Work Text:
Illuminated
Written for Lokane Week 2020
Prompt: Lights | I love you. I will love you till the stars crumble, which is a less idle threat than is usual to lovers on parting, Robin McKinley
Asgard at night is a feast of lights. Torches outline gleaming streets, turning them to dull rivers of gold flowing through the city, studded with tiny red flames marking street corners and intersections. The aurora above is a scarf of colored silks, diaphanous in the sky, veiling the stars in pink, green, and purple and transforming them into strings of fairy lights. Asgard's moons are large and round as paper lanterns, washing the houses in silvery effervescence. The lights are so bright and defined as to be almost tangible. Light here is not merely seen in what it illuminates, but seen as an entity in itself.
Standing on her balcony, Jane's fingers twitch. She half-believes that if she reached out, she could pluck the wavelengths of light like strings in her fingers, tie them together in knots, or wind them into even more unique and beautiful shapes and colors. Starlight plays over the back of her hands; she turns her palms to cup it inside, and feels nothing.
So much for fantasy.
"Are you still determined to go back?" his voice at her back is a shadow, looming into the brilliance of the scene before her.
"Yes," is all she can say, because she's said it before and nothing in between her first admission and this one has changed her mind. It's beautiful, it's marvelous, and it's everything she thought she always wanted, but Asgard is also fundamentally alien and alienating. She will never be at home here, no matter how long she stays. Better to leave now, while her heart is still free.
Free enough, that is. It has already started to expand into the vast possibilities offered in Asgard, already started to put down roots, and Jane knows that when she leaves the next day, those tender little roots will tear and bleed bitter, raw sap into her veins. But bleeding stops, eventually. Better a little pain now than a lot later.
She hates that there is no painless option left to her. No path she can walk that won't cut with each step. Such is life, she can rationalize it. But such has never been her life.
Frustration sharpens his tone, honing it to petulance. "Why? There is no need for this. Everything you could want, I can give you. Everything you need can be here. I am here."
"I know," she says, wishing that her words could soothe him. But he is beyond the comfort of her words, now that she won't give him the only one he wants to hear, "But I don't want to be given things, Loki. I want to give. And what can I give Asgard that's worth anything at all?"
"To Hel with Asgard," he growls. His hands fasten around her waist, fingers digging into her hips. "Why do you care for it when it will never care for you?"
Funny how they can know the same truth and still view its impact in such different ways!
She breathes a shaky laugh. "Exactly. I'm useful on Earth; I can help people. Here, I'm useless. And I've tried, but I just can't be useless. I suck at it."
"Is it not enough, then, that you are useful to me?"
This is her strongest attachment, her deepest root. It takes her a moment to prepare, but she fastens her hand around it and yanks, feeling a hot rush of blood burst from the torn skin. Copper, sweet and cloying, is on her tongue as she says, "It's not. I'm sorry. I love you, I do, but I need more."
His grip tightens until Jane winces at the cruel bite of his fingers, but before she can object, he feels her stiffen and releases her. She still does not turn, fixing her misty eyes on the lights above and below, lights that now smear and blur through the tears in her eyes.
He sighs, and the sound is bitter defeat. "I will love you till the stars crumble. Which," he chuckles, but there is no humor in it, "is a less idle threat than is usual to lovers on parting."
She nods. "I know. But it's better this way. And when Odin lets you out of house arrest, you can come down to Earth and see me."
It's an idle promise; she'll be long dead by the time the All-Father trusts his youngest unsupervised in the universe again. Loki doesn't dignify her pretense with one of his own.
Her heart is still pumping, sluggish blood oozing out of her broken heart, swelling into her chest until she feels it will burst from the pressure. Oh, it hurts. Jane has never been in love before, and nothing, not all the songs and stories and movies and books and two o'clock calls from Darcy could have prepared her for the sheer agonizing ache of it.
Before she explodes, she gasps, "You will. You'll get out, and you'll come to Earth. We'll go to my old lab in New Mexico, and…and…" she runs out of breath and slumps forward on her hands, tears splattering against the marble railing, turning to diamonds in the starlight above. Even her pain transforms into beauty, here.
She can't wait to go home.
"I'll get out," his hands return, gentle this time, smoothing over her back, running over her shoulders, teasing out her tension even as they set her skin aflame, "And wherever you are, that's where I'll meet you. Should you mind leaving Earth, so long as we do not return to Asgard?"
She sniffles. "Nah. You can take me anywhere. I'm a cheap date."
He kisses the back of her neck. She whimpers.
"Don't. Don't…I shouldn't have…"
He shushes her. "It's all right, Jane. It's all right. You are right, of course. We should not stay here, both of us constantly at the mercy of Odin's whim. I was a fool to think you would stand for it, and neither shall I."
"Loki, whatever it is you're thinking—"
"I'm thinking nothing. You have nothing to worry about. I promise."
"A promise from you is about as valuable as—as—"
His laugh ghosts over her nape. "Well?"
"Shut up," she grumbles, "You've got the silver tongue, not me. I don't believe you, is what I'm saying. You're plotting something."
"Several things, but such is nothing unusual. Trust that, whatever I am planning, no suspicion of it will cling to you."
"It won't? When I disappear from Earth, that won't be suspicious?"
"You don't think that I could—"
"No," she interrupts him, just barely resisting the urge to clamp her hands over her ears, "I don't want to know. I may have accidentally inspired you to commit treason—again—but I don't want to know about it. Okay?"
"Very well," he accedes, but she can still hear the satisfaction he exudes with each syllable. She's opened a can of worms, there. Strangely, she doesn't feel guilty in the slightest.
"Good. Thank you. Well," she turns at last, trying to avoid the emerald lights that are his eyes, winking in the darkness, "goodbye, then."
"Goodbye, Jane Foster. Safe travels." He steps aside as she skirts him, nervous as a gazelle under a cheetah's hungry gaze. She has almost escaped when he drops a courtly bow and murmurs, "May our paths cross again soon."
"Don't," she spits the word, brandishing a finger in his laughing face, "No. I don't—" Her tongue trips over itself. No good can come of this. She spins and hustles off the balcony, through the sitting room, into the foyer, and out into the deserted hall.
There she can press her cold hands to her flaming cheeks and conceal her broad grin behind her fingers. Sorrow and glee swirl in her heart, and though she can't be happy about what she's done—because happiness is a far too simple and uncomplicated an emotion for what Loki makes her feel—she's certainly not bleeding anymore.
Still, it won't do for anyone to see her standing just outside the disgraced Prince's door, no matter how many evenings she's spent there during her most recent visit to Asgard. She trots down the hallway, following the flickering torches back to her own room, will o' the wisps illuminating her path towards an uncertain future.
What will be will be. At the very least, Jane feels ready to pack her bags now.