23So these are my Lokane Week 2019 entries... which I am still not done with... but better late than never, right?
Anyway, all my entries will be vignettes existing within the same AU. New chapters will be up either every day or every other day depending on how busy I am. Hope you enjoy!
Thor's banishment was… unexpected.
Not necessarily a problem- Valhalla knows the fool needed a good kick off his pedestal- but still far from the outcome Loki hoped for.
A bit of fun, he'd call it. Just another prank, albeit one that led to bloodshed. That was regrettable, and he'd sent his personal condolences to the families of the dead guards (not even Thor would've done so much).
But now Thor was gone. Powerless. Trapped on Midgard at the mercy of mortals. Loki didn't have to spy, but he couldn't help himself. He skulked in the shadows, invisible to all, as Thor stumbled and screamed for the gatekeeper.
A man and two women had found him. One of them was already smitten. Loki didn't know what CPR was, but that lusty smile was telling.
The second was equally entranced, utterly fascinated and consumed… by the Bifrost's markings. She sat on her haunches, almost but not quite touching the sand, babbling figures to her companions.
The man pointed out Thor.
Her response? "He's fine. Look at him."
Perfectly dismissive. He was barely a grain of sand in her eyes.
The next day, Loki strolled down the streets of Thor's new desert home. That woman, Jane Foster, had left him in the capable hands of Midgardian healers. Loki looked in on him and he was fine, sleeping peacefully following a failed escape attempt. Jane, meanwhile, power walked back to her lab with a plastic bag full of whatever passed as food in this realm. It smelled like burning meat and cheese. Not appetizing in the slightest.
"Excuse me," he said, appearing to her as merely another human going about his day, "do you live here?"
"For now," she said, swinging the bag back and forth. "Hopefully for the foreseeable future. Can I help you?"
"I certainly hope so. I've just arrived in this town and I'm afraid I don't know where anything is. Are there any points of interest I should look for?"
Jane snorted. "Points of interest? In Puente Antiguo? Anything I could show you is happening a few hundred miles that way."
She pointed at the sky and Midgard's single burning sun. Loki didn't look up.
"Hmmm… I see. Are you studying the stars, then?"
The question startled her out of leaving. She'd been inching away from him and a polite excuse was on her tongue, but now she was firmly locked in place. "How'd you know that?"
Loki raised his hands submissively. "Forgive me if I've spoken out of turn, but I heard there was a scientist in town tracking cosmic disruptions."
"Finding proof of an Einstein-Rosen Bridge," she said automatically. How many times had she made that same correction? "I mean, yes, that's me. I'm Jane Foster."
"Luke," he lied. After meeting Thor, Loki might be a bit much. "An honor to meet you, Dr. Foster. I hope you don't mind if I ask a few questions?"
She eyed him one more time, arms folded. "Yeah, okay."
They walked down the road to her lab, chatting all the while about her research, where she'd gotten her ideas, how she ended up so far outside traditional academia. Loki listened intently, asking all the right questions for a curious novice, and also a few of his own. Her ideas were fascinating, if rudimentary by Asgardian standards. A trip to the grand library might've been truly stimulating for her.
"And here's my base of operations." They were outside an oval-shaped building made of windows, ramshackle tech littering the tables and floors. A whiteboard covered in photos was next to the door It was the first thing Loki spotted as they walked inside.
"Are you alone?"
"My intern is on her break and my colleague is at the library," she explained. "They'll be back soon if you want to meet them."
"That would be wonderful," Loki smiled. "Thank you again for indulging me, Doctor. I hope I haven't troubled you."
"Oh no," she said with a slight blush. Next, he should kiss her hand. "No, no. Not at all. It's nice having someone else to talk to. Erik's great, but Darcy doesn't really get it, and most of the town thinks I'm from Area 51."
"What a shame," Loki said. He glanced at a disorganized stack of photos which didn't appear to have been looked through. At the top is a shot of the Bifrost, to mortal eyes just a swirl of smoke and color. A shadow in the center of the image gave him pause. "Have you… found anything yet?"
Her whole face brightened. "Oh man, like you wouldn't believe."
She then launched into a tirade about yesterday's storm and the markings in the dirt. Loki nodded along like he had no part in making it happen. She left out the bit about hitting Thor with her vehicle, which was a shame. That was his favorite.
"You believe this was an Einstein-Rosen Bridge," he said.
"Of course," she said. "An anomaly of that magnitude can't be anything else. I would've gotten better footage, but someone got hurt during the event and we had to take him to the hospital."
"Oh dear," Loki gasped. "Was he all right?"
"Oh yeah, he was great," Jane said, biting her lip. "I may have had… something to do with him getting hurt. Anyway, I'm heading back out there tonight after I go through all the new data. With any luck, nothing out there has changed since last night."
Loki hummed. While she checked her monitor and typed in commands, he made a show of studying the photos, scanning each one too fast to take anything in. At least with mortal eyes.
'Such an interesting woman,' he mused as she whipped another notebook out of nowhere and filled an entire page in under a minute. 'Perhaps all she needs is a push in the right direction.'
And what Thor needed was to learn a lesson. The All-Father never acted without purpose, and if his wish was for Thor to be humbled as a simple human, then it was Loki's wish, too. His brother has been idolized for long enough, and as Loki removed his silhouette from Jane's photos, leaving the true object of her desires intact, he knew it was the best thing for everyone.
Of course, he would retrieve Thor from the healers eventually. In a few months perhaps; a year at the most. That should be long enough to teach him the virtue of humility. Odin and Frigga could rest easy. Their firstborn was safe under the second's careful watch.
"I'd be happy to accompany you," he said, adding a shrug for good measure. "If you needed an extra pair of hands, that is."
"I think the fewer hands, the better," she said, smiling, "but if you really want to, you can wait in the van."
He'd accept that, for now.
Jane Foster could rest easy, too.
