Jane didn’t let Thor or Odin hurt Loki, but she didn’t stop them from meting out punishment either. The look of betrayal on Loki’s face when she made no move to stop his father and brother from locking him up would stay with Jane forever.
She may have not wanted him hurt, but that didn’t mean she was going to defend his actions either. How could she? He’d kidnapped her. That wasn’t love. That was obsession. And despite what she felt for him, she also knew it wasn’t real. It was simply Stockholm Syndrome. Jane had always had a strong moral compass. She knew right from wrong and felt very strongly about it. It was part of the reason she and Thor got on so well.
It didn’t make her feel any better though, seeing Loki taken off to the dungeons in chains. She’d had to leave the hall; she couldn’t take it. She told herself over and over that what she felt wasn’t real. It had been manufactured by his kidnapping of her and the time they had spent together. It had nothing to do with how he’d doted on her, kissed her so passionately and held her as though she was the most precious thing in the universe to him. Sadly, there weren’t any texts in the library of Asgard on Stockholm Syndrome.
It didn’t take long for Jane to decide that she couldn’t stay in Asgard.
She couldn’t marry Thor. Not anymore. In that, Loki had succeeded.
“Can you tell me what happened on Alfheim?” Thor asked after Jane announced she wanted to return home to Earth and could not marry him.
The words wouldn’t come to tell Thor what she’d done and how she’d felt about Loki. She couldn’t tell him that she felt very confused, very overwhelmed, and like she didn’t know what to do with herself. She wanted to go home and put all of it behind her. Asgard, Gods, different realms – she’d work fucking retail and put science all behind her.
Frigga opted to tell Loki that Jane was leaving Asgard. Loki begged to see her, begged his mother to stop her from leaving Asgard and later, when Frigga informed him that Jane refused to see him Loki had screamed and shouted and began to throw things to the point that he’d had to be restrained. Not that he would ever hurt Frigga, but his cell and meager belongings therein had taken quite the beating.
It had been a tearful and heartbreaking goodbye with Thor, but Jane couldn’t help but feel relief when she landed in London where Darcy and Erik were staying.
It was time to put everything behind her. Every single bit of it.
XXXXXXXXX
Jane did a lot of reading on the internet about Stockholm Syndrome after she’d returned to Earth. A lot of what she read revolved around abuse and trauma and how victims sympathized with their captors and had “positive feelings” about them. Some of the scenarios described did not fit the bill for her. Loki didn’t abuse her. He held her captive, yes, but he didn’t harm her.
“Keeping you captive was harming you,” Erik pointed out.
“But he didn’t hit me. Didn’t let me starve or go thirsty,” Jane argued.
“Jane, he held you captive,” Darcy said. “In a cave. In the middle of nowhere. Maybe he didn’t physically harm you, but kidnapping you like that was psychologically distressing. Look at you!”
Jane looked down at herself. “What?”
“You’ve been in your pajamas this whole week. You’ve showered twice. You’re up all night reading up on Stockholm Syndrome and you sleep all day. You barely eat and when you do it’s more junk than usual. You’re a mess!”
Darcy was right. She was a mess. She’d holed herself up in the room Erik had saved for her in his flat and hadn’t even stepped outside to get any air. She knew that Darcy and Erik were trying to be supportive, but she could also see their patience running thin. This had been going on for almost a month.
How many times could she lay in bed and think back to how she and Loki would sit on the beach together, her sitting between his legs and him holding her and kissing her temple, the back of her head, her hand, her neck, her shoulders, telling her she was his Goddess, his savior, his soul…
It had to end.
Erik wanted her to get back to work, she knew it, but the thought of doing anything that remotely reminded her of planets and realms and Gods…she just couldn’t.
So, she got a job in a bookstore. Forced herself to get up every morning. To shower. To eat. To dress. To leave the flat, and go to work. To not talk about Loki (though that didn’t stop her from thinking about him). She forced herself to talk to people and to go out with her co-workers when asked. She just wanted to feel normal, and she was willing to try anything it took to get there.
Despite Erik’s disappointment in her for not returning to her work, he let her be. She knew he hoped she would return to her work one day, but he also knew that he had to give her time to come back from it all. Darcy was right, Jane realized, Loki had fucked her up psychologically.
Or was she suffering a broken heart? She didn’t want to consider that a possibility, but once she’d thought it, she couldn’t stop thinking it.
That was probably why when Darcy told her she knew a guy that would be perfect for her – Richard something-or-other, Jane agreed most eagerly to the set up. She had to get over this already…this, of course, being Loki. She did not and could not and would not love someone that kidnapped her to force her to fall in love with him. That was sick and twisted and not her at all.
Loki slipped inside her for the third time that night and Jane clutched at him, already close to orgasm. He was hard and hot inside of her, stretching her so deliciously. He gazed down at her reverently as he moved and she took his face in her hands and crushed her lips to his. “No one has ever made me feel like you do,” she whispered when she broke the kiss.
He smiled. “No one ever will. You are my heart and my soul, Jane Foster. I will worship you as my consort until the end of time.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Jane hissed and then cried out as she came.
Nope. Not her at all.
xxxxxxxxx
Richard was cute and he had a great sense of humor. He leaned toward the self-deprecating side which Jane identified with, and he wasn’t a perv like some guys. He didn’t leer at her, didn’t stare at her breasts – he was kind and funny and sweet. He was perfect.
Except she couldn’t get a certain God out of her head the whole time.
“Just think of the advancements in science you could make, Jane,” Loki told her. “Think of how you would become the face of astrophysics because of the things I could show you. You want that, yes?”
Jane smiled and leaned in to kiss him. She loved it when he spoke to her about her work. “I do.”
At one point when Richard got up from the table to use the restroom, Jane sipped her wine and looked around the restaurant idly. Looking at other couple. Normal couples. Happy couples and unhappy couples.
And then, Loki.
Loki.
She gasped when she saw him, his reflection in a mirror that ran along the wall across the room. She whipped around to see where he was, but he was not there. She looked back at the mirror and he was gone.
“Jane? Are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Richard said as he sat down across from her.
“I—I’m fine. I just thought I saw someone I knew.”
“Ex-boyfriend? Cause you looked unhappy about it.”
“Ex-boyfriend…yeah, you could say that. But it wasn’t him.”
“Good thing. Shall we get dessert?”
Jane nodded and opened her menu. Richard was talking but Jane didn’t hear a word he said.
That night she heard Loki as clear as day – it was as if he was there, in her bedroom. “Did you really think I would give you up, Jane?”
The next day she saw him across the street before she boarded the bus. The day after that she saw him among a crowd of people milling about the stacks in the bookstore. The night after that she heard him again in her bedroom: “Have you missed me at all, Jane?”
Then, nothing for a week. Or, at least she didn’t hear or see him. But she felt him. She knew the exact moment he was around because the hair on her arms would stand on end. She tried to ignore it, but she couldn’t. How could she? He sucked the air out of the room every time he came near.
He was messing with her. His year in prison was up, and instead of leaving her be and deciding she wasn’t worth it as she’d convinced herself he would do, he had come to drive her mad.
One night when she arrived home, she felt him almost breathing down her neck at the entrance to the flat she shared with Erik and Darcy. She whipped around and screamed, “Show yourself, you bloody coward!”
“I’m the coward?!” Loki shouted as he materialized before her. “You’re the one that sent me to prison because you couldn’t deal with how I made you feel! You wouldn’t even see me!”
He vibrated with fury and Jane knew she should be afraid, but she wasn’t. She just wasn’t. She was tired of trying so hard to be okay when she wasn’t. She slapped him hard across the cheek. “I hate you!”
He grabbed her arms and pulled her to him. His green eyes burned into her. “What did I tell you about saying that to me?”
“I don’t care!” she shouted. “You ruined my life!”
“You ruined your own life by running away,” he hissed. “By sending me to prison.”
“You’re the coward, Loki. You had to kidnap me to tell me you loved me? You couldn’t have done that at any one of the hundred conversations we had prior to that? No, you had to make it big and showy and keep me captive on some other planet. You. Are. Fucked. Up.”
“Maybe so, but you fell just the same didn’t you?”
“It wasn’t real,” she whispered.
“Wasn’t real?” he murmured and pushed her against the wall. He rubbed himself against her and nuzzled the side of her face. “Are you sure about that?”
Jane bit back a moan at the feel of him. Tears pricked her eyes.
“Are you going to answer me?” he asked as he slid a hand along her body and then down over her bum. He pulled her further into him, let her feel the hard length of him. “Tell me how me filling you wasn’t real? How making you shatter in my arms again and again wasn’t real…”
Jane called upon everything inside her to look at him. “I don’t want your love, Loki. It’s twisted. It hurts me,” she said.
His face twisted into pain and anger and he pushed away from her, breathing heavy. “You are determined to deny me? Determined to leave me like this? Aching for you. In agony for you. Is that what you want, Jane?”
“You’ll get over it,” she said, even as she knew he wouldn’t. And neither would she.
He laughed then, maniacally. The laugh of the insane and then he looked at her and ran one shaky hand through her hair. “Oh, my Jane…my misguided, innocent, naïve Jane.”
She moved away from him. “Go back to Asgard, Loki.”
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” he whispered.
That sounded ominous. She looked at him. “What?”
“All that time alone. I had time to plan. To prepare.”
Something in her gut clenched with fear. “Loki…”
“Just in case you made this difficult, I found a way.”
“Loki, what are you talking about? You can’t kidnap me again. You can’t.”
He cocked his head to the side and smiled, a sinister smile that frightened Jane right down to her bones. “Loki, what—”
“I researched a few spells just in case,” he told her. “There are secrets in this universe humans have wanted to obtain for years.”
“Such as?” she asked as calmly as possible.
“There are pockets in this world that one may…manipulate in order to change the fabric of time. To go back and change events to their liking.”
Her eyes widened. “Loki, what are you talking about?”
“I often wondered what would have happened had you met me first,” he murmured sadly.
“Loki, no—”
“Jane!” Erik shouted just as Jane hit something – no, someone, hard with her truck.
Jane slammed on the brakes and flung the truck into park. She jumped out and ran to the figure on the ground, yelling to Darcy to get the first aid kit. He was long and lean, with shoulder length black hair and dressed in black jeans and a green sweater. “Do me a favor,” she said urgently. “Don’t be dead.”
He rolled over and looked at her, green eyes wide and shocked. There was flicker of recognition in his eyes that Jane dismissed out of the fear that she had caused him internal damages.
“Whoa,” Darcy said. “Does he need CPR, cause I totally know CPR.”
Jane just looked down at him in bewilderment. This night was just getting odder and odder. “Where did he come from?” she asked.
“I fell,” the stranger in black and green said.
“From where?” Jane asked incredulously.
He just smiled.