Epilogue

Jane wakes from nightmares most mornings.

Despite an endless warmth of sunlight that pours through their open windows on Alfheim, darkness still invades her thoughts, saturates them, drips like viscous slime through every happy memory of her days. Her nightmares twist, change, faster than she can control, too pervasive for her to withstand. For the first month after the end of Thanos, she always woke screaming.

When she did, Loki was usually already awake.

These days, she just jerks upright, shivering, biting hard on her tongue to contain her cries. The Aether has learned that her nightmares are not real opponents to be fought and stays contained within her, shimmering just under her skin. Unfortunately, this revelation came after the Aether accidentally lit their entire bed on fire.

She and Loki face their shadows together, through they are of quite different casts and kinds. Loki is haunted by phantoms of pain, often rolling onto his stomach as if to staunch a flow of blood and venom. He lashes out with his fists, pulling against invisible chains. After he fractured Jane's cheekbone, they finally bowed to the inevitable and decided to sleep separately.

Mornings are hard. They have created rituals against it.

Jane makes coffee, brewing it in a hand-carved drip filter, rationing out what remains of the ground beans she brought from Earth. The light elves need no intoxicants stronger than the water on their planet and a few choice wines distilled from various berries, but Jane's a creature of habit and the primary one of those is caffeine.

Loki joins her for breakfast on their balcony, which is nothing more than a tangle of intertwined branches, strewn with cushions stuffed with fragrant leaves. They nestle their cups and bowls in knuckles of wood and slowly reacquaint themselves with heat, light, and love after their dark nights of torture. They don't often speak. Just being near each other, sharing glances and smiles, brushing fingers as they reach for a communal bowl, is enough.

Touch is important. It grounds them both, settles them in their bodies, their bodies that have undergone so many violent changes in such a short time. Jane still reels sometimes, missing the power of the two Infinity Stones she gave up, feeling like a collapsed star, deflated and weak. And Loki...any touch used to make him flinch, no matter how gentle.

That she can now slide into his lap without any preamble or negotiation and be welcomed, not repulsed, is glorious.

Loki's hands on her skin are gentle. Too gentle. When she nips at the corner of his mouth, they grow in certainty, moving across her shoulder blades and around to her breasts with a surety that makes her shudder. Alfheim is a place of warmth, constant, gentle, even warmth, but between them now there's heat enough to burn. Jane burns, within and without, when Loki skims her with his nails.

She breathes into his mouth, kissing him ravenously, as her impatient, fumbling fingers tug at his collar. It's too high, too tight, armor over his soft skin that he doesn't need, not here, not with her. His hands still, uncertain whether to help her divest him or continue his own exploration of her.

Jane peels off his shirt without any assistance. It's one of the many things she's learned to do these past few weeks. She's also learned where not to touch him, skirting the area where no scars mar his flesh but where he feels them down to his spine. Jane drags her fingernails up the length of his spine, lingering in the hollows of his vertebrae, running the pads of her fingertips across each bone in turn. There's no need to rush, no need to hurry. There's no work either of them must do than this, nothing for either of them to study besides each other.

Jane's always been good at studying.

Loki trembles under her hands, her soft, questing touch. His jaw locks tight, as if in pain, and Jane studies his face from beneath her lashes.

"Okay?" she murmurs.

He nods, face screwed tight. With a quick breath, he forces himself to relax and opens his eyes. There's something unfathomable and dark lurking there, a ghost from their past, from long before Thanos. Jane remembers nights in Italy, talking over wine, discussing the fate of her world, the tension between them terrifying and unbearable. It should frighten her, seeing it again here. Somehow the fear works on her in another way.

Something blooms inside her, something that makes her feel like she's expanding inside, skin growing tight, ripe enough to burst. Her heart careens wildly in her chest, a bird crashing against the walls of its cage. She waits, tension winding tight inside her.

Loki is broad enough to envelop her entirely, strong enough to lift her without a breath. One of his arms slides around her shoulder, the other braces under her knees, and Jane relaxes into his hold, wrapping her arms around his neck.

He carries her into the shadowed darkness of their room, leaves overhead rustling in a soothing whisper above their heads. Either of their beds is large enough for both of them; Jane isn't sure which one she ends up on as Loki tosses her down. The tension snaps; she rolls, laughing, sliding her bare skin along the blankets' soft silk for the pure pleasure of it.

Loki's smile is somewhat fiercer as he crawls over her, one hand trapping her ankle and pulling her beneath him, pinning her own like a butterfly on a card. Jane lets her other leg fall and arches, a shaky sigh stirring the loose hairs on Loki's forehead. He bends over her, closer, closer, avoiding her lips at the last instant and settling on the juncture of her neck and shoulder, a place that never fails to make Jane moan.

Then he slides lower, and lower still, and Jane is lost completely, lost under his hands and his mouth, alive and whole in her body, freed from any lingering shadows of pain or fear.

Weeks pass, one after the other. They rarely hear from the outside world. Communication from Midgard, even assisted by technology from Alfheim and Asgard, still takes days to arrive. When they do get any video messages or emails, they don't reply to them right away, if they do at all.

Jane knows that Thor talks to Loki, telling him about their new liaison office in New York. She knows he hears from his mother, that her letters put him in a silent, contemplative mood for hours. She doesn't resent that; she never asks to read them. She gets her own correspondence from his family anyway. Lady Frigga's letters are welcoming and kind; Thor's are brusque and heartfelt.

Tony messages her regularly—as regularly as he does anything, anyway—and Darcy sends something with every data packet. Usually they're memes, but sometimes they're sweet little messages that brighten Jane's day, no matter how dark it had been before. She also gets fairly consistent requests from astrophysicists who would have scoffed at the very mention of her name years ago, asking to collaborate on papers or to utilize her observational data in research of their own.

Jane doesn't reply to much. It's selfish of her, she knows, but after giving so much of herself to the world for so long, she can't bear to break the bubble they've wrapped themselves in on Alfheim. Her time with Loki is too precious, too rare. They deserve this retreat, this beginning. She wants no one else to be a part of it.

It's dark again. Night approaches slowly, like a bolt of indigo velvet unrolling across the sky. Stars unveil themselves, one after the other, interspersed with fireflies idly bumbling through the cooling air. Night blossoms stretch, expanding their pale petals to greet the silvery moons above, fragrance pungent and sweet pouring from their throats.

Loki and Jane are still in bed together, entwined like ivy. They've been there all day.

Jane stretches, rolling off Loki's chest, helping herself to a seed cake from their bedside table. She munches messily, brushing pastry off the sheets as she goes. Loki drops his head like a bird and steals the last bite of cake from her hand, kissing the crumbs from her fingers afterwards.

"Do you think about the future?" she asks, almost flinching as her own voice shocks her. It's the first complete sentence she's said all day. "It's been two months. Do you want to move on?"

"Do you?" his eyebrow quirks.

"It's just...I feel a little lazy. Shouldn't we be doing something?"

"Why?"

"I..." she pauses, swallowing. "I don't know. I guess we've been doing for so long that not doing feels wrong."

"What would you do, if you could?"

Finding an answer that feels authentic flummoxes her. It stuns Jane to realize just how long it's been since she has done anything purely for herself and her curiosity. Even on Asgard, the research she'd done had been to understand the Convergence. Anything else she'd discovered, while certainly fascinating, was all in pursuit of preventing the apocalypse. Heady stuff, sure, but not exactly relaxing.

She thinks further back. "After...after you left Earth the first time, after everything with the Tesseract," she begins, "I went to a place called Hilo. It was beautiful. And so peaceful. I lived a quiet life there. I worked, read, hiked."

She rolls over, pillowing her face on Loki's shoulder. Quietly, she continues.

"The only thing I wanted was someone to share it with."

"'Someone'?"

She laughs. "If you expect me to say 'I wanted you', you've got another thing coming. We didn't exactly leave things in a very good way, you know," she pokes him playfully. He returns the favor until she squeals and wiggles away. "But I want you there now. Can we...can we just find someplace quiet, somewhere no one can reach us, and just...just be, for a little while?"

He looks down on her, thoughtful. "I did tell you I could show you the stars. But will you not be bored with only me for company?"

"Loki," she smiles, snuggling back down again, "We're only just getting to know each other. It'll be awhile before I get bored. Are you tired of me?"

"Never," he vows, kissing the crown of her head where it rests on his chest. "Never."

Fin

Thank you all for reading. I hope this epilogue, brief as it is, still gives some sense of what I want for Loki and Jane going forward. I will likely write a longer author's note shortly, but I wanted to get this up today.

To all those who have supported me since the beginning of this fic, or from even further back with World Under Siege, you can never know what that has meant for me. I honestly can't believe that after seven years and almost 300,000 words, that this story is actually complete. I can also honestly say that it would have never happened without readers like you, readers who cheered me on and encouraged me to continue when I would have been really happy to give up. If you ever wonder whether your comments cheer up an author's day, please know that they do. At the end of it all, fanfiction is a story shared between writer and readers, and it's been my honor to share this vision with you all.

Thank you.