No prompt this one; it just kind of needed to happen. Also, I felt like writing smut. Do I need a reason?
Wherein Loki pouts... until Jane gives him a reason not to. (Romance/PWP. NC-17.)
Loki's arm hurts.
Which makes it nearly impossible to sleep.
Both of these facts are grating on his nerves.
First of all, he can hardly believe that it is taking so many days for such a minor wound to heal. He faced worse in the training yard as a stripling child, let alone on the field of battle. There were several times in several wars where Loki truly thought he would not survive his injuries. Nornheim, Alfheim, Vanaheim, Jotunhe—
Not the last. He will not think of the last.
But on all these occasions, the healing rooms of Asgard, capable of nearly anything, had saved his life from these brutal wounds. This? A small hole through the flesh of his arm? From a small human weapon fired by a small human female? Nothing to speak of. He should have recovered in moments.
Yet here it is, days later, and the damned thing still throbs with pain. The medication he received when the laceration was sewn shut is now gone; Darcy Lewis was quite firm in her assurances that he would not be permitted to have more (and on these subjects he must yield to her superior knowledge), then offered him an substitute known as Tylenol, which has proven worthless. So he tosses and turns on the laboratory couch — banned as he is from the roof and the trailer, where he cannot support his injured limb in comfort — and listens to the wall clock tick away meaningless seconds.
This mortal form he must inhabit is truly beyond weak. If it is not failing to heal then it is demanding food, or rest, or recovering from lack or excess of one of those two. Perhaps it is a good thing he cannot wield magic, after all — he'd likely lose control and fry himself alive at the smallest error.
Thor has teased him a few times over his complaints, but that stopped when Loki reminded him of his own behavior during their near deaths by poisoning. Since then he has received nothing but sympathy from his brother.
And Darcy Lewis has been kind enough in her own airily dismissive way, Loki must admit. If she says this will pass in time, it likely will. The slave — servant — intern — has proven herself adept at sorting serious matters from the mundane.
But Jane Foster has hardly noticed.
Of course, there is no reason for her to do so. They are lovers, but she does not love him, nor he her. Such things are irrelevant; she is hardly the first consort he has taken for little more than physical indulgence and mild amusement with their company until he grows bored and sets them aside with honeyed words and well wishes. (Thor has always preferred the instant gratification of a single night's pleasure, for which he is never short of choices; Loki prefers to dissect a partner over a period of time.) And almost to a woman they were more beautiful, more charming, more… skilled than his current companion.
So it matters not if Jane Foster has spent the last week scowling at her star charts instead of minding him.
It doesn't.
It also matters not when the insignificant creature in question comes creeping into the laboratory twenty minutes later to stand beside the couch, poking him in the chest as though it isn't the middle of the night. "Loki!" the unsympathetic little human hisses. "Loki, are you asleep?"
He feigns unconsciousness.
"Loki, wake up!"
He rolls away to face the back of the couch — and bites hard on his tongue as his arm jars against his side.
"Loki! I cracked it! I figured it out! Please wake up!"
If she expects him obey her snapping fingers and imperious call, she can just—
Loki sits up straight, complaints forgotten. "You have?"
Jane Foster's hair is sticking every which way and her face is beaming brighter than the moonlight. "I did," she says. "I was just— I was thinking, well, not thinking, sort of sleeping and not sleeping, I've been so close, but I couldn't quite— but then it just all clicked, just out of nowhere and I saw it and I wrote all over the walls of the trailer because I couldn't find paper fast enough but it's there, it all makes sense now, I knew the science was there and I found it!"
She's talking so quickly and he's so tired that only bits and pieces are sinking in, but… "You can find the bridges," he says as flares of excitement beginning to flicker around his heart. "You're sure."
"I'm sure! It's not random! I told you it wasn't random! I can predict where the wormholes will be, any of them, down to the last second, it might take some time before one turns up but now all we have to do is find a way to jump them and we'll be on our way! Loki, I cracked it, I cracked it and we're going to see space!"
Loki doesn't even have time to smile before she grabs his face and kisses him.
He can't bring himself to object. He also can't bring himself to object when she climbs onto his lap to straddle him, grinding hard against his rapidly responding body. He hasn't had her in nearly a week and that has perhaps contributed to his sour mood.
A sour mood which is rapidly improving, truth be told.
"You're amazing," Jane Foster says as she unbuttons one of those soft striped shirts she often wears to bed. "Three years of collecting data, but just two months of matching your theories with mine and I had everything I needed." She's nude and her bare chest brushes his as she fumbles with his pants. "Three years — three years — but I finally did it and it's all thanks to you." Her mouth can't stop against his; everything she speaks is through eager, messy kisses. "You're incredible. You're perfect. You're a genius."
Loki preens. "You are the cleverest mortal in this realm," he responds graciously. "You would have succeeded in the en—" His sentence ends in a choked moan as she sinks down onto him without further preamble and begins to ride him with fervor.
Oh. This.
Who knew mortals could feel so delightful: mortals who do not care if you have magic, who know nothing of Frost Giants, who can laugh without mocking and value intelligence over brawn.
If he had been aware these things, he would have begun vacationing on Midgard centuries ago.
"You'll take me, right?" She digs her hands into his hair, her body hot and wet and desperate. "You'll show me all the stuff you talk about. The Bifrost, the different worlds, the—"
"Everything," he swears.
He will give this ardent human whatever she asks and more if she will only continue to look at him as she does now, as though he was the one who planted Yggdrasil and coaxed each branch to life.
Loki can feel the needlework ripping in his arm and pays the pain no mind. He has suffered worse.
"I knew," she gasps, tight, flaming, fluttering. "I knew when we met, I knew you had what I needed. You were a wreck but I knew."
He had been a wreck, staggering out of the desert into what he now knows as a diner, covered in filth and more terrified than he'd ever been in his life. Thor had already taken obvious note of her, and she of him. But before Loki had finished his first cup of coffee Jane Foster had turned from his brother to pepper him with questions, bright and eager with interest.
She is not the first to prefer him to Thor, but she is the first to turn away from the elder prince in favor of the younger. She is the first to look at him — at moments like this, anyway — like he is a god even though she has never known him as one. She is the first — the very first — he thinks he may not be able to do without.
His fingers splay across her back, trace the warm curve of her spine. "I will give you anything you want," and that is another first.
Jane Foster presses her forehead to his, moving ever faster. "I want to see the stars," she tells him. "It's all I've ever wanted."
The easiest request she could have made. Once he is whole again, that is. They will return to Asgard, Thor will be forgiven — he always is — and he will lift Mjolnir once more, while Mother restores the magic to Loki's fingertips and explains away all his preposterous worries from Jotunheim.
He is going to go home because of the little mortal moaning in his arms.
Loki tugs gently on the ends of his lover's hair, encouraging her to arch backwards so that he may lave his tongue down her throat and to her chest. The blood seeping into his bandage is nothing. He can begin repaying his debt with this.
She whimpers and shudders through her climax, and as he follows he does not beg for more noise than she is inclined to give. He does not need it. Loki Odinson needs nothing more than his family, his home, and Jane Foster wide-eyed with wonder as he shows her the secrets of the universe.
The rest is meaningless.
"Sir? Sir, we're getting some strange readings out of Jane Foster's lab."
Phil Coulson sets aside the latest dispatch from Fury — it seems Selvig may finally be on to something with the cube — to look over the agent's shoulder at the laptop screen. He is not a scientist; he'd much rather have team surveillance on the subjects, or failing that, a decent audio feed. But after the debacle with Hakim and Dion there haven't exactly been loads of volunteers for the former, and the latter has proven fickle as late spring bakes the desert air. The only bug they placed last week during the subjects' sojourn to Albuquerque that has functioned with any reliability has been the spectral time-matter diagnostic stream.
Which is what's sending purple spikes all over their usually flat meter. "What does it mean?" he asks. "Besides something strange."
The agent pauses. "Well, it could— that is—"
Coulson (correctly) interprets this to mean the agent has no idea. But before he can mention something about the thousands of dollars per hour that S.H.I.E.L.D. has invested in this project, the feed flatlines again, as though the spike never occurred.
"Ah," says the agent.
"'Ah', indeed," says Coulson. "Collect every scrap of data on that anomaly and send it to Washington for real analysis. I want that spike being picked apart at the Triskelion in the next half hour."
He really needs to put together his own team.
Come morning, after Jane Foster shares the good news and Thor gives her a hug that lifts her right off the ground and then starts babbling to Darcy Lewis about the taverns of Asgard, it occurs to Loki that his arm is feeling much better.
When he unwraps his bandages, only the shredded needlework and a puckered scar remains.
Well. Perhaps he underestimated mortal forms, after all.