Disclaimer: The story and characters of Thor belong to Marvel; all original characters and plot are my creation, are not based on real people or events, and are not intended for sale or profit. Please do not repost without permission.

AN: This chapter is what happens when you leave your muse's cage unlocked during class; you turn your back for a measly three hours, and when you check again, it's built an entire complex of subplots for you to reconcile. The cheeky little drunk… please enjoy!

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Darkness. Floating in darkness. Green sparks in the darkness. A cold weight on her chest. Blue flames glittering on faceted gold, and the splash of hot rain… rain? No… tears…

A soft touch against her forehead… the press of lips…

And then… light…

Jane's eyes flew open. She bolted upright in bed, gasping for air, her hand flying to her throat, grappling for the hand that wasn't there. It encountered only the cool, solid weight of the rune pendant hanging on its cord. She sat there panting for a long moment, trying to collect her panic-scattered thoughts.

A dream… it really was a dream…

"A dre… ngh!" she tried to say out loud, but winced, gritting her teeth. Her throat felt sore.

She sucked in a deep breathe, looking around herself. The room was just how she'd left it the night before. The sky, deeply grey in the early morning light, was still spitting fitfully against the window, but the storm was clearly long over. From the corner of her eye, Jane could see the digital clock on the night stand, flashing 12:00, in need of being reset after the power outage during the night.

A power outage… there was a power outage… and then… she swallowed hard, grimacing in pain. She tentatively reached up to touch her neck, and hissed in pain as she felt a hot swell of damaged tissue.

Throwing back the covers, she scrambled to her feet and practically ran to the mirror across the room. She stopped short, peering at her reflection; her eyes closed and her stomach clenched up at what she saw.

A swollen, dark blue-black imprint of a long-fingered hand wrapped mercilessly around her throat.

"Not a dream…" she whispered hoarsely against the ache.

Real.

It was tempting to ask the clichéd 'have I gone crazy' questions. Loki should be dead – she had watched him die in Thor's arms. But Jane didn't like to think she was the sort of person so set in their preconceptions that she had to doubt her sanity the moment something challenged her beliefs about reality. Last night had been one thing. But now, she had to face facts. What kind of scientist would she be to do otherwise?

So she would operate under the assumption that she wasn't crazy. And ghosts did not exist. Or if they did, she amended, they probably didn't leave bruises.

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable…

The most likely truth, she was forced to conclude, was that Loki had not, in fact, died on the Dark World.

How he had survived that mortal wound, Jane could not explain. But that hardly mattered at this point. Not twenty-four hours ago, she might have considered that excellent news. But after last night… Her mind skittered nervously away from those memories, and landed instead, on the ones she'd been rehashing the day before, only to find that they all took on uncomfortable new dimensions. Each one filtered into the forefront of her mind through her knew knowledge of Loki.

When he had been arguing with Thor on the flying boat about the pain her mortality would bring, had the bitterness in his voice been all for Thor, or had it been something more?

When he had sheltered her from the Aether's explosion, was it her imagination, or had his touch lingered a few seconds longer than was strictly necessary?

And when he'd pushed her out of the blast radius of the implosion grenade, only to be pulled in himself – when their eyes had locked, and he'd reached out for her, a even though there was no way she could have saved him – what had that look on his face really meant?

And her first memory of him, the most vivid, the one she always thought of first: the smile he'd given her on their first meeting, so self-assured… too self-assured… it suddenly seemed false, forced, designed to conceal rather than express, to distract with vanity whatever might be concealed underneath… And then the way his eyes had tracked her after she'd slapped him, fixed on her like he was mesmerized, that devious, unrepentant smile crooking his lips as he gazed at her, like he was trying to memorize her…

She hugged herself, rubbing her bare arms, suddenly incredibly self conscious, and made herself refocus on the present.

It all made a rather perfect kind of sense in hindsight. Loki had avenged his mother when he killed the Kursed. What was left for him after that, but to go back to his prison cell? Faking his own death meant escape from that incarceration, and making it a hero's death had left him a martyr, remembered in the best possible light and …how did he put it? 'Free in every sense'. Now Loki was in the wind, unknown and unsought, while Thor practically sainted him to anyone who would listen. It was not only logical, it was really kind of brilliant. The master strategist, whose mind she'd grown to admire when she thought him dead, still alive and hard at work.

Stop it, she ordered herself, realizing that her breaths had become quicker and more shallow the more she thought about him, you are not allowed to be impressed by him, Jane Foster! Look what he did!

She felt tear prick at the back of her eyes as a delayed but potent fear started to claw its way past the initial shock of revelation and up out of the pit of her stomach to nip at the base of her intellect. Loki was alive, and he… she tried again to escape the memories of the night before, but they were insidious, slipping in through the cracks while she struggled to breathe normally.

Helpless, defenseless, exposed, the flash of green light slicing the air with ozone.

The hot press of lips on her skin. On her mouth.

A crushing hand clamped around her airway, and the powerless and inevitability of suffocation.

"All of it… all of it, Jane… all of the suffering and destruction, all the fire and screaming and the blood… all of the killing…all of it was for you."

The gray square of the window seemed to gape like a hungry mouth that would suck her in and swallow her into the ruin of New York if she dared turn her eyes towards it.

I am not the cause of it. I can't be.

Two tears rolled down her cheeks anyway.

I don't want to be.

She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the bruises at her throat, framed by the black cord.

I won't be. I refuse to be.

She followed the line of the cord down, and her eyes came to rest on the rune pendant. Her face hardened.

Jane wasn't anyone's victim to stand around crying and afraid. Jane was a scientist. She knew that the only way to combat fear was with knowledge. So what did she know?

Loki was alive. Loki claimed to be in love with her. Loki had made some kind of Faustian pact to reach earth, supposedly to win her over, but had lost control of the situation, and possibly control of himself, to this nameless alien overlord. Loki had failed and had been locked up on Asgard, where he claimed his mind had been restored (Jane remained skeptical). Thor had freed him during the Convergence. He had faked his own death. Now he had turned up on Earth, in her hotel room, caught secretly casting spells on her. He had confessed everything. He had kissed her passionately. Then he had choked her out cold. Then he had left her here.

Why?

As she chased up and down the timeline, she kept coming back to the fact that Loki knew that she now knew he had faked his own death, but aside from rendering her temporarily unconscious, he had done nothing about it.

Which meant that either he could not do anything about it - or he did not want to do anything about it.

He clearly didn't want me to know he was alive – he said I'd changed the rules. What does that mean?

Maybe he really was in love with her, and just wanted to be close to her…?

Bullshit. Even if it were true, this was Loki - he always had an angle. What is he really up to?

She needed more information. More answers.

Jane knew what she should do – she should already be on the phone to Thor, to Stark Industries, to SHIELD, telling them what little she knew. She could see Stark Tower from the window – brilliant minds like Bruce Banner and Tony Stark could help her figure this out, and dangerously skilled soldiers like Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanov would keep her safe. Help, resources and protection were practically within shouting distance. It would crazy to delay.

But…

Her fingers curled around the rune pendant. There were more facts to consider.

Ever since her encounter with the crone on the street, she had felt wrong footed. Something about those women had struck a strange note in her that was still resonating even after all the distractions of last night. They knew something. She could feel it in her bones. Jane needed the help and protection of the Avengers… but she needed answers more. And she had a good idea where she could find a few.

Swinging away from the mirror with renewed purpose, her eye caught on a small, glimmering something sitting inconspicuously on the dresser beside her wallet. Her eyes narrowed as her heart skipped with a moment's panic, but when the object didn't do anything but sit there, innocuous and inert, she sighed and put a hand over her heart, willing herself to quit jumping at shadows.

The object was a small gold disc about three inches across, and half of one high. It was intricately adorned with fine inlaid knotwork patterns, and a number of runes Jane recognized from the website she'd visited yesterday, though she didn't recall their names or uses. A seam ran all around the circumference, indicating that it likely opened somehow, though there was no visible latch. Jane had no idea what it might be. But it definitely hadn't been there the night before.

Wary, she slowly reached out and carefully picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy for something so tiny, and it glittered in the morning light. Upon closer examination, Jane discovered even finer etchings had been filed into the planes of the object, clearly the work of a master craftsman. Whatever it was, it was truly beautiful.

It had to have been left there by Loki.

Jane was tempted to throw it out the window.

The only thing that kept her from actually doing it was an insidiously burning curiosity smoldering relentlessly in the recesses of her mind. It was obviously Asgardian, an object from another world. What was it? What did it do? Was it functional, or was it decorative? Was it something dangerous, or something useful? Was it valuable? Was it a gift? A threat? A bribe? She couldn't just throw it away, it could be dangerous to others – or dangerous if it fell into the wrong hands. She tried to imagine SHIELD finding out she was in possession of an alien artifact, and her fingers tightened around the disc's outer edge until it bit into her skin.

She would go for help. She would.

But first, she was going to get some answers.


Thirty minutes later, a flannel scarf wrapped around her bruised throat and the gold disc tucked securely in the pocket of her jeans, Jane was on the streets of Manhattan, retracing her steps from the day before. It did not take her long at all to find what she was after. She recognized the cart amongst the vendors that were setting up their stalls along the sidewalk. She spotted the woman from the day before soon enough; Jane was relieved to see that her grandmother wasn't with her today.

Steeling her spine, she marched forward and tapped the woman on the shoulder. The woman turned, a welcoming smile already on her face. As recognition set in, the smile faltered.

"Oh…" she said, uncertain, "Good day."

Jane had to work hard not to scowl when the woman glanced up at her forehead and blanched slightly. Fear had given way to anger about the time Jane had stepped off the hotel elevator, and she preferred it that way.

"Not really," she replied acidly, her voice still creaky and painful. She tugged the rune pendant out from under her shirt, dislodging the scarf in the process. Much as she hated to admit the thing might have any magical properties, she couldn't bring herself to take it off. "What the hell is this thing?"

The woman's eyebrows shot up as she looked down at the pendant, then widened as she caught sight of the bruising at Jane's neck beyond. She looked up at Jane, back at her neck, up at her forehead and back to the pendant.

"You had better come inside."

Jane was all ready to argue, but then she glanced around to notice people starting to stare, including a police officer buying coffee from a nearby Starbucks cart. She nodded grudgingly and allowed the woman to lead her into the shadow of one of the boarded-up storefronts, and through a weather-beaten wooden door that didn't quite hang square in its frame. The woman shouted something up the staircase just inside in that same foreign language Jane had heard the day before. She thought it might be a Scandinavian dialect, but she couldn't be sure. A moment later, a burly man with close cropped dark hair and a single, bushy unibrow crawling across his square face lumbered down the stairs and, glancing briefly at Jane, moved past them to take up a station next to the cart. The woman nodded to him, then turned and ascended the stairs. After a hesitant moment, Jane followed, her need for answers outweighing her wariness of entering a strange building alone with a stranger.

The staircase opened into a rectangular living space that appeared to function as living room, dinging room and kitchen all in one. Doors were set along the back wall, presumably leading to bedrooms or bathrooms. High windows interrupted at intervals by floor-length drapes lined the wall facing the street, leading Jane to believe the apartment had once been a shop. The air was heavy with the aroma of some unfamiliar spice. All of the furniture, from the scuffed dining table to the sagging sofas, was mismatched and rather obviously second-hand. They appeared to be alone for the moment; Jane was again grateful that the grandmother wasn't around. Jane hadn't realized just how much the old woman had spooked her until she felt a wave of relief that she wasn't up their waiting for them.

"Look, I need to know what's going on," she demanded as she halted inside the door. "I woke up in the middle of the night… sort of… to flashing green lights everywhere and the rather spectacular mood swings of… of an acquaintance, who is supposed to be dead. And it all started when you handed me this necklace. You know something. I can tell by the way you keep looking at me." She huffed out a sigh, throwing up her hands, and then motioning at her throat. "You said to wear the rune for protection." She was slightly horrified to realize that she was near tears, her anger crumbling as she vented her frustrations. "It didn't exactly do its job. So, what gives?"

"Yes," the woman said vaguely. She motioned to one of two dilapidated sofas facing each other across a stained coffee table. "Please sit."

She moved to a stove on the far side of the room, pulling down a teapot from above it and spooning some dried herb from a glass jar into it. Jane vacillated for a moment, then gave in and sank onto the faded floral pattern of one of the dilapidated sofas. She watched the woman add water from a lazily steaming kettle on the stove, then pulled down two mugs and a small jar of sugar cubes.

"Perhaps, in retrospect, I should have given you a talisman for algiz. It may have provided a truer barrier, instead of merely a deterrent." She opened the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of milk and pouring a measure into a small pitcher. "But it sounds as though served its intended purpose.

"Care to enlighten me as to its true purpose?" Jane demanded, recovering quickly. "What good is a magical protection necklace that doesn't protect you from anything?"

"I gave you the hagalaz to protect you from secrecy," she replied. "To inactivate the spell that was shrouding your senses while you slept. To repel uninvited contact as well, but more to remove unwelcome influence. Like a sleeping spell." She shot Jane a meaningful look. "I did not wish to block the god's ability to interact with you – I wished to force him to face you."

Jane narrowed her eyes at her, and her mouth fell open, confused and a little incensed.

"You seem to know a lot more about what's going on in my life than I do." she seethed accusingly.

"I know only what I see."

"What does that mean?"

The woman ignored her. "I wanted you to be able to decide for yourself," she said decisively. "The women of my family have seldom been allowed a chance to choose. Their fates were thrust upon them. I would not take the choice from you if I could help it." She shrugged almost self-consciously. "Perhaps it was a mistake."

Memories of seeing the hotel room with her eyes still closed made Jane's head spin. Magic talismans defying the laws of nature? Sleeping spells and green lightning? Complete strangers who knew things they shouldn't? It defied logic. What is logic anymore? All of this defies logic. However improbable…

"What… what was I supposed to decide?" she asked faintly. How was she supposed to decide on anything when she didn't even know the rules of the game she was playing, much less the stakes?

"Your own fate," the woman said. "Grandmother was right to warn you. The touch of a god is always a dangerous thing. But a danger is not always an evil. You had the right to judge that for yourself."

Of course it's evil! she thought automatically… then had to pause as she reflected on that thought. And on her memories of him – from the Dark World and from the night before, of all he had told her, all he had endured, and why he had done what he had done, all the mourning she had seen in Thor...Was it so simply black and white? Or had it been so dark last night that she couldn't see the shades of gray…? Is it evil? Or is it just dangerous? How do I tell…?

He strangled me. Evil.

And yet... Is that more bias? After everything he had done that had failed to drive her to hate him, was it okay to decide he was really pure evil based on that one act? An act which happened to be perpetrated against her? Am I heartless, being so eager to condemn him just for what he did to me? Or have I been a complete idiot to even consider excusing what he has been doing all along?

Jane shook her head, dispelling the shades of gray that threatened to overrun the banks of her memories. Now was not the moment.

"What else was your grandmother right about? Am I…" Jane grimaced, unable to believe the words about to come out of her mouth. "Am I cursed?"

The woman leaned her hip on the counter and cocked her head, for the first time staring openly at whatever she kept looking at on Jane's face.

"The mark upon you may yet prove to be a blessing. Or a curse. Maybe both." She shook her head. "Grandmother assumes the god cursed you because she believes she is cursed. She cannot see beyond the wounds of her own heart. I am not so eager to assume I know the mind of the god."

"Loki is not a god!" Jane snapped. The woman's eyes flashed wide at the mention of Loki's name, and she turned back to the counter, fidgeting with the tea things. "And what mark? You mean on my forehead, don't you? You keep staring at it, but there's nothing there!"

"There is nothing that you can see."

She hefted the tea tray and carried it to the coffee table. Turning back, she opened a drawer in a bureau next to the staircase and pulled out an old brass hand mirror. She wordlessly handed it to Jane and moved around behind the couch.

"Look," she instructed, standing behind Jane and stooping so that both their faces were visible in the mirror.

Jane didn't see anything.

She reached past Jane and touched the rim of the mirror. "Laguz," she whispered. The tip of her finger glowed with green for an instant, and the mirror face flashed with green in response.

And suddenly Jane could see it.

A symbol, gleaming with an icy blue glow, had been cut into the skin of her forehead. She gasped, reaching up to touch it. The skin was slightly raised around the cut, though there was no pain, and the edges felt warm and clean. It wasn't an illusion. It was there.

"Uruz," the woman told her, her eyes thougthful. "See how it is not laid on your skin, but is cut into it, the magic threaded into the wound. Hmmm… no wonder he wanted you to sleep. Not merely secrecy."

"But… it wasn't there before…"

"It was," the woman replied quietly. "You just weren't meant to see it." The woman's eyes narrowed as she examined the mark in the mirror. "It was incomplete yesterday. Now it is not…" Her eyes flicked down to the bruising at Jane's neck, and when they came back up to meet Jane's, they had hardened with regret. "I am sorry…"

Jane barely heard her. She stared, fixated, trying to absorb the presence of this mark on her body, the fact that it had been there all along, and the fact she had not been aware of it. There was something viscerally disturbing about the idea. So this was why Loki had been in her room, rendering her unconscious with magic, and when that failed, with brute force. The edges were surgically precise. The magic inside glowed like crystalline blue fire. Her jaw clenched as she fed her growing fear to her curiosity. What was it? What did it mean? What did it do? Was it dangerous? Harmful? Permanent?

And how could these women see it, when no one else could?

Jane pried her eyes away from the glowing mark to stare into the reflection of the woman's eyes.

"Who are you?"

The woman walked around the couch and sat down beside Jane. She silently poured the tea, adding milk and sugar to Jane's cup as well as her own. Pressing one warm cup into Jane's free hand, she took a sip her own before settling back and pinning Jane with a serious look.

"My name is Alexa Solberg," she said at length, seeming to weigh each word carefully before it left her mouth. "I have, perhaps, caused you trouble. Because of this, I will tell you our story."

Jane opened her mouth, then closed it, resisting the urge pepper the woman with more questions. This wasn't a social call, it was an expedition to gather information – not share it. She sipped her tea, the warmth and flavor of which she found instantly soothing, and made herself listen instead.

"Over a thousand years ago," Alexa began, "the gods descended from the skies and did battle against the Frost Giant armies that had come to enslave the Earth. During a lull in battle, one of the sons of Odin walked amongst the people of a nearby village, and met a woman, whom he took for a lover."

"The sons of Odin?" Jane felt her ears perk up, before she took a purposeful sip of her tea, trying to look unconcerned. "Er… which one? Thor or Loki?"

The woman shook her head, and gave Jane a knowing sidelong look.

"Baldur," she replied. At Jane's blank look, she elaborated, "He was the first born son of the Allfather. It does not surprise me that you do not know him. He was killed in battle long ago. Though his name has survived human lore, and it was stricken from all song on Asgard after his death."

"What?" That wasn't right. The Asgardians glorified people who died in battle. "Why?"

"There was a relic in the Asgardian treasure room, a jewel of great power. The Cosmic Cube. Odin desired to use it in the war against the Frost Giants. But while the gods had some knowledge of its uses, no one truly understood its power, or how it worked."

"You mean the Tesseract!" Jane exclaimed, her mind racing. Alexa nodded.

"The Cosmic Cube is volatile and ill-understood. Those who, in their arrogance, have used it to achieve their goals have almost always brought about cataclysmic side effects."

"That's an understatement," Jane muttered, recalling the images from the news reports of the smoke and fire and destruction immediately after the Chitauri invasion.

"Yes, but it is more fundamental than you realize." Alexa cocked her head thoughtfully. "Imagine a group of uneducated citizens who discovered a working nuclear power plant nearby their homes. They knew enough to understand that if they pulled certain levers and pressed certain buttons, it provided their city with light, heat, water, all sorts of fantastic benefits. But they had not enough understanding to fathom the source of the energy, how it worked, how it could be maintained – or how to contain it if something should go wrong."

Jane nodded, catching on. "It would be tempting to use it, but the results of messing with it could be devastating."

"Exactly," Alexa concurred. "And so it was with the Aesir and the Tesseract. Its power is almost without equal, but without a clear understanding of the Cube's nature, even the gods could easily shred the very fabric of the universe." She sipped her tea, her eyes distant.

"Baldur was far-seeing, and he feared the Cube's power, the destruction it could cause, even in the hands of one as wise as his father. So when Odin sent him to retrieve it and bring it into battle, he instead stole the Cube. He secretly placed it in the hands of his mortal lover, before he went back to the front line. That very day, he was slain in battle. And though the day ended in victory, many died, and Odin Allfather's eye was taken from him. The massive death toll was blamed on Baldur's betrayal. Worst of all, he had told none where he had secreted the Cube, and he had instructed his lover never to reveal the Cube to anyone, not even the king of the gods. For these crimes, his name was made forbidden, and his memory banished from verse. And for a thousand years, the stolen relic was never seen or heard of again."

Alexa paused for a breath, pressing her lips together as though wary of speaking the words she held behind them.

"This is my family's story, and secret," she said at last. "The faithful woman resided in the village known as Tonsberg, in Norway. Her name was Stella Solberg. She was my ancestor."

Jane sat up straighter, looking at Alexa with new eyes as a piece of the puzzle clicked into place.

"You're Asgardian!" she exclaimed.

"Mostly human," Alexa replied with another self-conscious shrug. "Many generations have passed since then. But yes, my family line is directly descended from the gods. And sometimes," she gestured towards the mirror, "we show signs of their magic. Magic, we believe, which was given to us for a purpose. You see, since that day so long ago, my family's sacred duty, handed down from the mouth of Baldur himself, was to hide the Cube for all time, passing it down the maternal line from mother to daughter, and to protect the Realms from its influence."

Jane thought she understood now what Alexa had meant, when she said the women of her family had rarely been given a choice in their own fates. The weight of that kind of legacy had to be overwhelming.

"My great-grandfather was the last keeper of the Cube. When Johann Schmidt discovered its hiding place in 1942, he murdered my grandfather and great-grandfather in cold blood, and ordered the destruction of the village and all its in habitants." She held the teacup close to her face, almost hiding behind it, her brow tightening. "My grandmother was a young woman then. Though she was raised from infancy with this duty before her, to defend the Cube unto the very last drop of Baldur's blood, she felt herself to be a wife and mother first. She had two young children, and could do nothing against Hydra's tanks and weapons. So when she saw that her father and husband were dead, and that the Cube was already in the hands of evil men, she did not lay down her life in a futile effort to retake it. Instead, she took my mother and uncle and she ran."

"She escaped into the wilderness as the village burned, and made her way south, then west, and eventually joined a train of refugees from the war; very soon they boarded a boat to Manhattan, where they settled. Here." She gestured to the old brick and plaster walls around them. "So our family escaped Hydra, but lost the Cube." Alexa shook her head sadly. "To this day, Grandmother cannot forgive herself for choosing her life and her family over her duty."

"That's crazy!" Jane interjected vehemently, absorbed in the story. "I mean, of course she chose to save her children! She shouldn't be ashamed!"

"Your sentiment is appreciated," Alexa said with a small, sad smile, "and we have consoled her with such talk again and again. But it is her faith. Grandmother cannot bear that she failed the god, our sire. It is her great shame, which she carries to this day. When…" her voice thickened suddenly, and she had to clear her throat before she continued. "When the Trickster descended with his dark army, the Cube in his grasp, Grandmother tried to throw herself to the Chitauri invaders. She believed that this was her punishment for her weakness. That we would all suffer and die for her failure." She offered Jane a watery smile. "It was only the sight of the Thunderer brandishing Mjolnir that allowed us to convince her to take shelter. If not for that…" Alexa closed her eyes, remembering. "The gods doing battle. It is a sight I will never forget."

"Wow…" Jane looked down into her teacup, horrified. And ashamed.

Loki's voice echoed in her head. "All of it was for you"

She swallowed hard. It's not my fault. He chose to do this, not me. But perhaps she knew more about what Alexa's grandmother was feeling than she liked to admit. Because even though it wasn't really her fault, she couldn't help the cloying guilt that threatened to close her throat.

"It has been a year since that time," Alexa said. "When Grandmother saw the mark upon your brow as you walked the street…" she shrugged. "Another woman beloved of the gods, set to drown in the beginnings of a heavy destiny not of her own making… For her, it was as though she was seeing our ancestor, Stella, walking out of time. She held a hope that perhaps she could still absolve some measure of her shame by helping you avoid the trials our family has endured. That is why she accosted you. And the reason why I gave you hagalaz in her place."

Jane sat back, clutching her mug, and glanced down into the mirror. The blue mark glared back at her. All this talk of gods and magic… She had come for answers, and she was getting them, but they weren't what she expected. She wanted hard proof, measurable data, a solution she could test and control. This was all beyond her experience and understanding. It left her feeling lost, adrift.

Memories from the night before, lightening and thunder, pounding rain, green light and the low, accented tones telling her sad, strange, terrible things. His hand at her throat. His lips against hers. She swallowed hard, suddenly acutely aware of her own body. Of her mouth, and her throat. Now that she knew the mark was on her forehead, she thought maybe she could feel that too. Tingling. Warm. Energetic. Inside. She shivered.

"What is this thing?" she asked, gesturing towards her head, almost reluctant to know. Her voice broke over the last word, and she took a scalding gulp of her tea to brace herself. "What did he do to me?"

"I do not think he has done anything to you. The mark seems dormant right now, very quiet… but uruz, like hagalaz, isa mark of the Trickster. Perhaps nothing more than a sign of possession. A warning to those who would harm you."

Jane stared blankly at Alexa for a long moment. Her face darkened.

"Are you saying he branded me?" For the first time, Jane decided definitively that it was a good thing Loki was alive; she needed him alive, so that she could kill him.

"No! No, not as such…" Alexa said hurriedly, eying Jane's furious expression warily. "Uruz is powerful magic. I strongly suspect that any one who tried to lay hands on you in harm would be repelled. Possibly in much the same way he was repelled by the pendant. Possibly in a much different way. Whatever the case… I strongly suspect they would regret it."

"You said 'uruz'? That's another rune, right?"

Alexa pursed her lips, casting a sidelong look at Jane. Her expression said she was once again weighing her words.

"Uruz is the symbol of the aurochs," she said.

"Auroch… that's an extinct species of wild oxen…"

Jane remembered reading about them in her evolutionary biology class during her second degree program. Aurochs, massive, volatile and incredibly dangerous wild oxen similar to modern longhorn bulls, had once roamed all over the European continent. It was said that the average auroch was only slightly smaller than average African elephant, with horns that grew up to six feet in length. Jane could barely imagine such a creature; they must have been truly fearsome to behold.

Alexa nodded. "The auroch is a symbol of great strength."

"So what does the rune mean?"

Alexa sipped her tea, thinking again. Jane waited with poor patience, tapping her foot slightly against the threadbare rug.

"Uruz," she finally said, "is complex. It is a mark of wildness, but may also mean the taming of that wildness. Its meanings depends on its context, but among them are…" she glanced at Jane, then away, "primitive irrationality, bestial strength, primal instinct, intuition. It may also be invoked as part of the ritual of the hunt, or as a rite of passage or initiation … And then…" she grimaced, clearly uncomfortable, "it may also represent raw passion. Unabashed sexual hunger. Desire that drives one beyond rationality." She hid her face behind her mug, taking a much longer and slower drink than was necessary. If Erik was any model for Scandanavian culture, she was probably embarrassed and trying not to show it.

Jane was plenty embarrassed herself. In her memory, Loki's voice echoed in the dark, his eyes so fervent she could barely remember them without squirming, his words impossible in their revelations…

Alexa cleared her throat.

"It, ah, has another meaning, more esoteric, less well understood."

"Oh?" Jane replied faintly, her face flaming.

"Yes. Uruz may also mean 'rain'," she said.

Jane started upright, nearly dropped her mug. A few drops of hot tea splashed over the lip to sting her fingers.

"You are my rain."

Alexa caught the movement, eyeing Jane curiously, and continued.

"As I said, uruz may mean wildness, or it may mean the taming of wildness. My understanding after much study is that, if uruz is to represent the wild strength of the auroch, fires of passion, and the dangerous chaos of irrationality, it is also to represent the will that tames it, the rain that quenches it, and the power that conquers and cleanses orders and stabilizes it. It is both the sickness, and the cure."

Jane swallowed hard, trying desperately to banish his words from echoing inside her head. The harder she tried, of course, the more her mind circled that memory, bringing it into sharper focus, cementing it, forming neuronal bridges, building and extrapolating all sorts of implications, meanings, and worse, emotions… She stared at the mark, an array of questions welling up in the back of her throat, ready to spill from her lips. The queries vied viciously for a place on the tip of her tongue, each more crucially important than the last. So she was surprised by the question that finally won out when she at last rediscovered her ability to speak.

"Why is it blue?" Alexa's eyebrows rose questioningly. Jane's cheeks colored slightly, but she stood by the question. "All of the… the so-called magic I've seen always involves green light. But this is blue. Why?"

"Observant," Alexa commented. "It is not merely blue. It is the very same blue fire that is emitted by the Cosmic Cube. I would know it anywhere. It is the magic of the Tesseract."

Jane looked up at her sharply.

"As I said, no one truly understands the magic of the Cube. It is unlike Asgardian magic, Elven magic, Giantkind's magic, or human magic. But it seems clear that the Trickster knows more than most about its secrets."

Jane's jaw clenched against the urge to panic, recalling Eric's ineffable brokenness after the Tesseract had influenced him…

"So why is he using blue magic to put a mark on me?" She was proud of how calm and even her voice sounded. She tried to say, 'am I being influenced?', but she couldn't bring her self to ask. "When he tried to put that sleeping spell on me, the magic was green. Why use the Tesseract's magic for this?"

Alexa shook her head. "I do not know."

"Damn it…" Jane whispered, staring hard at her reflection, willing the answers to come together in the eerie blue glow. "What does he want from me…"

"That is why I gave you hagalaz. So that you could discover the answer."

"Can you get rid of it?"

The words were out of Jane's mouth before she knew she'd spoken. She hadn't meant to say them. Reflecting over them, she felt a sickening mix of relief and reluctance. It felt like asking a barber to do brain surgery. But if the Tesseract had anything to do with this mark, if there was even an outside chance that it might be poisoning her mind…

Alexa looked away, troubled.

"I do not believe I should…" She looked up at the mark, clearly as wary of interfering with the magic as Jane, but at the tight, troubled expression pinching Jane's face, she sighed. "Come closer. I cannot promise this is a good idea. But I will try."

Jane let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. Sitting forward, she set aside the mirror and her mug. Alexa did the same, pulling in a slow deep breath and releasing it as she reached for the mark on Jane's forehead. The tips of her fingers glimmered with green fire.

Before she could do more than brush the skin of Jane's temple, there was a crackling noise, and then a deafening, ringing whine filled the air, like feedback from a microphone. Both women screwed their faces up in pain, scrambling to their feet as the light from the windows darkened. Jane thought a massive cloud front must have passed across the sun, until she looked around and realized that the lamp in the far corner of the room had dimmed as well, as though some invisible fog had fallen over all the surrounding light sources, blocking them out.

"Jane."

The bottom dropped out of Jane's stomach as her head jerked towards the voice. Her eyes stretched wide and her face went slack as her hand crept unconsciously up to grip the rune pendant hanging from her neck like a lifeline.

He materialized from empty air like a specter emerging from a shadowy corner of the room. His gaze burned through her like a wave of fire, so that she staggered back a step from the force of it before she caught herself. Her heart raced between terror and adrenaline, and her mind spun with all the battering gale of a hurricane. But her voice, when she spoke, emerged from the still, calm eye of that raging storm, which twisted around the one fact she fully understood: the name of the man in front of her.

"Loki."


TBC


AN: Goodness, they have to stop meeting like this… by which I mean in cliffhangers. So we have a mysterious gift, a mysterious mark, a mysterious woman with a mysterious story. And Loki. Or is it?

So sorry for the late update, life has been crazy. Graduating from nursing school is extremely time consuming. Thank you so much for all of your reviews, I am so grateful for the feedback! Please continue to tell me your thoughts, your comments and critiques, and if you have questions, I will do my utmost to answer them in a timely manner!

A reminder: the runes referenced in this story are based on real runic meanings, but some aspects may be embellished or uniquely interpreted for the purposes of this story.

My muse has been up late, swinging through the rafters and binging on booze while I waste brain cells on six hour blocks of N-CLEX practice tests; he needs to consume something nutritious before he starves to death. Your reviews may mean the difference between more Loko/Jane stories, and a pickled monkey carcass clinging to the neck of a cranberry vodka bottle. Please, think of the monkey.