.-.
Beneath
Chapter Two Hundred Twenty-Six – Ships
In the galley, the entire station was present – seated, eating. He'd somehow expected to find them just as he left them – standing, waiting for him. He'd thought some might still be lingering in the corridor. But the South Pole was by necessity a practical place, and it was lunchtime, if a bit early. They'd put out the food while he and Mari were gone and instead of the planned staggering of lunches and farewells, everyone was eating at once. The ripple effect that began with the first few pairs of eyes catching his and Mari's return silenced the galley in seconds.
Paul was up and headed over first, with Olivia, Ken, and Drew each rising immediately after.
Loki typically enjoyed commanding an audience, when the circumstances were of his choosing. Staying was his choice, he reminded himself. He wasn't hiding, as Mari had said, or lying or running, and he certainly wasn't trapped here until the first plane could land, like the rest of the Polies; one word to Heimdall and he could depart and go essentially anywhere he wanted. But he hoped this phenomenon would quickly pass. Part of what he wanted in remaining was some semblance of what he had before: the ability to blend in as one of fifty, no more and no less distinct or remarkable than the other forty-nine.
For now, though, of course they put down their forks and stared. There was an announcement of some sort to be made.
"Everything okay?" Paul asked, mostly to Mari but with a glance Loki's way.
Mari nodded, but was clearly waiting for the managers to reach them before saying anything.
The scraping of another chair signaled Jane's intent to join them.
"Mari?" Olivia said.
Mari nodded again. "I said what I needed to."
Olivia responded, but Loki only half-listened, quickly reviewing what seemed a meandering and at times stilted conversation from a moment before. She had already made her decision before we spoke? He wondered what it was specifically that she'd needed to say to him. Perhaps she'd simply wanted to be able to confront him on her own. She didn't want him to avoid her; perhaps he would have the opportunity to come to figure her out. With Mari walking away toward the kitchen, no answers were immediately forthcoming.
"It's final then, yes? You're staying?" Olivia asked.
"I'm staying," Loki said with a firm nod that didn't at all reflect how incredulous he was to be speaking them.
"Good. One thing. Carlo talked about being a team. We are a team here. One team. I know you're royalty where you come from…but I'd really like it if here you continue to be just another Polie. Can I expect that from you?"
Loki couldn't help a laugh at the irony. "I would like nothing more, Olivia. I neither expect nor want special treatment."
Olivia was nodding, but before she could speak an idea occurred to Loki.
"However…might I make an offer?"
"An offer," Olivia repeated; Loki smiled at her instant wariness, for he could hardly blame her. "Go ahead."
"With regard to house mouse duties, I am particularly well-suited to certain tasks, and particularly…unenamored of others. I propose that instead of rotating duties, I be assigned the most physically demanding tasks, namely, clearing the snowdrifts."
"I heard you didn't like washing dishes."
"I find it unpleasant."
Olivia burst into laughter while Ken squinted at him and Drew's chuckling seemed to come mostly from watching Olivia.
"Among other tasks," Loki added with a broad smile. He didn't quite see the humor, but was game to go along with whatever Olivia saw in it. He couldn't recall ever seeing her laugh before, not with this kind of abandon. She was wheezing by the end, the laughter cut off only when it morphed into a cough.
"You know what? I find it unpleasant, too. I don't like how it makes my skin feel, and I don't like wearing gloves, either. But I take my turn doing it anyway, because that's the way things work here. We all share in the chores because we're all in this together."
"I'm not asking not to share in the chores," Loki said as Jane joined them. He dipped his head toward her in acknowledgement but kept his attention on Olivia.
"I know. I heard you. You didn't let me finish. I don't care if you switch out chores, as long as you're contributing. Did you know something like a hundred people a year die from shoveling snow? Just in the United States. It's hard on the heart. I assume that's not a risk for you?"
"No," Loki said, while trying to fathom that the others here could die simply from clearing snow. That Jane could have died from that. A hundred people in a year wasn't so many out of a country of many millions, but still far more than the zero he would have answered with a laugh if asked how many he thought died from it per year.
"Then for me that's another win-win. I know people think I'm uptight, but you'd be uptight, too, if you had to study an encyclopedia of all the ways people can die out here in the winter. Ken makes those schedules, though, not me. Any objections, Ken?"
"I got that encyclopedia, too. Consider yourself on permanent snow-clearing duty. Maybe you can do some extra work under this building. Slow down the progress of the snow build-up."
"I'll see what I can do. Although I'll need to take care not to go too far beyond what your people could accomplish, lest it raise more of those questions you'd rather not have to answer."
"That's sensible," Olivia said. "We can talk more about that later. But watch your language, Lucas."
"Pardon?"
"Now that you're staying, you're one of our people."
"Ah." One of their people. One of them. It was what he wanted for the rest of the winter, and he would need to start thinking of himself that way for there to be any chance of it being more than words.
"And 'Lucas' because if we're going to continue keeping your presence here a secret, I think it's best if we don't get into the habit of calling you 'Loki.' It's just a suggestion, though. You have a right to be called by your own name if that's what you prefer."
Loki didn't know what he preferred; he hadn't given it much thought, considering he hadn't expected to be remaining. "Lucas," perhaps, was emblematic of clinging to a falsehood. "Loki" was his name, emblematic of the honesty between them now. But he'd grown accustomed to "Lucas," and the name was not at all offensive to him – he'd chosen it himself, after all, a name he'd heard among Clint Barton's men, close enough to his own for easy recognition should someone call it. And, as Olivia had reminded him, he would still be playing a role here, and not the role of prince, or warrior, or Odin's son, or Thor's brother. Continuing to go by "Lucas" here wouldn't change the truths that the Polies now knew, but it might aid him in remembering who he was here, who he wanted to be here. "Lucas is fine. We can consider it my South Pole moniker."
"Okay. One more thing. You've had more than one incident of non-compliance with the station's radio policy. If we're counting on you in case of emergency to be our MVP, as Austin put it, that has to change. I need you to ensure you've got your radio with you, charged, turned on, all the time, in or out of the elevated station. Do I have your cooperation on that?"
"Ahhh…about that…"
"Yes?" Olivia asked. Loki thought she looked like she was bracing herself for a battle.
"Might I be able to obtain a replacement?"
It took a moment to sink in, but when it did, Olivia quickly relaxed. "Yes. See Rodrigo about it. Today."
"I will. And I shall try to be more compliant henceforth," Loki said with smile both charming and rakish, in what he hoped would be just the right proportion.
"Oh, no, Luke, there is no try. Do or do not, and I expect do," Olivia said. Drew smiled and Ken stifled a laugh, and Loki knew he was missing out on some shared jest. "I'm serious about the radio."
"Then so am I," Loki said, dropping the effort at charm. "I'll have the radio with me at all times, charged, on…and in one piece."
"For the record, I recognize that there's bait there, I'm just not taking it. Maybe some other time. Everybody, if I can have your attention," Olivia began, turning to the crowd which had already been giving its nearly undivided attention, some of them close enough to have heard at least part of the exchange; Loki was gladdened to note some smiles. "Without further ado and with the agreement of every member of our South Pole winterover team, Lucas is sticking it out with us for the rest of the season."
Scattered cheers and applause followed; Jane, Loki thought when his eyes briefly met hers, seemed pleased.
"Hear hear!" Zeke called above the others. "Now you can stay here and freeze and keep getting pasty with the rest of us."
"Okay, listen, a couple of things. First, our fiftieth Polie is Lucas Cane. The South Pole is a scientific research station, not a target, even if that intergalactic war is over, so we're going to keep it that way. If he happens to come up in conversation, who you had dinner with, or played poker with, or what have you, the name you should be using is Lucas. Second, we've made an arrangement, whereby Lucas will be taking over clearing the snowdrifts, and maybe helping slow the rate of buildup underneath the elevated station. Anything else anyone needs help with that requires heavy lifting or other physically difficult tasks, see Lucas. Ken will be reworking the house mouse schedule to reflect that. Lucas?"
He hadn't expected this, but the surprise passed quickly, and he was hardly a stranger to public speaking. Still, this group, he felt, was owed a degree of honesty he normally did not concern himself with, and that complicated matters.
"I know many of you have questions," he began after a moment's thought. "Even if my earlier actions on Earth didn't directly affect you"— he found Mari behind the tray slide and caught her eye — "and regardless of any other circumstances, make no mistake: I came to your world in the role of an enemy. I sought to rule. I believed…I believed that I had a right to a throne, after the one I had earned was stripped from me. I was captive to my anger. I saw myself as superior to your people, and I thought nothing of anyone. When I followed Jane here, intending to find a way to use her to…to secure my freedom, my beliefs had not changed. I resented pretending to be an assistant to a mere mortal. I resented the food, the cold, the two-minute showers, the child-sized beds, the very notion that I belonged here with any of you. That I should have to wash dishes and clean bathrooms and floors and shovel snow."
He paused for a measured breath, to slow himself down. Surely there was such a thing as too much honesty. "I didn't see myself as one of you, and I didn't want to be part of this group. My anger kept me company. When Jane realized who I was, her anger kept me company, too," he said, letting his eyes linger on her for the first time since returning to the galley. An image of a fuming mad Jane flashed before his eyes; he did not miss those days, but they were simpler, at least in his memories.
"Still, I did become a part of something here, against my will at first, thanks to Jane, and in turn to many of you." Much as he had resented her for it at the time, he now knew he owed her a great deal for that particular form of scheming. "I told Gary I don't see you now as I did in the beginning, and that's true. But perhaps almost as importantly…I don't see myself as I did then. Ruling Earth could never have given me what I wanted. I can't explain everything, but I grew up with a king for a father, and a king-to-be for a brother. Then as soon as I became king, most assumed – wrongly – that I'd usurped the throne." Loki paused and gave a small shrug. These people probably couldn't easily relate to talk of thrones and royal intrigue, so far outside their experience. "In one way or another," he continued, "I have always been beneath. I wanted to know what it was like to truly be above. But my actions were misguided, and I regret that your people bore the brunt of it."
"Above is already taken," Ken said, nodding toward Olivia. "But as long as you're interested in a position alongside…."
"It's exactly the position I'm looking for at the moment."
"Perfect," Olivia said. "And since that was a lot of further ado, let's keep it moving, okay? Anybody who wants to speak with Lucas before he goes, well, you've got a few months to do it now." Olivia put her back to the tables and faced Loki. "You're used to giving speeches, aren't you?"
"I've given a few. You invited me to speak, Olivia," Loki said, somewhat tentatively. He didn't think she was particularly angry, and he wasn't particularly concerned, since if he was staying he wasn't going to waste his time worrying about reactions to everything he said or did, but he saw no reason to immediately set off on a bad foot.
"I didn't realize you were going to give a speech."
"You gave a speech."
"I gave remarks."
"I'm not sure I see the difference."
"Welcome back, Lucas," Olivia said as a smile broke out. She patted his shoulder and walked away.
Loki couldn't help craning his neck to track her departure from the galley. It struck him how little he knew not just Mari, but Olivia, and Drew standing nearby, and many of the others here. It struck him that he wanted to get to know them. Each of the members of this team. And that he now had plenty of time to do so.
"Don't mind her. She's just really relieved you're staying," Drew said.
"I understand her reasons for that. But she couldn't get me out of here fast enough before. I suppose I would expect feelings to be a little more mixed."
"We were all still in disaster mode then," Ken said. "You got us out of disaster mode. And then she did some thinking. We all did. The person who got you out of disaster mode is maybe not the person you want to be saying good riddance to. Not to mention the 'fifty arrived and forty-nine left' problem. And then that got us to thinking…regardless of events in New York, you were clearly not our enemy, not anymore. If we had any concern at all about that, it wouldn't have occurred to any of us to wish you could stay. We'd be thanking our lucky stars you were gone and that we had dodged one nasty bullet. I guess this is my way of saying we're really not just using you for what you can do for us. For those of us who hung out with you…there's a bond that's formed here. I've been with Veronica for sixteen years and she'll never understand what it's like to spend a winter down here the way the fifty of us do. It felt right, that you should stay."
Loki glanced around for Jane, finding her only with some effort, for the little group he'd been with had grown, hands out for him to shake, words of welcome, a hand on his shoulder or his arm, all of those who'd most vocally supported his rejoining them.
"What's this about set chores?" Austin said. "We're going to need new stakes to play for."
Loki chuckled as he shook hands in the local custom. "I suppose we will."
"I think we're going to have to rethink that game entirely," Zeke said. "Your own mother said you were cheating."
"She never said that! You said that," Carlo put in.
"Ehhh, okay. I admit my memories are a little hazy. Oh! You know what she did say, though? She said people on Earth used to worship you," Zeke said, breaking into laughter.
I suspect I will never hear the end of that, Loki thought, while wondering yet again what all his mother had said to these people while he lay unconscious, to the entire world while Jane stopped him from…. He swallowed over a sudden lump. From making a terrible mistake, he acknowledged. Even if the universe would have prevented it regardless. He looked for Jane again, no longer visible at all where he'd found her before. He would never have known that Baldur's death wasn't his fault. He would never have had the pleasure of standing in judgement over the truly guilty party. He would never have had this. The universe, he supposed, did prevent it. The universe used Jane to prevent it. It was a heady thought.
"Hey, uh, Lucas?"
"Yes?" Loki said distractedly, glancing around for which of those gathered had said his name. Paul, it turned out.
"Can we talk? I want to try to, uh, clear the air. If I can?"
"All right," he said with a nod. He didn't have ill will toward Paul. Yes, Paul had spoken up among those with concerns, but concerns were fully understandable, and Paul's were probably heightened by his care for Mari, who had surely shared her feelings with him. There was also that incident the day of the station's evacuation, when Paul had donned a green blanket in mocking jest, but he'd been mocking a stranger who'd invaded his planet, not the man he'd played card games with and occasionally shared a meal with. Perhaps Loki was in a charitable mood, but it truly didn't bother him. Still, it would be better to address any lingering concerns than ignore them and perhaps let them fester, especially if he was to rejoin the poker group.
"You want to grab some lunch?" Paul asked, while the others started taking the cue to excuse themselves and bid him – temporarily – brief farewells.
"I'm not very hungry, just allow me to grab some beef jerky and I'll join you."
"That's not a meal!" Ronny tossed over his shoulder as he headed off. Thankfully no one seemed interested in pursuing the matter, though, and in seconds Loki was alone.
Except for Jane.
"I'm really glad you're staying."
Loki nodded. He could not remember ever feeling quite so awkward in Jane's presence. "As am I."
"I know Paul wants to talk to you. I'm sure a lot of people do. But, um, maybe later this afternoon we can—"
"Hey, Lucas! Team meeting tonight? Mid-Winter prep work," Elliot called.
"Band after that," Wright said from the same group congregating near the door. "We've got to get you caught up."
"All right," Loki said, though he wasn't sure what "team" he was on. Perhaps the trauma team had some role in ensuring that the Mid-Winter celebration went smoothly. And the band…he had never expected to still be here when they played. Despite the chiding he'd received from Jane and his mother, he was glad he'd taken his playing as seriously as he had. He might actually be performing with them now.
"It's almost like you never left."
Loki turned back to Jane and mustered a smile. "Not exactly. I'll see you later, yes?"
"Yeah. I, uh, I guess I'll be in the Science Lab. Look over some things, get back on track. After lunch. I didn't finish before…you know. I just…come find me, okay?"
"I will."
"Okay."
"Okay."
Another few seconds later Loki was watching Jane head back to her table out of the corner of his eye while perusing the contents of the snack table. He settled on two packages of beef jerky and a granola bar with honey and nuts. Distracted by a flood of memories, most of them involving Jane, he made his way over to where Paul had settled.
"How have you been?" he asked as he took his seat, determined to focus on what was before him rather than what was five tables away.
/
/
Jane sank back into her chair in a daze. Loki had followed Paul to the other side of the galley and seemed to be listening intently to whatever Paul was saying.
"Cold boiled vegetables are gross, right?"
"Um…what?" Jane said, looking up as Macy slid into the chair opposite her, blocking her view of Loki's back. She glanced around and saw more than half the Polies had left, with a few more still trickling out. Only about a dozen were seated and finishing up lunch.
"You could pop it in the microwave. Bread'll get soggy though."
Jane looked down at her plate. She'd chosen one half of a Reuben sandwich for lunch, with a side of boiled cauliflower and carrots. Lunch service had been kept simple. Jane had only managed a few bites of the sandwich and barely touched the vegetables before Loki and Mari returned. "I don't know why I thought I was going to eat any more of this."
"Shame. The Reuben's pretty good."
"I'm not hungry." Jane picked up her fork and absently nudged a piece of cauliflower. A phone rang – an unusual enough sound that Jane looked up to see where it was coming from, and saw Rodrigo, who'd been seated with Nathan and Brody, rising with a satellite phone to his ear. "Back to business as usual," she said, watching him slip away out the door.
"Hey, Jane?"
"Yeah? Sorry. I don't mean to be so distracted."
Macy shrugged. "That's okay. With everything that's happened here the last week or so, we've all earned the right to be a little distracted."
Jane nodded, then stabbed the cauliflower floret she'd been pushing around and ate it. "You're right. Cold boiled vegetables are gross."
"What was all that between you and Loki? I mean Lucas. When you were sticking up for him and he was about to lose it?"
The fork went down. "Well, you see it as me sticking up for him, and I see it as me sticking up for him, but he sees it as me telling people about things he doesn't want to talk about. Basically, I butted in where he didn't want me to. Where I shouldn't have." Jane shook her head. "At least he's staying now."
"He's staying, and that's obviously what you wanted, but Jane…for somebody who got what she wanted, you don't look happy."
"I'm worried. I think he's really mad. And hurt. I know I screwed up. But he was shooting himself in the foot!" she said, leaning in to whisper-shout. "I was convinced that staying was the right thing for him."
"And for you."
Jane hesitated. It wasn't about her. It was about Loki. Loki, who was planning to run off to Alfheim to be alone with nothing but the demons that plagued him, and maybe to drift right back into believing Baldur's death was his fault and his Jotun blood made him inherently a monster and whatever else those demons whispered in his ear. But much as she also enjoyed the company of others here, without Loki the South Pole felt lonely and empty. He had shaped and defined her long austral winter from the start, and now with so much changed, reshaping was due. She wanted to do that with Loki, not without him. "Yeah, for me, too," she finally said.
"Jane…is it really platonic between you two?" Macy said, lowering her voice. "I swear I won't—"
"Yes, Macy, I wasn't lying about that," Jane said, glancing around. Only a handful of others were left in the galley now, including Loki and Paul and Loki's better-than-hers hearing, though their table was on the opposite end of the galley. "Besides, I'm with Thor. I thought everybody knew that now."
"The 'long-distance' relationship you told me about before," Macy said, holding her hands up for air-quotes.
"Yeah," Jane said, refusing to feel guilty. She had enough to feel guilty about at the moment, and it wasn't like she'd lied when she said she was in a long-distance relationship. "Can't a man and a woman just be good friends?"
"Well, not in my personal experience, but I guess for—"
"In some of my physics classes I was literally the only woman. If I hadn't been able to make friends with the guys I wouldn't have had any friends."
"How many of those guy-friends were also hoping they could get in your pants?"
"I— What?" A few memories from parties with her fellow students flickered before her eyes. "Some of them, maybe. Thanks for that. Anyway, it wasn't like that here. We got close. We didn't have a choice at first. He needed me to get out of all these restrictions that were on him, and I was forced into this shared secret, but then we got to know each other and we became friends, and we still shared this secret. We were already part of this tiny South Pole island but we were also on our own island of two. So of course we got close."
Macy was nodding. "You're jealous."
"I'm not jealous. I'm telling you there's—"
"Sure you are. Your island of two has fifty on it now. You want to be talking to him, but so does everybody else, and you aren't having to push him into hanging out with everybody else anymore. He isn't just your friend, he's—"
"Macy—"
"Let me finish, okay? He isn't just your friend, he's your best friend."
Prepared to keep arguing, Jane was taken aback and slumped in her chair. Best friend? She hadn't had one of those since high school. Her friendships tended to wax and wane, depending on where she was and what she was doing. Maybe in part because even if her intentions were good, she wasn't always the most reliable friend. Case in point, she reminded herself with a sigh, picturing herself questioning Loki right here, in front of the entire station, about things she knew he wouldn't want her to raise. Though she'd never done something like that before; more like forgetting plans because she got too wrapped up in her work.
Yet she'd told Loki about things she'd mentioned to few others, and had felt perfectly comfortable doing so. Loki, with his intent to leave for another planet, discomfort in remaining on Earth, and general ability to go wherever he wanted in the entire universe for millennia on end, was maybe the least permanent person in her life, yet of all her friends also the one she least wanted to disappear from it. The one she least wanted to let wane with the shifting of life circumstance. "Yeah," she finally said with a slow nod. "I hadn't thought about it like that, but maybe you're right."
"I went through that. I mean it was like junior high, but it sucked. We were going through a kind of goth stage, and it was me and my best friend against the world. Like you and Lucas."
"Yeah. No! I mean, no, not against the world."
"But sort of, right? Because you had your secret? In my case, Bree told me she wanted to have other friends, too – actually, she wrote me a note, you know, junior high. And I…sorry. That's not a good story. We got into a nasty stupid feud and to this day if I run into her back home it's just some fake-polite 'hi' with a fake smile."
Jane deflated further. "You're right. That's a terrible story."
Macy broke into laughter. "We were twelve. Thirteen? Anyway, I doubt you'll be badmouthing the rest of us to Lucas every chance you get, or the other way around. You can't possibly be as immature and insecure as twelve-year-old me. Or as petty. You'll talk it over and work things out." Macy twisted around, following Jane's eyes peering beyond her to where Loki and Paul still sat. "And you'll figure out how to share him with everybody else."
"When you put it like that, it kind of sounds like I'm immature and insecure. And petty. But I really don't mind sharing him. I want him to have other friends here and be a part of things, without having to lie about who he is. It's just…"
"You're used to being first in line."
"Yeah, I guess." That was part of it, probably. Maybe a big part of it. But she didn't want to be first in line so they could watch a movie or trade stories, not right now. There was a problem between them, and she was talking to Macy and Loki was talking to Paul and they should be talking to each other.
"Okay, clearly you need a distraction. Want to come down to the Greenhouse with me? Check out what's going on our plates in three days?"
"Oh, thanks, Macy, but I can't, I…." What are you going to do, Jane? Sit around the lab, hovering, waiting to pounce when he walks in? Paul and Loki started laughing then and it was decided. "Actually, I think I will. Just a sec, okay?" She strode over to Paul's and Loki's table – they were the only others left now – apologized for interrupting, and told Loki she'd be in the Greenhouse and go the Science Lab after. Loki nodded and gave an all too noncommittal reply that he would see her later, and Jane somehow managed to accept it and head back to where Macy waited. She stopped off at the leftover fridge to put away her plate – Reubens were perfectly good cold and the vegetables could go in the microwave – and set off with Macy for the stairs.
"So how come I never hear you talking about Thor?"
"It's sort of been a secret. Not a secret-secret, exactly, but I wasn't supposed to talk about Asgard, and it was just easier to keep it to myself, other than with the handful of people who already knew about it. Maybe that ship has sailed now, I guess I need to talk to SHIELD about it, but that's not happening until after Loki and I leave here." If it ever happens, she added mentally. She had tried to follow the rules before, but it was her life, and what secrets was SHIELD still trying to keep now that Vanaheim's King Gullveig and Queen Frigga of Asgard had shown up on Earth?
"Mmmm, yeah, that ship didn't sail. It sank to the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen again. The entire planet knows about it. I mean I totally get it if you want to keep your personal connection to it private, I wouldn't want to wind up in gossip rags with a gaggle of paparazzi following me everywhere I go either, but I mean come on. He's the Norse god of thunder. Okay, sort of. He's the alien prince who inspired the stories of the Norse god of thunder, and you can see why. If he was mine, I don't think you could get me to shut up about him. Or stop showing pictures of him to everybody. I mean, I'd be whipping out my phone to strangers in the street."
Jane's steps slowed, falling a few paces behind Macy just as they were approaching the Greenhouse. Papparazi? Gossip rags? No more than a second had passed before that idea went from way off-base to scarily reasonable. Macy was right: Thor was a prince, an alien, a "god," an Avenger. How was that not going to result in prying eyes and ears? Public curiosity when she just wanted a chance to be alone with him?
"Hey, Jane? I'm sorry if I said too much. I don't mean to be critical."
"No, it's okay," Jane said, struggling for a moment to find the last thread of the conversation she'd drifted away from. "What do you mean, 'critical'?"
"About you and Thor."
"Did I miss something?" Jane asked as she followed Macy into the outer area of the Greenhouse. Behind the glass windows, the variety of shades of green against the white walls and shelving looked like a modern Eden.
"Maybe? You did look like you kind of zoned out there for a minute. I was just saying how you never talk about him, and I've never seen you moping around, either. Nine months without that in my life and I'd definitely be moping. But everybody deals in their own way. I didn't mean anything by it. Come on, sit."
"No, I heard that, I just…." Still flustered by images of photographers stalking her at the grocery store, Jane plopped down next to Macy on the couch. "I met him when I was living in New Mexico, doing research there. It was just a few days…but a really incredible, unforgettable few days, you know?"
"I know. It's the best, isn't it? When you fall that hard, that fast? At least in the moment. Nothing like it."
Jane nodded. Certainly she had never experienced anything like it. Maybe Macy – a romantic, Jane suspected – fell in and out of love easily. It sounded like Macy had been there more often than Jane, at least. "Then he had to go back to Asgard." To deal with Loki, leading to a series of events she never could have imagined at the time. Even leading, ultimately, to the attack on Earth and Loki following her to the South Pole. "He said he would be back, and it's not like he said exactly when" – she'd parsed those words, his inflection, his expression, theories of the passage of time too many times to count – "but I was thinking in terms of hours. Not days, weeks, months…over a year."
"Ouch."
"Yeah. But I didn't sit around moping. I started collecting more data, and analyzing it, working out a new theory. Because if he couldn't get back to me, then I was going to get back to him."
"Good for you. No sitting around eating ice cream straight out of the carton for you."
"Well…"
"With a few exceptions on lonely Friday nights because you're only human, and not just a superstar scientist."
Jane laughed, then drew in a deep and pleasant breath of the more humid air here as some of the tension that had coiled tightly around her for over an hour now finally started to loosen its hold. She hadn't felt this comfortable talking about Thor since before Tromso, with Darcy, who had to have earned some kind of saint status for everything she had mostly patiently endured from Jane all that time. "Yeah, there were a few exceptions. There was some crying. And some questioning. I really believed him when he said he'd be back, but anything could have happened after he went home. What if something terrible happened to him? What if he'd been hurt, or even killed? What if he was just…swept away by the moment, like I was, and said things he didn't really mean? He was such an entitled jerk when he first got here and he changed so much, so fast…what if I totally misread him, or just saw what I wanted to see? Sometimes…I thought maybe I was just being stupid and naïve, staring up at the sky just like that girl who stares at her phone, day after day after day, and wonders why he doesn't call her back. I'm not like that. I'm not that girl. Okay, maybe I'm a little bit that girl. But I didn't want to be. So I wasn't going to sit around waiting, you know? I was going to find him."
"You gave yourself a problem to solve, to keep yourself out of the ice cream carton."
"I guess," Jane said with a chuckle, shifting to the side and tucking one leg up. "I get pretty single-minded when I'm working on a project. Anyway, the next time I saw him it was on the TV screen. And granted, I know he was busy, but—"
"But if he could make it to New York, why couldn't he make it back to New Mexico?"
"Exactly! I didn't know what to think, and I didn't have much time to think, thankfully. I'd barely unpacked in Tromso when I was offered the chance to come here, and I had a mountain of things to get done if I was going to make it onto a flight before the station closed. Then finally the night before I left to start heading down here, he showed up at my hotel, and he told me he wasn't able to get back to Earth before and he explained what was going on in Asgard, the short version, anyway." He'd told her about Loki. Her first warning, the first indication that her life was about to change again, and she'd brushed it off without a second thought. Everything about that night was surreal, looking back on it. So much had changed since then, in ways she never would have dreamed. "Then he showed up again in New Zealand, and he told me he wasn't able to get away because there was a war brewing. I knew if there was a war, he'd be fighting it. So what was I supposed to do, spend the season here crying? There isn't enough ice cream here for nine months of that."
"Have you ever taken a peek in the rooms over in the B1 wing? There's totally enough ice cream here for that. But I get your point. You're not that girl, right?"
"Right! Well, it's not the same thing. I knew where he was, and I knew he didn't forget me. But he was fighting in some war, and there's no phone calls or e-mails, no newspapers or TV to even know how it's going, if he was okay, and I was completely helpless." Jane pursed her lips and looked aside. One time, she'd found out he wasn't okay, and she hadn't been completely helpless – she'd had Pathfinder. Loki and his millennium-old net had saved her from what would've been certain death. "I couldn't let myself drown in that. It wouldn't have done either of us any good."
"Focus on the project."
She'd never thought of it in the deliberate way Macy was casting it, but that's what she'd done: focus on the project, the work. And Loki, once she figured out her "assistant's" real identity. He'd been enough to keep her mind off nearly everything else. She nodded.
"I wish I'd known. I would've planned some girls' nights to help keep you distracted and having fun. Back before the telephone when men went off to war you could at least write letters. You must've been missing him like crazy."
Jane sighed.
"What, you didn't?" Macy asked, brow wrinkled enough for Jane to realize how weird that idea sounded. How weird it was.
"Sometimes I did," she protested. "Do. Sometimes I miss him so bad it hurts." Her eyes drifted closed for a moment, remembering sitting next to Thor on a couch in his chambers. Standing, his arms around her, her back to the wall, melting into his kiss. That first kiss, outside Puente Antiguo, her body and mind in unison as a single livewire, a time-stopping moment of sheer passion, sheer perfection. "But I've spent way more time missing him than being with him. It's only in the last week I've needed more than one hand to count the number of days I've spent with him. And" – she made some hasty mental calculations – "I think that's including the first day, which was actually already evening, when he was mostly unconscious."
"Unconscious?"
"Yeah. Long story. Okay, not so long, actually. We were out driving in the middle of the desert and there was this bright light which I know now was him arriving on Earth and we hit him."
"You met him by knocking him unconscious?"
Jane grimaced. "Yeah. Well, just for a minute or two. But then my friend tased him. She was the one driving, too. He was acting crazy, and he was really big and upset and angry…anyway, he wound up unconscious."
"You have to write a book about this someday."
"A book?" Jane said with a laugh. Maybe it was book-worthy. She'd certainly never read a romance that started like that. "I guess I have to figure out what the ending is first."
"Yeah? Oh. Yeah," Macy said, tone changing with the repetition. "How are you supposed to do that?"
"He's got to straighten out a bunch of things on Asgard, get the recovery from the war going, figure out the relationships with the other realms, um, the other planets that were fighting…it's chaotic right now. So we're thinking after the winter season here things will be calmer in Asgard and we'll finally be able to be together. Take some time for us."
"Dream vacation?"
"We haven't figured out specific plans yet."
"It better be a dream vacation. He's a prince. King. Mythological god. If he doesn't give you a dream vacation he's not living up to the name, honey."
"You're right," Jane said, laughing. "Dream vacation it is. I'm going to Google 'best beach in the world.'"
"Your dreams aren't big enough. Best beach in the universe."
"You know what? You're right. I'll see what Google has on that."
"Wait, Jane," Macy said, interrupting her own laughter, "what did I say earlier, then? You looked like you'd seen a ghost."
Jane thought back, then shook her head. "No ghosts. I just never thought about paparazzi or anything like that before. When I was with Thor on Earth, people didn't know who he was. Except for here, of course, but no reporters here. And there was so much going on…"
"And we didn't grab our cameras when we evacuated."
"And on Asgard, sure, I caught people checking me out a few times, and heads turn when Thor walks into a room, but nobody was following us around asking questions and filming. I didn't think about how it would be here, in public, when people do know who he is."
"Maybe it won't be that bad. When do you ever see any royals being hounded by the press besides the British ones? And that's mostly their own press, isn't it? There's no Asgardian press here."
Jane gave a skeptical nod. She didn't keep up with things like that, though Darcy had filled her in on some of the pop culture and gossip highlights she'd previously managed to remain in blissful ignorance of. Before that, the one thing she knew about the British royal family was Princess Diana's death…while being chased by paparazzi. She rubbed her hands briskly over her arms and stood up. "Speaking of pictures, though, want to see some amazing ones?"
Macy thankfully went with the abrupt change in topic and they moved over to the little desk where a laptop was set up. Jane logged into her e-mail – it was on the local intranet so available even though the satellite window was past – and found the pictures of her and Thor on the rooftop in Tromso under the green and blue waves of the aurora borealis from when she'd sent them to Darcy.
"Jane, these are incredible," Macy said, peering down over her shoulder. "Seriously incredible."
Jane melted into a grin. "They are, aren't they?"
"How did you even get them? Who took them? There's nobody else there."
She looked more closely, flipping over to another picture, in which she and Thor stood on the hotel roof before a majestic celestial backdrop…clearly alone. The grin faded, but then returned with a mental shrug. She'd had so many other things to worry about that this had fallen entirely off the list. "Shady pseudo-government organization version of paparazzi?"
"You mean surveillance? Wow," Macy continued when Jane nodded. "I apologize in advance for making light, but I'd hire this surveillance guy to do my professional photos."
"You know what? So would I," Jane said.
/
Well, this has been the month and a half of flights and sickness and various weirdness. I'll put some of it on my profile page for those interested (I haven't done it yet, aim to tomorrow) rather than clutter it up here. This chapter's been "thisclose" to ready for release for like 3 weeks. I hope you all had Merry Christmases and Happy New Years and wonderful any other holidays, birthdays, and general good times you may have celebrated.
So let's dive right into previews for the next chapter! Thor has that trip to New York, as you recall. He and Tony have some business to discuss, and you know who that business is about.
Excerpt:
"You got me there."
"—but I beseech you most earnestly to do so for mine."
Tony sank back in his chair. "Wow. Nobody's ever beseeched me most earnestly for anything before."
