Chapter II
“I could have told them this would happen,” Loki remarked casually from where he lounged in his mother’s hand. “Scratch that – I did tell them this would happen. I even underlined it. But does anyone ever listen to me? Noooooo. Shut up Loki, Thor will be a perfectly reasonable and levelheaded king. Shut up Loki, we’re going to Jotunheim. Shut up Loki, of course Odin will aid you and the mortal.”
“To be fair, he’s not kidding about needing all his time and energy to fight –”
“Silence, mortal, nobody asked you.”
“I’ll take self-awareness for two-hundred, Alex,” Jane muttered under her breath, and she burrowed a little further into the warm cup of Thor’s hand. She loved it when Loki reminded her what an asshole he was, though. It kept her from giving in to the temptation to agree with him and join in on whatever rant he was on at any given moment. So far only half of his tirades while Thor and Frigga pled their case with the Allfather had been assholish in and of themselves. It just wasn’t right.
Jane briefly contemplated uncrossing her arms just to make sure their postures didn’t match. But then she might be tempted to slap him again. Or tear her petal dress to confetti, or gnaw on Thor’s fingers. Asgard was bad for her blood pressure.
“Loki could be a valuable ally in the upcoming battle,” Thor was currently arguing, and if that wasn’t a sign they were grasping at straws, Jane didn’t know what was.
“Loki is in this position because he refused to cooperate with something as simple as lifting an old prank spell,” Odin countered mercilessly. “Putting him in the middle of our conflict would be akin to wrapping a fire viper around your neck to ward off the evening chill.”
Jane couldn’t have said it better herself if she knew what a fire viper was. Now if only Odin wasn’t making that argument as part of his staunch refusal to lift another finger to help her or Loki.
“Darling,” Frigga started soothingly, but Odin cut her off by banging his spear with a sound like cannonfire. Jane almost jumped straight out of Thor’s hand. He and Frigga – and even Loki – snapped to attention.
Odin stood from his enormous golden throne. All the better to tower over them with. “Enough! I warned you to take Jane Foster back where she came from, that this was not the time and place for dalliances with mortals. The consequences of your stubbornness are on your own heads. As for Loki, he has summarily squandered his natural given right to anyone’s sympathies, least of all those of his king. The form they find themselves in poses no immediate threat to their lives or wellbeing, and with this attack looming on the horizon, I and the masters of magic have better things to do than tend to every scraped knee and burst pipe. You will put those two in a bird cage or a sunroom or somewhere out of the way, and you will go back to what you were supposed to be doing until we are no longer at war. THAT IS AN ORDER.”
For a long moment there was silence, filled only with Jane’s thought of, And I thought surgeons made for bad in-laws.
Then Thor pressed his unoccupied fist to his heart, bowed at the waist, and rumbled, “Yes, my king,” and would it ever stop being terrifying to have a giant fold up on her head?!
Oblivious to Jane’s frazzled nerves, he turned to Frigga, who was busy staring Odin down. Books were being written in the contortions of his parents’ respective eyebrows.
“Your dad –” Jane said, letting the temptation to talk smack under Odin’s nose because he couldn’t hear her anyway – she could barely hear herself over the hammering of her heart – get the better of her. “– has an amazing knack for making even a perfectly reasonable argument sound like the most insulting thing in the world. I agree with every– well, over half the things he said, anyway, and still I just want to tell him ‘no you’ and smack that superiority complex off his – oh god, I want to smack an old man, this is terrible.”
She was ninety-five percent sure Loki was about to burst out laughing, but just then Odin broke eye contact with his wife to skewer Jane with his one-eyed gaze and thunder, “WHAT WAS THAT?”
By the time Jane was done having a heart attack, Loki sure wasn’t grinning with her.
She shook her head and waved her arms ‘no’, then pointed between herself and Loki and made deflective gestures in Odin’s direction. I was talking to him, not you. Please resume your lovers’ spat. Odin narrowed his eye at her, but eventually turned back to Frigga.
“And you showed such eloquence for a while there, too,” Loki drawled.
Jane looked at him from the corner of her eyes. “And here Thor almost had me convinced your daddy issues came from being too unlike your father.”
“Very well,” Frigga suddenly said, all impish smiles. “I will return to what I am supposed to be doing, as a wife and mother. Which is to entertain our guests and look after our children. I will take Loki and the lady Jane to the flower safehouse, out of harm’s way, where I will have ample time to work on a solution to their little problem.”
“You’re leaving?” Thor said incredulously.
“We all have our duties to fulfill in times of need, and this is mine.”
“But you are also our queen.”
“Long ago, your father and I came to an agreement. Queens and fathers get to delegate; mothers and kings do not,” she said. “Now, Thor, say your goodbyes to the lady. I will take good care of her, and she will be back to her old self in no time.” She hooked her free arm into Thor’s and raised her eyebrows at Odin. “By your leave, of course, my king?”
Odin’s beard trembled. His face was unreadable.
“Go,” he said in a strangled voice.
“Excellent! Mind your hip when you go into battle, dear. I eagerly await word of your victory.”
She steered Thor away. Thor kept sending uncertain glances over his shoulder, until Odin cheerfully called after them: “Go, before I change my mind and throw your mother in the dungeons for cheek!”
“It’ll be like a family outing,” Frigga said happily as she and Thor carried their tiny passengers through the labyrinthine golden hallways of Gladsheim. “Or a study trip.”
“Oh god,” Jane groaned. “This is not fair, you guys aren’t even my in-laws yet.”
“Word will be Asgard’s queen fled and deserted her people,” Thor said in a low voice.
“Word will be wrong,” Frigga replied, unconcerned. “She leaves Asgard’s fate in the hands of her eldest so she can protect the future that lies beyond this battle.”
Thor’s brow furrowed. “Future?”
“Future?” Jane parroted, though the answer came to her the moment she turned it into a question.
Sure enough, Loki made a disgusted sound. “Planning the wedding already?”
“No.” Jane’s cheeks burned, and she looked up at Thor for confirmation.
“Perhaps a baby shower?”
Thor seemed to find his own suspicions confirmed on Jane’s face, because he shook his head frantically at Frigga. “No, mother, we do not yet have any such intentions. It is not the custom of Jane’s people to –”
“And of course I’m not invited to either, am I?”
“Dude, there’s not going to be a wedding.”
“There are dates that must be passed, you see, or had, I’m not quite sure – milestones of some sort, and with everything that has happened Jane says she and I have not been able to –”
“Not what I meant,” Frigga corrected delicately.
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
“Oh.”
“They should not be forced to live out their lives not whole and happy, is all I mean. It would not be fair to the prospects of either realm or themselves. Though I am ready to be a grandmother whenever you are. Either of you. Just saying.”
“Well, sorry to disappoint you even more,” Loki muttered darkly.
“How do you even know what a baby shower is?” Jane asked, somewhat mollified but studiously ignoring those last bits.
“What, you think we don’t have them? A birth is a rare and joyous occasion,” Loki mocked. “The whole realm is invited. They even held one for me, though the Norns only know where everyone found the time to think of what to give when I suddenly popped up out of nowhere,” he trailed off sullenly.
Frigga stopped in front of a vaguely familiar set of doors, as shiny and oversized and golden as everything else in the palace. Reminding Thor to tell Jane goodbye, she entered. The gust of air that enveloped Jane as the doors opened was more than just vaguely familiar. She would remember that mixture of herbs and parchment, battle gear before the blood and mud ruined it, and magic of Loki’s rooms, for the rest of her life. And in the moment the scent of them washed over her, Jane felt genuinely sorry for him for not being allowed to ever return to them.
Then he exclaimed, “WHAT DID YOU BRUTES DO TO MY CHAMBERS?!”, and she had to bite her thumb to keep from laughing.
Loki’s irritability brought out the worst in her in all kinds of delightful ways, and the best part was, she didn’t even feel all that bad about it. Maybe she should hang out with mass-murdering wannabe warlords more often.
Thor raised her up to eye level. “This is where we part ways once more, Jane Foster. It seems the universe is conspiring against us, but I swear to you, once this threat has been vanquished, we will have time to ourselves to perform your people’s ‘twenty questions’ ceremony.”
“At this point I’d settle for a quicky against a back alley wall and a magical STD for a souvenir,” Jane admitted with a crooked smile, since he couldn’t understand the chirps coming out of her mouth anyway. “But that sounds lovely.”
Never had a smile so tender been directed her way, and dammit, now she felt guilty. It was almost enough to make her regret all the times she’d gotten distracted sightseeing rather than getting to know Thor since she arrived in Asgard.
Okay, no. No it wasn’t.
Guilty guilty guilty.
Still, she beckoned him closer and leaned in to press a firm kiss to the tip of his nose.
Thor’s face scrunched up and he grinned, eyes squeezed shut. “That tickles.”
She stuck her hands in the scruff of his beard and scratched vigorously. His laughter almost blew her away – literally – and thank god Asgardians didn’t suffer from bad breath. But he didn’t lower his hands, no matter the faces he made.
After a while, Loki’s voice came from behind her, and Jane heard the doors close. “I think I might hurl. The only question is, do I do it before I kill you for the mess you made in there, or after?”
“Your brother is so cute, Thor,” Jane said, giving his beard one last scritch. “All that bark, even after he’s made it so he literally can’t even hurt me with his bite.”
“We’ll see about that yet.”
“All his own fault too. We would have put everything back where we found it, but suddenly I was three inches tall!”
Thor finally lowered her and sighed. “Goodbye then. Be safe, Jane, mother, Loki. Look after one another.”
He exchanged Jane for the book. Thor’s gaze lingered on Loki until Loki made a gesture Jane didn’t recognize but which, from the look on his face, could only have been rude, and Thor’s shoulders slumped. Frigga made a ‘what can you do?’ face and caressed his cheek. Then, after a few last parting words, Thor strode off in one direction and the queen in another.
“First a library key, then the guest rooms to gather Jane’s things… My own chambers… and perhaps a new jar would be prudent…” she muttered under her breath.
Jane and Loki began twittering in indignant tandem.
“Alright, two jars.”
By analyzing the energy and particle disturbance left by the recent Bifrost activity, Jane and her team back home had pinpointed the location of Asgard relative to Earth, so if anything happened to her there or she got stranded somehow, her own people at least had a good lead to follow in search of her. But Loki and Frigga refused to tell her anything about where in the universe their ‘flower safehouse’ was located, because ‘that would defeat the point of it’. This bothered Jane to an irrational degree (she couldn’t send a change-of-address message back to Earth anyway), right until the three of them actually arrived.
The royal hideaway was breathtaking. There were woods stretching in every direction up and down the slopes of gently rolling hills, a majestic mountain range in the distance, pale, pastel-tinted bodies of various sizes in the clear blue afternoon sky, a horizon Jane could swear was visibly curved, a cottage straight from a fairytale, a babbling brook that looked legally obligated to house at least five water sprites, birdsong from every direction, and – as the ‘flower safehouse’ monicker suggested – flowers. Flowers everywhere. Their scent was so thick it made Jane’s mouth water and her head reel.
As Frigga walked them up the cottage’s close to overgrown garden path, Jane took deep, steadying breaths of that intoxicating smell. Steadying. Steadying, dammit.
Her stomach growled.
“Loki. Why does the smell of flowers make me hungry.”
“Because they are part of your natural diet now.”
“God damn you.”
Loki shrugged. “’Tis how the stories go, is it not? Fairies are as bees or butterflies. They live off of milk and honey, sweets and fruits, nectar and pollen.”
“Pollen? Ew,” Jane groaned. Except half of her thought a mouthful of flower powder actually sounded delicious. She made a mental note to stay far away from all things flowery. “You put way too much thought into this stupid prank.”
“I did not become one of the greatest sorcerers in the Nine Realms by not practicing my craft.”
“Nor did you become the universe’s greatest jerk by practicing on anything useful.”
“Don’t think I cannot tell when you are bickering, children,” Frigga said, putting the spice rack holding them down on the cottage’s dinner table. “Is this really how you wish to spend your time here? Fighting until you drop?”
Loki scribbled something in his notebook and passed it on to his mother.
“‘Trying not to bicker is the more tiring option’,” she read aloud.
Jane and Loki nodded fervently.
Frigga heaved a deep, deep sigh.
“So how long do you think this is gonna take?” Jane asked that night. She was sitting on the edge of one of the many huge books stacked on the dining table, swinging her legs with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands.
Frigga had unpacked their things, readied the cottage for habitation, and art-craft-and-magicked together a pair of doll-sized boxbeds for Jane and Loki, which now stood one each on the little night tables on either side of her bed. Then, using what she called a ‘library key’, she had started pulling giant dusty tomes and scrolls out of thin air. Jane had been all over those – literally – but the texts were all written in runes, and of all the eclectic Old Norse-y things Jane had studied in the months After Thor, Futhark sadly was not one.
Right now, Loki and Frigga were examining a projection of Loki’s energy signature Loki had conjured up with what remained of his powers. The strength of his magic had shrunk right along with his physical strength. And, it would seem, his patience. Jane really didn’t think she’d asked that many questions or been all that annoying before he went for her throat and only Frigga’s fast reflexes had kept them from starting an all out brawl.
A part of Jane she had never known existed before Loki waltzed into her life had been disappointed. Provoking another fight wasn’t why she took up her questioning again, though. She was just bored out of her skull.
“I mean, are we thinking days or weeks or months here, or what?”
“We won’t know until we determine the extent of the damage,” Loki answered curtly.
“And how long is that gonna take?”
“Here’s a better question: what will it take to shut you up?”
“Something to do! Are you sure you don’t have anything in the Roman alphabet in your library?”
Loki looked up from his work to give her a fierce, unfriendly look. They stared each other down for several long moments before Loki sneered, pulled his notebook toward himself, and started writing something down.
“Come here, mortal,” he said, making an imperious ‘heel’ motion with his free hand.
Jane crossed her arms. “Say please.”
“Come here or I will leave you to your boredom,” he snapped.
It was a close call, but curiosity won out over indignation in the end. Jane almost started berating herself for her lack of self-respect before she remembered that her curiosity would always win out over anything and that she had made her peace with that fact a long time ago. So she hopped off of her book and crouched down beside Loki.
He slid the notebook toward her and handed her the pen. One page held a column of single runes.
He pointed to the topmost one and said, “Ffff.”
Jane stared.
Loki glared. “Write it down in your Roman characters. This one is pronounced fff.”
Jane’s face lit up, but she didn’t even care. Loki pronounced the runes one by one, and Jane wrote down the romanizations. Then Loki tore that page from the notebook to give to her and scribbled something new to his mother, who read it, chewed her lip thoughtfully, and spent the next few minutes grabbing at thin air with her library key while Jane eagerly started memorizing characters. Eventually Frigga conjured up the thickest tome yet, worked her shrinking magic, and handed it to Jane.
“This is a beginner’s guide to the lore and principles of magic,” Frigga said. “A children’s book, really, but the best starting point one could hope for. It is written in Alltongue, so once you know the script, you will know the language.”
“Are you serious?” Jane felt like she might cry for gratitude. “Oh my god, thank you so much! Thank you thank you thank you thank you!”
Frigga smiled. “It was my son’s idea.”
Jane stilled. Took a deep breath. Turned to Loki, who had already returned to studying his projection.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re so smart, are you?” he scoffed, not looking at her. “Then prove it. Make yourself useful, if you can.”
Jane’s goodwill evaporated instantly. “I have nothing to prove to the likes of you.”
“I thought so.”
Clutching her new treasure to her chest and shaking her head incredulously, Jane stood. “You know, of all the things I like about you, your habit of shooting yourself in the foot is probably my favorite.”
Now he looked at her – like she’d grown a second head.
“You think on that,” she said with a grin, and headed for the other end of the table.
Hours later, Frigga very gently prodded Jane. “It’s getting quite late, dear, and you’ve had a long, troubling day. You should sleep. The book isn’t going anywhere.”
“I’m fine,” Jane said, shaking her head at Frigga with a quick, absentminded smile. “I’m way too pumped to sleep just yet. You guys go to bed, I’ll be alright.”
“Are you sure? Shall I give you a lift to the night table? It’s quite a ways to fly on those wobbly wings.”
“No thanks!”
“Leave the mortal be, mother. The longer she sleeps in tomorrow morning, the more peace and quiet we shall have.”
Jane grinned into her pages. “It’s the least I can do to thank you for giving me this great gift of knowledge instead of Vogon poetry or the Asgardian version of Twilight or some other abomination against literature.”
Loki’s footsteps froze behind her. “Oh. So that’s what ‘shot in the foot’ means.”
The next morning, Jane woke up with her face glued to the table and her book draped over her like a blanket.
It was almost like being back in college.
She used to think deadline panic was the greatest motivator in the universe. She’d done her fair share of putting off papers and reports until the last moment; she was only human. But then a pair of aliens dropped a magic handbook and a foreign alphabet in her lap, and Jane found out she had been wrong.
She got functionally proficient in Asgardian runes in a matter of days. After two weeks, it felt like she’d been reading them her whole life. If someone had asked her two or three years ago whether she was capable of such a feat, she would have laughed in their face. Because she didn’t have a book about the science behind magic in her lap two or three years ago.
She read the book front to cover, and then again, tuning Loki and Frigga out completely as she did. Then she read it another time. And another. And another, until she could recite the contents by heart. She was on her sixth read and her second notebook of Earth physics vs Asgard magic comparisons, ready to ask for more sophisticated, in-depth material once she finished this last round of memorizing, when Loki’s voice cut through the blissful haze of Enlightenment In Progress.
“All this time, and you still have yet to try out your new wings. I know it must boggle the mind to realize how truly primitive your race’s understanding of the universe is, but I feel almost offended.”
And yeah, that did a good job cutting, alright.
For days, a lifetime’s worth of bookworm-based grief had been whispering in Jane’s ear that a normal person would be outside right now, in the sun, immersing herself while she could in the unique, once in a lifetime, universally coveted experience of being able to fly – not cramming on the same book over and over. Her access to Asgard’s knowledge would outlast her possession of wings, surely.
“Fuck off,” she told Loki ever so eloquently. “Talk about your skills and craftsmanship all you want, but those wings are a pain to use. And your spell’s in such a sorry condition I wouldn’t be surprised if they fall off the moment I get some altitude, anyway.”
Which was a poor excuse, but not a lie.
Loki smirked. “Your loss.”
He turned on his heel and took to the air with the speed, surity and grace of a hummingbird.
Jane’s jaw dropped. Loki turned on his axis in mid-air, threw her a jaunty salute, somersaulted, and zipped off through the open door of the cottage.
Son of a gun, she thought, feeling her cheeks warm. No, feeling her entire head come to a boil. Such show-off-manship was a taunt. A challenge.
“Frigga, I’m going out,” Jane declared in a chirp so close to a growl it was a purr, and slammed her book shut.
Smiling conspiratorially, Frigga helped her off the table and waved goodbye. “Go get him, dear.”