Asgard and its surrounding worlds, ropes of light winking in and out of existence to illustrate the branches of the World's Tree.
She watched the (holographic?) water pour over the model disc and remembered standing on the edge of that very same cliff for real just hours ago. Dizziness threatened and she snatched her attention away to the delicate metal bridges which crossed the centre of the room between the walkways. The thin metal was worked into more shapes of branches and vines, woven together in fractal patterns.
Not getting to stare for long, she barely took in the rest of her extraordinary surroundings because the servant was moving briskly on, escorting her under the eaves of the left side shelves into a close, cosy warren of stacks (which reminded her pleasantly of University) and around a corner to an alcove. There was a table tucked away there, set under a small brazier, and sitting at that table was not Thor, but Loki.
His head lifted as they approached. He looked awful, still in the clothes he'd been wearing the night before, visibly rumpled and with red, shadowed eyes. Jane doubted very much he'd been to sleep at all.
His gaze caught hers and Jane felt the rise of an hysterical desire to shake him, to demand to know why the hell he would shove her into a metaphorical escape pod without even- but he smiled tiredly at her, his dimples flashing in his cheeks and his eyes drifting shut for a moment. His eyelashes were even more shockingly black against his skin than usual, and his messy hair left to its own devices had become so curly that it looked inches shorter. The bulk of her anger leached out of her. How could she stay angry? She knew too much, now, understood his motives too well.
"Thank-you, Dúfa," he said very solemnly.
The servant startled, blinking at him in surprise before quickly bowing her head and raising a fist to her chest. "Your Highness honours me."
He nodded at her questioning look and waved his hand towards the door. She backed away three steps, bobbing her head deferentially, and then turned to leave at nearly a run.
Jane watched her retreat, then turned to stare at Loki.
He slid down in his chair, shutting his eyes again.
She was so worried and so annoyed and so uncertain that she didn't know how to move forward. "Well, I'm here now- still. I'm still here," she said provokingly. "You're still here, too, Your Highness."
Loki spread his fingers over his face, pressing them into his skin as he moaned at her pointed address. "Jane..."
Guilt mixed with her exasperation. "Are you okay?" He'd been through six kinds of emotional hell and it showed.
"No."
Her fearful rage was simmering again at that abrupt frankness, knowing his stark honesty was meant to be disarming, already sensing him planning to weasel away from this line of questioning. "Loki-"
"Look," he sat up and started moving huge translucent sheets around on the table, turning them towards her, "it took hours, but I found them."
She leaned over, unable to stop herself from investigating. Star maps. Vaguely familiar ones, she could kind of tell through the alien notation and the shifting of the depictions as Loki ran his fingers over them. It was indicating something in the movement, but she couldn't understand what. "Those are..."
"Your own stars, yes. This is observational data from Midgard, gathered at least a generation ago. I thought it would interest you."
Jane's fists clenched and she took a deep breath. "Why did you do that?"
His gaze shot up to hers and just as quickly shot away. "They will be invaluable to your research. I can translate the charts, it won't take you long to pick up the notation. If you compare them to..."
"You know that's not what I meant. Why did you set me up to abandon you here, to leave you to some maybe terrible fate?"
He sighed, picking at the edge of a star chart. "It cannot be abandonment when you owe me nothing, when I should be here alone. It was I who failed to keep my word. Another rash choice, another bystander caught up in my wake. I shouldn't have promised you a useful time here for the sake of my will when that will is so weak I allowed my plans to collapse within moments of our arrival. I've imposed on you and kept you from your choice long enough."
If it weren't for that indelible image of him kneeling at his father's feet, completely prepared to die by his hand, she would have screamed in frustration. His complicated space tunic thing was as wrinkled as an old flannel shirt, his hair was escaping from behind his ears, he had graphite stains under his nails from making notes for her, and now she knew there was a deep well of compassion for him in her heart which would never run dry. Enough to drown any stupid thing he did. For this one person, Jane Foster had discovered a heretofore unknown depth in her patience.
"My choice," she repeated ponderously, setting that aside deliberately. "I don't know how much choice you're really letting me have when you do things like this. There's always a contingency plan so far. In case I decide my choice was wrong. In case it blows up in my face. I think I made myself pretty clear on the whole 'making decisions for me' thing, but let's put the 'weaving elaborate safety nets for me' thing on the table, too. Why did you call me here?"
Looking sulky and perhaps even guilty through her speech, he tapped his finger against the charts when she finally let him get a word in. "If it's an unwanted web you've been caught in, I will endeavour to dismantle it, but I am trying to keep up some of my end of the bargain. Is that not simply maintaining the terms? Would you have chosen differently if you'd known how little fruit the choice would bear?"
Sometimes it was like talking to a brick wall. On the subject of his own inherent value, he was deaf. She decided to try the long way around. "Speaking of choices. Do you think you'll ever forgive him? Your dad?"
Loki frowned at the change of subject, his eyebrows going up in the middle with puppyish confusion. "I don't know," he said reluctantly, as if wounded by the question. "He has not asked for my forgiveness. Does it matter?"
"Yes, of course it does. Of course it matters! He should ask, do you not get that? He needs to ask because it wasn't your fault he lied to you, and it wasn't your fault he brought you up to believe that your- that you being a giant or 'Elder Race' or whatever you guys call it means that you're not a person. There was nothing wrong with you." Jane paused, thinking of Frigga's obvious cognitive dissonance. "You were a Jotun to your mother until you were just a helpless baby in her arms, and then you became her baby. That means any of them could have been. I was a mortal to her until I was the woman who helped her sons, I was just a mortal to you- now I'm…?" She lifted her hands.
He shook his head. "That is different."
"It's not different. You're not evil, you weren't born wrong or bad, your life isn't worth less just like mine isn't. People are people. You could fit right in here if you actually bought this supposed ideal, what colour your blood was wouldn't have mattered, I feel like you completely succeeded in proving that when you decided to act exactly like your dad to win his approval." The more context she collected, the more clearly she saw what his supposedly nefarious plans were really all about and the more plain the line of cause and effect became. "Only maybe you had a point that being the great warrior king isn't always so great."
"Imagine me bestowing forgiveness and beatitudes as if I had any right to such things," he muttered bitterly. "There is an end even to my shamelessness. I wanted it to hurt him, when I let go. I hoped it would. A subtle thorn even in the moment of my surrender, a wound from the wounded."
Jane swallowed a painful lump in her throat and tried to think of how to reach him through the miasma of his self-hatred. "I want to tell you something, okay? I want to explain something to you." She walked closer and he tilted his head to look up at her, his eyes glittering in the firelight. "I..."
He waited.
"Look, I've never been satisfied, either. I thought I was for a while, I thought I was content, well-adjusted to my place in the scheme of things. But when I started seeing that freaky stuff in the sky, I realised nothing before that was the real deal, I realised I actually did need that vindication- me going after proof like a crazy person is not all pure-hearted wonder, there's wanting in there. And I wanted so badly to be right- I mean, I knew I was, but… When Thor told me I was right..." She wasn't sure how to get her point across, how to tell him the parts of himself that he hated most were the most normal. "You scared the shit out of me when you made those anti-protons, you know. Professionally, I was terrified."
Loki leaned on his fist and his lips just barely twitched up at one corner.
He didn't seem to get what she was driving at, but who could tell. How did you explain to someone whose jealousy was inextricably tied with wholly justified hurt and neglect and had festered poisonously into a black shroud over his whole life that jealousy could be just a feeling, momentary and powerless. She changed tack, "Did you do this all for me? Did you decide to come here because of me?"
He made a face. "I should think by now my reputation regarding altruism precedes me and I need not answer such a question."
"Your reputation is a bunch of bullshit. You do this on purpose! You can push me and push me, trying to play devil's advocate and show me how terrible you think you are, but I'm not your family, okay? You can keep trying to find the breaking point, the thing that will make me reject you, but all you're going to do is hurt me. I listened! You didn't need to die to make me listen!"
Panting and hot, her cheeks stinging with a hard flush at overstepping so far onto treacherously sensitive ground, Jane covered her face with her hands. Accusations about taking sides and pitting herself against his family flashed through her mind, Frigga's not unkind but deeply wary probing at the forefront of her memory. She heard the chair scrape and then he was standing in front of her, pulling gently at her wrists so he could see her.
"Loki, I'm sorry I said that, I don't know if I'm making sense…" she looked up at him and felt a jolt. In her fancy slippers, barely more than thick silk socks, he towered over her even more than usual and it sent a burst of longing through her, making her want to let her aching head fall against his chest. To be swallowed up in his arms.
"On the contrary, you make such perfect sense, I feel a fool."
She made a disapproving noise. "Why a fool?"
"Some pernicious, greedy corner of my mind has ceaselessly sought to determine what I most could not bear about this ignoble homecoming and you have put your incisive little finger precisely upon it. Nothing has changed. It isn't even worse." He sighed. "How ungrateful I've been."
Suspicious, she studied his face, the slight sneer of his down turned mouth and the self-loathing in his eyes. "Ungrateful to me? I don't want payback like that. I keep telling you, I don't want some tit for tat, some trade. That's not how this works- it's not supposed to be how these things work."
He lifted his chin, looking down on her now. "I'm aware you know what you want, Jane. I have never doubted that."
"What does that mean? I don't want anything! You gift wrapped everything I could possibly have had as an ulterior motive and handed it to me with no strings attached and I am still here. Because I didn't come here for Thor, or for me- I didn't even come here for science as unbelievable as that sounds- I tried to tell you before we left: I came here for you."
"And perhaps it is admirable to a point, but pity…"
She put her hands on his shoulders for leverage, her tone hard and sharp, "This is not about pity."
He sank down to her level, so close his nose brushed hers. "Of course it is. Even Thor worked it out eventually. Guilt, pity, exchange, your damnable idea of fairness. What else could possibly possess you to-"
"It has nothing to do-!" Jane's throat spasmed and then the peace of complete terror settled over her, because she couldn't deny it to herself any more and it was even more important that she not deny it out loud, so she was going to say it and that was that. She took a deep breath. "Sweetheart, I don't pity you. I never have."
Scoffing at the endearment as if that was all the proof he needed, he straightened up. "What then? I've counted on it, and it has seemed I calculated correctly in every test. Isn't pity the only reason I live? Does he not claim it was pity that made him pluck me up from my death on an icy rock- or was it cunning, only? At best it was both, and that makes the pity all the more bitter."
Jane fell back on her heels, letting her hands slide down his chest to where she could feel his heart beating quickly under her palm. "Things can start out one way and get better. It happens. Look at us. Whatever you might have thought you could gain by working with me- is that still why you want to help me? Is that why you spent all night pulling these charts for me?"
He glanced back at the table, avoiding her eyes and edging away from her touch.
"Is that why you made me an astrolabe?"
He looked down at her sternum as if he expected to see it hanging there, and she swallowed a ridiculous flutter of self-consciousness that he knew about the necklace. She could guess when he'd seen it and under what circumstances.
"At first it was a lot of things, for me," she went on, ignoring her nerves, "you were exciting and mysterious, and everyone is aware that I can't resist a mystery. But it got more and more simple. You always knew what I needed, you spoke my language, you understood exactly how… alone it can make you, being… smart and maybe crazy, I guess. You listened. You understood my work, you understood me. You're the first person I've ever talked to who just… and I couldn't lose that. And then it got even simpler. It's so simple now."
"Is it," he muttered wearily. She reached up to run her thumb over his cheekbone, her pulse thundering in her ears.
"Yes. I'm here now because I love you."
His eyes doubled in size and shot to hers, staring in paralysed shock, then almost as quickly his head dropped and his lips drew back in a grimace. "Don't be ridiculous."
It was doubtless a sign of how warped and abnormal she was that her reaction wasn't to be stung or even angry. Instead, she was frustrated with a tinge of sad amusement. Maybe his absurdity was wearing her down. Maybe she just knew him too well to be even a little surprised. In fact, she was even less surprised than she might have thought she would be. He was so much work, more than she had ever imagined putting in to a relationship with another human being (he isn't human, though, is he, Jane?), but somehow for the first time in her life it was work she didn't remotely mind doing.
"What's in it for me?" she asked gently, stroking his face. Even tired and miserable and confused, he was so beautiful it felt like she shouldn't be allowed to touch him this way. "Really think about it and ask yourself: what have I got to gain? Why would I lie to you? Look at me. Loki, look at me. I put my life in your hands. I trusted you all along because you were so patient with me, and little did I know then that you could sure afford to be patient, because everything I was so scared to tell you, you already knew. But I don't care about that now. I got myself in this, in the middle of all this cosmic drama that's so much bigger than anything- I'm just human, you know! And I'm in it because…
"I didn't ask you to stay because of the bridge or for your brains or because I wanted to see Thor again or so I could go to Asgard. I asked if you wanted to stay because I wanted you to be there. I want to be with you."
"Do you? What an idle whim it must be if you have not already realised... How badly do you want it?" he muttered, still leaning over and away from her, his voice low and scratchy. "If I must always remain here, subject to Odin's whims, would you throw yourself on his mercy? If I said I was going to run away across the universe, never returning to Midgard, would you come? If I told you I could give you a life as long as mine, would you accept it?"
The fear was a constant hum, down her spine, through the tips of her fingers, like the beginnings of frostbite, tingling with ominous premonition, but it was as nothing compared to the rising sun which was her relief. The warm rays of maybe maybe maybe…
"Sure," she said, her voice a bit high pitched but strong enough. You wanted to be challenged, Jane, this is a challenge.
Loki shook his head despairingly. "No negotiation? No goodbyes to Erik Selvig and Miss Lewis and your mother? No ultimatums? You've never been so short-sighted, Jane. First you must extract the promises, the terms- there should be so much you require in promises before-"
"There's nothing required, not for this." She knew what he was really getting at. It wasn't about not needing to consult her for travel plans. "You don't have to say anything, you don't have to do anything. How I feel is going to be the same. That's the way it is, no matter what. It's unconditional."
He peeked at her from under his eyelashes, not turning his head. "A terribly imprudent word. I would have laid down worlds at your feet if you had asked."
She couldn't stop the shiver which ran through her. "I know."
He noticed it, flashing a reflexive grim smile at the pyrrhic victory. "And so even part of you admits it... still, I am a monster."
"I still love you."
The distress with which he gaped at her made her want to hug him until he couldn't breathe, to hold him so tight he'd believe her.
"This isn't a contest, it's not something you earn." She paused, thinking of what she could say to make him see. "And I wasn't moping around waiting for Thor to come back, you weren't a replacement or a means to an end, that's never what held me up. It wouldn't have worked out if he did. We'd have bored each other pretty soon. Or I would have pushed him away. I always used to blame my exes for… but it was me. I didn't have time for them. I didn't want to make time."
A wrinkle appeared between his eyebrows. "But…?"
"Yeah. Crazy how long it took me to realise I always had time for you. We've noted before, I'm not exactly a patient person, but I waited for the truth. Everyone told me I was stupid, including me, but I still waited."
"You're stubborn," he said.
"When it's worth it," she shot back.
"Worth it to discover a lie and the coward who lies it? If you'd been killed by the Destroyer, I would have thought nothing of it- I would have used your death to punish my brother. A whim of mine could snuff out the light of your whole world. If not for the bridge, if not for curiosity nor honour, why am I 'worth it'? How could I be?"
"I could give you a list of qualities and virtues, but none of it would be why. There isn't one reason, there isn't an equation." Jane struggled to swallow tears, shutting her eyes against them. "Loki, sweetheart, you just are."
His knuckles brushed her cheek and she lifted her head. He watched the water droplets roll over his fingers, then opened his hand to touch her jaw, so, so delicately. She strained towards the contact as it started to withdraw and he leaned down, his eyes shifting between both of hers. Searching for something.
"Do you trust me or not?" she pressed, the words wobbly but insistent. Uncompromising.
Loki caught his breath, as if wanting to object to the question, but he wasn't hypocrite enough to argue that wasn't the bottom line. He knew it was perfectly just. "It isn't you that I… doubt."
"It is, though. Don't I know my own mind? Didn't you say that?"
"Jane Foster…" he whispered, half offended and half awed that she'd trapped him with his own words.
She couldn't even feel the satisfaction in that right now. She repeated, "Do you trust me?"
His eyes, lovely and huge and vulnerable, shimmered more and more as he studied her, the terror and reluctance he couldn't conquer written so clearly in them. He reached for her, watching his fingertips trace over her brow and down her cheek, resting a moment on the beauty spot by her mouth. His lips pursed and relaxed as he considered and she smiled slightly at the familiar tic. Still, she could see how much it pained him that he couldn't just… she let her hand rest at his throat, meeting his gaze again as the contact startled him.
"The norns twined the thread of your life with mine as a judgement, I think. Which of us is judged?"
"Is that fatalism?" she wondered, sliding the pads of her fingers around the curve of his neck. His skin was flawless, soft and smooth as alabaster.
He scoffed quietly. "Perhaps. Can not I also be contrary?"
"Do you trust me?" she asked again mercilessly, not letting him slip away from the question.
Loki shut his eyes and let his forehead rest against hers. "Of course I do. I must."
"You definitely should."
"Yes," he gradually agreed, then tipped his chin to the side and brushed his lips over her mouth. He did it again, lingering there while she held her breath. "Yes, I should."
He lunged forward and she was swept up in his arms, her feet dangling in the air as he held her tight and bent his head to kiss her with sudden fervour. She pushed her fingers into his hair and sucked at his bottom lip, pressing forward invitingly until he completely relaxed his jaw and they could steal oxygen from each other's panting breaths.
She let her hand trail down his shoulder while her tongue traced the scar above his lip, his cupid's bow, and then pushed into his mouth. The lines of his clavicle and then the hard muscle of his chest were barely obscured by the velvety fabric of his tunic, the heat of his skin warming her palm as his lips moved desperately against hers.
When her thigh bumped something solid, she came up for air and realised he'd put her down on the edge of the table where he'd been organising star charts for her, pages and pages of careful notes in his rune-style handwriting on semi-translucent spacey paper spread over every inch of the surface. He tried so hard to always be doing something for her, to have something to give her any time her attention lingered on him too long.
She swallowed tears and turned to look at him, his messy black curls falling voluminously around his face and his pale cheeks flushed. She smiled, trailing her eyes downward over the hint of exposed skin at his collar, along his arms, feeling the warm grip of his hands wrapped around her waist. His thumbs almost met over her belly button, she noticed, the observation a little dizzying.
His delicate brows lifted in a slightly playful frown as he followed her gaze, his mouth a disconcerted pout.
"So little. Tiny, fragile mortal Jane," he mused, pressing inwards to show off how he could nearly span her waist.
"Excuse you, I'm a normal size. You're just enormous."
"Mmmm." He turned his hands, sliding his thumbs along the base of her ribs, his fingers brushing her shoulder blades around her back and sending electric tingles through her skin. "My condolences. It cannot be helped."
"Yeah, how terrible for me," she said, as sarcastically as humanly possible. "No one wants a tall, graceful, super-strong-"
He kissed her again, softly teasing her with pressure before pulling back, over and over. Then he looked at her, his eyes still somehow uncertain, bluer than a calm sea and twice as deep.
"I was never actually lonely before," she told him, hoping to break through, "even in school, being called a crackpot, in my desert with my tumble weeds and my irritating non-science intern. It was okay, I was busy and I couldn't be bothered. I never truly felt like I was missing something until..."
"Are you not afraid?" he finally said, encompassing far more than just this moment, and neatly drawing them to the crux of the issue. Jane lingered over it, wanting to remember it. The rich baritone timbre of his voice, the rounded vowels and soft Rs of his lilting accent, everything was so important to notice, to keep.
"Terrified."
Loki smiled, there was serenity and doubt and fond affection all tied up in it, and he lifted his hand to put her hair behind her ear, stroking her cheek afterwards with cautious, tentative caresses. "Oh, beloved. How can I hope to admire your courage so well as you deserve?"
Butterflies swirled in her stomach and she blinked rapidly to clear her vision. "Beloved?"
"Best beloved. Jane."
She leaned forward and tipped his face up to hers, kissing his closed eyelids and the bridge of his nose, then running the tip of her own nose down the valley of his cheek and along his jaw before burying her face in his neck, mouthing the tense line of muscle as he angled his head for her. "You can't have anything without having something to lose," she said, between touches. "Everything I've ever done that was most worth doing scared me a little. Must be a good sign you scare me a lot."
"I fear there can be no peace in such a life. Nor any life with me in it. You deserve better."
His shirt smelled of pine smoke and leather, like an alpine cottage, and she found it comforting to detect the slight hint of petrichor, of ozone, that was his magic. She took a long breath. "I don't know what it'll be, but I want you to be in it. You were willing to die for them, for me, for principle- but… I don't want you to die for me. I don't want you to die."
He pushed her further back on the desk and wrapped his arms around her, sitting down in his chair again and resting his head in her lap. At great length, he sighed, toying with a fold of her dress. "To die is much less to ask than what you do want of me."
Jane stroked his hair, her fingers tracing over the curve of his ear. "And what's that?"
"For me to live. Live differently."
He was quiet for a long time, his breaths coming with deliberate slowness.
"Would you really give up your own realm and your own people to stay with me? If that were the only way?"
Her hand stilled on his head and she kept her gaze on his lips, starkly red against his pale skin, to avoid looking at his eyes. Would she really? Forever? Her chest tightened at the thought, but the resolution was firm. "If I had to, if it came down to either or... then... yes."
Sitting up, he lifted his hands to cup her jaw and pull her face down close to his. "But I would never ask that of you."
"I know," she said, and some tears escaped as she tried to blink them back.
He smiled again. "No, no. Not because I don't believe you."
It was like a punch in the gut, hearing him say that, having him read her mind again. "Then...?"
"I thought it was quite, quite obvious, Jane Foster," he said, letting her sink towards him and into his lap. He nudged her with his chin, supporting her back with his arm as he teased her into place so her could kiss her again.
She melted into him, altogether too cognisant of his body heat and the firmness of his thigh muscles under her weight as she opened her mouth to him for a long, languid exploration.
"Another moment of innocent compassion from the merely pitiful, brother?" said a voice from the doorway which caused both their heads to turn sharply, violently breaking the kiss. "Do I misunderstand again?"