108Scheherazade
A lokaneweek fic
Prompts: Fairy Tales, Soulmate Marks, Mythologies, Historical
I
It was a cold, blustery March when Odin's three children descended from the sky, stepping off of prismatic rainbows onto the black, frosted ground of Earth.
Beautiful, invulnerable, and arrogant beyond words, they brought an ultimatum. Accept their father Odin as overlord of the planet and submit to his whim, provide him tribute, and stifle all objections, or be destroyed.
Leaders of Earth, reeling not only at the knowledge that Norse gods were real and apparently from space, but also from the expectation that they were meant to surrender all their authority and turn the entire population of Earth into serfs at a moment's notice, understandably declined to do this. Even those politicians who were on the fence still nodded in agreement behind those that rejected Odin's proposal.
What no one realized at the time was that Hela, Thor, and Loki were not human. They had no interest in haggling, in cutting a good deal, or in skimming away power for themselves. They were the war machines of their father, and when they delivered an ultimatum, they meant it.
The war that followed was swift, and it was devastating.
Dr. Jane Foster woke to another day of uncut boredom. Her cot was still hard, her cell still cold, her food still processed and stale, and her fellow prisoners still paralyzed by trauma. She was little better. As part of the team responsible for putting up such a fight at the final Battle of Manhattan—which loss finally broke the back of North American resistance—she had fully expected to be executed the moment her team was apprehended.
In her darker moments, she wasn't certain that she hadn't been. This endless purgatory, day after day marinating in fear, seemed hellish enough to be real.
Like most of the survivors, she clung to routine to avoid sinking into a gibbering puddle of once-human goo. Breakfast, cup of coffee. Ten laps around the prison yard, one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups. Recite the Morgan-Keenan stellar classification system withall its subdivisions. Forwards and backwards, because why not?
Exercise again. Lunch, cup of coffee.
It was after lunch that Jane's carefully-constructed system fell apart. After lunch was when they came.
Asgard's shock troops were monstrous men, encased in armored carapaces of crimson and gold. Each one's forearm was wider almost than Jane's head, thick around with corded muscle like steel rope. They were acknowledged masters of the prison. When they told you to do something, you either did it or you killed yourself trying.
One person, once, had refused to do as he was ordered.
Jane would never forget the wet thunk of his decapitated head against the tiles, nor the businesslike way the soldier had wiped his bloody hands on the dead man's shirt before letting it slump to the floor likewise.
Jane had always known it would just be a matter of time before they came for her. Over and over, she told herself that it didn't matter, that nothing mattered, that she might as well die now as later. Earth was over; what was there to live for? Nothing, that's what. With such mantras she lulled herself to sleep at night, anticipating death with something like sick fascination.
Yet that day, when they called her name, she realized how much life meant to her, and how much she would give for just one more breath of it.
"Dr. Foster,"
Jane's knees trembled so that the soldier who brought her had to hold her upright as she stood before the throne. Two minutes ago, she had been imagining an unceremonious beheading out in the yard, yet somehow, this was much worse.
"Have a seat."
A chair materialized impossibly out of some void, nudging at the back of her knees. Though she would have liked to remain defiantly upright—in her dreams she would have spat in his face—Jane collapsed into it with no more stiffness to her than a boiled noodle.
This was bad, this was bad, this was bad. Of course she knew Loki by sight—who in the world didn't?—but she had never expected to ever be face-to-face with him. Odin's youngest son was a sorcerer of terrifying powers, the depths of which no one had managed to plumb. Thor might summon lightning and Hela might animate the dead, but Loki could make physics stand on its head and reality do a jig.
More than anyone, he was responsible for Earth's subjugation.
And there he sat, turning over a file—her file—and reading aloud.
"Doctor Jane Foster, astrophysicist. Thirty-seven years old. PhDs in physics and astronomy from Stamford, post-doctoral fellowship at MIT. Consultant with NASA, Boeing, Raytheon, Stark Industries, and the United States Science Commission.
"Most important, though," he closed the folder and grinned like a death's-head, "the creator of arc reactor-based portal technology that almost swayed the Battle of Manhattan in humanity's favor. It's a pleasure to meet you."
Jane, through a combination of focused breathing and pure denial, had managed to sit upright and still during this recital. Her eyes, however, could rise no higher than the tops of his boots.
"That was a compliment. You have my permission to express your thanks."
She should have swallowed her own tongue first. But her curiosity, long-dormant, poked its head out of the dirt like a spring seedling. She had to see where this was going, even as she knew it was her grisly end.
"Thank you."
"There. What a polite child you are," his legs uncrossed; he sat forward. His elegant hands rested on his knees as he studied her downcast face. "You should know that I have no intention of killing you right away. I have arranged for a few free hours this afternoon to satisfy my curiosity about you. Then you will die. But you have my word it will not be painful."
For a dizzying moment, Jane felt herself dissolve into atoms. The world around her faded into darkness. Death was nothing. She could face it. She would face it.
Her eyes snapped open and she lifted her head, fearless and bold. Loki's thin lips stretched into a smile as, for the first time, they looked each other full in the face.
"Well done," he nodded, "I must admit, I have been impressed by you mortals. Oh, most of you beg and plead at the instant of death, but every so often, one in a hundred shows true grit. I suspected you would too."
"Why?"
"Your work was impressive. It showed a creative, resilient mind. Such minds have no need to fear the end."
"How would you know?" Jane's courage rose with her curiosity, "You're all immortal, aren't you?"
"Compared to you mortals, we might as well be."
Not a definitive answer. Jane heaved a silent sigh; that sort of knowledge would have been invaluable, once. That these gods could bleed and die. Too bad the knowledge would die with her.
She shrugged, soughing off regret. There was no purpose to that feeling now. Feeling in general was bleeding away from her, leeched as though through an open wound. Now that her curiosity was slaked, it wanted no more and subsided along with every other sensation, physical or emotional.
"Tell me how you came to think of manipulating neutrons to tear space-time."
The question came to her from a great distance and through several layers of thick cotton. As though she were falling asleep, wrapped in a cocoon of blankets, Jane's body was warm and heavy. That included her tongue, which felt like a bar of soft lead in her mouth.
"Dr. Foster?"
She shook her head.
He sighed, an elaborate bluster of disappointment. "You may sit there in silence if you wish. I will not force you to speak. But do not imagine that this show of resistance will sway me. Say what you will, if you will not answer my questions."
A twinge of anger was a taser bolt in her side. "How generous of you," she sneered.
He only shrugged, clearly intending to say no more.
They sat in silence that grew like unchecked cancer, eating away at Jane's hardened shell of shock. She checked her watch; even though the face had broken when Aesir soldiers had stormed her lab and taken her entire team prisoner, the hands had never stopped spinning. Two forty-eight. Normally at this time, she would have just finished exercising for the third time and would have been settling down to tell herself stories.
The habit began as another way to kill time, to keep herself from going absolutely batshit insane. She'd sit in the corner and close her eyes, remembering novels, movies, episodes from TV shows. She'd test her memory by reciting things word-for-word, or flex her creativity by inventing new scenarios for the characters. Or she'd rewrite the whole thing from the ground up, throwing out the established story altogether in favor of what her imagination could create.
Why not? He told her to say what she would, after all.
"Once upon a time," she cleared her throat, "there was a solar system. It was vast, full of planets, full of people." She could see each planet rising in her mind's eye, spinning like tops through a vast universe called into being by her words.
"At first, each planet and its people were individual and free. The closer planets, in the inner rings of the solar system, were wealthy and proud. They created an Alliance, to greater share their resources and centralize their power. After years, they sought to spread their government to the outer worlds in the solar system."
Through short, rhythmic sentences, Jane soothed herself. Her voice grew stronger. "There was a war. A long, devastating war. At its end, the Alliance had complete control of the solar system, and it punished all those who had fought against it. Those rebels retreated ever-deeper into space, living on the edges of society."
Now she needed a ship; she summoned it. The glow of its engine was a lone night-light in those deep reaches of space.
"One of these rebels wasn't able to let go of the war, even when it ended. He had neither power nor army, but he had the will to fight. He drew together others like him, and with the last of his money, he bought a ship. A Firefly. And he and his crew lived by picking the flesh off the Alliance."
Piece by piece, Jane told the story. A raid here, an escape there. Falling afoul of other bandits and taking on passengers to make ends meet. A mysterious man with mysterious cargo. A chase, suspicions, accusations, a fight. The cargo opened to reveal—
Breath stalled in her throat; she was parched, tongue dried and vocal chords rubbed raw. Licking her cracked lips, Jane swallowed and opened her eyes.
Light had faded from the room. She had talked through the afternoon and well into evening, ignorant of sunset as it lit up the sky, mindless of the night's early stars as they emerged from behind a curtain of twilight. Realization hit her like a punch in the throat. It was time.
Loki would kill her now.
It was of utmost importance that she not cry or beg. She would show him how a brave human died.
"Finish your story."
So wrapped up in telling herself the story of Firefly, Jane had hardly remembered her audience. And Loki was her audience. The tale, so familiar to her, was new and captivating to him. She read his fascination in the way he sat, elbows on his knees, eyes fixed on her face.
"Finish the story," he demanded. She flinched.
"I'm thirsty," she whispered. At a flick of his fingers, a glass of water appeared on her knee.
She drank. Each time she drained the glass, it refilled, until at last she wiped her lips and set the cup aside.
"Now, continue."
She swallowed. Did she dare? "I'm tired."
His lips twisted, furious at her daring and at himself for allowing it. "Now."
"It—it's a long story. It'll take longer than I have to tell it. And I'm tired."
In an explosive burst of movement, Loki surged to his feet, one fist clenched. Jane, hands folded in her lap, looked up at him calmly and didn't flinch. Exhaustion was more responsible for that than bravery as, watching power arc in green lightning over his fingers, her insides liquefied in fear.
"Very well," after a moment that crackled with tension, Loki mastered his irritation and lowered his hand, "You will finish the story tomorrow night. Then you will die."
Back in her cell, Jane collapsed on her cot, heart pounding, palms sweating, and mind whirring with possibilities.
If one story had saved her life, there might be another one that could help her.
It took her ten nights to tell the story of Firefly's fourteen episodes, mostly because she couldn't figure out how to turn some of the plot points into coherent narratives. Quickly, she discovered that it didn't matter what she told, so long as she told it well. However he spent his days, Loki seemed desperate for entertainment in his off-hours, and Jane did what she could to engage him with stories that always had a little more to tell.
On that basis, she planted the seed of a Star Trek arc, introducing the idea of an Enterprise setting out to explore the frontiers beyond the Alliance's reach.
This Frankenstein creation gave her material for another eighteen evenings. Wracking her memory for episode details, she described a trial for humanity's worthiness, a lost ship trying to return home, a bloody occupation of one planet by aliens from another, a godlike race of beings outside of time...every night, Jane's imagination pushed back—by a single day—the date of her death.
She wasn't done. The more she told, the more she remembered. Movies provided her with plot: Arrival, Contact, 2001, Cloverfield, Forbidden Planet...from popcorn flicks to deep ruminations on humanity's push into the stars, she turned them all into fairy tales.
One day, about a month into her surreal existence as a one-woman Netflix to a god, she realized she didn't remember when he'd last threatened her life. Indeed, their sessions had undergone a sea-change, the extent of which it boggled her to realize. Gone was the harsh throne room; they now sat on facing sofas, with a carafe of water and a plate of cookies reserved just for her. Jane no longer faced threats when she stopped at her habitual cliffhangers. Now, Loki merely thanked her and segued into...into conversation. Personal conversation.
"My work is almost finished," he said, during one of their chats. Jane nearly choked on her bite of cookie, "My father has already recalled Hela. He will soon call me."
Jane chewed carefully and swallowed. Hope, an emotion she did her best to check, swelled like a helium balloon between her lungs. Her breath came short. "Oh. What will happen to Earth when you leave?"
"Thor has things well in hand here. He has taken a strange liking to this...planet," Loki drawled the word. "It suits him; your people are as rough and uncultured as he is. I am glad to be returning to Asgard. I suspect you will like it as well."
"What do you mean?"
"You are an astrophysicist. Surely you will enjoy traveling among the stars."
Her heart froze, a terrified rabbit watching a fox's approach. "You mean...you'll take me with you?"
"Of course," he leaned back, smiling. "You still have more stories to tell, do you not? And once those are finished, perhaps you will have yet more to give," his eyes flashed, even in low light. "I would be a fool to throw aside such an interesting woman as you, Jane."
She had an instant, no more, to decide how to react.
Taking up another cookie, Jane took a bite that crumbled in her mouth like ashes.
"When do we leave?"
