Jane Foster flits like a ghost from hallway to hallway after her recent release from the healers, wearing an expression that suggests she's more adrift than she'd like to let on. Today is no different, except that she has wandered into a part of the great library where he had always hidden as a child to peruse books that weighed more than him.

Loki frowns. For someone who purports to be a woman driven by the science of the stars, such behaviour is odd to say the least. He studies her for a moment and notices that her time in the healing houses, this time as a patient, has still left her a bit more wan than she usually is—

He shakes away thoughts of her appearance and convinces himself that it's undoubtedly yet another failing of her mortal body. Giving her no warning, he glides silently up to her and stands just far enough to give her space to jump to express her shock.

"I never thought that you would ever discover this place."

A short, high-pitched squeak escapes her mouth, just exactly as he'd predicted. He calmly takes in her glower as she jumps and turns on him, delighting perversely in how easily mortals can be startled out of their wits.

Even Jane Foster, who shows a peculiar sense of not being afraid at the worst times, isn't immune to being at the receiving end of his mischief.

She blinks twice, disbelief and annoyance pinching some lines into her face, then blurts, "You're here."

His shoulders tremble slightly with silent laughter at the less-than-intelligent conversation that she's initiating. Jane Foster, if nothing else, can be a passable source of amusement in this drab place.

"Where else would I be?" He questions mildly.

"Uh," she waves weakly to the shelves, "I don't know. Terrorising some poor Asgardian? Recovering in your room?"

He sees through her forced nonchalance straightaway. "Believe me, Miss Foster. There's nothing you've said that I've not already done."

She snorts, still looking as though she can't believe he's standing in front of her. "Oh."

"You seem…distressed."

"Are these books on spells?"

They speak at the same time, the words coming together like a jumbled record of unintelligible sounds.

Loki gives her a dark smirk, recognising the deliberate switch in topic. He takes pity on her obvious discomfort by turning his gaze to the rows of books that contain the forgotten lores of the realms.

Nodding once at them, he says, "These are history books, no doubt authored by poor scribes who laboured under the order of the All-father."

She looks disappointed for a brief moment, then raises a hand to swipe a finger across them, disturbing the dust that has settled on their thick spines. "They haven't been touched in a long time."

"No."

The weight of her stare falls on him and Loki feels it as keenly as he had on that day she accompanied Odinson to his prison. Her temerity no longer infuriates him as it had but it irritates him nonetheless. Yet if the animosity between them is spent, what then, lies in its place?

"When you have finished your perusal of my being…" he trails off pointedly when he sees her hesitation.

"I spoke with Thor and Frigga. They told me some things that I didn't know."

Loki stiffens immediately. "If you believe whatever you hear, then you would certainly live up to your name as a foolish mortal. Go ahead, draw your own conclusions, Jane. I don't doubt that they'll be creative fabrications of your projections of me," he waves a disinterested arm in her direction, "and entirely inaccurate ones as well."

She falls silent, no doubt reassessing her original conclusions. He simply watches her closely, not bothering to explain himself at all. There's little that he will defend of his actions in freeing Surtur, just as he has no inclination to speak of his role in bringing about the demon's downfall.

"And to think I was actually worried," she says speculatively.

What?

He snaps his head back in her direction. There isn't a smidgen of dishonesty in her statement and it unsettles him. "You move me with your concern. Don't be too quick to show it for a-"

"Loki, stop."

He does, out of surprise than obedience. Her returning glare is ferocious but something else is written all too clearly on her face.

"We've had this…argument already," she points out.

"So we did," he acknowledges curtly. It still burns too brightly in his mind that to revisit it would be akin to forcing an old wound to reopen.

His invitation to leave this conversation where it should belong – in the past – does the exact opposite.

"Look, I know what you've done in New York. And in New Mexico. But a week ago, I also thought you were dead. You and Thor and…so many others. When I saw you knocked off your feet after Surtur's fires…burned. And I wasn't as happy…no, I mean, I thought the worst," she finishes lamely with a scowl directed at him.

"You conveyed that so eloquently."

"Is it so hard to believe I'm actually happy that you're alive?"

He purses his lips until they become a thin, white line. "The Aesir are knit together more strongly than a human's weak body," he tells her in deflection, taking a mocking look down her slight form for emphasis.

"Tell me something I don't already know," she mutters. "So why the hell are you here? Now that you've finished throwing my effort at being polite and my worry back in my face?"

He holds out his hand, Frigga's dagger materialising in it a second later. "To return this. I believe it's yours, no matter what you say."

Like she did the first time, Jane Foster makes no move to take it, simply eyeing it with the same amount of trepidation and distrust as she'd done before.

"I thought I gave it to you."

Loki frowns at her reply, closing his hand briefly around the dagger's hilt in frustration. Is the woman plain stubborn, stupid…or both, to reject the queen's gift? Or did it remind her so much of her failure in Odin's tests that she will not even associate herself with this useful weapon?

The All-father should no longer be a tormenting memory, Loki thinks, seeing as he has closed himself off in a dimension rift, locked in eternal battle with one of the most heinous foes that can ever walk Yggdrasil's pathways.

Odin's legacy, already confined to the realm of myth in humanity's pathetically short memory banks, will only live on in the Realm Eternal.

"You did. But I have no use for it any longer, so I'm returning it," he explains slowly as though he's doing to a dim-witted child, making certain that she hears the condescension creeping into his voice.

"I guess you don't want to accept anything that isn't rightfully yours?"

He doesn't miss a beat, stepping closer just to unsettle her. A wicked smile crosses his face when he hears her breath hitch. "My dear Jane, surely you know by now that I take what I want, even if it isn't rightfully mine."

"I don't doubt that," she says indignantly, looking anywhere but at him, then hurriedly gestures back to the dagger. "Or give it back to the queen if you don't want it."

"A gift, once given, shouldn't be returned, especially for something as precious as this. It's the biggest insult otherwise, to the giver."

Frowning, she reconsiders and tentatively reaches for the dagger with a grimace. "Well, we wouldn't want that, do we?"

Loki nods, watching her closely. She's such an open book, so easily read, so easily manipulated. But is she truly worth the effort when there is much larger game to stalk?

Shrugging once, he tells her curtly, "Good."

It's probably his most conciliatory form of farewell to someone who had started out as an illusory, static figure into whom he channelled his hate and anger. In the flesh, Jane Foster brings too much order to his chaos.

Loki snaps around sharply and prepares to walk away. Handing back that dagger had merely been a symbolic act of severing his last tie to her.

And there's nothing more than he'd like now than to-

"Wait!"

He stops, but doesn't turn around.

She takes advantage of his silence to go on. "What will you do now?"

Loki stills, buying some time for himself as he considers what to say.

Trust her to ask the very question to which he doesn't really have an appropriate answer. In fact, he's finding himself mortifyingly back where he began the moment he woke up in Eir's care in the aftermath of the battle: on Asgard, a place that he thought he'd so thoroughly renounced when he left Jane Foster in the big, clumsy hands of Odinson.

"I will leave Asgard," he tells her finally, putting his best-laid plans to rest and opts for the simplest, most obvious solution. His permanent, voluntary exile from the Realm Eternal is the only pardon that he will receive at the very least for the part he played in the battle.

"For good?"

This time he does turn around, seeing her wring her hands once in apparent nervousness, her jitters so obvious to him when he has all but learned the nuances of her tiniest movements in the days past.

Curiosity, rather than disdain, makes him raise his brows pointedly in question. "Likely so. Why do you ask?"

She sighs deeply, then confesses, "I've been thinking. Actually, I've been going crazy with nothing but my thoughts for company."

Loki cants his head in interest. "You are afraid of being alone."

"No, I'm not," she denies firmly, "but I would rather not be. That's a difference."

He finds Jane Foster's stilted admission rather amusing. Loneliness, apart from death, had always seemed to be one of humanity's greatest fears. It's a trait that hasn't changed in thousands of years.

"You needn't worry, Miss Foster," he tells her evenly, "If you do indeed choose to stay in Asgard, there would be plenty here to occupy your mind, enough so that you'll forget what it means to be alone. Its marvels would keep you ecstatic for an age to come, even after you tire of Odinson's one-dimensional noble goodness. As a guest of the royal family, you will have servants to tend your every need, the queen herself for company at times and silly, foppish courtiers tripping over themselves to make your acquaintance."

An ironic, bitter smile curves her lips. "Yeah, that sounds loads better than being locked up in a high, ivory tower with a long braid of hair for a ladder."

"I'm unfamiliar with that tale," he says with a frown.

"Never mind that," she winces and waves it away with an expression too peculiar for his liking. "You know what you said days ago? I think you might have been right. Asgard has never been and will never be my home. The only hard part is going on, moving forward when you've seen too much."

Loki finds himself agreeing with her last sentence. "Perhaps." And perhaps he will look back on this moment in a hundred years and finally be able to dismiss her as an insignificant memory, a small blight in a tumultuous times when the realms were shaken up.

Deciding to leave her indulging in humanity's penchant for sentimental ruminations, he takes a step away, fully intending to leave before he gets mired in yet another soul-searching moment into which Jane Foster has a bad habit of dragging him. "I will bid you farew-"

"Actually, I might have an idea," she hurriedly puts in, as though afraid he'd disappear on her. "Or…a request, I guess, if you want to call it that."

He sees her take a deep breath, like a swimmer taking a plunge into a waterfall.

And then she tells him something that isn't what he expects at all.

The first sentence out of her mouth surprises him; the second astounds him. The more she talks, the more he finds himself mortifyingly warming to the idea. But the time she's finished telling him what she sees and wants – with a spark of inspired boldness he doesn't expect –, Loki finds himself confounded, fairly speechless and possibly…quite possibly, desperately hopeful for the first time in hundreds of years.

Her palpable excitement lingers as she walks away, leaving him staring after her absently, his mind already turning to the dimensions that aren't known to Asgard.

oOo

When her eldest son would have once been in the centre of the revelries, he is now withdrawing to the long balcony for a moment of solitude that she fears interrupting.

She should have known he would have sought refuge away from the crowd.

Frigga pauses, then moves to join him as he stares silently out at the towering spirals that still show the recent signs of destruction, despite the unceasing work of their best smiths and mages to restore the Realm Eternal to its original glory.

"It will take a long time."

He's the first to speak, letting out a heavy sigh that follows that pronouncement. But he leaves the vagueness hanging in his statement, trusting that she, as his mother and as Asgard's queen, will understand just what he's trying to say.

She does.

He has changed much. Clad in his finery, her son looks every inch the King, yet the weight has never looked more burdensome on him. When he had once been prone to brooding over insignificant matters pertaining to personal vanity, he now broods over Asgard and over all that has been lost.

And she thinks that he is now truly worthy to take his father's place.

Frigga clears her throat delicately. "It is a glorious burden you were always meant to carry."

He gives her a pinched look of disbelief and it's such an incongruous sight that she cannot help but laugh a little. Sobering, she places a light arm over his shoulder. The All-father had bequeathed the gift of the Odin-force to his son when he slipped into an unknown dimension to battle the fire demon. It's a shimmering aura that's intangible to all who are gifted with sight – surely the mark of a worthy heir to the throne – that he only discovered in the aftermath of the great battle.

"But I have faith in you. My king," she says simply.

Her affirmation brings some light back into his eyes. But it isn't enough to chase away the haunted melancholy that she knows is permanently etched there.

More quietly, he says, "Loki was always meant to be my counsel, Mother. By my side, helping me to be the king I should be when I finally take the throne."

"I know. But you will forge your own path."

It breaks her heart to see the loss that swirls in his eyes. Beyond the daunting task of being Asgard's King, there is much else to do: alliances to reaffirm, new ties to forge and a future to shape. She knows, however, that his younger brother has never been far from his mind, despite Loki's deliberate absence from the coronation and the celebration feasts.

Her sons' paths have forked the moment the impulsive decision was made to march into Jotunheim. She recalls it as clearly as she does the day they were put in her arms for the first time and feels the same mix of wistfulness and loss at the memories.

But Frigga refrains from saying anything more, because as both a mother and a queen, she also knows how to play her role.

It's a long moment before Thor stirs from his perusal of the brilliant constellations. Out there, the former ruler of Asgard – the All-father, his father – guards the realms still. At least, it's the way Frigga knows he will choose to remember Odin Borson.

He gives her a small smile as he gestures to the liveliness inside. "I should return to the feast."

Frigga returns his smile softly, but doesn't join him as he returns to his friends. Instead, she turns back to the sky and looks up at the stars.

oOo

Thor is in the middle of accepting the toast when he sees them. Raising his goblet absently to his lips, He takes a surreptitious glance around and realises that they're only visible to him in his peripheral vision…and hidden from everyone else.

It's Jane, with Loki.

They're standing close together yet with a carefully maintained distance between them. But whether out of propriety, of pretence or by choice, he doesn't really know. Yet there're matching, conspiratorial looks on their faces, as though they share a secret no one else knows. And the way they're actually looking at each other-

Thor looks away for a moment. As much as there's an ache that he thinks he isn't able to articulate at present, there's also an equivalent measure of deep relief that he feels as he watches the both of them.

He takes a moment to consider these diverging paths that his mother spoke about. They're all unknown routes as unpredictable as the winding branches of Yggdrasil, still wrought with danger and mischief for as long as Loki treads them.

And he has centuries, if not millennia, to come to terms with that idea…and eternity to make peace with it.

A shout from the end of the table snatches his attention away from the shadowy balcony. Volstagg has just found himself in a lively argument with Sif and Hogun and Thor's wiling to bet that inebriation is its primary catalyst.

It wrangles a genuine smile from him, a welcome, momentary distraction.

But he's unwilling to lose both his brother again, as well as the woman whom he knows – or is slowly accepting – belongs elsewhere and also to…someone else.

Lifting his head and turning back in their direction, he squints up at-

Nothing.

There is nothing now but air and space where they were standing.

Thor blinks a few more times in surprise, a small, incredulous laugh issuing from his throat.

After a moment's deliberation, he lifts his goblet in that particular direction and drinks deeply from it, unable to ignore the strange swell of emotion rises along with the warming heat of the ale.

"Well played, Loki," he says, then glances at the empty spot again, still tasting the lingering bitter dregs in his throat as the twilight sky finally deepens into a midnight blue.

-Fin

A/N: 'Incalculability' was originally intended to be a (Thor 2) alternate universe one-shot that would help me get Loki and Jane out of my system and I'm now shamefaced to admit that it was something I wanted to write to get over writer's burn-out of my other works-in-progress that are still yet unpublished. But the more I got into it, the bigger the story grew and I'll always be grateful to the support I received from other 'Lokaners' on Tumblr and for those who reviewed and read on this site.

I know I left the fates of Loki and Jane rather ambiguous here because it's difficult at this moment to imagine that they'd kiss and make up that easily in a relationship that's as complicated as theirs. But as someone who demands happy endings from other writers that I stalk, I'd like to think that they'll get there eventually.

As always, thank you for reading and for your reviews. You help make writing fanfiction worth it.