Lokane Fanfic Archive

This blog is a fanfiction archive dedicated to the pairing of the Marvel characters Loki and Jane Foster. PLEASE READ THE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES & FAQ BEFORE SUBMITTING A STORY.

[dailyloki]

Loki becomes the God of stories.

[neil-gaiman]

I've watched the recently released season 2 of Good Omens, and I know a third series is dependent upon the audience and the writer's strike. In the unfortunate event that Good Omens is not renewed for a season three, would you consider releasing a script book of what would have happened for the fans to read?

No, I'd write a novel.

[magic-n-science]

Hi, sorry if this has been covered, but I was wondering if you'd heard of two separate oneshots on fine, one starts with "her" other with "his". Sorry I dont know more

Hmm. No I don't.

Anyone else have any idea?

[magic-n-science]

Hey I read a lokane fanfic around a year ago, that I desperately want to read again but I cannot find it. It was set during the Viking ages or at least pre industrial revolution. It featured Loki like throwing sticks and reading runes? Being like a nomadic shaman almost and Jane being sick but also sometimes helping him. To save jane he has to get her to say his name and she finally does. I can’t remember where I read this to save my life please help

Sorry I just saw this so many weeks later! I cant recall any stories that fit that description. Anyone else know?

[magic-n-science]

Do you know of any lokane fics based in like ancient viking times, and Loki is like a shaman/medicine man? Jane is dying and he saves her? I read a fanfic like this a long time ago and now I’m trying to find it again for reasons and I can’t find it at all.

Huh. No I don't.

Anyone recognize this?

[magic-n-science]

Do you know of any Lokane soulmate fics where they find out they are soulmates through some magical bond or circumstances like names or words written on the other? Or any circumstances really.

@iamartemisday has written stuff like that…Here is one:

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11741301/1/Black-Ink 

[magic-n-science]

Lokane Fanfic Archive turned 4 today!

Post a link to your favorite Lokane Fic to celebrate!

[magic-n-science]

Reminder

Hello, fellow Lokane lovers!

Do not forget about the archive here! I’m always taking submissions. Visit the page for instructions, and “ask” if you have any questions! 

[magic-n-science]

TITLE: We Met on Accident AUTHOR: Anonymous ONESHOT/CHAPTER NUMBER: 7 Chapters RATING: PG-13/T GENRE(S): Romance, Humor SUMMARY: After Odin saves Thor, Loki, and the others from Laufey, the BiFrost drops Loki down to Midgard. Loki calls to Heimdall and finds that he cannot go back home. Odin doesn’t realize since he was angry with Thor’s reckless behavior until Heimdall speaks up about it later. Thor, banished by their father, joins Loki and now the two brothers are stuck in the realm of the mortals. NOTES/WARNINGS:

http://archiveofourown.org/works/485735 or https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8426305/1/We-Met-on-Accident

[magic-n-science]

The Tesseract Effect, Prologue

TITLE: The Tesseract Effect (on ff.net) AUTHOR: WinterCandyMints ONESHOT/CHAPTER NUMBER: 1/? RATING: T GENRE(S): Humor/Romance SUMMARY: Jane blamed Loki. Loki blamed Tony. Tony was still laughing his head off at the ridiculous situation. When astrophysicist, Jane Foster and fallen Asgardian prince, Loki cross paths, neither of them thought they’d wind up where they are now. Jane already lived the nightmare once and now she had to do it again with him all because of a freak accident. High School. NOTES/WARNINGS: High school shenanigans. Tony sass.

[magic-n-science]

Beauty in the Frost

TITLE: Beauty in the Frost (on ff.net) AUTHOR: WinterCandyMints ONESHOT/CHAPTER NUMBER: 4/? RATING: T GENRE(S): Romance,Drama SUMMARY: The invasion in New York was stopped; Thor returned to her; she had SHIELD and Stark Industries backing her research. Jane’s life was going well. Or so she thought, until a candlestick landed in Thor’s landing site instead of Thor. Maybe she’s finally lost it, but if what the candle says is true, it’s up to her to save Asgard. The question is: who’s going to save her? NOTES/WARNINGS: Um… Fandral the Candlestick flirting.

[magic-n-science]

Hey, what happened to the prompt blog? Is everything okay?

Hi Anon!The prompt blog was separate from this one, and when I took this one over, I agreed to only manage the Archive. I couldn’t do both. My guess is that no one volunteered to do the Prompts. Sorry! :/

[magic-n-science]

Smoke and Mirrors

Next chapter! 

The nightmares had become unbearable.

Every night the galaxies were consumed in fire, and he watched frozen as countless worlds crumbled into the void. The flames stretched out to twine about his armor like searing serpents until the molten metal branded his skin in liquid silver. His voice could find no echo, though his throat bled raw with each silent scream that was ripped from him. Then the burning clouds would close in until the fumes strangled him, and for the fourth night in a row he awoke gasping for air in the dead of night.

How Sigyn must have burned. How she thirsted, and you let her burn.

The thought speared Loki and he collapsed forward with a moan, eyes squeezed shut against the tangle of sheets beneath him. The words ricocheted about his mind in a brazen cacophony until he clawed at his temples in an effort to silence it all. Sweat rolled hot across his skin and his breath came in short, ragged gulps as he fought to dispel the nightmare’s rolling fog. But peace would not come, even as the room grew more familiar around him, and he stared forward with the eyes of a dead man, silent and sightless. He felt unhinged, unmade, and desperately far from a lucid shore. What knowledge was worth all this?

Anger suddenly roiled within him and Loki swore at her in his renewed grief, his voice finally returning as his tongue lashed out in hideous oaths that rang about the chamber. After all he had done, she had left him with this. His wandering grasp fell upon a nearby water carafe and he hurled it at the wall, the glass shattering and embedding fragments deep within the embroidered tapestry. When the last of the poisonous words had finally spilled from his mouth, he slid to the floor and leaned back against the bed, exhausted. Shaking fingers reached up to push away the hair plastered across his forehead as he threw a listless glance about the room that was still lit by two sputtering torches. How long he remained motionless, he did not know. He finally rose stiffly, half in a haze to stumble across to the golden water basin in the adjacent washroom. The cool splash of water steamed against his burning skin and he sighed as the heat evaporated along with the last remnants of the dream. Blinking, he felt reason return in slow waves until he could breathe easier as the madness retreated like the tide, though likewise, it was bound to return.  Fear prickled at the back of his mind as it searched for any distraction to keep the darkness at bay, falling instantly upon his latest attempt at such a harmless diversion.

He immediately recoiled at the thought of Jane Foster. He had had no desire to see her again after their last meeting, for she vexed him, and was full of foolish hopes and graced with an impertinent manner that gnawed at his patience. His lips twitched in a rueful smile at the memory of the stinging slap she had once laid across his cheek. Had Thor not been present he would have answered her with much more than just the tilt of his head and a sly gibe. What Thor saw in her was a mystery to him, though Loki suspected it was the scientist’s childish enthusiasm and occasional pluck that held his brother enthralled. These traits only served to mildly amuse Loki, for he found most Midgardians woefully dull and Jane not far above her kind’s lot. Humans were fools in a universe too big for them, and they thought themselves able to conquer the stars through the sheer will of dreams without the raw possession of power. Oh, but how they loved to chatter endlessly about those hopes in every detail they could muster. Surely his nightmares could not return while she talked in that ceaseless, frenetic way of hers. He half-wondered at this weak reasoning, and with an effort fought down the sour disdain at the thought of her unwitting usefulness. Another glance about the oppressive room and he felt the madness lurk along the edges of his consciousness, waiting to corner him like a wolf before it consumed him alone. A mind could be a weapon unto itself as much as to others; the notion deeply unsettled him even as it settled the question.

With weary resolve, Loki cast the Allfather’s visage about him once more but paused, surprised at how much effort the simple magic had taken. He had barely slept in days, and he began to wonder how long he could effectively hold the illusion without it revealing the true form underneath it. Shaking his head, he quickly dismissed the thought and continued to thread the image around him. Again, it chafed him—he was growing tired of traveling about as Odin for the simple, frustrating reason that he could not go as himself. Restlessness began to needle him and imagining how he might finally reveal himself to the dismayed Asgardians was the only thought that buoyed his patience with any measure of enthusiasm.

Jane would merely be a step in that direction, and nothing more.

====================================================================

Striding down the barren corridors, it occurred to him that she might have retired much earlier, and he found himself hoping that that burning curiosity of hers might have robbed her of rest. It did not take him long to find her chambers, as they were undoubtedly the same as Thor’s. He chuckled despite himself. Thor must have truly thought his mission short for him to leave his lady in such an open hiding place. Perhaps he even underestimated his father’s disapproval of her presence, and hoped Odin would forgive her second trespassing. Regardless, Loki was delighted to find her awake and bent over a book beside a collection of parchments that she had scattered pell-mell over a great oaken table. She did not hear his entrance, but continued her studies, occasionally scribbling down notes and drawing careful lines in a notebook to her right.

“Jane Foster,” Loki began, Odin’s voice rolling easily off his tongue in perfect mimicry. “I must offer a humble-”

She dropped the volume she had been holding and it crashed to the floor with a dull thud. Loki ambled forward and bent to retrieve it, pausing as his hand found where the pages had been held open the longest.

“The death of stars,” he read thoughtfully, eyes flicking up to hers as he slowly placed the book back into her hands.

“Uh, yeah,” she muttered as she began frantically straightening the papers before her.

“I’m afraid that I find the event too common to be of much interest.”

She lit up at his remark, and Loki fought back a triumphant smile. How easily she could be goaded to conversation!

“No, this is an anomaly,” Jane blurted, stabbing a finger at the map before her. “A thousand stars that die at once, each feeding off the other in this, this…endless chain of stellar collapse.” She ran a hand through her tousled brown hair. “It’s incredible.”

The grin broke free upon Loki’s lips. “Then may I welcome you to the larger side of the universe.”

Jane searched his face, as if trying to detect his scorn from the last time he had mentioned her small world. Finding none, she risked a shy smile that grew as she glanced back over her notes. The warmth of his tone was apparently enough to melt away any further reservations she might have had, and she suddenly burst forth in a whirl of excitement.

“Allfather, did you see the red giants—” she stopped at his confused expression and recalibrated. “Oh, um, not real giants. Back on Earth, there’s a phase of a dying star called a red giant which happens when it’s used up its store of hydrogen which is a gas that fuels its core.” Her words gained momentum as her confidence grew. “Then gravity begins to collapse it in upon itself and the star glows red as the hydrogen atoms undergo continuous fusion into…”

Loki sank slowly into an armed chair and listened as she rattled off a list of terms and scenarios that meant little to him, his attention held by her tireless vigor. To one as exhausted as he, she seemed a leaping spark in contrast to his black moods, and he watched carefully as she shuffled through the documents she had no doubt procured from the observatory. How she had done so, he did not bother to ask. Her tone entranced him, but not because he was charmed by it; rather, because her voice held an inexplicable quality that soothed his nerves as she prattled on about nothing and everything at once. Jane could hardly have found a more agreeable audience than the Asgardian before her, all too willing to listen to anything apart from his own dark thoughts.

“…and that’s why when the sky was so red the other night—” Her words stopped on the tip of her tongue. “What’s wrong?”

Loki had visibly stiffened. “I was not aware you took much notice of that.”

Jane laughed. “Why wouldn’t I? The light kept me up for hours!”

“Dying stars.” Loki dropped his voice in a flat tone. “That’s what you think that was?”

“What else could it be?” Jane flipped through the celestial maps and carefully flattened one out, leaning in to rest her chin on the back of her hands. Her brown eyes flitted over the ink-scrawled creases as she gingerly traced an index finger over the paths of galaxies and the realms that they claimed. “Where’s Earth?”

Loki tapped his fingers against the arm of his chair. “Let me see.”

Jane held up the thick sheaf and tilted it toward him. Loki leaned forward and merely glanced over it before falling back against the cushions. “Those are not Midgard maps.“ 

"But shouldn’t Midgard,” she stumbled slightly over the strange word, then warmed to it, “Shouldn’t Midgard be on all of these?”

Loki chuckled as he rose and walked toward the table. “Although your realm is at the center of the World Tree, it is by no means the only one.”

“Thor told me about that!”

“About what?”

“The World Tree. He called it…” Jane trailed off for a moment, then shook her head sheepishly. “Well, I remembered it then.”

“Yggdrasil.”

“That was it.”

Loki leaned two fists upon the table as he absently perused its contents. “And was that all he told you?”

She shrugged, suddenly fiddling with the worn pages of her open notebook. “Actually, I can’t really remember. He started talking about the nine realms and where they came from, but I think I fell asleep.”

Loki quirked a brow. “The subject bored you.”

Jane’s eyes widened as her face fell. “Oh, no, of course not! I mean, I was tired, that’s all. Perhaps, you could tell me…again? You must have been to them all a million times.”

A strange smile crossed Loki’s face. “Yes, I have.”

“Great. So…” Jane glanced back down at her charts, then fell into silence as they slowly claimed her attention once more. She seemed to forget him completely, but it was not long, however, before she frowned. “I still can’t see this World Tree. I can’t place anything, or get any directional bearing! Don’t you have a map of everything?”

Loki stared at her, unease beginning to pool in his stomach as he was struck by a trace of familiarity. He began to back away, though he stopped short at her wounded expression.

“I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right,” Jane said apologetically. “I meant a map of the realms. I was wondering, if perhaps—”

“Yes, we have several.” His mouth answered her question before his mind could even register the action.

“Are they in the observatory?” The hope in her voice was unmistakable.

Loki’s surprise at his automatic response gave way to veiled annoyance. He had come only for the amusement of conversation, not to be the pageboy to the whims of a human. Still, the alternative to talkative company was far worse. He did not crave silence just yet.

He checked the strain in his voice. “Shall I show you?”

“You sure you wouldn’t mind?”

The walk was a relatively short one. The residential halls were parallel to those of high academia, with the star chambers the chief fixture among them all. Loki had once wondered why Odin had built them when the Gatekeeper who watched from the edge of the Bifrost could describe every view of the universe. It was only later that he realized how the skies stirred great passions in some, infecting its students with a thirst for knowledge that could not be slaked by mere description. The skies demanded to be seen, and to be seen firsthand, and its limitless reaches provided enough questions for even the most ambitious Asgardians to pursue. And so for thousands of years the galaxies had been watched, studied, and recorded with the highest of detail until the shelves and vaults of the observatory became a vast library that held within its bosom the very history of the worlds.

Loki could not remember the last time he had been in this room, and found himself absorbing it all as if for the first time. The marble chamber was wide in berth, its ceiling rising high to a glassy dome that opened up to the bright night sky. The walls were flanked by great gilded shelves of thick tomes that stretched to the very ceiling as a massive desk cut the width of the room like a banquet table. Upon its surface were scattered volumes and diagrams from a previous study, Jane’s, Loki quickly realized. Two great scroll cabinets stood at the far end of the room beside an open arch that lead to the vast observatory itself. Loki remembered the musty scent of parchment as soon as he stepped across the threshold, and he glanced up instinctively at the clear dome, his vision filled with the cold light of Asgard’s closest moon. They would need no torch light in here.

Jane was already marching toward the map vaults when he reached for her shoulder and drew her back. “Please sit.” He indicated a chair and she obeyed, her face etched with questions. His fingers ran delicately over the well-worn edges as he walked beside table before coming to a halt at the far end. His hand slipped from sight as he flipped a latch, and watched as the table slid apart in one quick, graceful motion. Jane’s reaction was not as fluid, and he smirked at her muttered oath of surprise as she jumped back. From the center of it all rose two great rolls of ancient paper bound together in scarlet ribbon.

“Untie it,” Loki ordered quietly, and Jane was only too eager to comply.

The map immediately spilled outward, tumbling over the smooth surface in either direction until it had stretched the full length of the long table. Jane’s hand flew to her mouth as she watched it  unfold, her eyes betraying her excitement as she glanced over at him in muted wonder.

“Your master atlas,” Loki said slowly as he returned to stand at her side.

Then Jane was moving in a flurry of conversation and paper. One moment she was leaning in to study it all in greater detail, the next found her skittering further down  to follow the whirling galaxies to their final, farthest ink strokes. “Midgard!” Jane finally exclaimed, running delicate fingers over the etched realm, ancient but still bold against the parchment. “And Asgard! Oh wow, are we really that far away? How many light years have I traveled here?”

“I believe I heard it to be a hundred thousand, as the Asgardian raven flies.”

Jane gaped at him before returning her attention to the scrolls. “This detail is amazing! Every star must be on this map—” She stopped short and glanced up at him with a flashing grin. “The red giants! What direction did that balcony face, the one we were on the other night?”

Anxiety soured Loki’s stomach. “South,” he managed finally.

“South…south…” Jane mused, finding her place again on the chart. “The closest star in that quadrant had to have been at least 200,000 light years from Asgard when I first saw it. The distance is roughly equivalent to the size of Earth’s irregular galaxies, so south of Asgard would be—” Her brow furrowed as her tongue stumbled over the word. “What's…Múspellsheimr?”

Loki swallowed, and with a trembling hand he pulled out the nearest chair and lowered himself into it before leaning his forearms on the table before him. “Muspelheim is one of the Nine Realms, made of consuming fire and turmoil that forged the beginning and end of the universe.”

Jane stared at him. “You mean those red clouds the other night, those dying stars, are an entire realm?”

“If chaos can be said to have limits, yes.”

“What livesthere?”

“Only that which goes to die there.”

Jane gave him a quizzical look. “So it doesn’t have any viable planets? Is life sustainable anywhere? I mean, it looks very similar to this galaxy that—”

“No,” Loki shot back, then immediately checked himself. “No, not that has been discovered.”

Jane had turned to study the fiery symbol branded into the ancient atlas. “If the Bifrost lets you visit any world, like Thor said, is there a way…”

Loki felt it hit him in full force, breaking the levees his mind had worked so hard to maintain the past few hours. Unsteadiness trickled cold through his veins and his throat rumbled in an unnatural chuckle. “And why would you want to do that?”

“Surely there’s a way to get closer to it.”

“Certainly!” Loki laughed through Odin’s voice. “So is that it? You wish to touch a star as it dies?”

Jane blinked, her mouth dropping slightly open. “If it were—”

“Oh yes, it’s possible. I’ve done it myself, or rather, I helped another do so.”

“What happened?”

“What happens when fire meets flesh, Jane?”

The stretch of silence felt interminable. Jane’s gaze dropped to her lap as she rubbed her fingers together restlessly, and Loki watched her from behind his dimming illusion. Exhaustion swept over him as it battled his frayed nerves and he gritted his teeth as he strained to concentrate the last of his energies on protecting his cover. He calmed as he secured it once more, slumping  back with his head tilted to the ceiling,

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Jane’s murmured, but her voice sounded clear across the empty space between them.

“You ask too many questions.”

“Yeah, I can get pretty carried away,” she said with a slight grimace. “I’m sorry, my timing’s not always the best. And…thanks for helping me. I know I’m not even supposed to be here.”

“No, you’re not.” Loki opened his eyes and they glinted in a shard of moonlight. “But you’ll do as company for now. An old man grows weary of the same faces, you know.”

Jane smiled but said nothing, her eyes roaming over the high mountains of books that corralled them in. She tried to stifle a yawn, but Loki could see that the lateness of the hour had finally taken its toll.

“Perhaps you should return to your chambers.”

Jane rubbed her bleary eyes before dropping her hand back to rest upon the map. “Uh, maybe in a bit. I just wanted to—what’s this?” Her fingers traced a lump beneath the sheaves and she carefully reached beneath them, pulling out a battered book bound in leather. “This wasn’t here before.”

Loki managed a smirk. “There is your history of the Nine Realms. No more questions.”

But Jane was already flipping through the thin pages and only moments passed before she was absorbed in their contents. Scrambling about the research before her, she located her small notebook and began scribbling notes faster than he cared to follow. Loki sighed as he felt the final vestiges of fear slip away. There was something soothing about her presence, though her inquisitive nature had not entirely ceased to annoy his more solitary sensibilities. It had not been difficult to be civil to her, though his disguise gave him little freedom to act otherwise. The night’s desperation and his long lack of sleep had robbed Loki of his sharper nature as the mask he wove about him every day weighed heavier upon his shoulders. He had not been himself, and he began to wonder just how much of his own identity remained. Odin, even in mimicry, would always hold him back.

Breaking from his reverie, Loki was surprised to find that Jane was asleep, her head resting against her right forearm that still held the book open before her. He tilted his head up to watch as the last sliver of moon slowly sunk from view, leaving the chamber entombed in an oppressive dark. Loki passed an hour in thoughtful silence before he finally gave in to the weariness that had gradually been pressing upon his eyelids. He stumbled to his feet and made it only as far as a soft armchair before he collapsed into it.  The oblivion of an untroubled sleep immediately overtook him, and in the nothing that filled his mind he stretched out in contentment.

 He did not wake when his illusion of Odin sputtered out in the darkness. 

[magic-n-science]

Natural Selection

TITLE: Natural Selection on FF.net AUTHOR: Dristi5683 CHAPTER NUMBER: 1 RATING: T GENRE(S): Adventure/Romance SUMMARY: Jane is using the tesseract to build an Einstein-Rosen bridge under SHIELD’s order when two Asgardian princes show up after their queen foresaw her success. Her life and Earth will never be the same as things soon spiral out of control. AU NOTES/WARNINGS: Inspired from Prompt 87

[magic-n-science]

Virtua, Chapter Five

TITLE: Virtua AUTHOR: iamartemisday ONESHOT/CHAPTER NUMBER: 5/5 (On FF.net here: Ch 5) RATING: M GENRE(S): Drama, Suspense, Horror, Alternate Universe SUMMARY: Psychologist Jane Foster can’t imagine a stranger case than the one that’s just been brought to her: an unknown man claiming to be the Norse God of Mischief, who seems to know more about her than he should. Unlocking the mysteries of his mind will throw Jane’s entire world out of line, as she must question what is real, and what is just a dream. NOTES/WARNINGS: I hope you all enjoyed this story!

**

The hospital’s main building carried a haunted air in the hours after closing. The night staff would be half-asleep by now, the janitors long gone home for a few precious hours of rest. Jane drove against the sun through town, on a road that would be wall to wall traffic in another thirty minutes. She followed her well established path without a single conscious thought, her speedometer miles above the speed limit. She made sharp turns in all directions and swerved in and out of lanes on the deserted streets. Only a few had emerged from their boxy suburban homes to get the paper or water the grass. Not one of them stared after her.

Somewhere deep within Jane’s psyche had to be her common sense, crying out with all the strength of a bedridden child that there had to be a logical explanation for all of this. Like a hallucination or drugs in the water. Maybe an angry ex-patient was enacting some kind convoluted revenge plot, gaslighting her until she could no longer function as a doctor or indeed as a human being. As far out as it sounded, it still made more sense than what the greater part of her was thinking.

Yet here she was, going sixty miles an hour in a twenty mile zone. The tattered remains of her good fortune worked just enough to keep the sirens from blaring, but it couldn’t prevent the simultaneous sinking of Jane’s gut and swelling of her chest as Genial North appeared, silhouetted on the horizon like a ghostly apparition.

The security guard took one glance at her ID and opened the gates, no questions or comments to speak of. Sometimes, doctors show up early to get extra work done or to plan for upcoming conferences. Jane doubted any of them were typically here a full three hours before their shift was to start, but that was the least of Jane’s concerns. She found a parking spot close to the elevators and bolted. In her frenzied state, she may have forgotten to grab her key from the ignition, or she may have just dropped them somewhere by the tires. They weren’t in her hand with her ID badge when she stepped off the elevator, that was all she knew.

The fourth floor was where most of the patients were kept, organized by name and security level. General patients—those with common conditions who were likely to only stay a few months came first. Jane passed Mr. Folan’s room on the left hand side and didn’t look in. Next were moderate level patients like Ian. His door bore the latest stick drawing that he’d done for arts and crafts. Jane caught it out the corner of her eye and she almost screamed. They looked way too familiar.

Next were the truly sick patients. Some of them cried out in answer to voices no one else could hear, others slept fitfully and rocked on creaky bedsprings. Darcy’s door was wide open, her bed newly made and her belongings untouched.

Jane darted across the hall. The few night staff who remained on duty spared her not a glance, even if she almost ran into them. It was as if their eyes slid right by her, unseeing and unaware. Or perhaps they were the ones who weren’t really there…

The room she wanted was at the very end of the L shaped hall. It was the final door at the end of the hall. The numbers, brass and emblazoned, shot out and stung Jane’s eyes. The sunlight reflected off the metal handlebar into her face, blinding her unless she kept blinking. Her eyes opened and closed so fast that her vision became like that of an old fashioned film projector. It made her descent into the narrow, isolated hallway seem all the slower. Each step she took on her lead metal feet felt like one more step up a mountain, but somehow, someway, she reached the top. She pushed open the door and it gave like it wasn’t even there.

She didn’t know how she knew he’d be waiting for her, but when the door swung on ungreased hinges, creating a sound that grated on Jane to her bones, he was there, out of bed and garbed in uniform white pajamas. They looked ridiculous on him. That color was all wrong. He needed something darker.

Jane stood rooted at the spot, daring not to go in, but not wanting to be caught disturbing a patient she no longer had a right to see either. She was left at something of a standstill. The patient was over by the window, one leg hanging on the sill and looking out. He hummed a little song that Jane didn’t recognize, in spite of a clawing, grasping voice in her head that told her she should.

It also told her to run.

“I knew you’d come.”

The patient was not looking at her, could see nothing reflected back at him in the window expect the faintest outlines, and yet that was the tone he always used with her when he wanted her to feel small. It was so he could crush her underfoot.

He leapt gracefully off the window, like some kind of ballet dancer. His long body stretched out, first his legs and then his arms. There was a good three or four yards between them, yet Jane felt he could reach out and grab her without moving an inch.

“I shouldn’t be here,” she told him, or maybe she was telling herself. It was a stupid thing to say either way. She was a little late in the game to come back to her senses.

“And yet, here you are.” His tiny laugh echoed. “I have to wonder why.”

Jane wrapped her arms around herself, turning her body away and doing all she could to disappear from sight. This was what animals did to avoid hungry predators.

“You have no need to fear me,” he said.

“I’m not afraid of you.”

That laugh again. Louder this time; it bounced around the room.

“You have a great many fears.” He started to walk to her. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. I know you’ve suffered in your life. I’ve born witness to much of it.”

Jane shook her head, harder and harder the closer he came. Hard enough that her neck would break, or her whole head would fall off. At this point, it would be a mercy. She wouldn’t be able to hear him anymore.

“Now, now, Jane,” he said, and her name on his lips was like a curse and seduction all wrapped up in one big foreboding package. “I think it’s high time we move past this nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense,” Jane said. She waved around the room and at the patient. “It’s not nonsense. This- this is nonsense. All of this— You’re trying to do something to me. You’re trying to make me as crazy as you are!”

His hands found her face, stilling her body and forcing her to gaze into his eyes as deeply as he did hers. The look on his face was indescribable, but it bore signs of pain and regret and determination, and maybe a little humor.

“I don’t think it’s possible to be as crazy as I.” A ghost of a smile played at his handsome features. Jane’s next out of nowhere and highly unnecessary thought was that he’d look better if he got a haircut. “But you’ll understand everything in just a moment.”

He leaned in, his intent obvious. Jane gasped and wrenched away from her with a chocked cry. She pressed herself into the wall. A bedpan and five and a half feet was all the protection from him she had left.

“Don’t touch me,” Jane said, gulping back some much harsher words. “Don’t you touch me again!”

He lifted his hands, palms out. “My apologies. That was much too forward. You are still in a delicate condition, though you have improved significantly since I last saw you.” He took another step and moved the bedpan out of the way. “I said that I would not hurt you, and I meant it. I would sooner end my own life than lay a hand on you.”

“Don't…” Jane’s knees grew weak, bending outward as they came dangerously close to giving out. “Why are you doing this?”

He hunched over, meeting her at eye level. Before Jane could fight him, he took her hands in his. His thumbs rubbed circles into her cooling skin. Color returned in small bursts from his ministrations, and Jane was loathed to admit how his touch soothed her. Her whole body had fallen limp, held together by skin; her bones seemed to have vanished. She fell into him. His strong arms held her steady on her feet. Drawing them both to full height, he wrapped himself more fully around her, covering her view of the outside world and relative safety. All she could see now was him. All she could hear was the beat of his heart. All she could feel was the papery material of his pajama shirt, which seemed thicker and coarser than it was before. Her senses honed on him, shutting out everything else as a consequence. No longer did the dim ring of the hospital phone or the hushed voices of night workers glace her ears, and she couldn’t see the light of the sun that should be getting brighter. The whole world was gone; only they two remained.

“I haven’t held you like this in so long,” he said, his chest vibrating against her cheek. “You’re smaller than I remember.”

Jane wanted to pull away. His words fueled a rage that ran through a feral side of her that she never knew she had, and in no uncertain terms, it wanted her out of here, and away from him. She would have listened, but powerful as the urge was, her heart wasn’t in it. He took that need away from her. He was consuming her.

“You’ve never held me,” she hiccupped, her final, futile defense coming in a wavering voice tarnished by the tears.

His chest rumbled with more of that laughter, terrible in its warmth and sincerity.

“Ah, Jane,” he said. Soft fingers ran through her hair. “Always so stubborn, so intent on being right and having the final word. I had hoped I’d see that in you again.”

If possible, he held her tighter. Jane didn’t know why he bothered. She’d lost the ability to stop him ages ago.

His nose tickled the shell of her ear. “I knew coming here was a good idea.”

She felt his lips, feather light on her skin. If she thought he would kiss her there, he was determined to prove her wrong. He rested his chin atop her head, allowing her to dry her eyes and take in more of his scent. It calmed her fraying nerves with the rest of him, and the knowledge that he wielded such power over her brought a whole new litany of anxieties to the forefront, only to be soothed in turn. It was a vicious, endless cycle that left Jane emotionally exhausted. She couldn’t feel anything from the neck down. If he wasn’t holding her so tightly, she didn’t think she’d be able to stand.

“You’re wrong,” she mumbled, her words slurred with her mouth half covered. He pulled away, just enough that she could raise her head. She hated that she was still crying. “I am as crazy as you.”

He smiled, and for the first time, there wasn’t a trace of a smirk to be found.

“That’s my curse, darling.”

He brought a hand to her cheek, cupping it with a touch that belied the chaos lurking within him. That was the last thing Jane’s formerly sharp mind could process before she let that go, too. A tiny whimper preceded her eyes fluttering closed, and his breath on her face as their lips met.

The world fell to pieces.

Jane saw next to nothing in the empty void, except faint moving pictures over the side of his head. They flared to life in a ball of white light that took the center of Jane’s vision and grew out. From a pinprick to a ball to an enormous globe, it shut out the unending darkness.

And then, Jane saw everything.

She saw herself in the dark desert nights with her notes and equipment waiting for something to happen in the sky.

She saw Erik at her side waiting with her, and Darcy—sweet, snarky, sane Darcy—sitting in the back with her Taser and iPod.

She saw the man she hit with her car charming her with his gentlemanly ways.

She saw him talk to her in the dead of night about the world he came from, and prove the very next day that he meant what he said.

She saw him leave in a flash of light, only to return years later in the same way.

She saw herself fight a war with him that destroyed half his family and made them close.

She saw them together, first in her home, then in his. That was right… he had to return unexpectedly, and she went with him.

Then she saw their wedding.

She saw herself on the throne of a true to life magic kingdom.

She saw the years pass like the turn of a dial. So many years; more than she ever should have known.

She saw the light fade little by little: of the city, of the sky, and in her eyes.

She saw the rise and fall of countless uprisings.

She saw the dawn of every war and the eve of every esoteric victory.

She saw her husband leave her arms, sparingly at first, then more and more through the years. Over the years, he would withdraw. He’d grow tired of her. Whatever love had joined them together was withered and dead.

She saw him turn his attentions to other women, forgetting all about the one who waited in their bed.

She saw the people betray her. They’d never cared for her from the start, but now that she’d lost the king’s good favor, nothing could hold them back. She saw herself become a laughingstock.

She saw herself age, in spirit if not in body.

She saw herself run.

She saw herself cry.

She saw herself weaken.

She saw herself search in vain for a single pair of non-judgmental eyes, until the day she gave up and left the palace for good.

She saw all of it and more, and when she could see no more she looked away. She returned to her body and unleashed a scream that had been building for days, if not for years. She pushed with all her might and she fell away from him. She stumbled into a corner, wrapping frail arms around her legs. There was a mirror right there, but she couldn’t look at it. She couldn’t see herself right now, divest of a treacherous mask and back to an unreal reality.

“Thor…” she whispered. His smile burned in her mind’s eye with a somber quality, like he was hurt that she’d forgotten his name for so long. “Thor…”

She heard a growl. It came from the man standing over her, his face twisted in a snarl that he seemed to want to hide for her benefit.

“Don’t say that name,” he snapped. His fingers flexed, not like he was going to grab her, but like he wished there was a particular man’s neck there for him to strangle. “You always remember him first, don’t you?”

She edged away, but as she had yet to regain feeling in her lower half, she had to content herself with sliding on her behind. She noticed too late that she was approaching the mirror. She could no longer hide from the mess that she was. Her clothes were mismatched, her hair was in knots, and her skin was pale grey. And it was all because of him.

She knew exactly who he was now.

This was the man who had tried to destroy her home out for his own sick purposes.

The man who had faked his death to usurp the throne, and then disappeared to parts unknown when his charade was over.

The man who couldn’t show his face for five hundred years, only to return when Asgard was in dire straits, against an enemy who might have had the potential to end the realm eternal.

This was the man who had single-handedly ended that war, all in the name of Asgard’s true king, or so he said.

The man Thor had been all too happy to see the good in again, and believe that he’d learned his lesson at last.

The man who had wormed his way into her life, first to mock her, then to befriend her, then to be the only one on that godforsaken realm who never looked at her like she was no better a pebble in their shoe.

The man whose arms she had cried herself to sleep in the first time Thor left her for another woman.

The man whose promises of a better life for them both she never took seriously. Not until he vanished without a trace the day she exiled herself from courtly life, only to return months later in the midst of a powerful storm to tell her that all would be well.

“I’m going to make you happy, Jane,” he said to her that day, his eyes an unnatural shade of blue. “Truly happy. You will never have a sad day again.”

“Loki,” she said now, as she had said then, too. “Loki… what have you done?”

He got down on one knee, caressing her face with a soft hand that nevertheless burned her like fire.

“You know what I’ve done,” he said. “I’ve saved you from your misery. I’ve taken the cruel old world that deserted us and remade it into something new. I’ve given us both a chance to find the happiness we deserve.”

“No,” Jane pulled away. She had to get away from him. As far away as possible. “No, I don’t believe you.”

“Jane, I know we’ve made some mistakes. I know that our previous lives haven’t worked out the way I wished them to, but there has been a reason for all of it. All that we have suffered in search of that perfect life has led us to this place. It’s right within our grasp, my love, I can feel it.”

“Stop it, Loki!” She shrunk back as much as she could. It just wasn’t enough. “You can’t do this anymore. We have to go back-”

“Go back?” His eyes flashed. In an instant, Jane was on her feet. He bent over her and she could see all the different colors running through his veins, from smoky red to glowing blue. “Go back? There is nowhere for us to go back to! Don’t you understand what I’ve done for you, Jane? What I’ve done to myself-" his veins pulse red one more time, ”-to give you all that he never could?“

"But I didn’t ask for this!” she cried. “I may have hated Thor for what he did to me, but I never wanted this… this lie you’ve created.”

“It’s not a lie!” He shook her. “It is truth, Jane! We make it truth. Do not look me in the eye and say that you feel nothing for me. You want a life with me as much as I want one with you, and this is our only way of getting it.”

“No, Loki, this isn’t real. It was never real, and nothing you say or do is going to change that.”

All the furniture in the room flew through the air and collided, bursting into splintered pieces that rained down upon them. They landed in a circle around Jane’s feet, but not a single granule had found its way into her hair, or his for that matter. A circle of energy surrounded them, raising them inches off the ground, as the room and the hall and the sky outside all shifted and melded together, like a painting with the colors running.

“You are mistaken,” he said. The melting background had lost all proper form and was unrecognizable. The voices Jane had counted as a tether to all that he tricked her into believing were long gone, if they’d ever been there at all. “Everything I say matters here. This world is ours now, Jane, and it’s as real as anything you’ve ever seen.”

The circle closed in on them, invisible energy forcing Jane back into his embrace. She fought for as long as she could, but she had long ago given up trying to control magic. Some things just weren’t science, she was sorry to say. Jane struggled regardless, as she had all the other times, and as she would every time that was to come.

“Loki,” she begged him. “Please, no more. I can’t take it anymore.”

“I know,” he said, with a kiss to her forehead. “You couldn’t take it before. That’s way I brought you here, to make you well again, to bring back the Jane I fell in love with. Now that all is well, I think I finally know how to make a lasting life for us.”

“No, Loki, please-”

“Yes, this will be it. This time, we’re going to get it right.”

And then they were falling.

“NOOOOO!” Her voice merged with the roaring of the changing tides, gone in a flash and leaving her to nothingness. The decaying room shattered, her form unraveled. All was lost to her, but still she could think.

‘No! I won’t let you do this. I won’t fall for it again, Loki. I swear I won’t!

'I have to remember it this time. I have to remember that there’s nothing real… there’s nothing real… there’s nothing real!

'Don’t forget, Jane, there’s nothing real!

'Don’t forget, Jane… Don’t forget… Jane…

'Don't… forget…

'Jane…’

Jane…

Jane…

Jane? Hey, Jane? Wake up!

“I said, wake up!”

Jane sat up in her desk, an ungraded test on stem cell cloning stuck over her eyes, so she could only see the fuzzy shadow of the person standing over her. She ripped off the test and read the first line. She instantly knew this was one of her 'not so overachieving’ students. She’d deal with that later.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” she said, rubbing the sand from her eyes. “I was just resting before fifth period.”

“Uh-huh,” said Betty Ross, the new chemistry teacher, hired to replace an old retiree. “Well, if fifth period is what you’re waiting for, you’re a little late.”

She displayed the time on her phone, and Jane took in the hour well after two in the afternoon with a plummeting heart.

“Oh God!” She stood up so fast that her chair turned over, and frantically gathered the stack of lesson plans on her desk that she should have gone over last night. “How did I mess up this badly?”

Betty shrugged. She was taking this much too lightly and Jane did not appreciate it.

“I guess field trip day will do that to you,” she said.

“Yeah, field trip day,” Jane repeated. She continued her mad scramble for another few seconds, only to pause in the middle of arranging practice tests. “Wait, today was field trip day?”

Betty pointed at the wall calendar, and the trail of black Xs that stopped right in front of the red starred day marked 'AQUARIUM FIELD TRIP.’ It had a big circle around it with little squiggly lines forming another circle around the first one. This was the day Jane had been looking forward to as the day to finally get caught up on all the work the sixty something students in her three classes had handed in since Monday. Today was Wednesday. She liked to have everything ready by Friday.

“Oh…” Jane dropped the stack of papers. “Okay. My brain is not working today.”

“Well, we all have those moments,” said Betty.

“No, really,” said Jane. “I just had the craziest dream where I was working in some kind of a mental hospital, and one of the patients was after me.”

Betty winced. “That does sound pretty bad. Too many horror movies?”

“I don’t watch things like that,” said Jane as she grabbed her shoulder bag and stuffed her papers inside. Now that she’d calmed down, getting them organized was a cinch.

Betty waited by the door for her to finish packing up. Afterwards, Jane locked the door to her office next to the counseling center and across from the science hall, and together they entered the halls of Genial North high school.

“I just need to grab a few things in my classroom,” Jane said.

She led the way to the back of the science hall. They passed the lab room where Betty taught her one class of the day. Just another few months, and the school board would graduate her up to two or three. Jane couldn’t wait to share the workload with her.

They stopped in front of Jane’s room. She let herself in and walked to the desk where her mess of pens and highlighters made a puzzle of finding just the set of red pens she wanted. She also grabbed a few blank memo pads and a fresh eraser. While she was there, she might as well get some stock for home. She was always losing things in that bottomless pit she called a living room sofa. One of these days, she was really going to have to pull the cushions off of that thing and do some digging. She was bound to find a gold mine.

On her way back to the door, something caught Jane’s eye. She turned to the blackboard. It was scrubbed clean at the end of each day with soap and water to remove residue. Maybe she was just a stickler for cleanliness, but Jane liked to have every edge and corner of the board spick and span at the end of each day. If it wasn’t, she’d spend the next day checking for more chalk stains that she might have missed.

“Dammit, Darcy.” Jane grabbed an eraser.

She held it over the already half removed words, pausing so her eyes could scan the disjointed letters. For some reason, she felt compelled to try and make it out.

“Nnnn-nnnuh,” Jane furrowed her brow.

What remained of the message was 'N t ng r al.’ Just silly class clown scribbling from the look of it. A single swipe of the eraser removed the offending words, and Jane put them far out of mind.

“I swear, I tell that girl every day to make sure the chalkboard is clean before she goes home,” Jane muttered to herself.

“Student teacher problems?” Betty asked. It wasn’t the first time Jane had complained about her new 'intern’ of sorts. Darcy Lewis, while smart and passionate about learning, was hardly any better than the students half the time. How she expected to teach high school kids herself in a few years, Jane didn’t know.

“Let’s just say, you’re lucky you weren’t eligible for one.”

Betty giggled, and Jane would’ve joined in were it not for the running man sliding into view. He stooped over to catch his breath. He must have sprinted all they way around the school to be this out of it.

“S-sorry to bother you, Ms. Foster,” he said. He stood up straight, and he was wearing a student teacher sticker on the breast of his shirt. That figured. All the teachers and most of the students would know better than to run in the halls.

“Did you need something?” Jane asked.

“Just giving you a message,” he said. He motioned to the left. “Principal Selvig wants to see you in his office.”

“Right now? Why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just delivering the message.”

“Go on ahead, Jane,” said Betty. She took backwards steps away. “I’d come with, but I have a stack of tests at home with my name on it.”

“Okay, Betty, I’ll call you later,” said Jane.

“Right. And don’t forget, we’re still on for drinks next week.”

“I know.”

Jane thanked the student teacher and left him and Betty. She headed for the main office as he had designated and heard the back doors close as Betty left for the day. She wondered when it was that they’d decided to go out for drinks. She was going to have to try and sleep a more in the night and less in the day, because she couldn’t remember it at all.

Erik’s receptionist greeted Jane with a glance over her horn rimmed glasses and a momentary cease in typing.

“He’s expecting you,” she said.

Jane walked around the welcome desk to the door with Erik’s name on it. She found him standing by window overlooking the parking lot. He told her once that he liked to look out on warm spring days like this one and reflect on his life, on the things he’d accomplished and the things he failed at. Jane couldn’t imagine the latter category being longer than the former. Erik was the most successful person she had ever known.

“Hi, Erik,” she said.

He turned around, his face breaking out in a grin.

“There you are,” Erik said. He enveloped her in a big, bear hug. “I was starting to think I’d missed you.”

“I had some extra work to finish,” Jane said with a surreptitious glance at the floor. It was probably best not to let him know what she’d really been doing.

“Haha, that’s good.” He drew back to his desk, placing a hand on the oak wood and stroking it fondly. “I’ve just been having a moment alone in the old office. Only a few more weeks before I have to let it go.”

“I still can’t believe you’re retiring,” Jane said, shoulders sagging. “This place won’t be the same without you.”

“Ah, you’ll be fine,” said Erik. “I’ve had thirty five years in this place. I’m not looking for a thirty sixth. I need that time to catch up on some sleep and practice my golf swing. I might even try my hand at writing some books.”

“Yeah, but I’m going to miss seeing you every day.”

“Don’t worry, Jane,” he said. “In a few months, you won’t even notice I’m gone.”

Erik sat down, and Jane took that as her cue to follow suit.

“Anyway, the reason I wanted to see you is because the school board is sending the new principal down today to have a look around,” he explained.

Jane’s eyebrows shot up. “They picked him already?”

It was no secret, in spite of Erik’s optimism for retired life, that his leaving had just as much to do with the superintendent wanting him out as it did Erik wanting out. She’d never ask, but she was pretty sure that stepping down years before he was legally a senior citizen never would’ve occurred to him if he hadn’t been pushed so hard. She’d think it all she wanted, though.

“They want him to get an idea of how thinks work around here before he takes over. He’ll be observing us for the rest of the week.”

“And he’s coming right now? That’s pretty short notice.”

“Apparently he wanted to get an early start,” said Erik. “At least, that’s what I was told.”

There came a knock at the door. Jane watched Erik’s face go from surprised to friendly in a tentative sort of way.

“Ah, speak of the devil,” he said, motioning behind Jane. “Come on in, we were just talking about you.”

Jane turned her head, and her breath caught in her throat. He was a little over six feet and slender, with slicked back black hair, green eyes, and a pale, handsome face. He didn’t stand up straight; he had his hands in the pockets of his pants, leaning in an easygoing sort of way. The suit itself was fitted and casual, with the jacket left unbuttoned and the tie missing. Without it, Jane was forced to acknowledge the long lines of his neck above his collar, and how very nice they were.

“My apologies for being late,” he said. “I had trouble finding my way.”

“Yeah, we need to do something about that entranceway. I keep telling the board…” Erik grumbled for a few seconds more and then caught himself. He chortled. “But, I guess that’s not my problem anymore, is it?”

“Indeed,” said the man. He removed his hands from his pockets, and they were very nice, too. “I’ll have to act in your place to see that the matter is rectified.”

“You do that,” said Erik, getting to his feet. He looked at Jane. “Jane, I’d like to introduce you to the new school principal. This is Mr.-”

“Loki, please,” the man interrupted. “I prefer to go by my given name. I hope that’s all right.”

He held one hand out for Jane to shake, his mouth tugging upward to reveal very nice straight, white teeth. There were a lot of very nice things about him, though something about his demeanor had Jane thinking his personality wasn’t one of them. Still, she felt an inexplicable pull to him and all of his better qualities. He was really far too attractive for someone she was going to be working under.

“That’s fine,” she said. “I’m Jane Foster, a science teacher.”

“Really? I am a student of science myself,” he said with a gleam in his eye that Jane couldn’t place. “I’m sure we’ll get along swimmingly.”

He let go of her hand, which Jane had expected him to kiss along with her cheeks before doing the same to Erik. It must’ve been the accent. At the very least, it was nice to know that she was probably wrong about his character. He seemed like a perfectly likeable guy, and Jane had a really good feeling about him now that the awkwardness of their introductions had passed.

“Looks like you too will have a lot to talk about,” Erik said, getting up. “Now, I need to go meet with the vice-principal. Would you mind showing Loki around, Jane?”

“Not at all,” she said.

Jane and Loki left the office with a goodbye to Erik and a nod at the receptionist. Jane started the tour with the cafeteria. No one was there at this hour, but her stomach was growling and they usually had trail mix in the vending machine. While Jane fished through her pockets for spare change, Loki was examining the wide open space and the rows of rectangular tables. Luckily, the janitors had been through here already. The kind of messes the students left behind weren’t bound to make a good first impression

“I like this place,” Loki said.

“Yeah, and on Friday afternoons, they serve pizza,” said Jane. She ripped open the bag and popped some peanuts into her mouth.

“I was referring more to the whole of it,” Loki said. “I think it will serve me well.”

That was a weird sort of way to talk about a new job. If Jane didn’t know any better, she’d think he was going to use Genial North as the base for some kind of world domination plot. Wouldn’t that be something else? If that was the case, he’d do better working at the private school five miles up the road. They had private parking lots and everything.

“Have I said something funny?”

Jane hadn’t realized she was laughing at her own joke. Now that she did, she couldn’t stop herself. She blamed it on him. He was far too blasé while scolding her. He was going to be her boss in a month and he’d just caught her daydreaming on the job, but there wasn’t a hint of a harsh tone in his voice, and that was hilarious to her. Just another part of his charm, she supposed.

“No, it’s nothing,” she said. She met his eyes and kept staring, long after she should have stopped. He had a particularly hypnotic gaze and it didn’t help that his eyes were his best feature. “I’m just kind of surprised how… easy you are to talk to, if you don’t mind me saying. I’m usually not this open with strangers. You sure we haven’t met before?”

He looked up and out the window. It was a beautiful day and the sun was bright and golden. He seemed to like it a lot. His stance was one of calm and surety. It was a good look on him.

A smile crept up over his face, a look of contentment.

“In another time, maybe.”

THE END

[magic-n-science]

Virtua, Chapter Four

TITLE: Virtua AUTHOR: iamartemisday ONESHOT/CHAPTER NUMBER: 4/5 (Read it on FF.net here: Ch 4) RATING: T GENRE(S): Drama, Suspense, Horror, Alternate Universe SUMMARY: Psychologist Jane Foster can’t imagine a stranger case than the one that’s just been brought to her: an unknown man claiming to be the Norse God of Mischief, who seems to know more about her than he should. Unlocking the mysteries of his mind will throw Jane’s entire world out of line, as she must question what is real, and what is just a dream. NOTES/WARNINGS: None

**

Jane took her work in her bedroom that night.  The kitchen was a little too dark for her liking.  Those lightbulbs needed to be changed, and she was thinking about buying some thinner curtains.  A little more sunlight would do her good; give her skin some color and all that.

She pushed aside the blankets and arranged her files, pens, and tape recorder all in a line that was neat where the rest of the room was cluttered.  When she had some free time, she’d have to consider getting rid of a few things, such as all that old clothes she didn’t wear and more, or those books she didn’t read. 

Past experience told her that it wasn’t going to happen, something would come along to distract her for another few months, and then she’d promise herself again that next time, she’d do the cleaning.  It was always next time, but she could still hope.

She started with an older patient, one she’d been seeing for a couple of months.  He suffered from bipolar disorder and tried to attack his wife with a golf club before coming to his senses and checking himself into the hospital.  He was one of those patients Jane truly felt for.  He wasn’t a bad guy.  He just couldn’t control himself when the fits came.  He never remembered what he did when it was over.  It was like something entered his body, a foreign entity invading his senses, inserting its hands and feet into his and using his body like a puppet.  When he opened his eyes again, all he could see around him was destruction, of his home and his family, his wife curled up into a ball crying, and he never knew just how much of it was himself and how much was the monster.  Whatever was inside of him, controlling him like this, it could be nothing but.

He was an eloquent man, Mr. Folan.  She could see how he supported his family as a writer all those years.

She put down his file and her notes with a few changes, mostly grammatical errors that made her want to gag.  She grabbed her tape recorder and ran down the list of recent files.  He was the third down, from three days ago.

‘This is Jane Foster of Genial North Psychiatric-’ Jane fast forwarded.  ‘-Mr. Folan, how are you feeling?’

‘Oh I’m fine.  As fine as I can be at least.’

‘And is there anything you wanted to talk about today?’

‘My wife came to see me.  She says she misses me.  She wants me to come home.’

‘You just might very soon.  You’re responding well to your medications, and you’ve been on your best behavior.’

“Yes, that’s wonderful.  I just…’

‘Just what, Mr. Folan?’

‘…what if the monster comes out again?’

The rest of the recording was twelve minutes long.  Her sessions with Mr. Folan were always the quickest.  He’s one of the best patients she’s ever had, and the only one she’d argue never needed to be at Genial North in the first place.  He kept himself trapped by a fear of himself, but over time, Jane knew they would break him of it.  He’d be back at home cranking out books and short stories before the month was out.

At the end of the tape, Jane clicked on the next file.  Another voice that wasn’t Darcy’s or Ian’s or the patient’s filtered through the speakers, and then another after that, and another after that.  Jane’s notebook lost another three pages.  Notes were scribbled at random like thoughts in a journal.  She wasn’t bound to look at them again tomorrow.

She was down to two files.  She’d never brought home any for the patient.  He was technically still Erik’s responsibility.  Between Darcy and Ian, she would have preferred to listen to Ian again.  Her files of Darcy weren’t even current.  The last one dated a month before her last outburst, and none of them were fun to listen to.  But fun was never in the job description, and Jane’s fingers had different ideas about how she should focus her energies.  She found herself flipping through Darcy’s files.  The earliest was from Jane’s first session with her, back before all the drugs were out of her system.  That was when Darcy never made jokes.

Jane pressed play. 

She didn’t bother skipping the intro this time.  She let it run its course and mouthed along with the words.  ‘This is Dr. Jane Foster of Genial North Psychiatric.  The time is…’

The first half of the tape was uneventful.

‘Darcy, my name is Dr. Foster.  Do you want to talk to me?’

‘…’

‘Take your time.  Don’t rush.’

‘…’

‘Do you want to talk about your mother?’

‘…’

‘Do you want to talk about your mother’s friends?’

‘…’

‘Do you want to talk to me, Darcy?’

‘…’

At the fifteen minute mark, another voice joined hers.

‘Darcy, what was that?’

There was a small burst of static.  Not an uncommon occurrence.  Jane had been saying for months that they needed to upgrade the recording equipment.

‘Don’t wanna… be here…’

‘Where would you rather be, Darcy?’

Ten more seconds of silence.

‘Home… with mom…’

Jane fisted her pillow.  At the time, if she remembered correctly, she had snapped her pencil in half and needed to write out the rest of her notes with a stub.  That woman Darcy called a mother was lucky she was no longer alive and never met Jane.  She would have gotten something much worse than alcohol poisoning.

‘Your mother isn’t around anymore, Darcy.  Do you remember that?’

‘No… she leaves sometimes… she’ll come back.’

‘She won’t come back, Darcy.  You need to understand that.’

Twenty more seconds of silence.  Darcy’s breathing became shallow.

‘I know… I know… never see her again… won’t see anyone again… trapped here… trapped… we’re all trapped… every one of us…’

The tape stuck.  Jane clicked her tongue and lifted the recorder over her head.  She fiddled unsuccessfully with the buttons and the speaker.  She slapped the side as a last resort, and the machine whirred back to life.  It had skipped the next three and a half minutes, to the part where Darcy became incoherent.  Her words slurred and stopped making sense.  With the volume up, her gibberish rang louder and clearer than when Jane had been in the room with her.

Something on the recording stuck out that Jane hadn’t heard before.  She rewound the tape ten seconds and listened again, the speaker pressed so far into her ear that it started to ring, but she heard it again.  It was exactly what it sounded like.  Three more listens confirmed it. 

Jane reached for her pen.  She fished under her pillow where they sometimes slipped, but all she found was smooth satin that needed to be changed and the bottom end of a lacy throw.  Jane threw the pillow aside, but her aim was terrible when she wasn’t looking.  She heard a crash, and the whine of a broken tape.  Jane shut her eyes and cursed herself.  Her tape recorder was on the floor, next to the wall it had hit.  It was outwardly fine, but the screen was cracked on one side, and the same five seconds  of audio played on repeat.

‘…that’s it… there’s nothing real… that’s it… there’s nothing real… that’s it… there’s nothing real…’

Jane stretched out her arm, grasping for a hint of thin, cylindrical plastic.  She brushed it once, then twice, and then she pushed herself forward in one quick thrust to grab it.  Clasped between her middle and index finger, Jane dragged the wayward pen up to the surface, gently pulling herself back into a comfortable position with as little pressure on her aching neck as possible.  That was what she got for sleeping at the kitchen table.

She would have felt much better if she didn’t need to get her three hundred dollar tape recorder fixed.  Good thing there was a tech guy two floors up who didn’t charge much.  Jane would give him a call in the morning.  Right now, she had to quickly write this down, try to turn the tape recorder off—and shove it between some bath towels if she couldn’t—and get some much needed sleep.

She raised the pen to paper, wrote three letters, and stopped.

She looked over the pen in her hand, the light blue plastic that bore the name of a cheap motel she’d stayed at once, the same pen she carried around everywhere she went as something of a good luck charm.

The same pen she thought she’d left behind at her session with the patient.

The skipping tape was loud in her ears, louder with each repeat, and Jane heard every one of them through her sharp, sensitive ears as she stared at the pen.

‘…that’s it… there’s nothing real…’

‘…that’s it… there’s nothing real…’

‘…that’s it…there’s nothing real…’

**

“I keep having nightmares about what Darcy could have done.  Sometimes she’s pulling pills out of the cabinets, other times she on the floor…” Jane stared a hole into her half full cup of coffee.  “God, am I going crazy?”

“No, you’re not crazy,” Erik said.  He was back in fatherly mode after an hour and a half of ‘Goddamn this bureaucratic board I can’t take it.’  Monthly board meetings always did that to him.  “You’re just involved.  You’ve gotten close to Darcy.”

Jane glanced at the next table over.  Three doctors traded jokes and funny patient stories over sandwiches and cola.  They were the only other people around.  The courtyards weren’t typically packed this time of year, even during lunch hours.  Jane had thought she and Erik would be the only ones brave enough to be out here on a ‘semi-warm’ day in January with only their mittens and winter coats to protect them.  She was wrong.

“Try to speak up a little next time.  I don’t think they heard you.”  Jane eyed the other doctors again.

“I mean it as a good thing, Jane,” Erik said.  “Some patients need more than objectivity from their doctor.  What Darcy needs is someone she can trust and confide in, someone who won’t judge.  She needs a friend, more or less.”

Jane stirred a fourth sugar packet into her coffee.  It just wasn’t sweet enough today.  “I wouldn’t say she’s my friend.  Ian’s her friend, I’m just her doctor.”

“But you’re getting through to her because you act like a friend.”

 “Yeah, I’m getting through to her alright.  That’s why she had her stomach pumped two days ago… and, you know, she was awake when I went to see her yesterday.  I wanted to talk to her about what happened, but do you know what the first thing out of her mouth was?”

Erik shook his head.

“’Where’s my mom?’ she asked me.” Jane slammed her hands onto the table.  Her palms stung, and those other three doctors were definitely staring at her now, but at least Jane felt a little better.  “I just don’t understand where all the love for that woman is coming from.”

“It’s her mother.”

“Yeah, sure, her mother.  Her mother, who gave her drugs and let her boyfriends’ use her for sex.  Who tried to smother her to death and only stopped because all the vodka she drank kicked in at the right moment.  I’m supposed to just ignore all of that while Darcy is-“

“Darcy is a very sick girl.”  Erik gave her his most severe look.  “You know that, Jane.  She doesn’t see things the way you and I do.”

Jane shrank under his gaze.  It had been working on her since she was seven, and even at thirty, nothing had changed.  He could still make her feel like that little girl in pigtails who spilled grape juice on the rug if he needed to.

“I know,” Jane said.  She reached for her coffee and found nothing but air.  A hint of brown out the corner of her eye got her to look down, where a puddle of her coffee was spreading over her shoe.  She probably shouldn’t have hit the table.  “I’m just… ever since Darcy did what she did, I feel like everything around me is crumbling.  I’ve worked so hard to help her.  I thought I was finally reaching her, and now this!  Has everything I’ve done been for nothing?”

“Don’t talk like that,” Erik said firmly.  “You think I haven’t dealt with this before?  I know exactly what you’re going through right now.  I know how easy it is to blame yourself, but you can’t give in to it.  None of this was your fault.”

He pressed something into her hand, the last of his box of scones from the local donut shop.  She’d had no appetite since yesterday, but the sight of the sugary bun brought wetness to the corners of Jane’s mouth.  She took a bite, savoring the taste, and she did feel a little better when it was gone, if only just.

“Thanks, Erik,” she said, resting her elbows on the table.  “I guess I just didn’t get enough sleep last night.  I’ve been way too stressed out.”

Erik fiddled with a piece of wrapping.  His fingers flexed in and out.

“It’s not just about Darcy, is it?”

Jane, who had been watching his hands trying to decipher their meaning, had a moment of understanding and apprehension.  He laced his fingers together, ending the infernal fidgeting.  Jane could’ve thanked him for that alone.

“Jane…” That wasn’t a good tone.  “I know I’m asking a lot from you, bringing you this patient.  He’s very difficult.  I’m still not sure that he isn’t dangerous.”

He searched Jane for all that she could never hide even if she wanted to.  The truth was that she’d been hoping the conversation would turn in this direction, she just hadn’t known how to bridge the gap.  Erik didn’t know about the rest of Jane’s dreams.  That after Darcy fell, blue in the face and cold, a dark shadow appeared over her.  It was tall and thin with burning red eyes, and it grinned a horrible, demonic grin.  She thought she heard it speak to her, but the words were too far to hear, always just out of reach.  If she could hear them once, she thought, maybe she would finally understand.

Or maybe she just needed to use some of those vacation days she’d been hoarding.

“I don’t think he’d hurt me,” that was the truth, “and I’m not afraid of him,” that was a lie, “but I am starting to wonder if there’s a line between a patient’s health and a doctor’s, and where that line should be drawn.”

She made a fist, one that tensed and relaxed in quick motions, as Erik’s larger, warmer hand came to rest over it.  She looked up into eyes that were so much like her father’s.   She wondered if Erik knew that.

“It’s drawn right here,” he said.

**

Jane walked into the session room.  She was the pinnacle of detachment and poise, looking over the patient like he was nothing more than an ugly potted plant.  Nothing in her stance indicated that she’d needed twenty minutes front from of the mirror in her office, followed by another ten minutes in the bathroom, to perfect it.  If she was doing this right, he would never notice a thing.

The first thing he did when she shut the door behind her was cross his arms over his chest and smile.  He noticed.

‘No, no he doesn’t, Jane,’ she told herself before she could falter.  ‘That’s just your nerves talking.  He can’t read you.’

“Good morning, Dr. Foster,” he said.

Jane nodded a little as she sat down.  She let her bag slide off her arm to the floor, the strap still looped around her wrist for easy access.  This wouldn’t take long.

“I just want to let you know that after today, you’re going to be back in the primary care of Dr. Selvig.  This will be my last session with you.”

The smile vanished.  In its place was something unreadable.

“I don’t believe that,” he said.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe or don’t believe,” Jane said, refusing to entertain even a notion of indigence for what he just said.  “Now, I don’t have any questions for you, so if you’d like to get a day off from therapy, now’s your chance.”

He played with the edge of a sheet of paper, had been since before Jane stepped into the room.  He let it lay flat and slid it to her.

“I thought we were to go over this.”

Jane looked down at Erik’s questionnaire.  His flawless handwriting awoke a twinge of envy in her gut, and made her want to laugh for reasons she’s couldn’t adequately explain.

“Dr. Selvig will talk to you about that next week,” she said.

“I’d rather talk to you.”

“That isn’t your call.”

A moment of unbroken eye contact passed, and then he took the paper back.  Jane’s breath of relief was cut short when he picked it up and read the first line.

“’What are your plans upon being released from Genial North?’  A bit of a misleading question, isn’t it?” he looked at her.  “How many of your patients really expect to leave here?  It can’t be that many.”

“I can’t tell you that,” Jane said.  “So if that’s all-“

“That’s never all.”

Jane had been in the process of standing.  His voice triggered an impulse to sit back down, and so Jane had to grip the table to prevent an ungraceful fall to the floor.  She steadied herself, brushing strands of hair out of her face and trying not to look and see if he was grinning again.  So much for being indifferent.

It was just one more on the long list of reasons why this had to end.  This man, whoever he was, brought out all kinds of thoughts and feelings that were alien to Jane, much he wanted her to believe they weren’t.  Though he hadn’t claimed to know her again since their first meeting, his general behavior remained entirely too casual.  He acted like they were old friends instead of a doctor and a patient, and the more flustered Jane became the more at ease he seemed to be.  Almost as if disorder gave him cheap thrills.

Not that this was anything for Jane to speculate on.  She wasn’t his doctor anymore.

“Okay, what else do you have to say?” she asked, her posture and tone conveying the message, ‘and make it fast.’

The patient consulted the paper.

“Do you feel that your worldview has improved since arriving at Genial North?’  I can’t decide if this is really mean to help me or if Dr. Selvig is looking for an ego boost.”

“How did you answer the question?”

“I left it blank.  There were much better uses for the ink.  I had quite a bit to say about the quality of the staff and my doctors.”  He pushed the paper back to her.  “Would you like to read it?”

Jane wanted to look away, but her eyes betrayed her.  She caught a hint of his writing, but his cursive was impossible to make out with just a quick skim.  She did see her name a few times, under questions such as ‘How do you think we can improve the quality of your treatment?’ and ‘Briefly describe your relationship with your primary doctor.’

“I requested extra sessions with you,” he said helpfully.  “I thought it might be beneficial to us both.”

Jane pinched the bridge of her nose, but the beginnings of a splitting headache had already come to pass.

“Was I mistaken?”

Jane dropped her hand.  “It’s a little late for that.  Dr. Selvig is already making arrangements to transfer you back under his care.”

“I thought I was never truly out of his care.”

“He’s rearranging his schedule to make room for you.  The point is that I am not going to be seeing you again.  Do you understand that?”

Her nails dug into her skin, leaving behind curved red imprints.  The pain did nothing for Jane except to increase the rush of her blood flow.  Every second this man looked at her like she was little more than an ornery pet throwing a temper tantrum for food, she squeezed tighter, and cared less.

“I see,” he said, pursing his lips.  “Then perhaps this is the last day.  Please forgive my impertinence.”

She wasn’t about to forgive him for anything, but if it got her out of here faster, she would happily -pretend.  She un-balled her fists and used her remaining strength of will to force a smile that hopefully resembled something pleasant.  A mirror would’ve been helpful right now.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice clipped and tired.  “Your next session with Dr. Selvig will be on-“

“I never consented to seeing Dr. Selvig again.”

Jane was just about to find a nice clean spot on the wall to knock herself out with.  Being dead from the neck up for a while would undoubtedly be preferable to this. 

“What was that?” she asked.

“I believe my meaning is clear.  I shall endeavor to be plainer.” He leaned forward.  “I have no intention of attending another session with Dr. Selvig or anyone else.”

He returned to his seat, a little lower down if Jane was seeing right.  He sure did love that spread out stance of his, almost like he had something to prove.

‘More Freud,’ Jane quipped to herself.  Keeping a sense of humor was important in times like these.

“That’s not your decision to make,” she said.

“What if I edited my responses on this paper to request no further therapy at all?”

“Your request would be denied.”

“Then why bother asking such insipid questions in the first place?”

He crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it in the corner, away from the wastebasket.  It sailed by the side of Jane’s head, prompting no from her.  He wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last, to complain about the logic behind Erik’s ‘survey’ method.  To allow the patient a little control over their lives inside the hospital (not to mention potentially get information on patient abuse at the hands of staff) was to prepare them for their eventual (hopeful) return to society.  It was all about acting humanely in Erik’s view.  After dealing with this guy, Jane was starting to think he should be more selective in using it.

“You can ask him yourself at your next session,” she said.

“I have already said I will not see him.”

“And I’ve told you, you don’t have a choice.”

He gave a boisterous laugh.  It was unlike anything Jane had ever heard from him and it didn’t suit him at all.

“Oh, you have no idea, Dr. Foster, no idea at all.”  His eyes shined.  “Everything that happens here is up to me.”

“Because you’re a god?”

His eyebrows shot up.  “I do believe that is the first time you’ve been so direct about it.”

“I can afford to be now.  I’m no longer your doctor.”

She got up to leave.  She had long since said her peace and only stuck around this long because he was distracting her.  Logic dictated that it was all for personal gratification; he would have done this to any doctor, be it her or Erik or Betty or anyone else, so long as he could rile them up and make them squirm.  It still niggled her, though.  She needed to go before it niggled any harder or she might just decide to stay and find out what it was.

“Why are you leaving?”

 Jane kept walking.  “Our time is up.”

“You’ve barely been here ten minutes.”  She heard his chair push out.  “And you have misunderstood my meaning.”

His shadow crawled over her.  It was easy in moments like this to forget that he wasn’t considered a dangerous subject.  Being a special case didn’t automatically earn you a chain on the ankle or a straitjacket, not if you were a star patient when more than one person was around.  His form covered hers completely.  It was really unfair how much taller he was than her.

“I understood you perfectly,” she said.  “This is the end of my sessions with you.  That means our time together is over.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” he said.

Jane took a deep breath.  In another minute, her fist was going to fly into his face and knock all of his teeth out, consequences be damned.  She’d happily take the write-up and whatever else they tried to throw at her.  After almost two weeks of putting up with this, she’d earned it, and so had he.

“If you are so desperate to know,” she hissed, “I’m leaving because being your doctor is emotionally exhausting.  It may be horrible of me to say, but my mental health is more important to me than yours, so it’s better if we quit while we’re ahead, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Quite.”

Jane started, her prearranged retort dying on her lips and her arms falling limp to her sides.  She chanced a look over her shoulder.  He was leaning against the table without a care, and that table wasn’t secured to the floor.  It should’ve been moving under his weight.

“Surprised?”  He didn’t wait for a response.  “You shouldn’t be.  Your state of being means more to me than anything, and there have been times where I’ve come far too close to losing you.  That’s why it fills me with joy to see you now, so much the woman I used to know.  I know that it was worth it to come here after all.”

He reached for her hand and took it.  Her skin was soft and warm though inside Jane was nothing but ice.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, with no feeling behind it.

His touch had awakened something deep inside of her, so deep that Jane could barely recognize it.  All at once she wanted to scream and curse at him until her throat was hoarse, she wanted to fall to her knees and beg him for mercy, she wanted to stay still and let him touch more of her.  No part was stronger than the other and the battle was devastating.

Four words rang out in her head that made no sense.

‘What have you done?’

What had he done?

Jane jerked away.

“Nothing,” she said aloud to herself.  He wasn’t meant to hear.  “Nothing.  This is nothing.  Nothing.”

She clutched the hand he’d held to her chest.  His eyes were downcast, his fingers twitching like he longed to hold it again.

“I didn’t hurt you…?” 

He took one step.  Jane rushed for the door.

“No,” she said with a wild shake of her head.

“Jane, please, let me explain-“

“No!”

She flew out the door.  She stopped at the threshold of an empty hall.  The receptionists had chosen a brilliant time to go on their lunch break.

“Don’t say another word!” Jane pointed an accusing finger at him.  “I don’t want to hear it.  I’ve had enough of this, do you hear me?  I don’t know you and you don’t know me and this.  Is.  Over!”

Jane ran, passed the few apathetic personnel that had remained to roam the halls, and she didn’t stop for anything, not even when she realized that she’d forgotten to lock the door.

**

Someone stood in her office door.  Jane looked up to see Betty over sections of her uncombed hair.  She’d been raking her hands through it for so long that her scalp was numb.

“Am I interrupting something?”

Jane’s desk was a disaster the likes of which would make her apartment look immaculate.  All her files on the patient were piled on top of the trashcan.  Jane knocked a ball of paper that was once a cover letter to the top, where it teetered for a moment and then fell to the floor by the filing cabinet.

“No,” Jane said.  She flicked her pen around in the absence of more paper.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Jane flicked the next one harder.  It flew over the phone to the floor.  Now she had nothing.

“No,” she said again.

Betty sighed.  “Well, you know I’m around if you need to talk.  It doesn’t have to be right now.  How about next week we go out on the town for some drinks?  We could check out hot guys.”

Jane laughed in spite of herself.  Trust Betty to be there, helping her up when she was down.  She didn’t know what she’d ever do if they’d transferred her to the bigger hospital instead of this one. 

She hoped they would get that night out away from work, long after Betty said goodbye and left for the night.  A couple of days of throwing herself into work, followed by a weekend spent hitting the night scene, getting drunk, and possibly getting a date with some handsome, non-crazy stranger was just what she needed.  Especially that last one.  It felt like it’d been centuries since she last had sex.  Eventually, she might even forget about the patient, and stop hearing his voice in her head all the time.

Because she did still hear him, when no other sound was present.

And she still felt his hand on hers, warm where she was deathly cold.

And she still heard that voice that sounded just like hers, screaming endlessly.

‘What have you done?’

**

Jane threw her coat aside and walked over a carpet of fallen magazines and junk mail to the couch.  She grabbed the remote, turned off the Harry Potter movie playing on HBO, and sank down with her feet in one of the file boxes.  She threw a hand over her face, blocking out the moon and stars.  With the TV off, it was the only light source left, and on better days she would enjoy having them to watch in her free time after work.  They were like beautiful white beads, a reminder of childhood dreams long forgotten.

Tonight, though, anything that cast a heavenly glow made her stomach roll.  She needed total darkness for five or six hours if she wanted to get up tomorrow.  She pulled her feet—still enclosed in loafers—up and out of the mess of papers, knocking the first few out of the box and leaving scuff marks on the restored upholstery.  She was going to kick herself for that when she had to spend hours scrubbing the stain out until her hands were raw. 

She needed to empty her mind, to go back to those mind-numbing self-help books her mom used to read that talked about the power of meditation and positive thinking.  It was something about counting your blessings and not allowing negative impulses to weigh you down.  That, at least, was a good idea, but new age ideas never held up in Jane’s professional opinion. 

She closed her eyes and thought of peaceful winter nights in with a good book and a cup of hot cocoa.  She thought of lying in the grass with the stars overhead and a calm state of mind with which to enjoy them.  She thought of that night out with Betty, doing anything they wanted not related to work.  She thought of Darcy getting better, both physically and mentally.  She thought of a dreamless sleep that lasted for as long as she wanted.  No alarms to force her back to wakefulness before she was ready.

She thought of never walking into session room 8 ever again. 

She thought for so long that somewhere in all that thinking, she must have fallen asleep.  She opened her eyes and sat up to a much darker room.  The moon had changed positions, from the highest point in the sky to lower down.  Her watch read quarter to five in the morning.

“That worked better than I thought.”  Jane sat up on the couch, stretched her tired muscles, and let out the longest yawn of her life.

She turned on a few dim lamps.  LED was just going to make her headache come back.  She walked around to where the boxes were.  There they sat, side by side, stuffed with papers all bearing her name.  Jane sat, eyes glued to the rows of manila folders.  She grabbed the closest box.  Getting herself comfortable, she slid it between her legs and thumbed out the first of the files.

Within an hour, three boxes sat upturned and empty in the corner.  The fourth contained all the folders she had deemed worth keeping.  All the rest would be fed into the shredder and deposited in the trash as soon as the sun came up.  Jane carried the box into her tiny den (really a converted walk-in closet) and slid it into the corner behind the door.  She walked back to the living room, changing course at the last second to enter the kitchen.  There, she spent half of her barely touched bottle of dishwashing liquid restoring her dishes and bowls to a healthy shine.  They went neatly into the cabinet with the silverware, which she rearranged into sorted stacks of forks, knives, and spoons. 

The coats for the clothing drive went into a bag that was tied around the door of Jane’s den.  She took her day coat from the floor and smoothed out the creases.  She shook off a few dust bunnies and hung it by the neck on the empty rack. 

Jane stepped back to admire her work.  Admittedly, she hadn’t done much.  Her home was still a mess of grime and clutter, and now that she could see the rug, it was in bad need of a vacuum, but her kitchen sink was clear and her files were in order.  The air tasted sweeter already, like a new beginning.

She went to her room and sat at the edge of her bed.  Her eyes would not close and weren’t likely to for a while.  After everything the last few weeks, Jane was sure Erik wouldn’t mind covering for her if she took a sick day.  She could spend it tackling that closet after another ten hours of sleep.

It was open and gaping as ever.  Every time Jane looked at it, she thought she saw more boxes.  She’d probably be in Narnia before she got to it all.  At the very bottom was the purple shoebox.  The cover was misplaced, which was odd.  Jane hadn’t touched it in weeks, and she was pretty sure she’d put the lid back on correctly.

Shrugging, she sunk to the floor.  Knocking off the lid, she examined the box’s contents.  Nothing was out of place since the last time she looked.

‘Might as well get an early start on cleaning,’ Jane thought, sizing up the intimidating towers of stuff long ago saved ‘for later’.

She took out the pages from Erik’s book.  She didn’t read more than a few words at a time and she definitely didn’t look anywhere near the illustrated rendition of Loki.  She would probably be well served staying away from all things Norse until this whole thing blew over.

Next, she removed the rubber band ball and threw it a few times in the air.  She caught it two times out of five and set it aside.  With it went the picture of her first crush, which she now recalled having clipped out of the school year book just above his name.  For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what it was.

Her old story was the last thing in the box, still folded up and pushed to the side out of sight.  Had it been brown construction paper instead of red, it would have blended right into the cardboard.  Jane picked it up by the corner edge.

‘bzzz- it… there’s nothing real… that’s it… there’s nothing real…’

Jane shrieked, and the box flew out of her hands as she stumbled back.  Her hands groped around the bed for the tape recorder, sitting precariously close to the edge where she’d been a moment ago.  She looked at the screen, tracing the lines of the cracks spreading out like a spider’s web.  There didn’t appear to be any new ones since this morning.

How it had gotten here was the question on Jane’s mind.  She’d been certain she left it in that pile of dirty towels when she left for work that morning.

‘I must’ve brought it here after I took the towels to the laundry bin,’ Jane thought.  It made sense, but it would be better if she had any recollection of even holding the thing recently.

She pressed a few buttons, and then hit it once or twice while it spat out those same five words a hundred more times.  This morning, it had been the only way to make it shut up for a while, but it didn’t look like that was going to work a second time.  Shoving it under the pillow for later, she went back to the task at hand: getting that paper out of the box and taking a breather from the pains of adult life.

The happy stick drawing of her seven year old self and her prince smiled up at her when she unfolded it, the hearts a blaring red in spite of the almost identically colored background.  She read the first few lines to herself.

‘Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl who lived in a tiny village.  She had lots of good friends, but what she really wanted was a handsome prince.  One day, a handsome prince came to the town, and he met the beautiful girl and they fell in love at first sight.’

The more Jane read, the more her smile grew.

‘The prince wanted to marry the girl, but then an evil wizard came and took her away!  So the prince traveled to the evil wizard’s house and beat him up with his sword.  And so the prince freed the beautiful girl and they got married.  And they all lived happily ever after.’

‘But that was not the end of the story.’

Jane’s heart missed a beat.  She stared hard at the last line on the paper.  She read it over and over again and traced the wobbly lines of a new writer.  It was all still in her handwriting, but those were not the words she had written.

‘The story continues long after the girl thought she found her happy ending.’

Jane’s breathing grew erratic, and she made no move to stop and calm down.  Sweat pooled at the top of her forehead and dripped down, yet she kept reading.

‘For a long time, she thought she was happy.  She thought she had it all: a prince, a kingdom, and infinite knowledge, but with such privilege came a price she wasn’t prepared to pay.’

“What the hell is this?” Jane muttered.  She held the paper tight enough that her nails dug through the other side. 

‘What the girl didn’t know what that the man she had married was not who he appeared.  She had been caught up in dreams of true love, of a life in the stars with all she could ever ask for, and a devoted prince by her side who would love her always, and dreams are not meant to last.’

“No, no I didn’t write this.”

‘Over time, they turned grey and nightmarish.  She grew older and wiser, and she saw more than she was able to bear.  She saw her love crumble under the weight of new responsibility and broken trust.’

“I didn’t write this.”

 ‘Her prince grew tired of her, and sought love from elsewhere.  He fell into the arms of his admirers and left the wife in the cold, her affections scorned and squandered.’

“I didn’t write this!”

‘He left her to face the ridicule of a populace who had never accepted her, never thought her worthy of them.’

“No, no, no, no-”

‘And while she suffered alone in her exile, the wizard suffered in turn.  He suffered the pain of his beloved, whom he would have given all that her prince should have, had he only the chance to do so.’

“No, stop it.”

‘He tried many times to make her see that he was the one she was looking for.  He was the one who would love her and cherish her, and give her everything she deserved.’

“Stop it!”

‘But she could never see it, would never see it.  Not unless the wizard took drastic measures.  To save her from this tormented waste of a life, he would have to-‘

“NOOOOO!”

Jane’s hands ripped the paper to shreds, the pieces flying about like red confetti.  They clamped over her mouth as her body willed back the bile rushing to her throat.  Her feet moved one uneven backwards step at a time, taking her to the living room.  Her coat flew off the rack and onto her shoulders as she raced out the door, to the elevator, all the way to her car at the far end of the parking garage.  Her hands gripped the wheel, her feet stepped on the gas, and she sped out of the dark into the early morning light.

Back in her room, under the pillow, the tape recorder played one more time-

‘..that’s it… there’s nothing real.’

-and clicked off.

[magic-n-science]

Virtua, Chapter Three

TITLE: Virtua AUTHOR: Artemis Day (iamartemisday) ONESHOT/CHAPTER NUMBER: 3/5 (Read it on FF.net here: Ch 3) RATING: M GENRE(S): Drama, Suspense, Horror, Alternate Universe SUMMARY: Psychologist Jane Foster can’t imagine a stranger case than the one that’s just been brought to her: an unknown man claiming to be the Norse God of Mischief, who seems to know more about her than he should. Unlocking the mysteries of his mind will throw Jane’s entire world out of line, as she must question what is real, and what is just a dream. NOTES/WARNINGS: None

**

Jane watched a nurse enter Darcy’s room to check her vitals and fluff her pillows as if watching a movie. A really bad movie, the kind she’d walk out of twenty minutes in.  There was nothing about the image of Darcy— sweet, snarky, difficult Darcy— laid out on a hospital bed with tubes sticking out of her mouth that didn’t make Jane want to find something big and fragile to smash into pieces.  Her ire was only partly to do with a pair of nurse’s aides on staff, whispering to each other in the corner of the room.

“I heard she wasan addict before she got locked up,” one nurse whispered.

And the other one shook her head.  “You just know that even if she makes it this time, we’re going to be seeing a lot of her.”

To avoid punching their lights out, Jane had pretended to need a bathroom break and spent the next ten minutes in a cramped stall, resting her back of her head on ice cold metal.  It numbed all the physical pain, but inside she continued to ache.  Malaise came over her as she spent the next hour at Darcy’s side, feeling like she was the one who should be on that bed.  A receptionist had seen through her façade and brought her some hot chocolate and a pillow for her chair.  Jane thanked her, but her voice was a mere whisper, and her words were slurred.  The woman may not have heard her at all, but she still smiled at Jane, and wished her all the best.

Jane spent the time at Darcy’s bedside flipping through files.  They didn’t pertain to Darcy’s case or any of her other patients either.  It been left behind by a very careless doctor, and Jane just needed something to keep her hands busy.  If her body was in motion that was less brain power she had to dedicate to thinking.  It was odd for a doctor to say, but thinking was bad for her right now.  Thinking meant wondering, and wondering meant theorizing, and there wasn’t a theory or a hypothesis in the world that could give Jane clarity on this.

A nurse came at ten after six to check Darcy’s vitals, a different nurse from before, thank goodness.  She was a kindly old grandmother of a woman, her steel grey hair permed and her face soft and gentle.  She had lines at the corner of her mouth that told Jane she smiled often.  The nametag around her neck was party covered by the folds of her scrubs.  Jane could make out a ‘B’ and nothing else.

‘Barbara?’

‘Bethany?’

‘Bertha?’

“How is has she been?” the nurse asked.  Caught up in her guessing game, Jane almost missed the question.

“She’s been stable, as far as I can tell,” Jane said.  The heart monitor had been beeping steadily with no sign of increase or decrease for hours. 

“Everything does look good,” the nurse said, checking the monitor and a few others wires and machines Jane only vaguely knew the function of.  “I think she’s going to make it through the night.  After that, it shouldn’t be long before she’s recovered enough to be transferred back to Genial North.”

Jane nodded.  She felt a bit like a balloon had deflated in her stomach.

“Why don’t you go home and get some rest,” said the nurse.  “Visiting hours are almost over.”

“Yeah, I guess I should,” said Jane.  She picked up her bag and her coat.  Outside, the sun was halfway through sinking below the earth.  Betty or one of the other doctors will have taken care of her regular visits by now.  She could probably get away with a day off under the circumstances.  If not… well, she’d take that up with her boss tomorrow, after full a night of sleep in her bed.

She wouldn’t even bother sitting at the kitchen table with her notes tonight.  No way could she make herself focus after the last few hours.  Even her John Doe had been out of mind since noon.  Aside from a voicemail from Erik that she had yet to listen to, there’d been nothing around to remind of her him.  For that, Jane was eternally grateful.  She’d be using this hospital the next time she got hurt for sure.

“Before I go,” Jane said at the door.  “How was Darcy before I came in?”

The nurse’s face fell, and her demeanor shifted.  She had seen a lot of cases like this in her time, and used to it as she was, they wore her down, and they ate away at the cheerful optimism that had characterized her in her younger days.  That was Jane’s guess anyway.

“She was in trouble for a while,” said the nurse.  “This is only the second time I’ve seen her myself, but the first time, I was sure that she wouldn’t make it.  I’m happy to see she’s stronger than I thought.”

Jane smiled.  “Yeah, she’s tough one, Darcy… was there anything else?”

“You can look at the files if you want to know more.  They’ll tell you more than I can.”

“Thanks, I’ll do that.”

Jane stepped into the hall.  She had her coat draped over her arm and it was freezing outside.  She was likely to regret not putting it on sooner once she got into the car lot and into her car with its ever unreliable heating system puffing smoke in her face instead of warmth.  One of these days, she was going to stop at that Chevrolet lot a block away from her building, and then she was going to-

“Dr.  Foster!  Oh, wait just one second, Doctor!”

The nurse was running towards her, and she’d dislodged her name tag from between two buttons.  ‘Beatrice,’ it read.  Jane hadn’t even been close.

“I’m so sorry, I just remembered something.”  The nurse paused to catch her breath.  Running most likely wasn’t her normal choice of exercise.  Jane could relate.

“You did?  What is it?”  Jane didn’t want to sound pushy about it, but she really, really needed the nurse to tell her.

“It probably doesn’t mean anything,” the nurse said between pants.  “I know that people in a semi-conscious state can blurt out the most meaningless things, or even complete gibberish that has no greater meaning then ‘oh, my head hurts.’”

If that was a joke, Jane couldn’t manage more than a weak almost-smile.

“Go on,” she urged her.

The nurse took a breath.  “Well, when she was first brought in, I supervised her admittance into the ICU.  When I was checking her pulse, I could’ve sworn I heard her whispering.”

Jane should grabbed her notebook before she left: the pocket sized one that was mostly full of lunchtime doodles and the odd introspective about that pear shaped crack in her bedroom wall.  There were at least two empty pages in the back that would have been perfect right now.

“What was she saying?”  Jane asked.  Would it be too forward for her to take the woman’s hand?  No, it probably was.

The woman glanced around at the doctors and nurses lost in their own worlds full of paperwork and sick patients, almost as if she expected them to be listening in ready to silence her as soon as she said too much.  To Jane, they were all but invisible. 

“Well, it was very quick… and my ears aren’t quite what they used to be… but I believe she said, ‘nothing real.’”

**

The time between Darcy’s suicide attempt and Jane’s Thursday morning sessions passed Jane by in a blur of motion and color.  She went into work that day on an empty stomach, having found herself unable to look at her scrambled eggs and toast, let alone eat it.  Probably not one of her best decisions; she was starving by the time Ian’s session began.  After him, she had two more patients to go before lunchtime two hours from now.  She didn’t think she was going to make it.

To distract herself, she counted backwards from one hundred to one ten times and patted the back of the young man who held on to her like a lifeline.  He cried his eyes out into her shirt, which she would probably have to change.  It was times like this that made Jane forget Ian was a man in his twenties.  His age was only a number.  His life had been long stretches of abuse at the hands of those who should love him, with hospital stays like this one scattered here and there.  His doctor before Jane determined that his mental age was half what it should be, which could account for his curling up into her like he’d just watching a scary movie he couldn’t handle.  Not that Jane could blame him for crying at a time like this.

“I- I think I could’ve stopped her,” his face was red and puffy, and his words were so garbled that Jane had to guess most of them.  “If she’dve told me, I could’ve  stopped her, I could’ve…”

“Relax, Ian,” Jane said.  She cradled him like a child, heavy as he was.  “There’s nothing you could have done.  There’s nothing any of us could have done.  You know Darcy’s very sick, that’s why she needs people like you and me to take care of her.  All we can do now is hope for the best.”

“I’m afraid she’ll die,” Ian said, voicing aloud everything Jane had dwelled on in silence.

“She won’t die,” Jane said.  She looked straight ahead—the side of Ian’s head just barely in her vision—and found a glove dispenser with a reflective surface staring back at her.  “We both know she’s too stubborn for that.”

Jane allowed Ian to slip off her lap.  He sat hunched over on his bed like he was nearing death.  He’d always been small and skinny, but today he seemed to shrink before Jane’s eyes.  She placed a hand on Ian’s shoulder, guiding him to look at her.  He took the tissue she offered him, wiped his eyes, and blew his nose.  He crumpled it up in his hands and held it there without a thought for the waste bin just within his reach.

“I have to ask you something very important, Ian,” Jane said. “I need to know if Darcy said anything to you recently that was… strange or different than usual.”

Ian blinked; his eyes looked bigger when they were dry.

“Different… well, she talks about her mother a lot.”

Jane felt a stabbing in her gut.

“She says she wants to see her again.”

It went in deeper and twisted. 

“Was there anything else?” Jane asked.

Ian thought hard, scrunching his face together so that it became even redder.

“I don’t know,” he squeaked.  “I don’t… I don’t remember.  What if she did and I forgot about it?  Oh God, is this all my fault?”

“No, no, Ian.  This is not your fault at all.  This-“

But Ian was gone again, regressed back to that needy child who was desperate to have his only friend back.  He hugged Jane to him in Darcy’s absence, and kept her there, running tears down the lining of her coat, until the clock struck ten.

**

“Do you want to talk about it?” Erik asked on their way to the basement. 

Jane had just forced an entire ham sandwich down her throat against the protests of her stomach, so no she didn’t want to talk about anything right now.

If she had her way, she wouldn’t even be seeing The Patient today.  She’d chalked the dream up to stress coupled with an uncomfortable sleeping position, but that didn’t make her any more eager to face a man slowly wheedling his way into her mind, intentionally or otherwise.  That was supposed to go the other way around.

“We could reschedule if you need some time to yourself,” Erik said.

‘Yes!  Thank you!  I would love to!’

“No, I can’t do that,” said Jane, biting back the omnipresent voice of dissent.  “I’m better off keeping myself busy than sitting back and worrying.”

**

Within ten minutes of the start of the session, Jane had filled two pages in her book with notes.  None of them were anything relevant; she just didn’t know what else to do with herself.  She scribbled and doodled whatever came to mind while the patient stared up at the ceiling and traced the lines with his eyes.  Nary a word had passed his lips from the moment Jane sat down, to now.  If this was some grand plan of his to make Jane uncomfortable, and therefore pliable, it wasn’t exactly failing.

In the ensuring five minutes (Jane found herself checking her watch every few seconds), the patient leaned his chair back on its hind legs, maintaining perfect balance as he propped his feet up on the metal tabletop.  Jane glanced at his standard issue blue slippers—they barely fit over his large feet— and then at him.  He never looked her way, but moved them back to the ground and sat normally.  He whistled the opening notes to a song Jane could’ve sworn had been sung by the Beatles, and that was about all she could take.

“So,” she said.  He stopped whistling.  “I hope you’re having a good day.”

He studied her, like he was trying to determine if that was a joke or not. 

“It’s marginally better than yesterday,” he said.  “I find myself in much more pleasant company.  Your orderlies aren’t the friendliest bunch.”

“If you feel they’ve been mistreating you, you’re allowed to file a complaint.”

“That won’t be necessary.  There is little they could do to me even if they wanted to.”

Jane thought about scrawling a note about a possible God complex, but that was why they were here in the first place, wasn’t it?

“Okay, that’s fine.  Now let’s talk about you,” she said. 

He groaned.  “Must we?  I so prefer it when you are the subject of our conversations.  Tell me, did you sleep well last night?”

Jane’s pen, with which she’d been writing a few thoughts on the patient’s tone of voice, skewed off to the side of the page, leaving an ugly line that tore through the paper and left a corner hanging by a fiber. 

The reaction was unprecedented, even for her.  It was also unnecessary, and an oversight on her part.  What did it matter to her if a patient asked an innocuous (if somewhat intrusive) question such as that, just because she happened to hear his voice in her head a few nights ago?  Coincidences happened and when they did, that was all they were: simple coincidences.  A doctor should know that.

“I wanted to talk to you about some reading I’ve been doing,” Jane said.

The patient frowned, no doubt disappointed by her dodging his question.  Jane would write that one down, but she seemed to have misplaced her pen.

“I get the feeling it wasn’t very compelling,” said the patient.

“It was the Prose Edda and the Poetic Edda-“

“Oh, of course.”

“-and I wanted to ask you a few questions about some of the mythology.”

“Haven’t we already established that it’s nothing but tall tales?  Why you continue to push the issue is beyond me.”

“I’m just covering my bases.”

Jane flipped back to the notes she took on the myths. They were a bit sparser than she had hoped, but going over the old stories in Erik’s book (that he’d so graciously lent to her after apologizing once again for the mysterious missing pages) had sent her on a full nostalgia ride, and it was hard not to get carried away when Thor was doing battle with the fearsome world serpent.  Certain lines were bolded and highlighted to delineate importance.  On the next page were her questions, arranged neatly in a column with extra space off to the side in case she wanted to write something else.

“I guess we’ll start from the beginning,” she said.

“How about we don’t start at all?”

Jane gave him a look of warning, soft, yet firm.  Any other patient would have been cowed by it.

“First of all,” Jane tapped her finger over the first question.  “You are of the belief that your true identity is Loki, the God of Mischief.”

“You say that as if I’m some kind of madman.”

Jane frowned at him, but moved on to the next line.

“You’ve also said that your parents were Odin and Frigga.”

His fists clenched around his sleeves, his mouth hardening.  Jane watched him closely, taking a mental picture of him now in place of writing his actions down, as would have been infinitely easier.  She checked her pockets and under the notebook one more time for that stupid lost pen, but nothing.

“My parentage is not something I wish to discuss,” he said curtly.  “I believe you mentioned last time that you would respect my boundaries as I set them?  Well, I set them here.  I hope you are as willing to comply with my wishes as you claim.”

It’s really a shame that Jane did say that and meant it.  After everything, she’d love to press him for more, to squeeze him dry of every detail and then leave with a song of her own on her lips back to comfortable reality.  Not often did a patient drive her to such extremes, but that was before the patient.  He was likely to go down in her book capitalized, with a big color photo in the center. 

“Okay,” Jane said, writing a small blurb in her notes about possible family and abandonment issues.  “We’ll skip over that for now.”

She added the ‘for now’ to see if he’d jump on it.  He did not.  Jane was almost disappointed.

“How about Sigyn?  You mentioned to Erik that she wasn’t really your wife.”

“She wasn’t really real is more like it.”  The patient’s demeanor and tone took on great annoyance.  “Some fanatical story teller of old with delusions of true love conquering all created her in his head and then spread her name as if she truly existed, all because he believed I should find a wife and settle down.”

“That must have bothered you.”

“Is it a doctor’s job to make worthless comments and repeat the obvious?”

Jane’s mouth twitched.  ‘Remember not to start fights with the patients…’

“The same foolhardy man also spread the story of Thor’s courtship with Sif, a ridiculous notion then and now.”

Now there was something Jane hadn’t heard before.  In almost all of the recorded sessions with Erik, the patient had remained completely mum on the subject of his brother and sister-in-law.  His only mention of them was that infamous claim of having loved said in-law, and desiring her for his own in spite of her rejection. 

Jane didn’t doubt something like that really had happened in this man’s life.  Perhaps the notion of gods and goddesses was the farthest extent of his delusion, just a fantastic backdrop to true to life events that he couldn’t face.  If that was the case, and if she were a follower of the psychoanalytic theory, she might think they were dealing with some kind of oddball Madonna-Whore complex.  Sif in the myths was known for her loveliness, which could translate to purity, which could mean that the patient was projecting his need for sexual satisfaction from his sister-in-law on a pure mythical being.  Delving further, maybe the whole reason he slipped himself into the Loki role was because of Sigyn, the Goddess of Fidelity.  He desired a stable and loving relationship, but because he couldn’t have it with the woman he wanted, he denied the existence of such love, of Sigyn, entirely, failing to realize the irony of his assertions.

That would all be fine and good if the power and complexities of the human psyche could fit into neat little boxes, where this was normal and that was abnormal, and if one could just separate the normal from the abnormal, all their problems would be solved.  A shame that it didn’t work like that in the real world.

“Please inform me when your mind has finished wandering so we can continue.”

The patient’s words had a ripping quality that dragged Jane back to earth by her ankle.  It tingled a bit as the thought came to her; just one more of those powers and complexities of the mind. 

Clearing her throat, Jane turned to a new page in her notebook, even though she had barely written anything on this new page. 

“Sorry about that,” she murmured.  She sat up a little straighter and cleared her throat.  “So you say that Thor was never married to Sif, and Sigyn was never married to you, Loki, because-“

“Because she doesn’t exist.”  The patient placed his hands on the table, like he did the last time during his outburst.  If Jane didn’t know any better, she’d say that was the exact same placement, too.  “I can tell you of a few more who are fantasy, since you are just so interested in hearing about it.  There is no Baldr, first of all.  If you planned to interrogate me on my cold blooded murder of poor innocent Baldr, I’d advise you to reconsider.”

Jane glanced at the page, through which she could see a backwards image of her list of questions.  She surreptitiously covered the column on Baldr with her hand.

“I see,” she said.  With her free hand she started playing with the cap to her missing pen.  “How about-“

“I have no children either, if that’s your next question,” he said.  Her next question was actually going to be about the myth of Sif’s hair, but that was also a good place to start.  “Hel is real in the sense that she presides over the Underworld—what you would call Hell— and typically presents herself in female form, but she is of no relation to me.  I’m grateful to say that I’ve never met her before, though there have been some close calls.”

Jane entered that into her mental notes.  Those ‘close calls’ could mean anything, though from their interactions so far, she didn’t peg him for suicidal.  That would require further examination and possibly more extensive monitoring while she wasn’t with him.  She scrawled out a memo to discuss that with Erik later on, using the coveted pen which she’d just now found under the sole of her shoe.

“I have never desired to end my own life,” he said, stilling Jane’s hand, “at least, not of my own volition.”

Jane re-read her notes, perfectly legible to anyone with eyesight good enough to see across a table.  Maybe she should take lessons from Erik in doctor’s scrawl.  She moved the notepad under her arm, lowering her head so that her long hair formed a curtain.  He had no outward reaction, but to lace his fingers together and blink his eyes once or twice.  He was disappointed that he wasn’t scaring her anymore.

Not that he ever had.

“But you have wanted to,” she said.

His eyes darkened.  “Is that really a matter you’d like to get into, Dr. Foster?”

He said that like it was a hilarious joke to him, but it was an improvement from their last session (albeit a small one) and so for now, she wouldn’t complain.  He shouldn’t think she’d let it slide a second time, though. 

He slid his long body to the edge of his seat, rendering them nearly eye level.  His legs were likely spread, though the solid grey table prevented Jane from seeing.  His head was lolled back with his hair out of his eyes, which were lidded like he was going to fall asleep at any given moment.  He painted a picture with his body and posture, and that picture said ‘I could not be more bored with you if I tried.’  He wasn’t even trying to hide it. 

Not that he ever really could.  Jane’s super receptors had struck again.  She could see the beads of sweat on his brow and the subtle, but ever present twitching of his fingers.  Behind that collected façade that he so carefully cultivated was something infinitely more visceral just waiting to break through his barriers.  He was like a docile animal in that sense, much as the comparison made her stomach turn (patients were not animals, patients were human beings).  There was something caged back, something he was desperate for her not to see, and through that desperation, she had seen it all.

 “I think you should feel safe talking with me about it if you want to.”  She spread out her arms, revealing the notebook.  “I just want you to know that if the time ever comes that you do want to talk about it, I’m here to listen.”

He nodded as she spoke, but he didn’t buy a word of it.  She could have the people skills of a brick and still see that.

“You’re here to listen, hm?”  For the next few moments, he was deep in thought.  “I have a question for you, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Not at all,” Jane answered, sitting back a little herself.  “Fire away.”

“Why do you believe that I am not who I say I am?”

It was a question Jane had and hadn’t seen coming.  All things considered, this was a well-functioning.  He maintained a strong awareness of his surroundings, and outside of his delusions, he was an eloquent speaker and almost too smart for his own good. 

That said she couldn’t shake the feeling that this was too much too soon.  Never before had a patient openly challenged her like this.  Darcy might have counted, but her belligerence stemmed directly from her lack of awareness.  Everything to her was just another part of the game.  This patient wasn’t like that.  Every word out of his mouth was practiced, and real.

“Have I struck you dumb at last, Doctor?”

Jane started.  She thought she saw a smile flit by.  If she was right, it had to be the most smug, superior thing she’d ever seen from a patient, or anyone else for that matter.

“No, I was just…” Jane’s hand curled into a fist.  “Well, why don’t you tell me why I should believe that you’re who you say you are?”

He tsked.  He actually tsked her.  “Dr. Foster, don’t deflect the question back on me.  Where I come from, such things are a mark of weakness.”

“I see, and can you tell me anything about where you came from?”

“Now you are changing the subject.  Does your cowardice know no bounds?  I’m almost disappointed in you.”

“Almost?”

He grinned.  “This is all a game for you, isn’t it?  You’re trying to make me slip up.”

The thought had crossed her mind, it was true.  It was to Jane’s great irritation that she had to admit (to herself of course), that he was more right than wrong this time.

Unless he was the one trying to trip her up.

“You still haven’t answered me,” the patient said, completely assured in his victory and probably knowing full well that there was still another twenty minutes left for her to deal with him.

“I believe that you believe it,” she said, business-like.  “I believe that you are very intelligent and coherent.  I don’t think that you’ve broken completely from reality-“

“That puts you one huge step above the good doctor Selvig.”

“-but that doesn’t mean I believe your story either,” she finished.

Loki frowned at her.  “That’s a bit blunt, isn’t it?  I had pegged you for more subtle than that.”

“Only for patients that approach works on,” Jane said.  “You, I think, require something more direct.  Am I wrong?”

His shoulders shook with suppressed laughter, the contagious kind.  Jane’s mouth twitched at the sides several times, dying to form into a grin that rivaled his Cheshire cat look.  Jane wondered if maybe they should stop for the day.

“Dr. Foster,” the patient said when the moment had passed.  “If I might go off-topic for a moment, may I just say that you are looking very well today?”

Jane furrowed her brow.  Where the hell had that come from?

“Er- thank you.”

“I mean it, really.  Your face has much better color today, and it looks fuller.  I trust you’ve slept well these past few nights, yes?  No bad dreams?”

“No,” Jane said, a bit too forcefully.  It wasn’t quite his fault that his redundant questioning again triggered the memory of that dream, but she almost wished it was.  It would have felt so good to blame some of her current troubles on taking his case in the first place. 

“Are you certain of that?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly (and he clearly didn’t like being honest about this).  “For everything I do know of you, much remains a mystery.”

That couldn’t be hard since they don’t know each other at all.  Jane feels the ticking of the clock in the next room, more than she can hear it.  The minutes have dragged on until they feel like ten years each, but if Jane was keeping time correctly, she’d been in there long enough to call it an hour.  When she actually stood up and looked, it had only been fifty six minutes.  Oh, well.  Close enough.

“Okay,” she said, brushing off her pants.  “I think we’ve covered a lot of ground today.”

“Have we?”

Jane made the educated decision to ignore that.

“I’ll see you next Tuesday.  Until then, Dr. Selvig asked me to leave a short questionnaire for you with the orderlies.  They’ll give it to you when you’re back in your room.  Please answer every question to the best of your ability.”

“I thought I wasn’t allowed writing utensils.”

“They’ll be watching you while you work.”

Jane got her coat from over the chair and flung it over her arm.

“You’d best be served putting that on,” he said.  “I hear it’s a little nippy out.”

Jane ignored him a second time.  Her hand wrapped around the doorknob and she turned it one inch.

“Dr. Foster?”

It was the first time he said it that didn’t sound like a taunt.  If she didn’t know better, she’d call it a plea.  Whatever it was, her curiosity was piqued.  She looked back at him.  He hadn’t yet tried to stand up.  Erik said he’d finally learned to wait for his escort.

“Yes?” Jane asked.  She kept her hand on the door.

“I just wanted to say…” he paused and waited a beat.  “I’m very sorry about Ms. Lewis.”

Of course, it was common knowledge around the hospital what Darcy had done.  Things like this were never kept secret.  A suicide attempt took high precedence whenever they happened, and it didn’t help that Darcy was already infamous for her schizophrenic outbursts.  Add in the fact that interns were known to talk, and it was really no wonder that the patient knew about what happened.  The only thing surprising about it was that he’d found out so soon.  Normally, these things took at least three days to make it through the grapevine to the specialized patients.

Jane knew all of that in her logical heart of hearts, but she couldn’t stop the small, active illogical side of herself that was sounding the alarms.

Something was off about all this, she just knew it.

 “Thanks,” Jane said, swallowing hard, “that’s kind of you to say.”  She started to leave again.

 “It’s truly terrible, what she did,” he said leisurely.  “Taking all that mind altering medication at once should have killed her.”

Jane’s hand tightened, so hard that her knuckles cracked.  An imprint of her fingers would be left behind on that door, and they would carry with them a distinct cold feeling that none after her could describe.

It made sense that he knew what Darcy.  Everyone did.

To know how Darcy did it… only she and Erik, and the doctors on staff at that hospital, were supposed to know that.

So how did he?

Jane faced him fully where she hadn’t before, and she could no longer mask the tremors coursing through her.

“What did you say?” She sounded so weak, too.

“I’m just saying that she’s lucky.”  His mouth curled into a grin that Jane could only call sinister.  “One could almost call her survival… divine intervention.”

Jane’s hand sought the knob.  When had she even let go?  She found it, and she sailed out the room with the patient mugging behind her.  Outside, she didn’t see if Erik was still there waiting for her.  She headed for the elevator, her fingers clutched around her notebook and the sign out sheet she was supposed to return to the triage nurse, the one she just walked by. 

(She’d be back in her office before she realized she’d forgotten her pen.)

The elevator dinged with Jane ten feet away from it.  She picked up the pace, only to slow when the doors slid open, and those three tall interns stepped out, laughing together like there was anything at all laugh about. 

“Hey!”  Jane’s shout stopped them in their tracks.  “I saw you hanging around the John Doe’s session room the other day.”

The men all looked at each other, two at a time in all possible combinations.  Never once did it reach their thick heads that they should say something before Jane got really mad, and then it was too late.

“Look, I don’t know what you three are doing lazing around on the job and trading gossip, or how you could have found out about what happened to Darcy, but when it starts to sabotage the recovery of my patients, it becomes my problem.  You three do not want this to be my problem, you understand?”

“Uh… I think so,” said the one on the far left, who looked the most befuddled out of all of them.  He glanced at his friend on the right, who smirked.

“I think you need some Prozac, lady,” he said under his breath.

“What was that?”  Jane got right in his face.  “Do you want to lose your internship?”

“No, Ma’am, no I don’t,” said the intern, rolling his eyes.

“Look, we don’t know anything about the Lewis girl, honest,” said the one in the middle.  “And we’d never talk about it to a patient if we did.”

He sounded so honest, and the other two interns looked so bored, and Jane was so spent of anger and aggravation and every other kind of emotion.  All she could manage was a wordless shout, and then she stalked passed the three, leaving them to snicker and spin their fingers around their temples in her wake.  As she entered the elevator, her eyes darted in all directions, as if he would be there wherever she looked.

There in the shadows, watching her.