iamartemisday said: AU prompt: Loki is a Joutunn prince and Jane is his mortal concubine.
Wherein Jane experiences culture shock. (Severe dub-con PWP AU. NC-17.)
Once upon a time, a mortal woman lived in the world of Midgard. Midgard, meaningless Midgard, backward Midgard, Midgard which sat so strategically planted between realms and planets that no race of creatures dare leave it be for more than a decade or two at a stretch. Midgard, where gods and demons of all stripes walked freely and took what they wished without regard for the primitive inhabitants.
Once upon a time, a mortal woman came to the world of Asgard. A woman of science — that way of thinking which denied magic, that spoke of universal constants even the gods must obey, that concept which reared its ugly head every century or so until Galileo was burned and Newton was hung and Einstein was locked away to scream his blasphemy at padded walls — who was looked upon kindly by the Prince of the Aesir. A woman who, resistant to pomegranates and puzzle boxes, fell prey to the lure of the stars.
Once upon a time, a mortal woman attended a feast in the halls of Odin. An anniversary feat, thrown to commemorate the end of a war which all knew would begin again as soon as a legitimate opportunity presented itself, bringing together two peoples happy to celebrate the peace whilst simultaneously preparing for the next battle. The mead flowed and the food was plentiful, and the mortal woman drank and ate and enjoyed the attentions of one prince without realizing she had drawn the eye of another.
Once upon a time, a mortal woman learned of the indifference of the gods.
Jane Foster spends the wait picking at the silk sheets and cursing her own stupidity.
She knew what became of people who drew the attention of gods (aliens, not gods, just other people from other planets who think they get to rule us because they freaked out our ancestors with some ice and lightning). Dusty tomes and tabloids alike were littered with cautionary tales about reaching too high.
Julius Caesar. Anne Boleyn. Marilyn Monroe. For every William Shakespeare there were twenty Lindsay Lohans.
If someone from another world calls you worthy and offers to blow your mind, you walk the other way.
But Thor had been nothing but kind. And the science of the Bifrost had been beyond her wildest dreams. And Jane had forgotten everything she'd ever learned about accepting the gifts of gods who havn't made you any promises.
Still, when the All-Father had promised King Laufey his choice of gifts from the great halls of Asgard (a traditional offer made in courtesy, and in the same tradition meant to be courteously refused), not even the most jaded Asgardians could have guessed Laufey's son would point at her.
A crack of furious thunder sounds somewhere distant in the palace. That's been going on for awhile.
Jane supposes she should feel touched that Thor is so indignant on her behalf, but it doesn't matter. Odin won't insult the Frost Giants by taking his "gift" back. In the eyes of the All-Father, what's one mortal's dignity against the safety of two realms? Less than nothing.
Lost in resentment, Jane nearly jumps out of her skin when the chamber doors open.
He strides into her bedroom like a panther, leather and armor as ice-blue as his skin and nearly indistinguishable, prowling as though he belongs there, as though this place belongs to him, as though everything belongs to him. Red eyes flit over every surface, his face bored beneath etched markings—
—before turning the same look on her and glancing her over from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes (bare beneath her robe). His disinterested air doesn't change in the slightest.
Then he catches her expression. His lips, blue as the rest of him, twitch in what can only be described as the most exact definition of a smirk ever known to man or god.
It makes her want to punch him in the nose. If she can reach that high. It would be a stretch, but she's willing to make the effort.
"Your name."
An involuntary shiver runs through her body. Stupid gods with their stupid perfect voices.
Stupid rude perfect gods. "Was that a question?" Jane replies sarcastically. The Prince of Jotunheim raises an eyebrow, and she elaborates: "I know you do things differently around here, but on Earth, if you want to know someone's name, you ask."
His eyebrow is almost at his hairline now. The smirk grows into an indulgent, condescending smile. "Would you be so kind as to favor me with your title, my lady?"
He's mocking her, but it's not like she expected anything else. "Jane Foster."
"Jane Foster." Her name rolls off his tongue like molasses. "I am Loki of Jotunheim. You may have heard of me."
Of course she has. The history books are chock full of Loki's visits to Midgard, and nothing good ever comes of them. "Once or twice, I guess."
"Then further introduction is unnecessary. Undress yourself." When she doesn't move, Loki makes a small noise of impatience. "You know why you're here, Jane Foster, so don't insult us both by feigning ignorance. Do as I say."
Jane swallows.
And Loki waits.
The battle of wills is over shamefully quickly. After all, she never had a chance at winning.
Meddle not in the affairs of the gods, she thinks to herself as her fingers fumble at the ties of her dressing gown. Meddle not, meddle not, meddle not. She is such an idiot, and now, if she's lucky, she'll go down in history as an object lesson in human folly. If she's not, she'll be forgotten. One more lost mortal. Another speck of dust in a war without end.
It's so depressing she wants to cry. "Why me?" she asks, shrugging off the robe to reveal the wispy gown underneath.
"I should think it obvious."
"You think wrong." Jane's hardly the only mortal in Asgard at the moment. She's not even the most attractive, objectively speaking. And who says the Prince of Jotunheim had to settle for a human? Odin had offered an open choice of gifts. Loki could have had Sif. Hell, Loki could have had Frigga. "What's so special about me?"
"Nothing," Loki says simply. He's tilted his head to the side, and his red eyes are near to glowing as Jane unbinds her hair. Or maybe it's just the candlelight. "Nothing at all, except that you belong to Thor."
Figures.
Jane's been traded like a basket of fruit by the people she almost-trusted and is about to be used to who knows what perverted ends by the chaotically unbalanced prince of a race of ice demons. So she's pretty nauseated when her first reaction is to be insulted by the revelation that her only appeal is in the fact that Thor will be irritated by someone else touching his stuff. Five steps back for feminism, right there.
Still, it's a bargaining chip. "Thor loves me," she lies, raising her chin in something she hopes looks like arrogance. "He loves me, if you do this, he'll kill you."
Loki blinks at her for half a second—
—and then bursts into laughter. It lightens his expression, makes him look like a young man instead of an ageless god… well, as much as a blue-skinned alien can look like a man at all. "Your concern for my health is touching!"
"If Thor smashed your face in I wouldn't shed a tear."
"Few would, but you ought not waste your time anticipating it. My father left me to die on a rock when I was born, yet here I stand. I've quite the inconvenient knack for survival, you see."
She doesn't know what to say to that.
"And besides, Jane Foster, you are not such a fool as to think Thor cares so much for your honor," he says, still chuckling. "We have been acquainted in one form or another since we were children. I know him well. You are a trinket, and he will set you aside as soon as something new and shiny crosses his path — nevertheless, if I do not take a strike from Mjolnir for this outrage, I shall think even less of him than I already do. But I would happily trade a hundred blows to my body for a single blow to Odinson's ego." He smiles again, his teeth unnervingly white. "Do you understand now?"
Jane just stares at him. "You're disgusting."
"And you've stopped undressing. Continue."
"No." It's a little thing, and stupid at that, considering the ending to this pageant of theirs is more or less inevitable, but she'll be damned if she'll help him along. "If you want me naked, do it yourself." The coward is implied.
A flicker of something crosses the prince's face, and his whole body stiffens. "You would not care for that," he says softly.
It's on the tip of Jane's tongue to say I won't care for any of it — but then she catches the way his slender hand with its black nails flexes at his side, and she remembers all she's been told of the Jotunns. "You can't touch me," she breathes.
"Can't is a strong word." All the smugness and humor is gone from that smirk now. "But whatever you may think of me, Jane Foster, I'd rather not have my mortals screaming in pain as their skin sears and freezes from their bones."
That's an image to get a woman in the mood. "Then there's no point," she says, crossing her arms. (It makes her gown hike up closer to her waist, exposing more thigh, but what different does it make now?) "You can't do anything, so get out of my room."
"And report to Odin what an offensive gift he has bestowed upon the people of Jotunheim?" He laughs again, low and cold, because he knows he has her. "Remove your clothes. This is the last time I will ask."
She hates him.
She hates them all.
Jane jerks her gown over her head so hard she hears something rip. Stamping down hard on the instinct to cover herself, she settles for glaring at the Jotunn prince and imagining she could cause him to burst into flames with the force of her rage. Spontaneous combustion is a force of physics, of science, not magic.
If Loki notices her fury he doesn't give any sign of caring. "Better," he says, looking over her exposed body, gaze lingering in all the usual places. "Much better. Lay back on the bed."
He can't touch me, Jane reminds herself as she reclines. The silk sheets are warm against her back, but the room is cool, and growing cooler with every moment. It's no mystery what's coming next, but she's safe… in a way. He can't hurt me. He doesn't dare. He's just a spoiled, bratty kid who wants to play with someone else's toys. The hell with him.
Loki steps closer, until his knees are brushing the side of the mattress. "You're flushed," he observes.
"That happens when I'm angry."
"Ah. And here I had hoped there might be another reason."
She snorts. "You don't know much about women, do you."
That bit of snark earns her another one of his genuine smiles. If he wasn't, you know, a frost giant, he'd be very attractive. "I know a great deal about a great many things, Jane Foster." He makes his words a caress.
They pool the rage in her blood into different kind of heat — just a little.
"Now touch yourself."
Jane takes a deep breath and, deliberately misunderstanding, grabs a lock of her hair and begins to braid it. Contemptuously.
The temperature drops another five degrees. "As much as your disobedience amuses me, a little of such goes a long way, especially from a mortal who sees fit to walk amongst the gods. Obey me, as your kind were made to obey."
This is revolting, he is revolting, (and she is revolted by the feeling that stirs in her at the tone of his voice), but the sooner she does it the sooner he'll lose interest. Jane closes her eyes, brings one hand up to cup her breast, and thinks of the skies of New Mexico. She should never have left.
It's impossible to pretend, though, when she hears the hitch in his breathing. "Harder," he murmurs. "The way I would touch you."
She squeezes dutifully — and, to her great annoyance, imagines a larger, colder hand in place of her own. Her rage flares and sinks simultaneously, before settling to a dull throb deep in her belly. "If you wanted more than this," she says, "you should be in bed with another frost giant."
"Perhaps," he replies, and that's a lot of acid stored in a single word. "But when one travels as widely as I do, one develops more… exotic tastes. Spread your legs."
She does, and she doesn't wait for his order to slip her fingers between her thighs; if she acts first, on her own, it's almost like she's still making the decisions. She's deeply disturbed (and not as shocked as she should be) to find herself already wet. The moan that chokes in her throat has got to be some kind of a sin.
Once she gets back to Earth — if she ever gets back to Earth — Jane's getting herself some therapy.
"There, now." Loki's voice has dipped another octave, and she keeps her eyes shut tight. "Is this not simpler?"
"Simpler and sick."
"Sick need not be unpleasant. Faster."
She hardly needs the encouragement. Just get it over with, she tells herself as she slides in one finger, then a second, and tries to think of her jackass ex-boyfriend, of the human lovers she's had, but a chilled palm ghosts just out of contact with her shoulder and a frigid breath brushes across her cheek. The crisp smell of winter mornings combines with her own warm scent.
Jane knows exactly where she is, what she's doing, and who she's with.
She writhes against her own hand and hates him.
Loki chuckles in her ear, as though he's read her thoughts. "I like you, Jane Foster," he says, and she can feel his frozen skin dangerously close to her own. "So bitter! You loathe me with such desperation, and you would take me inside you in a heartbeat if you could."
"You're the one who's risking another war so you can pretend to fuck your frenemy's 'trinket'." She opens her eyes long enough to glare at him, all carved markings and bright irises, his lips inches from her own, and thinks for a moment about the danger of developing exotic tastes. "So don't talk to me about bitter, asshole."
He bares his teeth.
In his otherworldly face she sees her own death.
But instead of crushing her throat, he growls: "My pretending is going to ruin you for every other man you will meet in your fleeting mortal life."
And Loki is suddenly over her, his right leg between hers, his knee shoving hard against her hand and forcing it deeper into her flesh, his leather and armor so cold against her bare thighs that she gasps in shock. There's no other contact and thank goodness for that because it would hurt like hell, the ice of him stings the backs of her fingers even through his clothes but she follows his brutal lead and grinds down and strokes herself inside and out and everything, everything locks together like molecules snapping into place—
"Look at me, Jane Foster," Loki commands, but his eyes are on her mouth, and Jane sees that he would kiss her if he could, just as she knows she would respond and hate herself for it— "look at me, and never see another."
She looks.
Once upon a time, a mortal woman faced the indifference of the gods. The indifference that began thousands of years before her birth, the indifference that continued thousands of years after her death. The indifference that taught humans their utter irrelevance, how they would never be more than pawns of pawns in an endless game crossing undreamed worlds and beyond.
Once upon a time, a mortal woman was pursued by a god for no other reason than spite for another. A god who took pleasure in the mortal woman's desire and malice until his pleasure overwhelmed him into pain. A god who returned the mortal woman to her world, out of the reach of the deities she had come to loathe, and could do nothing thereafter but curse her name in his dreams until there were no dreams left to be had.
Once upon a time, a god came to the realm of his enemy, knelt, and begged for mercy from the only one in the universe with the power to grant his desire. A god whose eyes turned from red to blue, whose skin turned from blue to white. A god who traveled to a primitive realm, where no good ever came of his visits, to delight in the hatred of a mortal woman.
Once upon a time, a god offered a mortal woman a golden apple with a lie of apology and without a sliver of regret.