A/N:
I wanted to take a quick moment to
formally apologize for my long hiatus pre-chapter 16.
While chapters may take me a week or longer to post,
updates should be more regular from here on out.
Your response to my return was overwhelming
and I thank you from the bottom of my flaky muse
for your humbling kindness and understanding.
~
There's a room where the light won't find you
holding hands while the walls come tumbling down
When they do, I'll be right behind you
so glad we've almost made it
so sad we had to fade it
~
Jane couldn't be sure when soft spoken stories had given over to the nothingness of sleep, but reprieves seemed to come and pass unnoticed as of late. Just before the nightmares besieged her mind, the ground was shifting beneath her, the pressure against her side disappearing all at once. She blinked heavy eyes, forcing them to open.
An unforgiving hand gripped her upper arm and she realized with startling clarity that she was being drug to her feet. Something soft was being tugged up her arms. She fought back exhaustion enough to lift her chin and look up into shadowed eyes. Her brow furrowed and asked him the hundred questions that fluttered silently within her heart.
Loki studied her for a moment, his features reflecting a solemn darkness that rivaled empty night skies.
Before she could clear her scratchy throat and give voice to her concern, she was being guided toward the cave entrance.
"He is coming."
She could hear the falter in his words but with them all signs of sympathy were lost. Her vision blurred with swells of incensed fear but she could see clearly enough as he morphed before her eyes; his jaw drawing tight, his mouth thinning to a line across his face and eyes hardening upon her as if she had cursed his name at the top of her lungs. It awoke a prickling urgency beneath her skin that tempted her to do so.
Her gaze left him to search behind in the darkness of the cave for support. She fought and twisted in his hold but found none.
"What are you doing?" Jane pulled uselessly against him, a certain degree of panic edging in when her struggle left his steps unaltered. "Where is Thor? It's not supposed to happen like this," the attempt at reason sounded more like a plead than she had meant for it to as he towed her nearer to the lip of the cave. She reached out her free hand to catch the wall. "Loki you promised! Please, you don't have to do this…"
She only breathed when the words started to slow his paces, stopping him just before they left the protection of hollowed stone.
He used his last step to move in front of her and out of the view of anyone searching outside. His stolid mask flickered. The hold on her shoulder adjusted and was used to press her slowly, carefully back again the cool wall, the suddenness of the contact flicking warm fire through her veins. She felt trapped but only long enough for her to realize that nothing had substantially changed.
Jane's heart flipped patterns in her ribs and when her eyes leveled with Loki's chest, she couldn't help but to remember the first time he'd done something similar. Only this time the weight of his gaze was much more forceful than his hold upon her.
"You cannot save me, Jane." The lifeless words fell to her ears just over the rapid beating of her heart and something deep within her subconscious told her that he was not speaking solely about the matter at hand. "But you have the power to protect yourself." Jane felt his free hand press against her right hip and the unmistakable pressure of the flat steel of her dagger against her thigh. "You owe me nothing but I must ask that you remember everything I taught you – no matter what happens beyond these walls you must fight with a clear head and an empty conscious."
Jane could feel everything too much at that moment; the solid rock against her back, the anxiety and fear of what was waiting for her just beyond the mountain that led to the responsibilities asked of her and something else sending licks of simmering flame beneath her skin.
It should have been at the forefront of her mind she knew but one thing stood so far beyond the rest. He did not speak of his want for the Aether or how he intended on tearing Malekith away from it. He spoke not of regret, or worry, or even the revenge he sought so wholly. He merely wanted her to fight for her life. It made her brave.
"I will try," the words came out sounding frailer than she would have liked, but they were honest. She did remember each of her lessons and had seen what she was capable of with the Aether in her system, though only in the measure of destroyed healing rooms and explosions of dirt and rock. She steeled herself and met his eyes in earnest. "But not just for myself. He's trying to take my world from me and he's already taken so much more than that from people I care about..."
"Jane…" Loki tried to stop her, his eyes sliding closed in a new agony she couldn't name even if she'd wanted to and she caught the side of his face in her palm before it could fall as defeated as his voice. It froze him.
He felt like stone beneath her light touch, cool and unmoving for the longest time before he let out a deep sigh that sounded as if he'd held it within him for the entirety of his long existence.
"I can never seem to win with you."
Jane exhaled at a remark so familiar to her yet so uncharacteristic of him. She trailed her thumb in a short line along his cheekbone, carefully asking him to open his eyes; to explain himself to her; anything. When he hesitantly obliged, they were living pools of green.
"It would be selfish of me to ask for your help without returning the favor however I can," she soothed.
The heat within her both dulled and swarmed in rhythm with her restless heart and she watched fixedly as his brow dipped low and he coaxed her hand down from his face and into one of his own.
"This is you asking, then?"
It was only then that she realized she never truly had, never knowing if it would be the smartest choice where choices wore thin or if maybe, just maybe, she really was losing all control of her mind. Somewhere in between, she noticed she nodded softly up at him, finding the infinitesimal amount of strength she felt with her hand enclosed in his to be a sign as good as any.
"Then forgive me Jane," he uttered with enough troubled sincerity to soften her bones and unsettle her nerves, "but I do have to do this."
And with his claim, he went cold once more. The fire in her came back with unrelenting force. She stiffened as his grip re-found her upper arm with bruising force and she was hauled out of protective walls and into the whipping sands.
He could sense the dark ships arrival, tearing unnaturally through the sand-soaked air before he could actually see it, but for a short while he couldn't bring himself to pay any attention to the world beyond the cave. It wasn't an entirely peaceful sight that lie before him but he knew that the moment she was awoken, her state of being could only get so much worse before it crumbled into unrecognizable pieces of a girl that glued him back together.
Selfish thoughts crossed him then. Ones he would somehow consider worse than taking the Aether for himself. He could steal her away again, this time to a place where no one, not Thor, not even Malekith would be able to find her. The healers believed the Aether to be too powerful for her human form but he was sure proper teaching would be all it took to prove the fools and their farce techniques wrong.
But there was a tiny, minuscule, repulsive chance they were right and if so, she would die entirely at his hand – instead of only halfway by it. And as he stood over her, preparing to drag her out as an offering to the enemy in a show of imagined alliance, he wasn't sure if he was capable of properly handling either of the circumstances presented to him.
Jane would have to believe his betrayal. That was key. With Malekith in more control of her body than she herself was, she could not know the true plan. He just never expected to hate himself so much for having to keep it from her.
He took languid steps to cross the cave and bent forward to grab their sprawled out jackets from the ground. His blood stained both, which he thought darkly poetic when he noticed the act of shrugging his coat over his healed shoulder brought him no pain. That could only mean it was his turn to burn and heal wounds.
He crossed the cave back to her, purposefully pressing a well-placed boot over the last flicker of the small fire that separated them and the cave fell into darkness. Still she glowed, and red flickered beneath the skin of her wrists as he maneuvered her jacket sleeves up over them to hide as much of her as he could from the harshness outside. He only wished he had a bit more than the flimsy, brown material.
Wishes were lost when she tilted her tired head up and met his eyes with the look on her face like he'd already saved her from the worst of her troubles though they had not yet begun. It shook him and sobered him all at once and for his own sake, the show had to begin.
And he tried. Gods how he tried, but she always seemed to know the right words to root him to the ground and grip his heart in a delicate little fist. It almost hurt to see how easily she believed his deception but the rejected thought came and went a quickly as it took him to remember the multitude of sins she'd seen and suffered at his doing. Of course she believed it. More than likely expected it.
And it broke him; cracking through his façade so much that he had to tuck them both out of view from the outside world for just a bit longer. Weakness of any kind would not be acceptable beyond the cave walls and this unrelenting human girl seemed to unintentionally make it her purpose to find each and every one of his. He never did consider himself a masochist until that very moment.
It was far too late for him but the same could not be said for the perceptive mind that looked up at him through keen brown eyes; always slightly wrinkled in the way that one would look at an unfamiliar language written upon paper. But to her, the unfamiliar was the equivalent of an invitation.
And she continued to study and prod; not only with which words would cause which reactions or which ones would somehow skip his mind and go straight to his chest, but with touch as soft as fine silk when her hand met the hard of his jaw line and turned him to ice in a way that no frost giant, half species or full, should have been able to experience. A touch that she had to have believed was her express right because no one had ever done such a thing in as long as he cared to remember.
It would take him only a fraction of a second to admit to himself that it was not contact that took the breath from his lips. No, it was her words, always her words; so tender and careful and piercing. It was almost as if she tore what he could not say from the deepest fibers of his heart and bared it like the burden was her own.
He would have been able to deny her claim if not for the sincerity on her face. Not a single stuttered blink or downturned glance or any of the other signs nervous humans portrayed when poorly hiding true intentions beneath a false assertion. A huge, beautiful, unbelievable, assertion at that.
She could have asked him for anything after without denial, but of course the lovely Jane did not make things so simple. Instead she bargained. Her help for his. And if it meant she would fight with him to keep that subtle spark lit within her, her offer was as good as a breath of fresh air to empty lungs.
He used it as newfound determination to play his part. An angry Jane was a force to be reckoned with and he knew exactly how far to push back, with enough force to mold her without snapping her in two. She would hate him for it, he knew, but a bit of loathing burning hotly in her eyes far outweighed never having the chance to look into them again.
Epigraph: Everybody Wants to Rule The World - Lorde