Epilogue: Earth
This epilogue has mentions of suicide, but no written or mentioned specific examples. There is suicidal ideation, however. Please don't read if it's going to upset you.
Jane and Darcy sat across the wobbly, vinyl-topped table; Darcy perched on the edge of her bed, Jane on the sole plastic chair in the room. Her fingernail picked at the torn edge of the vinyl, plucking pensively at the rough edge; the soft fabricky underbelly and the sticky plastic sheen on top. It looked like it'd been salvaged from a pizza joint, and its cheery red-and-white check was wholly at odds with the grim scene. Darcy had turned on the light, but it only gave a faint, almost oily illumination to the room. The sun had risen, but no evidence of it was visible in the gray scene outside, either.
It was surprisingly hard to talk. But she was willing to blame it on the mouthful of stale bread congealed with a thin scraping of peanut butter. Between them, their sandwiches had emptied the rest of the jar, and Jane had to pretend she couldn't see the nervous pucker on Darcy's forehead when she scanned her cupboard for food that wasn't there. Jane would have fixed it with a thought, with a wave of her hand, but somehow, here, it felt like using her powers would be rubbing her friend's nose in the dirt. She'd make an excuse to slip out later and do it there, and make up a story about it. Darcy wouldn't believe it, but it would be something, at least. A gesture.
But they couldn't sit in silence forever. Jane ran her tongue over her teeth, scouring them clean of her bite, and swallowed it down. It landed heavily in her empty stomach, but she wasn't hungry enough for more.
"Is it all like this?" she gestured to the window.
Darcy shrugged. "Yeah, man. Earth's a mess," her voice wobbled on the last syllable. "But actually, I don't really know. There's a fraction of satellites up there, most of them commandeered by whatever governments are left."
"America?" Jane had never had much feeling for her home country, but it was at least a familiar straw to grab.
"Yeah. Although we hear more from the governor than the president."
"The governor of..." she paused, looking out the window again. "Where are we, anyway?"
"You don't recognize Chicago?" Darcy's smile was weary, as wobbly as her voice, "I guess not, the Bean's gone. Pritzker's not doing a bad job, but it'd be hard to say what doing a good job would look like. Braidwood hasn't melted down yet, though, so that's something."
"Braidwood?"
"The closest nuclear plant. A ton of them are already gone; there's dozens of Chernobyls spotting the US. Not as bad as Chernobyl, but—"
Jane couldn't catch her breath. "How? Wh—what happened?"
Darcy shrugged. "This started happening way before; you don't remember? Power plants were targets, and then so many scientists and technicians died or scattered...not enough people around to maintain them. So all that waste is either in the atmosphere or in the groundwater by now. Even here," and now a tear flashed down her face, despite the clear effort she was putting into keeping the stream of terrible, horrible words coming, "Braidwood's okay—that's why we've got power at all—but there's still fallout in the atmosphere. Drifting down from Canada."
Fallout. Reactors didn't have to explode to poison everything in a radius around them. The whole Earth, or enough of it not to matter to the survivors, covered with Earth more wasted than if the ground was sown with salt.
It couldn't be true. Not after everything they'd been through. Not after everything they'd suffered, and survived...to die like this?
Then another thought, calm and beyond the horror of it, broke through the thick clouds ringing her mind.
It didn't have to be true.
"What else is wrong?" and her voice was the precise kind of calm that Darcy's was struggling to maintain. "The big stuff. The stuff it would help most to fix right away?"
"Jane, what—" and then the light dawned on Darcy's face too. "Oh shit. Oh fuck," she laughed, startled by her own audacity, a hand coming up to cover her trembling lips. "I got back here and I fucking forgot. Everything was so miserable and I wasn't certain I'd ever see you again and I just—fucking—forgot."
Jane laughed too, not so much out of joy at what she would have to do—because all she wanted to do was rest, and try to forget everything she'd been through—but for the satisfaction of seeing hope steal back onto Darcy's face, furtive as a thief but equally as bold.
"I mean," Darcy gasped, reaching out over the table and knocking the scraped-out jar of peanut butter to the floor in her effort to grasp Jane's hands. It bounced along the floor with a hollow, plasticky dong, and rolled under the bed. Darcy didn't even spare it a glance. "I—I don't know. I've never had to put a world back together before."
"You said there were no satellites, right? Countries can't talk to each other; we can't talk to ourselves. A good place to start?"
"Yeah, yeah, that would..." she paused, eyes darting side-to-side, animated by the lightning-quick thoughts animating her mind. "That would be good..."
"Okay then," Jane closed her eyes, concentrating. She had no idea how many satellites had been in orbit, nor which ones had been vital and which ones were junk, but the Aether did. It could put everything back just where it had been. In her mind's eye, the Aether started to manifest a vision of the Earth, all its little tools zooming in rollicking orbits around its spinning-top head. Jane's mouth opened—
And before she could say a word, Darcy slammed her open palms on the table and hissed, "Wait!"
The vision disappeared and her eyes opened, confused.
"Wait," Darcy repeated, taking a few slow, deep breaths. "Do you realize what we could do?"
"Fix the global communications network?" Jane didn't know what else to say, so her voice rose along with an eyebrow.
"Sure, yeah. But you know—you know better than I do, I've heard you talk about this—that there's so much up there that's useless, right?"
"Yeah, but—"
"We can fix it, Jane."
"That's what I was trying to do."
"No," the lightning that touched her brain now reached her eyes, and she leaned forward, fixing Jane with the first direct look since they'd darted across the room to each other and held the other in a bruising hug. "I mean, we could make it right. Build the perfect system. Just what we need, in the right orbits. Fix the space-junk problem."
"Oh..." and now it was Jane's turn to grin and swear. "Darcy, your fucking mind!" She jumped up, running her hands through her hair. "We could, couldn't we? And not just the satellites...everything! We could put hospitals where we needed them, and take pollution out of rivers, and the soil, and...I'm not an environmentalist, so I don't know what else—"
"Once we get the internet back, we can call anyone we fucking need!" Darcy interrupted, "Anyone left who would know, anyway. Or, couldn't the Aether just do it for you? Design the perfect world?"
"I mean," doubt soured her mood in an instant, unease permeating the buoyant lightness of a moment before, "that doesn't feel right. Shouldn't humans redesign the perfect world?"
"They should," Darcy shook her head, "but we might have a hard time getting them all on the same page."
"Then we should take this one step at a time," Jane forced her breath out in a determined whoosh, forcing her heartbeat to slow. One step at a time. Miracles that came too fast might start to seem like horrors. After all, hadn't confirming the existence of alien life, meeting beings from another world, and then learning that they were beyond humanity in so many ways all been miracles, in their own right? And how quickly those miracles had become nightmares. She couldn't let her gifts to humanity be viewed with the same suspicion. She couldn't let herself override the last remnant's of humanity's self-determination and free will because she was personally too impatient to put everything back—not even the way it had been—in the way it always should have been.
"Yeah," Darcy agreed, "but start with the internet." She tried for a grin, but it faltered. "I miss Instagram."
A network of satellites—just enough to cover the planet in flawless coverage, and all of the latest, state-of-the-art design—appeared overnight. And overnight, every internet-capable device on the planet logged into it. Data was corrupted, yes. Servers had been lost, and with them troves of data. But connectivity was possible, and after a few days that governments spent carefully examining the teeth and tongue of this incredible gift horse, humanity once again reached out to each other.
The world exploded into speech, questions flying so thick and fast into the atmosphere than Jane and Darcy wondered if their perfect design could withstand the strain. It did.
But among all the questions, the are-you-alives and are-you-safes and where-can-we-meets and what-happened-to-thems, a sizeable chunk of those questions was how is this possible?
Jane, being the person with the ability to analyze and interpret the staggering volume of global communications, was also the person who had no idea what to do next. It was Darcy who made their plans, directed Jane to listen in on certain politicians' messages so that she could interpret them and figure out who it would be best to reveal themselves to. Jane only made one requirement: that it would be 'them' instead of just 'her'.
She had all the power, but she just couldn't fathom doing all this alone. Facing all this alone.
Because this was Darcy's arena. She had always wanted to be a lobbyist. She had followed her favorite activists and politicians on social media and even been followed in return, occasionally. On her own, Jane might have chosen to find Tony Stark, and Pepper Potts, the few people she knew in her personal life who had perspectives she trusted. But she couldn't go to them either. They hadn't been given power by the people, and politicians had.
After a day or two, Darcy named two people who were A) still alive and B) the ones most likely to accept what Jane would offer, in the way they wanted to offer it. Jane's first thought had been just to go directly to the president, but Darcy immediately contradicted her.
"Ask the oldest and dustiest of all the old dusty white men in charge for permission to change the status quo?" Darcy's headshake had been both patronizing and pitying. "Jane, this is the same guy who signed the Sokovia Accords. If he could, he'd lock you in one of those suppressor collars and only let you out to sic you on whatever problem they had."
Properly chastened, though vowing to herself she'd leave Earth forever before letting anyone lock her in another tiny room again, Jane accepted Darcy's choices and her reasoning. It took them another day to decide how best to reveal Jane's powers to them, and then they were off.
Senator Lorena Flores-Martinez was in a FEMA field office in the heart of Philadelphia, her brow in a permanent worried pucker that had everything to do with the quickly-dwindling supplies in the resupply tents. Her sleeves were rolled up, and she looked more like a dockworker than a senator, with her heavy fleece jacket, dirty jeans, and muddy work boots, but Jane knew they were in the right place.
"Who are you?" she greeted them, the pucker on her brow deepening. A hand reached subtly for a walkie-talkie dangling from a lanyard around her neck. "I don't recognize you. If you're here for something, you can tell," she gave a bitter laugh, "the trip hasn't been worth your time."
"Senator," Darcy took the lead, as they'd agreed, "first of all, we're big fans. Well, I'm a big fan, anyway. Jane here doesn't follow politics, which I personally think is ridiculous. Sorry," she redirected herself at Jane's pointed stare, "not important. I'm Darcy Lewis—also not important—but this," she gave a dramatic flourish, "is Jane Foster. She worked on the team in charge of defending Manhattan in the last battle."
"Got any ID to back up those claims?" the Senator's hand was still poised to call for help.
"No," Jane had no idea where here ID had even gone; she couldn't remember the last time she'd even needed her driver's license. It occurred to her, absurdly, that settling back down to life on Earth was going to be annoyingly difficult without any proof of who she was. "But it's not really important, who I am. What's important is what I can do."
"And what is that?"
"What's the one thing you need the most of right now?" Darcy said, gesturing to the nearly-empty tent behind the Senator.
"I don't engage with black market vendors," the Senator clicked her radio on, "This is—"
Jane's fingers twitched, and a burst of static erupted from the walkie before it went dead. After a frustrated minute of flipping switches and checking the battery, the Senator dropped it against her chest and swore.
"Listen, I don't know who you two are, and I don't care. I have too much work and nothing to do it with. I'm not going to buy what you have, but if you happen to have any shelf-stable foods, I'll take your donations. I doubt that's what you're here for, though."
Darcy held up her hands, "I know it's hard to believe, but that's exactly why we're here. Shelf-stable foods, you said? All kinds? What about baby formula? Need that too?"
"Yes," the Senator's wry voice made it clear she didn't believe their altruism in the slightest. "But if you've been holding onto it this whole time, why give it to me now?"
"This is going to be hard to explain," it was Jane's turn now to raise her hand, and step forward. She needed to do this where the Senator could see her do it, but knew that she was too smart to turn her backs to two strangers, especially if they were promising something so unbelievable. "But I'm not going to give you anything. I'm going to make it for you."
"You're going to—" she cut herself off, rubbing at the grooves now carved deep in her forehead. A bitter laugh burst from her throat. "Listen, ladies, I know the past few months have been hard. The waiting lists are long for psychiatric care, but I think I can get you an appointment with a nurse on-staff in a few days. In the meantime, there are a few beds in our temporary shelter I can hold for you."
"I know this sounds crazy, but if you'll just let me—look," Jane cleared her throat, "You can send me to the doctors or lock me up or whatever you want, but just let me try something first. If it doesn't work, I swear we'll leave."
"You'd better," the Senator's hand dropped from her walkie to her belt, and Jane saw a suspicious bulge under her jacket that hinted at a concealed weapon. She cleared her throat again.
"That tent behind you is full of food," Jane said, closing her eyes. Her meal of stale bread and powdered milk—all Darcy had had left before Jane created them a cheesy vegetable omelet with hashbrowns and fresh coffee from thin air—was thin in her stomach, making it easier to imagine the bounty she wanted appearing in the tent. "Everything you'll need to feed the refugees here and distribute more to the people waiting outside. And every time you run out of supplies, you'll find a box of whatever you need waiting for you where you thought it was gone."
"Oh, my—" the Senator's voice inhaled on a breath so fast it choked in her throat, "How—you—how did you do—"
Jane's eyes opened to see stacks and stacks of fresh boxes, each one neatly stamped with what was waiting inside. Noodles, rice, powdered milk, eggs, baby formula, peanut butter, canned fruits and vegetables and soups. None of it particularly appetizing, and not near the limit of what Jane could do, but she and Darcy had agreed: this was the place to start. With the normal, the tangible, the expected. So that way, when they proposed the incredible, the world-changing, the Earth-shaking, they'd be more likely to be believed.
And from the way Senator Flores-Martinez was touching the boxes—half-fearfully, as if expecting them to vanish like the taunting mirage they seemed—Jane knew they would have a bit more to do before she could be brought around to their point of view. Magic, despite being something the world had been forced to become accustomed to rather quickly, was a source of fear rather than hope.
And who could be surprised?
The Senator turned. "Are you Asgardian?" her hand moved to the pistol at her side, revealing it with a businesslike push of her jacket. She didn't draw it, though. Possibly from a drizzle of doubt—neither Darcy nor Jane really looked Aesir—but more likely from a sense of despair. If they were Aesir, and they did mean her harm, a bullet would in no way be enough to stop them. "Are you one of them?"
"No," Darcy said, "we just have some powers, and we want to help."
Jane didn't contradict the we, even though she made a mental note to discuss it with Darcy later. She hoped the slip didn't mean her friend was growing more attached to her powers than she was. If at all possible, Jane wanted to use the Aether and then, if it was safe, let it go. The further she was from all this insanity, the better.
"Well," the Senator's eyes flicked to the supplies, which had not vanished yet, "you've done that. So what do you want for it?"
"We just want to talk to you. Because this?" Darcy gestured, "This is really the least we can do."
Hours later, over a cup of instant coffee from one of the boxes Jane had conjured earlier, the Senator shook her head and regarded them with a doubtful smile.
"Ms. Foster," she began, slowly, "what you suggest...what you want to do," she hesitated, "I think it's a good idea. I think it's...revolutionary. It's, quite possibly, the best thing to do to not only put this country—and the world—back on its feet, but launch us forward at the same time."
"But?" Darcy prompted her when she hesitated to continue.
"But," the Senator set her cup down and stared at the pattern of bubbles on its surface, "my colleagues will never approve the use of supernatural powers to such an extent. And..." she hesitated again, "I think you don't know the damage done to the American psyche by the use of similar powers on us. I don't think that if you demonstrated your abilities, and held a vote, that any suggestion of using your powers would pass, either."
"You can't be serious," Jane's words were a knee-jerk reaction; though they'd only talked for a few hours, she had very quickly realized that the Senator meant what she said. "We can fix everything. Everything that they destroyed. We can clear the rubble, purify the soil, grow enough crops to feed us through the winter, and make anything we can't grow!"
"Yes, you can," the Senator had made herself sure of that after a series of escalating tests she'd asked Jane to pass. "It's not a matter of ability. It's a matter of public image. I've been talking to you for hours; you've told me your story and all about your past. I'm sure that if I searched the archives, I'd find proof of who you are. And even after all that, even I have doubts about whether you're a real human, actually here to help me, or just another horrible illusion caused by," her eyes flicked upwards and her brow wrinkled, "them."
"So..." Jane paused, almost unable to parse through what she was thinking. It seemed incredible that she and Darcy had thought so hard, planned so much, and been so excited to rebuild the world that someone could just stop them like a brick wall with a polite no thank you. "Because my power is too alien, you don't want me to do anything? You'd rather the world stay the way it is?"
"You misunderstand me, Ms. Foster. I'm not suggesting that you don't help. What I'm saying is we need to manage your public image while you do it. And the lower profile you keep, the better."
"You want her to help," Darcy said, slowly, "but you don't want anyone to know she's doing it?"
"What would be gained by that?" the Senator fixed them with a level stare through her smudged, round-rimmed glasses. "Truly, ask yourselves. A person with godlike powers—one in a succession of such beings, mind you—comes around and starts making changes to an already fragile world? Can't you see the likelihood that, far from comforting people, you'll re-traumatize them?"
"Yes," Jane admitted, "I do see that. I'm not in this for praise; I just want to help."
"You will. Believe me, you will. But can you trust me enough to wait to act until we figure out how best to do it? People aren't going to interrogate things too closely, I don't think; not if the general trend is towards improvement. They'll be thankful things are getting better. We can tell them it's new technology, or from some Domesday facility somewhere...they'll buy that. But if you start walking down Central Avenue, waving your magic hands and fixing skyscrapers," the Senator sighed and spread her hands, "I don't think you can be killed, but I think people will certainly try. And that opens everyone around you to the same harm."
Jane's eyes met Darcy's; the other woman shrugged. "I think she's right," Darcy said, "Miracle workers are pretty loved, right up until they aren't."
"Okay then," Jane nodded, "just tell me what to do."
It took a good while for the Senator to actually make good on that request. So long, in fact, that Jane secretly went out to several resupply centers to add discreet boxes to their number in the dead of night, like some kind of magical Robin Hood. Not that Jane didn't hear anything at all; in fact, there was a plethora of emails flooding her inbox, all marked at the highest priority and all taking her to private networks as soon as she clicked the attached links.
Her security clearance—a holdover from her days advising in the corporate world—was upgraded to a level Jane wasn't even aware existed. She was fingerprinted, her biometric data was taken, and she and Darcy were both visited by a host of sunglassed, suited, Secret Service agents prying back into both of their pasts nearly to the day they were born. The treatment set her teeth on edge, but she kept reminding herself of the light at the end of the tunnel. At the end of it all, she would be able to use her powers for something beyond trickery, destruction, and death.
Once the remnants of government had decided that Jane was who she said she was, and that she meant to help as she insisted she did, there was a week of dead silence.
Then, the first request.
As Darcy had thought, the first priority was nuclear cleanup. Accompanied by a nervous scientist in full protective gear—gear they didn't issue to Jane, rather pointedly—she walked into a fallout zone, the scientist's Geiger counter clicking madly at his side. An earbud piped her instructions; clear the atmosphere, the soil, and repair the structure. Once that was done, and the scientist had checked, for the fourth time, the absence of radioactive waste and shakily removed his helmet, regarding her with a slack-jawed, wide-eyed gaze that sent shivers up Jane's spine, she was dismissed.
A few days later, they pulled her back to reignite the fission reaction.
Power came back to half a state, and the government loudly thanked Stark Industries for its generous donation of labor drones and plutonium.
Jane didn't mind; it was a plausible excuse, and hospitals and homes could power lifesaving equipment because of her. Darcy was less charitable.
"They could have let us turn it into a green energy plant," she grumbled. "What's the point of rebuilding a time-bomb that's already gone off once?"
She had a point. Jane tried to forget about it when they called her to do the same thing, halfway across the country. And then again, and again, and again.
She had had no idea how many nuclear power plants there were in the country until it became her self-appointed task to repair them all.
Somewhere around the fifteenth summons, Darcy lost it. "You could be doing so much more than this! They're wasting you on this!"
Jane sighed. By that point, it was an old topic between them, well-worn and threadbare. "It needs to get done."
"Of course it does, but they haven't asked you to do anything else, have they? Not feed a child or make medical supplies or...or grow a single fucking ear of corn!" she breathed out a huff, the air hissing through her clenched teeth. "You should just do it. Next time they put you in the middle of nowhere to clean up their messes, just...put a cornfield there. Or, actually, soybeans. Better for the soil, soybeans."
"I promised not to act outside how I was asked," Jane shook her head, "I signed a contract."
"And they were gonna enforce that how, exactly?"
She had a point.
It was a very uncomfortable thing, playing a game of plausible deniability with the extremely trigger-happy remnants of the United States government.
Where Jane went, nuclear emissions decreased, soil cleared, the sky brightened. Also, farms sprouted where none had been, windmills bloomed like enormous daisies, and hydroelectric plants—up to the newest standard and a little beyond—bridged rivers and waterfalls. As time went on, carbon levels decreased markedly, to a level that couldn't quite be explained by the many stands of new-growth trees—although 'new-growth' couldn't be applied to the towering oaks and maples she left in her wake—that came up overnight.
No one who noticed, which was everyone, said anything. But the governmental summons slowed to a trickle, before finally stopping.
Jane waited. A week, then two. A month, then another.
"Fucking cowards," was Darcy's succinct estimation. Privately, Jane agreed.
People were confused, undoubtedly. News anchors spun frantically, putting out puff-pieces about the majesty of the American spirit and praising the fresh can-do attitude shown by her industrialists, philanthropists, and scientists. Most people accepted that, whether because they believed it or whether because they didn't want to examine the sudden onslaught of miracles too closely, it didn't matter.
But other countries began to take notice.
Foreign governments began to release statements, on the one hand praising American innovation that seemed to be leading to its swift recovery, and on the other hand subtly condemning its selfishness in not sharing these advances. If the invasion of Earth had proved one thing, the common thread went, it proved that we are all one species, and we live and die together. It was a shame that America, they concluded, seemed content to return to its hegemonic, superior ways.
Eventually, Jane sent an email to Senator Flores-Martinez, asking what had gone wrong, while already knowing the answer she would get.
But it still hurt when the Senator replied with a straightforward: You fucked it up for both of us. Wait until I fix things. If I can.
Darcy, meanwhile, was losing her mind. "She wants us to wait, when people are dying from fallout and living on poisoned land? When every day we wait, someone else gets leukemia? It's not as if the rest of the world is wrong! We should be helping them too."
That was when the pressure really started.
"Let's go elsewhere," Darcy said, one night as they sat together staring out the windows at the city struggling along beneath them. There was still not enough power to go around. There was still rubble crowding every street. There were still food shortages in every major city, and stockpiles of food, medicine, and other necessities dwindled by the day. Children weren't going to school; with every day that passed, their futures were being robbed. "There must be one country in the world that isn't afraid of changing it."
Jane's mouth opened to object, but there were no good objections. Her national identity had never been strong enough to keep her from identifying with others, and she chafed to do good as much as Darcy did. Somehow it was worse—to have the power, to know her capabilities, and to be deliberately held back from acting.
They left that night, abandoning their computers, phones, and anything that might be used to track them behind.
They had gone to Britain, Australia, and South Africa before Darcy pointed out they didn't need to limit themselves to English-speaking countries. Jane could make herself the mistress of any language at a thought. So Jane stuffed herself full of new words that weren't actually new, and took them to Mongolia, Chad, Uzbekistan, Bolivia, and Antarctica. All the permanent residents of the latter had been evacuated, but the penguins certainly appreciated the quantity of ice Jane conjured for them.
Some countries welcomed her with desperate cries for reform. Others didn't. And as they traveled, even Jane, who was by no means politically-savvy, began to pick up on the pattern.
They spent months in South America, making every change they were asked to, and when they left, Darcy shook her head and laughed.
"It's as if the CIA never happened!"
Jane caught the joke—as Darcy had made her well-aware of the US government's past involvement in all the countries they visited—but she couldn't bring herself even to smile. They had both made new email accounts and picked up new burner phones, and the CIA had already made that their business too. She kept deleting the Senator's emails, but even without opening them, she could still read the subject lines and internalize the guilt.
It seemed like everything she did pissed someone off. For every country she helped, she hurt another by inattention.
One night, somewhere in Senegal—she wasn't even certain the name of the city—she broke down in ugly sobs.
"This is going to take years," she pressed her face into Darcy's shoulder in an attempt to stop shaking, "I can't do this for years. All this suffering...seeing it all little by little, one step at a time..."
"I know," Darcy rubbed her back in long, soothing strokes, Jane mortified from how her sweat-wet shirt stuck to her palm, "But you know the alternative. You know the other way we could do this."
Jane snuffled herself together, Darcy's suggestion drying her tears faster than any tissue ever could. "We can't. I can't."
"Except you could. You could do whatever you wanted to do. You could even make people forget that you'd done it, once it was done."
"Darcy," she groaned, wanting to put her hands to her ears in a childish attempt not to listen, "please stop. I can't. We talked about this. The Senator wasn't wrong when she said that this might break the world. It'll terrify people, and after all they've been through..."
"Yeah, they'll be scared," Darcy's mouth set in its firm line that told Jane she wasn't about to be swayed, "until they realize that the world's better for it. Has anyone complained about what you've done for them so far?"
"We've been invited everywhere we've been. And there's always been a cover story. Enough for plausible deniability, at least."
"People are tougher than you think they are."
"I'm not," she admitted, voice small and fragile. "If I were, I could hold on and do this the right way."
"You shouldn't have to," Darcy took her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. "Jane, you've been through things no human could even imagine. You've turned into a fucking superhero because of a primordial force from the origin of the universe. You helped topple the most powerful beings in however many Realms there are, and you're still standing. Give yourself some credit. Give the rest of us some too."
Jane couldn't tell if she was so close to being persuaded either from the truth of Darcy's argument or her own exhaustion. Her former certainty—in her own rightness, in her determination to do this only when asked—was hanging by a thread. Something was going to have to give, and she was only afraid it would give for the wrong reasons. But what were the right reasons? Did she have the right to stand on her own judgment and ignore Darcy? They had been invited many places, been begged to come, even. And yet, no one had been honest about her presence. Rumors had leaked, to be dismissed as wild conspiracy theories. Whistleblowers had been discredited, each one another straw that came closer and closer to breaking Jane's back. And some governments were so secretive that she was smuggled in and out like contraband, speaking only with a tiny team of politicians to get her work done.
Darcy said to be honest. Others, through their actions, warned against it. Jane had no idea what to think.
Except, she did. She knew. Her certainty hadn't really wavered.
But she was just so tired.
"Okay," she said, stomach dropping even as she said it. "If we did something all at once, where do you think we should go?"
Two weeks later, and Jane was deafened by the noise. Headlines shrieked at her, wherever she saw them. Crowds roared and moaned and surged, whenever they saw her. People talked at her all day, until she couldn't take in another word, not another syllable. She couldn't hear a single note in the discord that assaulted her through the days and chased her into her dreams.
Everyone had an opinion about her, about what she'd done. And everyone felt they had the right to say it, as loudly and as often as they wanted.
Jane tried not to take it personally. She knew this would happen, and, logically, sensibly, she wasn't offended. The insults, the accusations, the wild theories...it didn't surprise her that all these had grown up quickly as mushrooms after a rainstorm. She had brought the rain. She didn't get to complain about the consequences.
That didn't stop her from wishing they'd just shut up.
At least today, she was taking a positive step in that direction. The interview she was about to do—so soon that a makeup artist was currently sponging on foundation with a shaking hand, her eyes darting all over Jane's face except her eyes—would be her first public appearance since she'd stood on the dome of the newly-restored Capitol building in the heart of the fully rebuilt National Mall while Darcy down below had released her statement to the assembled press officers.
It had been shocking, what she'd done. They'd planned it that way, wanted it to be something huge, visible, and impossible to deny. They had very much brought all the attention on themselves.
None of that helped.
She noticed the makeup artist was done only when she noticed the absence of fluttering butterfly wings on her face. The woman had packed her brushes and left without so much as a word. Again, Jane couldn't blame her. She had seen the fear in her face. It was new, having people be afraid of her. Even when Jane had proved her power to Loki, Odin, Surtr, and Laufey, they hadn't been afraid of her. They'd been covetous, jealous, indignant, furious, yes...but not afraid. Only Hela had shown fear, but in a cocktail with all the other reactions.
She found that afraid was the most unsettling reaction of all of them. She didn't want to be someone that people feared. Increasingly, she just wanted to be someone that people ignored. Wanted it in the most desperate way, like a starving woman wants food, a drowning one wants air, and a freezing one wants warmth.
"You ready?" Darcy's head poked around the corner, the dark circles under her eyes visible even in the dim light of the studio's green room. At least Jane wasn't suffering alone, though she chastised herself for taking comfort in the knowledge that her friend felt at least a fraction of what she did. "I went over the questions with them again," she said, shuffling into the room as she shuffled her papers, not waiting for an answer. "They'll stick to the script. Wanna practice again?"
"Not really," the words danced around the pages every time she picked them up, but she didn't need to memorize them. The Aether had committed them to its cosmic memory, and she planned on leaning on that like a crutch during this interview. Besides, every time she breathed, the lump in her throat seemed to grow. Better to be quiet until the interview.
"Okay," Darcy hesitated. "The audience is a little bigger than they promised."
A hundred thoughts flashed through her mind. "Oh?"
"Yeah. It's full. But there's tons of security, and they've sworn that anyone who says anything gets escorted out, right away. I've told them that if it gets out of hand, we're gone. They want this exclusive; they'll do what we want."
Jane could have pointed out they already very much hadn't by allowing an audience in the room at all, but it wouldn't matter. Darcy was already well-aware, just as she was well-aware they had to do this if their plan was going to work at all. Public perception on Jane had to shift in her favor so that more and more voices would clamor for her to work her magic on a greater and greater part of the world.
Darcy checked her phone, and sighed. "Time to go. Are you ready?"
Jane smiled. She hadn't been ready for any of this, from the invasion, to mounting a defense of Manhattan, to losing, to being captured, to catching Loki's eye, to being abducted, to being hurt, to gaining power, to staging a coup, to being loved in the most absurd and inappropriate way she could possibly have imagined...
But she'd done it. Somehow. Because in the end, it didn't matter how she did it. What mattered was only that she did it at all. What mattered was taking the next logical step, and the one after that, and the one after that.
She stood up. Swallowed hard.
"Let's do this."
A year passed. The slow spaceship that was Earth made one revolution around the sun. And the face it turned to the rest of the galaxy was completely different to the one it had shown twelve months before.
Its cities were either rebuilt or re-engineered entirely. Its lights glowed from wind, solar, geothermal, or arc reactor sources. Fewer people meant fewer cars, but better cities meant fewer still were needed. High-speed trains connected not only cities, but continents. Healthy, thriving forests bloomed in lands where decades of clear-cutting had destroyed not just the wood, but the soil beneath it. Not a speck of plastic was in the blue, blue oceans, nor in the stomachs of the millions and millions of new fish that swam there.
Factories no longer spewed smoke. Nuclear reactors were no longer needed, and so they and their carefully-stored poisonous waste had never existed at all. The future and the past had both been inextricably changed.
One thing that hadn't was the noise. The discontent.
That was endless.
Even on the top of Humphreys Peak—because Jane had no better place to call home than Arizona, when all was said and done—with nobody around for the entire five-mile climb to the top, Jane could still hear it. She couldn't stop herself anymore. She could have magicked her ears away, and she still would have had an endless narrative playing directly into her brain.
Had humanity's desires been achievable, she would have given them what they wanted. Endless food springing from the ground, without the slightest effort needed to bring it forth? Child's play. Weather controls on dials in everyone's house? Tricky, but doable. A new species of playful, harmless lions? Why not?
They didn't want that. Well, to be fair, some did. Jane had a whole staff of people to pick through her inbox, sifting stuff like that out. Whole governments intervened on her behalf, careful—so careful—not to tire or offend their closest thing to a living goddess.
But what most people wanted was what Jane knew she could never give them.
They wanted the dead back.
They wanted them never to have died.
They wanted the trauma undone, the past unwritten.
Could Jane have done it? In her darkest moments, she thought: maybe.
The possibility of it terrified her. So she remained adamant that she couldn't. The dead were outside her sphere of influence. For God's sake, she'd been to Hel! She knew what had happened to the reanimated corpses Hela had co-opted. She had already done her best to set them free, and her best had only been enough to shift their allegiance from Hela to herself. She couldn't imagine doing the same for all the dead on Earth, puppeteering them back to their loved ones, putting on a daily show on a planetary scale, just so everyone would be able to pretend that their loss and trauma hadn't happened.
But communicating all this to humanity, who had seen her work miracles beyond their ability to imagine until they saw them happen before their eyes...
They didn't believe her. They didn't want to believe her. Jane had made them a paradise, but it would never deserve that name until she made it possible for all humanity to live there, together again, as they should always have been.
Of course she understood how they felt. She expressed her sympathy all the time, in press releases, in interviews, while waiting in lines, while walking through crowds, while hiking alone—because alone was the only time people didn't ask her, didn't pester, didn't get on their knees and beg—but it wasn't enough. Because they didn't believe her. They didn't believe she couldn't, and so all they knew was that she wouldn't.
She had given them paradise, but it was a hollow one. Incomplete.
The sun was rising, and with dawn, the hiking trail would open. Jane unfolded her stiff and chilled limbs and stood, eyes fixed on the horizon where the low clouds were turning pale yellow and baby pink. People knew her habits, her desire for solitude. They'd be here soon. If she wanted to hike the way she wanted—in the old-fashioned, human way, on her own two feet—she had to leave before dawn.
It didn't matter. The parking lot was already jammed full, national guard soldiers blocking the path. Jane hid behind a rock and sighed. This would be the fourth car she'd abandoned, but she could go and pick it up later that night. With a thought, she vanished from the trail and appeared in her living room. Although 'her' living room would be a misnomer. It was 'a' living room, temporary and transient, like the last dozen she'd inhabited. Sometimes for only a night or two, sometimes for a whole month, but eventually, inevitably, she'd have to move on.
For now though, it was a quiet place to be. She'd only chosen it a few days ago, though days, like everything else, were hard to keep track of now. Time melted and slithered, like facts, like emotions. There were so few things left that were dependable around Jane, that the basic facts of the universe seemed malleable, like wet sand from a castle that hadn't been built yet.
A clatter sounded in the kitchen, and Jane jumped.
"Hey, pretty lady," Darcy's voice was hoarse with sleeplessness, "how do you like your eggs?"
Jane laughed. She only laughed around Darcy anymore, but at least she could still do it. It hurt her ribs a bit; the muscles there weren't accustomed to the strain.
"Scrambled, please. There should be some mushrooms in the fridge; I'll love you forever if you saute them in balsamic and toss them in, too."
"Well, I did haul my ass all the way to Arizona to be your short-order cook, so your wish is my command." Jane heard the fridge door open and close, and the startled plastic squeak of a container opening. A moment later, the sharp scent of balsamic knifed through the sterile air. Jane sneezed.
"This'll take a minute, so go shower," Darcy's matter-of-fact order was bracing. So was her insult. "I can smell you."
Jane laughed, the sound cracking through her dry throat. She couldn't remember the last time she'd done that, but she suspected it was the last time Darcy had paid her a visit. She did as she was told, and showered. Then ate her eggs with a slice of toasted sourdough bread as Darcy filled the static air with a cheerful babble of inconsequential gossip. They both knew it was a prelude to something—Darcy had her agenda, like anyone else—but Jane appreciated the effort, anyway. And the food.
Once she pushed her plate away, though, Darcy's gaze sharpened over the edge of her coffee cup, and Jane braced herself.
"I wanna ask something."
"Yeah?" she swallowed her own coffee, a little too fast. It burned the roof of her mouth; then it didn't, and it never had. Jane used her powers on herself now nearly as often as she used them for others.
"Do you remember Ian?" Darcy corrected herself immediately, "No, of course you wouldn't. You never met him. Maybe once. Anyway," she waved her hand, but the gesture was studied, stiff. "doesn't matter. We were gonna try to get over the Atlantic, after Manhattan fell. I chickened out; he went. I've been trying to find him ever since I got back."
Dread prickled in Jane's stomach, curdling her breakfast. "Yeah?"
Despite all the improvements they'd made, making a complete list of the dead was something Jane had never attempted to put together. She could have done it—and certainly had been asked to do it—but making and then delivering a list of over two billion names was something Jane couldn't even imagine herself doing. The pain, on such a global scale...she knew she was selfish, avoiding it. She excused herself from the job knowing it wouldn't change the agony of the Earth, and might in fact sharpen it. But she also knew it could bring closure. Just because she couldn't stand knowing whom she'd lost and couldn't bear the idea of forcing herself to accept their deaths didn't mean that no one else could.
"I found him." Darcy went on.
Her voice was not a celebration. Jane swallowed bile.
Darcy's eyes flickered up, then down. A bitter smile curled her lip. "I found proof, anyway. The boat he was on was sunk. There was one survivor, and she tells me that she saw...she saw him..." she swallowed, and shrugged, and her lips trembled, "He didn't make it."
Jane sighed, but it wasn't a release. She knew what was coming, and tried to head it off. "Darcy, I'm so, so so—"
"I know," Darcy nodded, sharp. "I know. Everyone's sorry. His sister's sorry. His stepdad, too. They're the only ones who are left, to be sorry. And me, of course," a tear flashed down her face, and she sniffled, "I'm sorry. Jane—"
"Darcy," Jane slid back from the table, "no."
"You're the only one who can—"
"I can't. You know why I can't."
"I'm not asking for that." Darcy cleared her throat and wiped the tears out of her eyes so definitely that her digging fingers left deep red impressions on her pale cheekbones. "I want you to take my memories away."
Jane's breath caught. "What?"
"I've tried. I don't even know why this is my limit, but it is." Darcy shrugged, a helpless, tremulous smile on her face, "Everything else, I could handle. We changed the world; we saved it. That should be enough, right? I know; I've told myself. But it isn't. Because when I found out that Ian was..." she swallowed, and fresh tears flowed. She let them, as if the effort of staunching them was beyond her. "It's been months, and I can't...I can't move on. I had to sit across from what was left of his family to tell them, and...I don't even know how I stood up, after. I wanted to die. I still want to die."
"When," Jane took a careful breath, "When did you find out?"
"Two months ago."
Mentally, Jane counted. It had been about three since they'd last met. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"I'm telling you now. I didn't want to add anything else to your plate."
"Darcy," Jane slid forward, reaching a hand across the table that Darcy didn't take, "You're the only thing left I care about. You could have come to me; you can always come to me."
"I know. This wasn't about you. I was trying to get my head on straight; I've been trying. That's why I'm telling you now. It's not working," she sighed, and finally wiped her tears, though a few more spilled over her fingers. "I can't...see a way out of this. I've talked to people, and tried things, and nothing's helping. And from what my therapists have told me...I'm not the only one."
Jane knew. She knew the suicide rates had gone up, no matter how much life on Earth had, on paper, improved. People had made her keenly aware of it, when they'd shoved pictures of their dead loved ones into her face as they'd begged her to bring them back, telling her that they couldn't go on like this. Alone.
Darcy's quiet despair, though...it hit her, hurt her, in a way she didn't know she could still be hurt. It took her breath away, and she heard the blood surge in her ears as her heart rate skyrocketed. She couldn't lose Darcy. She couldn't.
It would untether her.
"You want me to take," she paused, "just his memory?"
Darcy sighed, a blissful, relieved smile spreading across her face as tension leaked from it. Within arm's reach of oblivion, she was able to lay down her despair at last. "Yeah," she said thickly, "I think if I just...didn't have that on my mind, I could bear everything else."
Jane sighed. All her arguments—some that she'd even made directly to Darcy, in the past—seemed weak and flimsy in the face of her friend's immediate pain. Messing around in Darcy's brain seemed, in that moment, not only the right thing to do, but the only thing to do.
"Hold my hand," she murmured. Contact wasn't strictly necessary, but she hoped it would help them both. They'd pulled each other through so many things in the past; they'd get each other through this, now.
Darcy's mind was a tangle of overlapping threads, some bright and vibrant like golden chains in the sun, others faint and glimmering like spiderwebs at dawn. Jane lost herself in following the threads, whizzing past a host of memories, so fast and fleeting she could barely grasp what they were before they were gone. Memories of Darcy's college days, her friends, her family, Jane herself, Ian, the war, Asgard...everything was so interconnected that Jane couldn't see how to unwind Ian from everything else that had happened around him. Memory was nonlinear; anything that happened affected the recollection of anything that came both before and after.
She withdrew from Darcy's mind, slowly. Darcy's smile faded and her eyes—closed before—fluttered open as Jane pulled her hand back.
"I—I don't feel any different."
"I don't think I can do this," Jane said. "It's too complicated; if I took him away, there'd be gaps everywhere. And if I erased your memory before he came into your life, you'd lose everything that came after."
Darcy's head bent, a flower on a stem too weak to support it. She was silent for a very long, very grim moment.
Finally, her head rose again. "Then you'll have to change how I feel about him. The memories will still be there, but they just won't matter to me. Not the way they do now."
Jane squirmed in her seat, but in for a penny, in for a pound. She'd lost the right to object. "Okay."
She dove in again, isolating the initial memory of Ian, so bright, so rosy. Darcy had felt a myriad of ways about the gangly kid, ways that surprised Darcy herself. Jane closed an imaginary fist around that first memory, its raw emotion warm and vibrant, and chilled it. The memory, that first memory, dimmed, a candle-flame drowning in its own wax, and with it, all that came afterwards dimmed too. In affecting the root memory, an inevitable chain-reaction began that altered the entire landscape of Darcy's mind. Even her trip to speak to Ian's family was now a dutiful visit she'd made, to give a colleague's family some closure, and not something terribly, personally painful. Jane skirted a few of Darcy's other memories, both pleased and concerned by how Darcy's perception of her entire relationship with Ian had changed.
She surfaced, sighing lightly. Darcy's eyes were closed, and the tears had dried on her cheeks.
Jane squeezed her palm. "How do you feel?"
Darcy roused with a shrug, yawning as if she'd been asleep. "Fine," she said, her frank voice practical as always. "Why? Were we talking about something?"
Jane's lips thinned, but she managed a smile. "Nothing important."
It was funny how once one bridge was crossed, crossing another became intellectually easier. Jane had once thought she'd never use her powers on herself, except in most dire need. Then one day, she'd had a headache, and aspirin hadn't helped. The definition of 'dire need' had changed that day, and continued to evolve as Jane's sensitivity to self-modification gradually shifted. After all, she had powers! Why should she suffer when she didn't have to?
Jane could feel her sensitivity dulling now. Like holding a tide back with her outstretched palms, though, she also felt herself powerless to stop this sea-change. Darcy was happier. Stress and tension was out of her mind; yes, she'd lost Ian, and yes, she was sad, but the sadness was manageable. She'd lost a coworker, not a soulmate. She could move on. She could—and would, hopefully—grow, develop new relationships, and find the love that she no longer remembered had once been taken from her. And she could do all that with just one little nudge of Jane's influence, one chilling hand laid on one foundational memory.
What was to stop Jane from doing that again? From doing it to more people? From doing it to the world?
Jane sat on her bench atop Humphreys Peak and stared at the stars. She asked herself those questions, again and again, and her answers shifted and evolved. Nothing could stop her. No one could. Doing it to the whole world at once would be hard, but not impossible. Everyone had lost someone important. Some people had lost connections so important that they couldn't see a way into the future anymore. And if they couldn't see the future, they might stop themselves from reaching it. Which could affect others and others, on and on, until the Earth would be blighted by an epidemic of grief and hopelessness, just as dangerous as the apocalypse of nuclear fallout it had faced just over a year ago.
She had stopped the former disaster. Why shouldn't she stop the other?
Jane sat up, her head reeling. She should. She'd played God this far, hadn't she? If she had to do one more thing, even if it violated every single living human's mind...wouldn't that be worth it if the world was finally saved and free to move forward into the bright future she and so many others had worked so hard to craft?
They wouldn't forget their loved ones, after all. Darcy remembered Ian. Her memories were intact. The laughs they'd shared, the time they'd spent...it was all still there. The only difference was the importance those memories held to her. And that, in itself, didn't change anything else about Darcy. Her ability to love, and love deeply, was still there.
The more she thought about it, the more the cycle of Jane's altering thoughts reinforced itself. What was impossible, unthinkable, was now the only logical, sensible thing to do.
Just as Jane knew—and she knew, deep down—that she had to do this, she also knew that once she did, Earth could no longer be her home. What she was going to do would be a greater crime than anything Odin and his children had done to Earth. They had only killed people. She would be destroying the significance of their memories, erasing them in a wholly different way.
Did she have reasons, good, valid, reasons, for doing this? Of course. But that didn't make what she was contemplating any less monstrous. And if she did it right, there would be no one to care enough to punish her for this crime. So she would have to do it herself. Banishment was as good a punishment as any.
But another, gleeful consequence occurred to her. Once she did this, humanity wouldn't need her any more. She would be free to...
To do what? She had no idea. But that didn't matter. Humanity would be safe from its last, greatest crisis, and she would be free. That was enough of a start to get on with.
Jane sat upright on her bench, turning her gaze away from the stars. Their clear, unblinking eyes were her only witnesses as she breathed deeply, shook out her arms, and let her mind wander far and wide.
The Aether bloomed with her new request, stretching itself and its influence in a net wide enough to encompass the world. As its power built within Jane and radiated endlessly outwards, she had a moment of existential terror at just how little she had called on its true power in the past. The Aether was a cosmic force from the foundation of the universe, and she had been asking it to do party tricks. For the first time, she was brushing up against the limits of its true capability. Information flooded Jane's mind as she took the memories of all humanity into her brain, and for a moment, she was as vast and limitless as the Aether itself. Her heart, human still, ached as it swelled with the consciousness of the magnitude of humanity's loss, and sudden understanding slammed into her that this could not be allowed to continue. Some traumas could not be lived through; they must be undone.
And it was done. Undone. Jane laid a cooling hand on all the brightest, best memories, the ones that could not rest easy because of the way they had ended, and in her passing, a soothing peace descended on the world. She could feel it in every individual mind; she knew it as surely as she knew her own thoughts. This would be her greatest contribution to the future of humanity, more than the clean water or the clear skies or the new sources of power or the food she had made spring from the ground. This, a clean slate, an emotional reprieve from all the grief and suffering of the past, would push humanity into its unclouded future.
With a soft gasp, her eyes opened on a piercing ray of sunlight. The morning had arrived without her awareness, and the sharp lance of light startled tears to her eyes. One ran down her cheek and into the seam of her lips, and its taste was bitter on her tongue.
Humanity shrugged off the past like a nightmare. And just like a nightmare seems unimportant in the light of day, it could now collectively rationalize its losses as something over and done with. They had all lost people, sure, but those who were most important had survived. They were lucky, really. Newspaper headlines focused on new initiatives, not memorial efforts. The dead were buried in mass graves, and the funerals were attended dutifully. Pictures were taken down from walls, and new ones were hung in their stead.
Jane watched it happen. For the first few weeks, she felt as tense and doubtful as she had when she and Darcy had first started to change the world, fearful that some terrible consequence would result from her amateurish meddling. But nothing did. The wait times for therapists plummeted. The suicide rates decreased sharply, and as the months went on, birthrates rose from flatlines.
Most importantly—to Jane, at least—Darcy introduced her to her a boyfriend, her smiles light and untroubled. The three of them had dinner together, Darcy sliding into his lap on the sofa afterwards and planting a giant kiss on his cheek as he grinned.
Jane said goodbye to them that night, knowing it would be the last time she'd ever see her friend. Okay, so maybe that was a little bit dramatic, but she knew now hat her job was done. She didn't know what she'd do in the future, but all she wanted to do was lie down in some corner of the universe and wait for the guilt to fade.
She knew she would be waiting for a very, very long time. Which meant that there was really only one place in the universe she could go. Darcy, bless her, would get worried. She'd come calling. She'd confront Jane with the consequences of her actions, even if they were only positive ones. Jane didn't want confrontation. She didn't want reminders. She didn't want the guilt in knowing that she had engineered every happy smile on Earth, and that she had only put them there by violating every single human mind.
Her actions were defensible. Understandable. Reasonable. Logical.
They had still been wrong.
Jane wandered aimlessly around her apartment that night, picking things up and immediately putting them down. There was nothing there important enough to take with her. There was nothing she had that she couldn't either summon or make again if she wanted it in the future. And choosing things to take would have been making decisions, and she was highly skeptical of her ability to make good decisions just then.
She turned on the TV, flipped through the channels. She checked her emails. She flipped through a book and all the words danced before her eyes.
But she was just dodging the inevitable. She knew what she was going to do. What she had to do.
What she wanted to do.
She paced. She paced from one end of her living room to the other, and each time she did, the room lengthened a bit. Then one end of it faded away. And then she walked out of it and across the universe altogether.
Asgard's throne room was different than she had remembered it. The threatening shadows were just as deep, the wells of fire that cast those shadows just as bright. The throne itself was less intimidating, though; its wings of gold had been cast off. The biggest change was the ceiling. Gone were Odin, and Frigga, Thor and Hela. Gone even was Loki. Now there was only a fractal geometric pattern inlaid with glittering stones that reminded Jane of a mosque. What a profane thought, to think of God in a place where Loki ruled. But she was a little surprised that he was so self-effacing. She half expected to find a giant statute of the man himself there as a reminder of who had taken Odin's seat.
At least it was night on Asgard too, and the room was abandoned. Not even a guard was there to protect the empty throne. Did Loki trust anyone enough to do that for him?
She banished the thought. She wasn't here to involve herself in anything; she wasn't there to care. She was there because Asgard was the one place in the universe she could be where she might not matter at all. She was desperate for anonymity. For irrelevance. For insignificance.
Yet even here, she would be seen.
The double doors to the throne room flew open, crashing against the walls behind them. Jane turned, her gaze dropping from the ceiling.
They stared at each other for a long moment. Even at this distance, Jane could swear she saw his eyes glitter.
She cleared her throat. "My old room still available?" It was absurd, because he was the last person she would ever need to perform for, but she was glad her voice didn't shake.
Loki cleared his own throat, and he stepped forward. Without his armor—which he hadn't summoned—he seemed oddly soft and vulnerable. The sly, sideways slant of his eyes was less pronounced than before, as was his habitual sneaking smirk. Authority had settled on his shoulders, and with it had come certainty. He looked like he knew who he was, and for the first time, Jane envied him.
His teasing nature, though, was certainly not gone. As he drew nearer, he offered her his arm with a mocking, flourishing bow.
"Milady," he said, winking up at her. Jane scowled.
"I'll take that as a yes," she brushed past him and walked towards the door. His laughter chased her like a ghost, and her skin prickled.
Notes: No one might read this, but! I still feel glad that I'm finally finishing this story! There is another epilogue (already almost done!) that takes place on Asgard. If you do read this, and the other, I hope you enjoy the extra 20k words of content!