.oOo.

Now you see me, brother.

It is the damp smell of the too-still air that Jane notices first.

For Loki, it is the throb of magic in his veins.

Next comes the grit of the cave floor.

(For this must be a cave, so damp and so, so dark.)

It is pressed hard into her cheek, and she can scarcely draw a breath for the great press of some heavy weight at her back. She tries to move, and she realizes that she is standing, though not by her own volition. Something is pressing her into the wall of the cave. Her hands push against the wall.

Something she can make no move against.

She shifts against him.

Or tries to.

Oh, yes.

How feeble he was before the return of his power. How less than. He hadn't realized until this moment, with this mortal pinned beneath him. He can feel how frail she is, how terribly, deliciously weak.

He feels drunk with the thrum of power sluicing gloriously through him. The farther he travels from his dampening cell, the stronger it becomes. Like staring too long into the light of a star, his vision spots and blurs with color-bursts as he feels his power galvanizing his very sinews.

He is immovable. He is absolute. He is Loki.

And she, so small, so breakable, oh, she makes him feel like a god.

It is when she feels the crushing grip of his large hand at her hip that Jane realizes the overpowering weight is Loki. Her heart rate, irregular and sluggish after losing consciousness, picks up in a wild rhythm that he can surely feel through the cage of her ribs.

He yanks her back into him, so very easily, though she hadn't thought she had room to be pressed any firmer into him. But she fills where he is hollow, and her soft is shaped by his hard.

Suddenly, he drives her all the harder into the wall, applying special pressure with his pelvis. His punishing thrust elucidates how powerless she is. How indomitable he has become.

It is not terror that spikes through her, however, but a crashing, smothering, delirious dose of want.

Loki breathes deep lungfuls of the dank air, hoping to dampen his voracity. At this moment, were he to take her, and he will take her, he might just kill her. He might just rend her, for the coursing power bids him do so.

He wants her to rend, but around him, possessed by him. Exquisitely, by a power summoned by them both. He does not want her death, but rather he wants her to wish for it, again and again, to escape pleasure too potent.

Before, when he was hollow, when he was the shriveled husk of what was once great, he longed for her. The sigil of hope, of restoration when he had none. He wanted her.

But now that he is he—that burn is an inferno. The discrepancy in their sheer might fuels him like the most bellicose of aphrodisiacs.

And so he breathes until the temptation to tear her to shreds passes.

Breathing has become difficult. It isn't just the weight of him that wicks the air from her lungs, but the barely restrained vitality of him, like the roar of a jet engine muffled only by the strongest of shells. She can feel it, agitating the air around them. Cold blasts of winter air move her hair as he breathes, slow and measured, against her.

The logical part of her would hope he is able to maintain this control.

She can't seem to find her logic anywhere.

Her trembling breath stirs her vocal cords and her inadvertent whimper eviscerates him.

(He is losing his hold on restraint.)

He slams one errant fist against the cave wall, sending a shower of loosed grime down on them, while his other hand slides to her outer thigh.

Jane surprises him by reaching quaking hands to the fist he has planted high on the wall, as if searching for an anchor to hold. Her trembling fingers can't quite reach and lace instead about the iron of his forearm, her grip so insubstantial in the shadow of what is to come. She does not try to push him away (as if she could) but rather clutches at him, her short nails digging into his rigid flesh.

He pauses, only a moment, before furiously pulling up the skirt of her dress in crude tugs.

The rough drag of his fingers, only intensified by the material of her dress, against her waist, then down to her thigh, is like a match to a flint, igniting her. She reaches for something, anything, to hold her fast against the slow course of his hand. Her hands fall upon the immovable scaffold of his arm, and she clings to it.

The delirium of his rocketing them through a bridge known only to him has slowed her thoughts to sensory flashes. The ache of her ribs as he crushes her against the wall. The ragged sound of his icy breath as he breathes jagged spirals of frost over her scalp and down her neck. The cool licking at her bare legs as, all at once, he pulls at her dress. Drags it higher and higher.

It is the first frigid touch of his hand to her naked skin that moves her thoughts to align enough to call out.

It is his name.

He smiles in the dark. A benign touch is all it takes to coax the shape of his name from her. She gives him such power in this, does she know?

Perhaps he need not a kingdom if he can rule her so completely.

He nuzzles cool lips into her hair, just above her ear. Elsewhere, nimble fingers unravel her, her body the tumblers of an easily picked lock. She arches into the sensation the best she can.

Those nuzzling lips move into what she supposes is a smile, and he adds her name to the incantation.

That won't do.

Her name is as soft as her skin, as her hair, as the pliable flesh beneath his fingers. The mechanical burr of his clockwork voicebox sharpens her name in a way that is wholly unacceptable.

This woman, this dying star tiring already beneath his hands—he wants to claim her, body and mind. He wants to find that horizon with her, a whole and complete man. Intact and unaided by the trinkets of a world that would stifle him.

He drags his unoccupied hand down the wall, detouring only to brush against the flutter of her pulse at her neck, before reaching to his own.

The sickening sound of metallic and wet as their creation disengages from his neck wrenches a shudder from Jane. Something surprisingly hot, something she won't name, drips once, then twice, on her cheek. She can hear the thing clatter into useless pieces as he throws it from them.

(His voice is watery and gurgling when he tries her name again, but at least it is his own.)

His hand, damp with something Jane refuses to think on, touches again at her neck. She doesn't quite trust him, no—not now that they are free and he is undulating the raw voltage of his regained potency. But some overheard whisper, spoken when they thought her sleeping, calls her to lean into the tempest.

He cups his hand around her neck, holding so many strings that tie her to life. Her windpipe. Her carotid artery. Her spine. Were he to strum these strings just so…

His fingers flex minutely and he utters her name again.

She shudders at wet sludge of it, her name spoken in blood and injury.

Trust my rage.

She reaches a hand back, hoping for his face or his hair, but meets instead with the curve of tensed muscle further down. She offers what little comfort the squeeze of a mortal's hand on the shoulder of a god can evoke and hopes it enough.

Some yards away, a torch flares to life.

He brings his hand up to cage her jaw in long, bony fingers—tips her head back against his chest. The feeble light of the distant torch reveals her beauty, such simple beauty, to him in crepuscular flickers. Her lovely face is dirty, scraped, a few drops of his own blood congealing on her cheek. Her weak grip at this shoulder and her drowsy eyes tug at something long dormant in him. She licks her lips, tongue sticking to the chapped skin, and answers a question he has not asked.

He looks possessed, his haunted face looking down at her in the gloom.

But caught beneath his bruising fingers, she thinks being a possession is not so terrible a fate.

"Yes," she says.

("Yes," is all it takes.)

Loki is glad for his magic. Not so he may return to his gambit of bringing the cosmos to its knees. Not so he can catapult himself from the clutches of Asgard. Not even so he might reign over this bewitching being breathing sweetest surrender beneath him.

He is glad for his magic for the simple reason that it is within his capacity to light a torch. To illuminate this dark.

To see the look of exquisite rapture on her face when he is finally, finally seated deep within her.

So little he knows of her body, her soft secrets pressed instead into the wall. So little is given when the need is as great as theirs.

But he does know one truth, and it is that no joining has tasted so ambrosial as this.

Jane is glad for his magic. She is glad for the light that shows her his look of peace as he fills her so completely, takes her so close with only one sating plunge.

The moment is fleeting, however, and soon the thirsty glint is back in his eyes. He takes his hands from her body and braces them against the wall. Her hands follow in a limp imitation of his bolstering and she lowers her forehead to rest against the wall as he sets a punishing pace.

There will be time, he promises her in rasping whispers, for them to swim these waters in languid strokes. But he needs; he cannot.

"Please, faster," is her strangled response.

(They do not make it for very long.)

After, as the last echo of Jane's wails dies in the dim, Loki roughly turns her to face him for the first time.

Jane expects he'll kiss her, or tear apart her dress in preparation for a second go.

He instead falls to his knees, long arms wrapping about her hips.

He presses his face into the soft dip beneath her sternum and weeps.

Her quaking fingers navigate comforting trails through his sweat-cooled hair. He thinks this the safest he's been in an age, in the guard of her body. Even the (not so) impenetrable walls of his cell could not coax security so ripe as the rise and fall of her chest, the beat of her heart.

A bridge to comfort he long thought was destroyed.

He winces at the crack of her small voice when she asks, "What now?"

His stomach turns at his answer.

"Now, I must kill you."

His voice is healing, is all that Jane thinks.

She is weeping, as well, is all that Loki thinks.

Jane does not falter in her ministrations. She only nods.

And waits.

Heimdall does not miss much, in the scheme of things.

He missed the Frost Giants, but only that once.

He missed Loki, but only that once.

Jane Foster, however—she seems to elude him regularly. He named her Clever once, but now he might name her Tenacious. Perhaps it was the Aether that shielded her from him that first time, and perhaps it was its lingering taint that hid the intent behind her visits to the Fallen Prince from his all-seeing eyes.

Perhaps just enough Aether remained to hide the fugitives once the guards found Loki's cell, and Thor's bed, vacant.

Whatever it was, it hides her no longer in death.

He sees her crumpled body upon the Rainbow Bridge.

(He sees not how it got there.)

He sees the bridge's fantastic colors reflecting grotesquely off the pale of her dead flesh. He sees the face of Thor, still drawn over his lover's escape, and knows it shall crumble further at the news of her death. He sees the hate that will solidify in Thor's chest, and the merciless hunt for Loki that will end only in certain death. He sees Loki's last terrible effort to outmatch Thor, to finally be seen.

All this Heimdall sees—and so misses the theft of a valuable apple.

(This apple is one of two prizes a would-be-prince secrets away from Asgard. The other, a would-be princess, will fortunately, happily, miss her own funeral.)

.oOo.

End.