Jane barely sleeps that night. She tosses and turns until the sheets are a wrinkled mess and gives up at 0437 hrs when her body refuses to shut down. After a moment's deliberation, she makes her way to the mess hall and snags a large cup of coffee, barely tasting the bitter dregs as she waits for caffeine to kick in.
A little later, she's regretting it when the morning shift begins and the noise of human activity pounds an unwelcome tattoo in her head.
Pushing reluctantly off the table, she makes her way back down to the cell just as she debates the wisdom of spending most of her waking time in there with an unresponsive patient whose case file is as mysterious and disturbing as his dreamscape.
There are only questions and even fewer answers after the second link that she had established with him. On her work desk is the report that she'd typed late into the previous night, liberally peppered with hypotheses and medical terms, but all it really takes is some reading between the lines to know that she is uncomfortably out of her depth.
The meticulous set-up, the precise-settings on the machines and the intravenous fluids that prepare the body for revisiting potentially traumatising memories are parameters ensuring that the control over every session with a patient had always been hers to wield. In every dreamscape, she'd been either a casual bystander, or a counsellor in the guise of a friend, or a coaxing voice that reached out from a far-off reality. But she had never been a victim who relinquished control of her emotions in a virtual tussle that had seemed all too real, with a tenuous lifeline that came in the form of a failsafe alarm triggered by the extreme spikes in physical responses.
Jane mentally runs through her report again and sighs. Her hypotheses have long crossed the line into conjecture, barely supported by theories that haven't been validated at all.
Or as the no-nonsense S.H.I.E.L.D agents might say, bullshit.
The extraordinary hold that Mr. X had on himself and over her is remarkable, to say the least, and Jane's both itching and dreading to explore this connection further.
Perhaps she'll even be able to wrangle his name from him this time around. That thought cheers her up enough to momentarily erase the huge dent in her nerves.
oOo
The next jump hollows out her gut. Shutting her eyes proves to be meagre compensation for that sudden whooshing sensation as she plunges into Mr. X's larger-than-life dreamscape.
Sky blends with ground as Jane lands on her knees. At least there seems to be no pain. A wan smile crosses her face.
At least the landscape is familiar, that same black silken ground that ripples beneath her. Miles of unnatural flatness, a skewed version of the three-dimensional universe.
Jane searches for that strange man who owns this surreal realm but sees nothing at all. She takes a step forward, then another, until she's walking herself in circles and finding herself back where she'd tumbled through that rabbit hole. She finds herself confounded in spades in this particular reality, unpleasantly out of control.
Seconds bleed into minutes. And minutes could be turning into hours for all she knows. The first freezing drops of rain that burst from above startle her; she hadn't noticed the angry dark clouds that swirl above unnaturally.
Mr. X isn't there but Jane finally hears a whisper, a snake's subtle sibilance that slithers into her thoughts.
It's her name. And it sounds uncomfortably like a declaration of war.
In a sharp flash of realisation, she realises that her patient had never been interested in her help at all. He's seeking to destroy conscious thought until every link to the reality she knows is severed.
Kill the subconscious mind and it would only be a matter of time before the physical withered again, shrivelling dry from the inside out.
Jane's skin prickles in dread. In this place, bolstered by the undetermined strength of his own subconscious, so far removed from theory, the rules are changing. Only stupidity and made her assume that the psychological hold she carries – at least in this virtual space – over her patients had always been secure. Mr. X's twisted mind is giving her the very lesson that she needs to learn quickly – that survival in this place is no longer fully dependent on the timer programmed into her virtual machine but on her trusting her gut.
The crack in the horizon is a mirage that shimmers golden, like the break of dawn on a hot summer's day, except that it's weightier, heavier, with a sheen that hints at faeness that can only come with magic. The stuff of imagination found in the books that she used to read, with huge measure of stardust thrown in.
Run.
The horizon recedes ever further into the distance as she breaks into a sprint towards it. It's her only goal, the only entity in this bizarre no man's land that makes sense.
Her breaths puff out in white wisps. For a short, blazing second, Jane sees a flash of black and green in her peripheral vision. Dread is blistering through her body like welts that rise over bruised skin.
He's here.
Materialising slowly in the distance, as indentations in the air that solidify into a majestic horned-figure framed against the black sky. He stands between her and the golden light that's beckoning to her, holding a sceptre tightly in his left hand.
Instinctively, Jane knows that he is ferociously guarding the only reality that she needs to see. The facts, the cold hard truth. His memories, his past, the kills, his imagination. An internal maze that's rich with possibilities.
His mental territory on which she's found guilty of trespassing.
"Jane Foster."
She snaps her head up when she hears her name, only to stumble backwards when she sees him standing only a few feet away from her.
The weight of his presence is suffocating. It's hard to breathe when he's this close. He's as pale as she remembers, though without the gaunt pallor that she's gotten used to seeing, his piercing green eyes skewering her feet straight into the ground.
Even then, Jane can't help but notice how alarmingly detailed and finely woven his…costume really is, as though they are truly made for battle and not for entertainment in crowded conventions.
A small, unpleasant smile tilts the upper corner of his lips. The rain is still sluicing down the black sheet, but he manages to stay dry wherever he stands and watches for her next move.
"You might want to turn back now," he tells her silkily. "Consider this your only warning."
A small part of her is tempted to heed that warning. The other part – the irrepressible bit that needs to get to the bottom of every scientific mystery – stoutly refuses.
"I want to help."
Almost immediately, she feels his amusement and mocking disdain all around her, pressing in, squeezing the air out of her lungs.
"A Midgardian mortal helping a god? So far gone are the days you begged for rain for your crops."
Jane blinks, letting his words sink in. Midgardian mortal…helping a god? A god? His delusions of deity and the need for worship are at least consistent; she'd give him that.
It's no level playing field that she has entered. The only way to get to his memories is to get past him – or his avatar, whatever it is – somehow. But before she can reply however, he simply turns his back to her and walks away, the ground between them cracking open, quicker than an earthquake splitting the earth.
She scrambles backwards and falls hard onto her backside, barely managing to avoid the crumbling earth as the ground beneath her feet roils and buckles.
His mocking laughter echoes all around.
Giddiness is reducing her vision to a thin white line, clearing out everything but that distance that she has to bridge.
But in this non-real space, Jane's also dimly aware that there's greater life in her body, preternatural abilities shaped by the power of illusions and self that transcend her physical limitations.
She closes her eyes, willing the gap that he has made to narrow.
It does.
The ground reforms itself, causing Mr. X to spin around with disbelief and rage, but Jane is beyond caring what he's feeling or doing. Impulse drives her to cross the space in a leap of biblical proportions. Her legs move of their own accord, her strides lengthening. She skids as she accelerates towards the chasm that now resembles the width of a canal than a valley.
With her breath still stuck in her throat, she leaps.
And slams down hard onto the other side, hauling her body onto the surface, only to be brought back upwards hard by the scruff of her neck by him and thrown backwards.
Air floods back into her lungs in deep gulps. Her knees are shaking. In fact, her entire body is shaking, but heady triumph is overriding the chattering of her teeth and the tingling in her spine. The fatigue that creeps in is unfamiliar. It isn't the gritty-eyed sleepiness that comes after pulling all-nighters, or the irritable tiredness borne out of an absence of caffeine, but rather, the bone-deep exhaustion that makes her want to sleep for days on end.
Still, Jane sees that the gaping, yawning crevice is just there for the taking. To give up now would be to give up that precious, hard-earned victory that she'd snatched from the jaws of the devil.
I'm not your problem here.
She doesn't know what it is that makes her yell that out loud. Perhaps it's the hope of Mr. X responding to that piece of humanity that she's trying to stretch out even as they battle for dominance in this non-place.
The shout goes flat almost immediately, like the muted sounds of a struggle taking place underwater.
"Oh, but you are my problem now, Jane Foster."
He's stalking gracefully after her, placing a hard over her eyes, whispering in a language that sounds both harsh and magical at once. She expects mind-numbing pain, cringing in anticipation, but there's only…chaos. The incessant, amplified noise of the chaos that he's pouring into her head. It's a force, a mass of tangled images and discourse and myths compressed into the fragile skin of a soap bubble.
None of it makes any sense.
Her heart leaps into her throat as she tries to resist the pull of these images, but it's akin to wrestling an immovable force with the strength of a newborn.
And then there is freezing cold, as though a torrent of snow and ice has been thrown all around her. The wind is picking up, whipping up a relentless rhythm that makes her think she's standing in the eye of a storm-
Jane surfaces with a hard jerk in a familiar cell, her strangled cry of relief still wedged deep in her throat.
oOo
She barely hears the warning beeps of the machines this time. Forcefully yanking the electrodes off her temple, Jane sits up shakily, planting her feet unsteadily on the ground.
Her mind is racing with after her most recent encounter with Mr. X. The surreal, garish images of what she has just seen and done flood back more clearly than a dream that splinters off into nothing upon wakefulness. They pound mercilessly in her memory, warring with the excitement – that has wholly to do with the potential advancement in neural engineering – that she's surprised to feel.
The tussle for mental dominance even when a patient is physically flat on his back…the encoding of thought patterns in the decision-making process, given the appropriate amount of visual stimuli. The possibilities are endless and that can only be–
"Dr. Foster, how are you feeling?"
Jane hears the cerebral, cool tones of Natasha Romanov through the speakers. Sudden exhaustion makes her sway and a steadying hand falls on her upper arm. It's then that she realises that Romanov is actually in the cell and not in the adjoining room, peering down at her.
The automatic response is to nod, but it will take some time before she'll have the words to put every impression down on paper and fashion them into a report that's full of fancy graphs and calculations and medical vocabulary.
The truth is, Jane doesn't really know what to say. This is the second time that she's finding herself completely out of her depth, stretched past her comfort zone in a reality that has a greater hold on her than she has on it.
As her luck typically goes, this is probably only just the beginning.
Peering into Romanov's unsmiling face, Jane exhales sharply and settles for the inane.
"Fine, I'm fine. Just a little shaky, that's all."
Looking around, she's startled to see the grim faces in the adjoining room focused only on her. Someone must have hit a light switch, cancelling the one-way mirror effect.
Jane turns away from the baffled looks to examine Mr. X's vitals, seeing only the slight jump in heart rate and blood pressure that had been recorded at the same time as hers had accelerated off the charts.
It's not a coincidence that these spikes are happening simultaneously.
They're both chest-deep in the same mire of the bizarre world that he has created to keep her out. It's only making her all the more determined to unpeel the layers behind this mysterious man – no, this killer.
If she can get past that formidable obstacle he's placing in front of her.
She remembers the elemental coldness, the plunging temperatures that no manufactured industrial freezer can replicate, the strangeness of the oriental spice that seems to accompany him wherever he steps.
"I'll need some time going through my findings," she tells them in a tone that brooks no argument and tries to look past the varying degrees of disbelief registering on their faces. "Maybe a session or two more with the patient."
"Bullshit." A new voice enters the mix as a one-eyed man stalks into the room. "If you think this is your bargaining chip-"
Bargaining chip?
Indignation has her talking before she questions the wisdom of opening her mouth at the wrong time.
"I'm not the criminal here, Director Fury," Jane cuts in baldly. A part of her is marvelling at the bravado that's spilling out of her mouth. Maybe the encounter with a crazy killer in his own head has actually emboldened her more than she thought it would have.
"Dr. Foster-"
"This man may be your most wanted criminal ever, but he's also my patient," she goes on and looks him in his only functioning eye before she loses her nerve and stutters. "And if I recall correctly, that is exactly what you brought me here for."
Fury's jaw is tightly clenched as he glares her down. Without a further word, he whips around on his heel, his black coattails circling around him in a graceful arc as he stalks out of the room exactly the same way he came in.
Jane resists the urge to cheer herself on when she sees the stunned looks in the adjoining room. There's more than a little admiration and awe there and – dare she say – a little more respect there now for her quack occupation. She hopes that will somehow translate into a little more space for her to continue her very intriguing work with Mr. X.
A steaming cup of coffee awaits her in the mess hall. With a glance at the clock, she decides on a quick time-out, rushes to the canteen to down the brew, then hurries back to the cell, grateful that there isn't anyone here to watch her work.
Jane throws all caution to the wind, rechecks all the displays and prepares herself for another plunge into the unknown.
oOo
The world rights itself again into a memory that he treasures the most, but Loki finds himself mortifyingly face down on the cool, bronzed tiles of the Asgard library, his fingers digging hard into their even surfaces.
His breathing is shallow, the fight in him frayed and unravelling.
Even the simplest of spells had made him weak. Throwing that woman back into the abyss is sapping him greatly of the magic he needs to regenerate. But the absence of blood and pain makes him frown as he realises that the bone-weary exhaustion has long faded into a steady thrum of adrenaline that pours through his veins.
It has taken him a while to realise that the pesky small woman isn't a dream.
Jane Foster is a thorn in his side that he cannot rid himself of, it seems.
Her appearance is more than a mystery; it's an anomaly inserted into his worst nightmares and his fondest memories, a recent and a very incongruous fixture in the realms that sway to the unique dynamics of their own conjuring.
She is of Midgard. Her peculiar dressing and speech seem to reaffirm his suspicions, but her presence is an unwelcome intrusion that he doesn't care to even entertain.
Or is she?
Whether she is one of Thanos's trolls bent on dragging him back into oblivion is a question Loki intends to have answered.
It frustrates him that he has no control over her appearances, leaving him only in a position of waiting and preparing to shore up his meagre defences against her tenacious attempts at breaking through everything that he wishes to keep hidden.
That she has made this connection is undeniable. But it's a connection that shouldn't even be possible without the use of very advanced spellwork, none of which he possesses at present. Getting past his own barriers shouldn't have been that easy for her and yet, Jane Foster had nearly succeeded in leaping past that boundary that she shouldn't have crossed.
Perhaps she practises a form of seiðr that is yet unknown to him.
That idea sits less than well with him.
Loki cycles through the recent memory of their last encounter again, uncertain for once in his long life, of this particular state of being in which he finds himself.
In the blink of an eye, he picks himself up and magicks himself to the balcony of his personal chambers in the royal palace, staring sightlessly out at the Bifrost and the great sea that bends and falls into the many branches of Yggdrasil.
Pushing himself off the balustrade, he moves quickly into the gardens and out into the streets, his steps slowing as he comes to an abrupt halt just before the town square. There's no sign of life now in those broad walkways, no traces of the Asgardian quotidian marked in the loud palace chatter or the feasting that regularly take place in the great hall. Relief is only temporary when he conducts a self-examination of his own faculties, only to realise that the Asgardian armour that adorns his body is too malleable to be real, or that the constellations that hang high above Asgard do not dim even in midday.
These uncanny scenes are deviant enough for him to suspect that he inhabits a corporeal self, a body that's somehow less substantial than the weighted physicality that he carries around.
But where then, is he really, if not in his own mind?
The solution, when it comes, slams into him like the freezing spray from the Jotunn's casket of Ancient winters.
The intermittent but inexplicable presence of a certain Jane Foster is his answer. He has seen sufficient curiosity in those eyes to reassure him of her return. Of the help she wishes to render to him.
Loki smiles, anticipating her return and the multitude of ways in which he can steer their future encounters.
This time, he'll be waiting.
oOo
As Loki had suspected, it doesn't take too long for Jane Foster appear again. In what seems like the blink of an eye when it comes to measuring the passing of time in corporeal form, he sees her standing on shaky knees, with her head tilted to one side as though concentrating on keeping her balance on the rocking threshold of his memories.
He positions himself exactly where she saw him the last time and waits for her to see him.
It only takes a moment for their eyes to lock and a minute for her to walk over to where he's standing. Uncertainty and exhaustion are written into her features, but there is also a mortal's fragile determination in there too, which he thinks can be easily broken by a contest of wills.
She tentatively steps over the invisible boundary that divides them, her emotions plain on her face.
He keeps his voice candidly pleasant. "Greetings, Jane Foster."
"So now you finally decide that you want to talk to me, huh?"
Loki smirks and peers down at her, leaving his hands crossed behind his back as he circles her lazily. "Spirited. A trait that I too seldom encounter in the wastes of humanity."
A peculiar expression crosses her face and it's gone before he can put a name to it. "You talk as though you're far removed from everyone else."
"But I am." Loki doesn't bother to clarify the vagueness of his response as he probes her with his magic. It isn't spiking out of control as it had been when he'd encountered all his kills on Midgard.
She isn't one of them.
"What?"
He waves away her confusion. "I believe that a little talk would do us some good."
She's looking at him as though he had just turned Jotunn blue in front of her. "I thought I mentioned that the first time we met. Talking," she says slowly like he is a dim-witted child.
"So you did," he concedes, "and I am not entirely unreasonable to see that there is perhaps some merit to your initial suggestion," he barrels ahead before she can get edge in another word. "Well then, would you care for a wager?"
"A wager?"
"Are you in the habit of repeating everything that I say?"
Loki doesn't bother to allay the confused suspicion that's colouring her voice just as he's unable to stop the small measure of glee that rises in him.
"Indeed. We are both looking for answers, Jane Foster. I wish to know all about your very unexpected presence here as much as you wish to know what lies beyond the horizon behind me."
"Great," she's muttering to herself. "I'm in a cosplay nightmare with a man in a cape who's delusional enough to believe that he's not human but some kind of god."
The words are all but incomprehensible to him, but Loki readily dismisses her grumblings as humanity's chosen flights of fancy that are of no interest to him. Her repeated intrusion here tells him what he needs to know about her tenacity and the lengths that she'll go to for knowledge.
Brushing off the bland look on her face, he barrels ahead with the little bit of fun he intends to have with her first.
"You have sought me. A brave feat, if I might say, and perhaps even one that is deserving of a reward. Get past this…obstacle, Jane Foster, and you might just learn about the things you crave to know."
With that, he spins around and stalks away from her, the ground cracking beneath his feet.
It is probably a familiar sight to her by now.
Jane Foster yelps and flings herself towards him, her fingers catching the corner of his cape. The force of her grip surprises him before it hauls him downwards towards the opening abyss, a flicker of admiration for her quick-thinking immediately replaced by the anger that had fuelled him to walk the four corners of Midgard in search of his prey.
He shuts his eyes in desperation, calling up the first and only reality that comes to mind.
The twisty pathways along Yggdrasil's ancient branches materialise-
The image is abruptly interrupted by a rattling in his shoulder. The pathways squeeze shut again, winking out of memory, out of existence as the talking in his ear grows incessant.
Loki blinks his eyes open slowly, astonished to see Jane Foster hovering above him as her small hands continue to shake him, her mouth shaping incomprehensible words. He stares at her hard, his lips pressed together tightly.
"You fainted."
Indignation compels him to grit out a response. "I did not."
She sighs in exasperation and eyes him knowingly. "You did. Game over, whoever you are."
"Well played, Jane Foster," he says grudgingly, trying not to give into the fatigue that is claiming him, even though it'd be a small mercy that his failing body can grant him right now.
"Oh no, not now. No, you don't-"
To his surprise, he feels two hands lock around his shoulders and pulling him upwards. The force of her grip injects some measure of wakefulness into his drooping eyelids, momentarily chasing away the exhaustion.
"Tell me your name, at least. Before you decide to faint on me," she demands, leaning so close that he can see the tiny, golden flecks in her irises. "Give me something to work with."
A brittle smirk crosses his lips. He likes her tenacity, in both word and deed, as well as the mild form of amusement she provides, even though he doesn't appreciate her constant presence in what he deems too private a sphere.
"Very well," he agrees after a moment, hesitation still giving him pause. Revealing his name is a bigger leap that Jane Foster will ever know that she is about to take.
Impatience is written in the lines of her furrowed brow and the curl of her lips. "Well?"
He gives her a glance through narrowed eyes. And gives in.
"I am Loki, of Asgard."