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Chapter Text

THE LAST MIDGARDIAN

Knowhere

He resembled a sculpture. The bright sapphire limbs huddled and curled inward, shrinking his impressive height into a deceptively small ball. He remained like that for days sometimes - entirely motionless, barely a whisper of breath to cause his serrated diaphragm to rise and fall like wind through tree branches. She knew he was tall because she saw him stand once...but that was a long time ago. (Or was it? She couldn't remember.)

He was so very blue. She liked to watch the way the shadows danced across his limbs in the shifting light and lose herself in the swirl of scarred patterns on his chest and forehead. Sometimes they became ocean waves or river ripples in her mind. Other times they became butterfly wings or a parrot feather. She liked to imagine those things. They stirred up good times, pleasant memories ...and she had so few of those now.

"This music is called the blues because it is sad. B.B. King is singing of his troubles. He calls it 'singing the blues' because blue is a sad color," her mother once told her, another lifetime ago, when she was a very young girl. She liked the warmth in her mother's voice. It reminded her of melted honey. Her voice was never sad. It must not have been blue.

But he was always blue...and not just in skin tone. There were days he opened his scarlet eyes and they wept with tearless sorrow. They reminded her of the way the waters were painted red when They came. She didn't like red. Red meant empty roads and emptier homes. Red meant change and tears and so many funerals. She didn't like those eyes. They were mirrors of her own grief and the loss of hope that threatened to consume her.

When those flashes of red threatened to burn away her will to fight, she dropped her eyes to his billows of sapphire scars on his chest and thought of butterflies...not the truck-sized kind housed in a display cage of its own, but the palm-sized ones from Earth. Those butterflies reminded her of her first home, the place she was born, and that gave her hope. Hope was gold and warm and filled with butterfly wings and melted honey and spring daffodils and starry nights.

She kept her eyes fixed on him when the doors open and the people came. She wasn't sure if she should call them "people," because at one time, in her native language, she would have called them "aliens." But every people thinks they are the only "real" people and all others are not until they are forced to learn otherwise.

Just as the "people" of Earth discovered.

Then she ended up the "alien," trapped behind clear glass as strong as diamonds and on display for the strange masses of various exotic creatures that came through their dark gallery. They came in groups or tours, by themselves or in large numbers to see all the exotic exhibits in this cluttered, chaotic, living zoo. (Was it a zoo or a museum? She was never quite sure.)

Exhibits lined each hall around her and above her. At one time in her life, she would have screamed in glee and pulled out her notebook to take notes on each and every display in this metallic institution. It defied the extent of even her extensive scientific imagination. She once dreamed of gateways in the sky and the study of other planets. She never once thought she would find flowers the size of parachutes that danced and sang when fed some kind of worm. There were skeletons of creatures that rivalled dinosaurs and more robots and automatons than she could count. An entire wall devoted to weapons towered four stories high. Records of star charts she would have given her right arm to obtain were a daily spectacle now.

Her glass box rested in the hall of live displays. From end to end of the cavernous gallery, tightly crammed cages barely allowed the spectators passage through the narrow walkways. Some of the displays incorporated plants in them or showed evidence of climate control (such as humidity or frost) but hers was entirely clear and empty.

Her vantage point showed her all kinds of creatures. There were bipeds and quadrupeds. Some with wings and some with horns. Some with five eyes and some with no eyes at all. Vaguely humanoid creatures listlessly sat on the floors of their cages while decidedly unhumanoid creatures lay...or floated...or oozed in theirs. The creatures in the exhibits were as disparate in appearance as tuna and oranges, but they all shared the same fate. They all were alone in their glass cage, a live display to tickle the fancies of the curious and provide fodder for the imaginations of the world-weary.

Yes. At one time, she would have longed to be one of these masses of sightseers. Now, she wished she had a way to hide herself from their perpetual gaze. She could still feel their eyes on her when her eyes were closed and her back turned. Their eyes prickled a trail of exposure everywhere they roved and she lacked so much as a leaf or a rock to hide behind for a reprieve.

In her early days, when she woke to her box, she used to scream and bang her fists against the unforgiving glass until bruises mottled her skin and blisters wept blood. The many eyes outside only stared. She used to cry, but she hated it when they watched her so she stopped. For awhile, she tried to smile and wave. Sometimes they'd respond, but she couldn't understand what they were saying when they pointed and whispered. Did they pity her or mock her? Was she an object of derision and disgust or fascination and awe? There were so many. It didn't matter anymore. Here they stared but could not touch. She was not always so fortunate on Asgard. She wasn't sure which was a worse form of prison

The sedative came in the food each day. It kept her complacent and hazy, comfortable and deceptively peaceful. She tried not to take it when she realized where it came from, but then the hunger came...and the claustrophobia and the terror. She tried a hunger strike once. She refused her slightly sweet, unidentifiable grey mush three times before what Jane thought of as a "Keeper" came.

Each cage was tended by a slightly pinkish feminine creature in a short uniform dress. The Keepers always smiled but it was a hollow, automatic smile as if formed by habit and not humor. They were inarguably alive. She knew because she watched one die once. There were no springs or microchips within the alien woman and Jane's nightmares were haunted by that gruesome death for months.

When the Keepers daintily shuffled through the museum, they pushed carts of multicolored containers of food. These were deposited in small slits near the floor of each cage and collected when empty. A small, self-cleaning hole in the corner of each cage was set up for waste collection and the cage itself underwent routine, automated maintenance to ensure the internal environment remained clean and inhabitable.

Jane discovered that when she tried to pull a "Finding Nemo" and see if she could escape if her cage was dirty. She could not make it stay dirty for more than five minutes before the cage cleaned itself. Similarly, she could not skip more than three meals before a Keeper appeared and inserted a tube into her cage which filled the space with some type of gas. She was unconscious within thirty seconds and when she woke, her hunger was gone. The hazy, deceptive aura of well-being filled her and she would have cried in frustration - if she was not so very comfortable. When her subsequent three hunger strikes ended in the same way, she finally gave up.

When the unceasing noise of the visitors stilled, another set of footsteps echoed through the metal hall. They were heavier than those of the Keepers and much slower, as if time itself was an endless commodity. Only after all the others were gone did he come. Their Owner.

It was his hair that first caught her attention when he arrived on Asgard. It was so white it could have been made of cotton. It was the hunger in his eyes that made her forget his hair or the shifting, mechanical way he moved. If she still wondered whether he was man or machine, his eyes gave it away. They burned with an insatiable greed worse than even the worst of the Aesir and when fixed on her, they wrapped her in steel chains and stole the breath out of her lungs.

After hours, when all that could be heard was the metallic groaning of the walls and the soft whimpers of the captives, his footsteps reverberated like a bullhorn in a library. He walked through each aisle and past every single display. His hungry eyes ate in whatever he passed and Jane new without a doubt that he remembered every last relic or creature contained in his museum. This place, these things, these beings were not just his hobby. They were his obsession.

When his shadow fell upon her cage, she internally cringed every time. He never smiled or spoke or made any show that he acknowledged her existence. He only loomed over her in his silent, clickish way, and burned her with those insatiable eyes before he continued on to the next cage.

She hated looking at their Owner even more than she used to hate meeting the disdainful eyes of the Aesir nobles. She preferred to stare at the blue man in the cage next to hers. He helped her forget, though he never even noticed she was there. She watched the listless, burdened rise and fall of his chest. He reminded her to keep breathing...keep fighting...keep going. She would not give up until she could see blue again - whether it was the blue of an ocean or an atmosphere or an old t-shirt, she didn't care. She would get out of this place and see something other than glass walls again.

How long had he been trapped here - slowly shrinking inward on himself until he forgot there was an external world to interact with at all? In a hall without windows or clocks, she could not grasp the passage of time. Was it a day or a thousand years that had passed since she first arrived? She didn't know and there was no telling how much longer the blue man spent trapped on display.

He never cried. She wondered if he was biologically incapable of producing tears or if he had forgotten how after all his tears were spent. He shouted once. In an unexpected burst of movement and emotion, he stood tall and let out a guttural shout of rage and despair as he tore at his head with his hands. That was the only way she knew how tall he was or that he was not frozen and mute as she had thought before. He pounded once against the glass and fell back into unbroken silence.

After that, she wondered if he missed his home and which planet he called home. Did he have a family and a name? Who was he before this? Before he became a living symbol of a distant, little-known people existing for the intellectual consumption of others.

She wished she could ask him. Did his world have a sun and did he miss it as much as she missed hers? She wished she could feel the warmth of the sun's rays on her exposed face. She wished she could be truly alone while at the same time she wished she wasn't so truly alone. She now felt her enhanced genetics were a curse which prolonged her captivity and robbed her of some of her escape options. Extended lifespans had once been welcomed as a lauded gift by the naïve inhabitants of Earth. Jane knew it was like all the other "gifts" the Aesir had brought them - sweet to the taste and bitter to the stomach. Earthlings paid for every "gift" tenfold before the end.

Thoughts of her beloved Earth left her so homesick she could feel the weight of it beneath her deceptively sedated mind. She was cogent enough to know she missed her home with every fiber of her imprisoned body. The dreams made it worse. Sometimes they felt so real. They reminded her of a past she could never return to and a place that solely existed in her memories. She would never be able to watch a baseball game or a ballet again. Who could appreciate her awe of the discoveries of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein with? Who could sing Christmas carols or eat Thai curry with her?

She was alone.

She remembered going to a zoo as a child. Her grandfather bought her an orange balloon and let her pet a boa constrictor. It was that day that she gained a fascination for the snow leopard. He was so beautiful and noble as he warily paced his small cage.

"There are so few of them left in the wild. They may soon be extinct," the zookeeper sadly told them.

Sad it was. Did the spotted, furry-faced predator know he was one of the last? Did he care? Was that why he paced so restlessly to and fro along his faux river, staring at the walls of his cage as if he could sense the freedom that lay beyond?

She never, not in a million years, thought she would become him...one of the last of her kind, the dwindling remnant of a vanishing species, preserved for posterity only in captivity.

But here she was - pacing the length of her cage just like the snow leopard.

One of the last of her kind. Maybe the last. She didn't know for sure, but on Asgard they told her she was the last Midgardian.

ooooo

Chapter Text

LABELED

"Janey...Janey...," shrieked the familiar voice in her ear. Jane turned her head to the side to where her younger cousin lay beside her on the blanket.

"What?"

"There's something alive out there! I just saw something move!" Chrissy answered, the fear in her voice lowering her response to a tense whisper. Jane felt cold fingers dig into her shoulder as Chrissy clung to her.

"Where?" she whispered back. She scanned the desert sky overhead. In the darkness, meteors dripped across the sky like rain on a windshield, only broken by the silhouette of the distant mountains.  Jane's dad and uncle were still arguing over how to position the telescope to find Venus. On another blanket, little Eliza lay curled up asleep on Aunt Jen's lap. It was too far past her bedtime to find a meteor shower as interesting as Chrissy and Jane did.

"There!" Chrissy answered, but failed to point her fingers to designate where she meant.

"Give me the binoculars so I can check," Jane said. Without sitting up, she tried to grab them from her cousin's hand but Chrissy's hand held them tight against her side.  In her panic, she had not moved from her rigid position on the blanket.

"Don't move a muscle! It might eat me!"

"Eat you?"

"I heard it rustling in the bushes right there...then it jumped!" Chrissy breathed out. Jane heaved a sigh of relief mixed with disappointment.

"Chrissy, I thought you saw something move in the sky and I was going to be excited to see a UFO or something."

"Oh no. This is much worse. I think it was a mouse!"

"You're ridiculous. If it looked like a mouse then it was probably just one of the local kangaroo rats. They aren't going to hurt you."

"See! Rodents crossed with kangaroos and I'm not supposed to be freaked out? That's like something straight out of a nightmare!"

Jane sighed and sat up. She moved to stand but her cousin's hand caught hers.

" What are you doing?" Chrissy squeaked out.

"Rescuing you from your worst nightmare...and getting the Fritos," Jane answered. She disentangled herself from her cousin's grip and stood. Her back was sore from lying on the hard ground for so long. She stretched to try to get the blood flowing again. As she did, a small shadow scurried from the bushes and out of sight behind a rock.

"It's gone," Jane told her cousin. Chrissy visibly relaxed.

"Wait! Don't leave me here alone! What if it comes back?" Chrissy said and she jumped up to follow Jane to the folding table where the snacks were waiting. Jane grabbed the bowl of Fritos and took a crunchy handful before taking the binoculars from her cousin.  The wrapper of the bag of Oreos crinkled as Chrissy struggled to get it open in the dark. Jane  scanned the sky through the binoculars and barely caught the bright flash of the tale of a meteor in the lens. She grinned and kept searching.

"Do you really think you would be excited?" Chrissy asked between bites of Oreo.

"Excited for what?"

"You know. To see a UFO. I think it'd be terrifying," Chrissy said.

"I think it would be awesome! Imagine all we could learn or see out there!" Jane said and motioned to the vastness of the sky above them. In her young brain, she imagined all the swirling galaxies and distant planets teeming with exotic life forms and infinite possibilities. Her heart nearly swelled to bursting with her desire to see it all, or as much as she could fit into her lifetime, already insufficient for her oversized curiosity.

"No, thanks. What if they have mice the size of dinosaurs?" Chrissy asked.

"Then you'd better hope they are vegetarians!" Jane answered and both girls fell into a fit of giggles. They were interrupted when Chrissy's dad called them over to the telescope.

"Girls, come here! I finally found Jupiter," he said excitedly. Both girls dropped their snacks and ran over to see the King of the Planets.

Every exhibit in the museum boasted a uniform placard on the lower left hand corner of the glass enclosures. If the meticulously maintained placard so much as tilted a centimeter askew, the Owner's frigid glare was enough to scatter the Keepers like frightened cockroaches until one managed to remedy the errant label.

Jane couldn't read them. She tried. She strained her eyes to clearly see the geometric shapes and patterns of lines, but the alien alphabet characters were incomprehensible to her Midgardian eyes. She could guess, though. They must have some system of taxonomy used to categorize their perception of the universe. Perhaps it was based on living and nonliving objects. Perhaps it was based on size and shape, or subsistence patterns, habitat, or locomotion. They could even be organized by "animal, vegetable, or mineral," and she wouldn't know the difference. She had no way to tell, but she knew she was one of the many things in the museum with a label.

What did hers say? Did it call her a "Midgardian" or a "Terran" or a "primitive humanoid being from the Aesir's extensive protectorate"? Was she identified by her native planet or solar system or her galaxy? She could imagine some alien version of Latin classifying her as a "female Homo Sapien," but was her label limited to a scientific description or did it include some of the political and socio-historical context? Did it explain how she was "acquired " from Asgard? Did it display her earthly moniker of "Jane Foster," or her Aesir title, "Jannike, daughter of Luke" or did she lose all personal names completely upon waking in her cage?

During her initial months in Asgard, she was flattered to be given a name in their language. Heimdall's firm command of "Lady Jannike, you are required in the observatory," at first deceived her into thinking she belonged there. As months dragged into decades, she grew to miss hearing "Jane Foster" (even more than she missed coffee and Christmas and blue jeans). "Lady Jannike" became another way that Asgard rewrote her and emptied her of who she had once been. However, at least on Asgard she still had a name. Here, she doubted she received a designation more specific than "Specimen 35" or "Earthling AX4" or "Pink Bipedal Vertebrate Mammal".

This "loss of name" unsettled her so much she decided to give names to all her fellow exhibit mates that were more personal than descriptions of their physical characteristics. She called the giant butterfly "Scorpius" and the rounded, armadillo-like creature she named "Perseus." The tall, pale humanoid down the row was "Orion" and her nearest neighbor, the blue man, was now "Sagittarius". She sometimes caught a glimpse of "Draco," "Cepheus," and "Leo" when they woke and stretched their various limbs and antennae. She named them all as she saw them. Her view from her cage was limited, but whenever a new display came into sight, she tried to come up with a new, unique, and personal title. Sometimes she dreamt up backstories and personalities for them.

Scorpius came from a rainforest planet and was part of a colony of intelligent Lepidoptera who inhabited the canopy and fed on the verdant flora fed by the constant rain. The winged giant was caught by an exotic insect hunter armed with invisible nets and sold to the museum at a high price. Someday, Scorpius would be released again and would return to flutter above her beloved flowers again.

Perseus once loved to roll in the dirt and bask in the dual sun. He buried his mate's eggs in the soft soil of a blue-grassed planet and drank dew drops from orange leaves. He outlived a dust storm that engulfed half the planet and only survived when a passing traveler found him and nursed him back to health. He lived as cherished companion of the traveler for decades until that man's death parted them and Perseus was set adrift and eventually planted in the museum.

In this manner, Jane wrote their fictional biographies and tried to make their stories as cheerful as possible. It worked well - until she looked into the sorrowful eyes of her blue neighbor. One glance at the huddled figure of Sagittarius was enough to sap the optimism from all her fabrications like helium from a punctured balloon.

Sagittarius was like Jane. He was the last of his kind, the slowly dying remnant of an extinct people. There were no verdant forest canopies or benevolent travelers in his eyes. She could inscribe no joy into his past or his future and so she gave up trying.

Ursa Minor gave her no such difficulties. Even half-drugged and caged, the little creature was bursting with cheerful optimism. It lived across from Jane in a glass enclosure about half the size of her own. Ursa Minor was the size of a bulldog but it resembled a cross between a bear and a triceratops. It was as pink as bubblegum except for the overly large, beady black eyes in its head. The soft, rounded muzzle was framed by three horns and a fringe of bony protrusions covered in feathery scales. The four stubby legs ended in sharp claws which scratched at the air when it slept on its back. A long, horned tail curled and twisted on the floor of the cage and vibrated ever faster the more excited it became. Soft snuffling sounds and plaintive cries like the sound of a peacock accompanied its waking or hunger, but it chirped like a young cheetah when it was happy, which was most of the time.

Jane imagined that one day, when she managed to escape, she would take Ursa Minor with her and keep the cheerful creature with her to make her smile on rough days. She would share her Poptart corners with it and let it sleep on her couch on her favorite grey, fuzzy blanket.  Ursa Minor, free of cages and sedatives, would frolic and learn to play fetch and chase its tail in circles till it rolled onto its back to sleep.

In the museum, Jane could always depend on two things: constant change and timeless monotony. Despite innumerable days spent across from Ursa Minor, the little creature was not permanent. One day Ursa failed to eat and the next she failed to wake. A Keeper came and poked and prodded and ran a scanner over Ursa before calling for the Owner. When he came, arguing and chattering with the three Keepers at his heels, he removed the limp, unmoving pink mass of fur and feathers and placed it on a cart. The cage was cleaned, the label was removed, and all lay empty for the next twelve meals.

Jane quietly placed all her daydreams of life with Ursa Minor into her least favorite place in her mind: the Box of Buried Dreams. It was the same box she kept her seventh grade softball season in and her tenth grade crush and her first rejected thesis and her final failed grant proposal. It was a dark and dreary box that she tried to keep the lid on as tightly as she could. She allowed the mental dust and cobwebs to thicken on its unopened lid as deep as the scrapbook hidden under great aunt Margery's guest room bed. She avoided looking into the empty cage as much as she could and pretended she didn't care that it was empty.

She realized that she cared when she woke to find it inhabited again. Neon green winged centipedes silently crawled and flew through the glowing cage. They did not chirp or vibrate their happy tails and they did not look at her with expressive little eyes. They could not be taught to fetch or sit beside her on the couch. She let three tears fall down her cheek for Ursa and then she curled into a ball and went to sleep, determined not to think of Ursa again.

She failed. It wasn't long before a new exhibit emerged on the shelf behind Ursa's old home. A Keeper came and pushed aside the jars of preserved eyes and claws and then moved the display of pinned insects a few feet higher on the grey wall behind. She carefully dusted the emptied space in the center stage of the shelf. Four meals later, the Keeper came with a box and began to neatly arrange its contents in the space. Out came a freshly cleaned skull, a fan of pink scaly feathers in a glass box, and a preserved horned tail. Lastly, she placed a new label beneath it all, perfectly aligned to the left. Alongside the alien characters was an unmistakable portrait of Ursa Minor.

After that, every time Jane looked across the room, she saw Ursa and was forced to think about the deceased creature. Jane shuddered as she envisioned her own corpse someday immortalized as an exhibit with a picture of her on her label. Would it be her scalp or or hands that they kept? Would they preserve her in formaldehyde or make her a taxidermic mount or only keep her skeleton? She longed for the cold, impersonal escape of soil and earth more than she ever thought possible. She did not want her tenure in the museum to continue long after her consciousness left her body. Could not even death prove a reprieve from the constant gaze of the anonymous eyes?

Ursa Minor's skull was a constant reminder that whether alive or dead, display was inescapable.

After Ursa Minor's death, a haze of depression rolled over Jane like June Gloom on the California coastline and it wrapped her in an impenetrable mist that barricaded her from any rays of sun. For more meals than she bothered to count, she lay curled on the floor of her cage. She did not bother to name the three new exhibits that made their way through the hall. She did not notice the punishment of an errant Keeper or the egg that hatched at the end of the row. She let herself sink into the haze and forget about everything else except the beckoning grey.

It was the blue that roused her. Blue fingers connected to a blue arm crept into her range of vision. She wouldn't have noticed it at all except for the strange opaque layer of white that came first. From the palm spread against the side of the cage nearest to her, frost spidered out from where the pads of fingertips met the glass, creating flaky rivers of white crystals along the walls. Layer upon layer of ice covered the wall until it was fully white. Then a sharp fingernail began to draw patterns in the ice. They began as swirls and geometric shapes but then became stalky animals and winged creatures and basic stick figures.

Jane sat up and watched in fascination. She had never seen him create ice, let alone display such an artistic flair. She wondered what his inspiration was. Red eyes met hers and his lips pulled back into a closed half-smile. His eyes were no longer sorrowful but filled with something warmer, something almost questioning. Then he slumped back against the side of his cage, allowing his designs to slowly melt away in rivulets down to his bare feet. He kept his eyes on her and they both sat motionless on the floor of their cages, their eyes fixed.

Jane was the first to move. She crawled to the edge of her cage that faced his and knelt. She felt the chill of the glass as she blew her breath against it and formed a little circle of fog. She used her pointer finger to draw a happy face. Underneath, she wrote, "hi." When she realized it would appear backwards to him, she breathed on the glass and wrote it the other way. Then she frowned and chastised herself.

He wouldn't be able to understand her writing. What an idiotic, childish instinct.

She was about to follow his example and slump to the floor with her eyes closed when she caught his movement. He crouched facing her, his red eyes fixed on her quickly fading message. He placed his hand on his glass and in the spreading ice, he mimicked her drawings exactly. Still watching her, Sagittarius placed his large hand against the glass at about her eye level and let it linger there. He cocked his head to one side, as if waiting for her to do something. She raised her own hand against her glass at the same level as his hand and pressed it flush on the cold surface. While separated by at least four feet of space and two panes of glass, she felt more "human" contact at that moment than any handshake or hug she had ever received at home.

For the first time in recent memory, Jane smiled.

She pulled her hand back and used her breath to fog up the side of her cage again.

"Jane," she wrote backwards for him to read and pointed to herself.

Chapter Text

STUDIES

Heimdall was in one of his rare moods. It was a day where he was at leisure to speak and indulge Jane's insatiable curiosity. She knew better than to miss the opportunity. With the revolt on Vanaheim quashed and the uprising on Nidavellir's third moon now last week's news, his sight and attentions were temporarily at liberty to rest and wander the cosmos for her amusement.

The platter of fruit and cheese he requested lay nearly empty on their silver platter. He finished a flask of wine as he sat in a chair, his posture no longer rigid with the formality of his role as gatekeeper or the eyes of his countrymen upon him.  For a few moments, alone in the observatory together, he melted like iron in a forge.  He removed the fittings of the gatekeeper, both external and internal, to lounge at ease as a man.

He answered her questions between sips of wine. For some time, she had been observing a bright re d and blue emission nebula in the southwest quadrant of the Asgardian summer sky. With so many other pressing issues stealing his attention, she had been forced to wait.  Her very insignificance was what granted her these stolen secrets and crumbs of knowledge from Asgard's gatekeeper, but her relative unimportance was also what kept her from having constant access to his wellspring of knowledge.

"That one is called 'Thymnire', a word in the tongue of the Aesir four generations past, which means 'the herd of war horses,'" Heimdall said. "You see how the shape of the edges resemble horse heads and hoofs?"

Jane nodded eagerly. "They do kinda look like horses."

"Our seers for generations have said it is fortuitous to march into battle when the Thrymnire guards the steps of our warriors and grants us favor with the Norns."

"The fact that it is only visible from late spring to early autumn helps with that," Jane observed.

"Aren't you the clever one, Jannike? Yes. It surely aids the fortunes of our warriors to wage war when the weather is in their favor, thus supporting the prophecy."

With an indulgent smile, he motioned for her to use one of the long-range telescopes he kept in a dark corner of the observatory. She grinned in excitement and set it up, just as he had taught her.  He never required the use of technology to see into the cosmos. He could see and hear all just by focusing in on what he wished to observe. This tall, metal telescope  was a strange combination of technology and magic and no matter how many questions she asked, she never could quite understand the mechanics that made it work. But work it did and her heart skipped a beat as the cloud of ionized gasses filled her lens.

"I have watched the birth of this young star for almost five thousand years," he told her. "The stars are never as magnificent as in their first and last breaths."

She memorized each wisp of scarlet clouds and cluster of stars in the lens. It was breathtakingly beautiful and it it stirred that deeply hidden crevice of her heart which sang and danced and came alive when she gave her mind fully over to study the heavens. It was this vibrant pulse of life that first led to to study the stars and it was these stolen moments which kept her going and gave her something to look forward to, in the midst of everything else.

Moments like this were what she came to Asgard for in the first place, though her position as Heimdall's "assistant" turned out very differently than she expected. She did "assist" the gatekeeper - in every imaginable way, except in research. Heimdall's duties rarely permitted him the freedom to leave the observatory so Jane handled all his errands and tended to all his needs. Her room, chosen because of its proximity to his own much larger, grander suite, allowed her to hear him whenever he called for her. It also gave her intimate insights into the current affairs in the Nine. Even with her "inferior mortal" hearing, she could glean the daily reports sent to the palace, the movements of the Aesir across the realms, and all incoming visitors into Asgard, whether for trade, diplomacy, or tourism. She could watch and listen while she waited to be summoned again.

Heimdall left her to entertain herself with the telescope. He replaced his golden armor over his tunic. As he did, his whole bearing froze over as if we were turned into a proud statue carved to guard the gate into the Realm Eternal with his sleepless vigil.

When she heard horse hooves on the bifrost, she silently left the telescope and vanished through a side door that led into her room. It was  more of a glorified storage closet than a proper room and barely fit her small cot and a writing desk. From her bed, she could look out through her one window and out to where Asgard ended and the cosmos began. She loved that window.

In her notebook, her most prized possession, she wrote it all down.  A much appreciated perk of Asgardian notebooks was that they never ran out of pages. For decades, she poured all her observations and hypotheses into that book and its grew along with her data.  She kept careful notes of everything: the way the star clusters migrated through the sky, the shifting of the planets, the orbits of the celestial bodies, she kept track of it all. She scoured her mind for every detail she could remember of the Thrymnire Nebula and filled page after page of her notebook with her observations.

At first, Jane assumed it was a holiday of some kind. There were no visitors that day, something she had only seen the day that construction occurred in all the central halls of the museum. On this day, the main entry doors remained shut. A robotic cleaning crew came and spent twice as long scouring the floors and shelves and displays. They were followed by another crew of robots who draped colorful ribbons from the ceiling, laid blue carpets on the floor, and set up tables of food in the far side of the exhibit hall. The Owner came through after to inspect it all and he barked out orders with twice as much vehemence as normal. His employees jumped to rearrange or reclean whatever he pointed at with a frenzied fervor until he nodded his approval and allowed them to relax again.

The robots left and the Keepers followed the Owner into a back room of the museum, leaving the exhibition hall in a strange, tense silence, as if the hall itself were holding its breath. To Jane's surprise, she realized her senses were keenly aware of all that was going on around her in a way she had not experienced since the last time she refused a meal. However, their meals had arrived with all the predictable precision of the phases of the moon or the movements of Orion across the night sky.

She leaned against the glass, unsure if she should enjoy the full alertness of her faculties or wish for their comfortable and familiar dullness returned. She closed her eyes and wondered what kinds of holidays this place held. Was she on a planet or some kind of space station? Did anyone live here other than the beings she saw around her each day? Perhaps a thriving alien metropolis lay outside these halls filled with people and plants and a sky and life. Perhaps there was nothing and they were a hunk of manufactured metal floating through space - a kind of nomadic extraterrestrial version of Ripley's Believe It Or Not.

She decided it was definitely a vibrant alien planet and that this was a holiday to celebrate their independence from a former colonizing power. All the inhabitants would wear their finest clothes, dance in the streets, eat cake and roasted sausages, and sing to marching bands. She imagined it all and decided it was a magnificent holiday. She closed her eyes to visualize it all and inevitably, her mind wandered to holidays spent on Earth. She thought of pie and turkey and parades and roasted chilis and strings of brightly colored lights. She thought of the hot beignets and coffee she had that Valentine's Day in New Orleans and the fresh baked French bread she ate in Marseilles on New Year's Day. Then she remembered her mother's special Jello salad she always made on Christmas. She said it was Grandma Foster's recipe, but Grandma Foster denied it till the day she died.

Grandma Foster always brought the wine and that awful green bean casserole. After a few glasses of merlot, Grandma sat at the piano and began to sing. It didn't matter which holiday it was, she always sang. Jane decided that was one tradition she could continue. She opened her mouth and began to sing. She sang every Christmas carol and stupid patriotic ditty she could remember. Then she morphed into old hymns and her mother's favorite jazz songs. She sang the songs she learned at camp as a Girl Scout and the songs her old boyfriends sent her on mixed tapes in high school.

When her voice grew tired and rough, she let her songs morph into quiet hums and she opened her eyes, breaking herself out of her reverie. Red eyes watched her carefully, curiously from under his arm. When he noticed her, he lifted his head, cocked it to one side, and pressed his hand against the glass. She mimicked him and met his smile with her own. With the greater mental clarity this day gave her, she realized something about him she never had before. His smiles never revealed his teeth because his lips were sewn shut. Tiny threads connected his lips to prevent him from opening his mouth more than a few centimeters wide and pulled at the delicate skin around the incisions.

Her other observation was the pair of silver bracelets he wore fitted around his wrists. They were so tightly wound that it would be impossible to remove them or even slip them up to his elbows. They were not decorated in any way and the skin around them appeared chafed and mottled, as if the bracelets emitted heat and burned at the skin around them.

The bang of a door made them both jump. The Owner arrived, adorned in clothes like Jane had never seen him wear before. His brightly colored purple and fuchsia robe was embroidered with silver geometric designs and glowing gems. A white ruffled collar matched his protrusion of white hair. Silver and magenta make-up lined his eyes, forehead, and chin in matching swirling patterns. His feet were shod in curled-toe slippers also inlaid with gems while white gloves covered his eloquent fingers.

A row of Keepers lined up behind him on either side of the designated walkway. From the main entrance to the banquet tables, they stood motionless and perfectly uniform in both dress and appearance. Each wore a short, pink dress that glistened in the bright overhead lights. Each held their hands folded as if they carried an invisible box in their hands and each held a wide, forced smile on their perfectly manicured, identical faces.

With a flourishing motion from the Owner, a line of visitors entered the hall as silently as if it were a funeral. They were humanoid and less strange in both appearance and movements than the Owner and his acolytes save for the fact that they were entirely golden, from head to toe. Every feature, article of dress, and smallest detail appeared as if they were forged of gold. There were only about twenty or so men and women who came into the hall. They moved with a grace that would put the finest ballerina to shame and their height towered over the Owner as they approached. The Owner met them with an obsequious bow and greeting.

With a flourish of his gloved fingers, he led them through row upon row of his beloved peculiarities and personally acted as tour guide. He paused at each display to lecture about each and answer any questions in his slow, meticulously fragmented manner of speech. The visitors followed and whispered to each other as their golden eyes took in everything they saw. She never saw a single smile or heard a single peal of laughter.

After their tour, the guests were brought into hall for their meal. The Keepers fluttered between tables and chairs, pouring drinks and dispensing utensils while the guests all ate with entirely unimpressed expressions on their faces. They were so emotionless that Jane might have thought they really were robots if she hadn't seen them up close and noticed the rise and fall of their chests. No conversation or music filled the hall, but only the sounds of metal dishes against metal tables, the quick footsteps of Keepers, and the strange, clickish speeches of the Owner.

When all were satisfied the the banquet was cleared away, the Keepers dispersed throughout the exhibition hall. Each stood in front of one display cage with such intentionality that Jane knew they were following orders and the displays were not chosen at random. One by one, the Keepers pressed a button on each of the chosen cages and the doors opened. Jane instinctively backed up and huddled against the back of her cage as a Keeper placed manacles around her hands and placed a set of chains around her neck. A muzzle was installed over her mouth. With a sharp tug, she was led out of her "home" and into the hall of the museum.

Since the day she first arrived, she had never once left her cage. The musty smell of the unfiltered, much colder air hit her like an old attic and the novelty of seeing "something else" was so great, she nearly forgot to keep walking until another tug on her neck chain forced her to continue. The Keeper brought her to the center of the hall where the visitors sat in a semi-circle facing a series of poles. Her arms and ankles were chained to a pole in the center of the room, specially installed for the occasion. The metal grates of the floor dug into her soft, shoeless feet and she wished, not for the first time, that she had something on more substantial than the light Roman-style toga that fell to just above her knees. She shivered and goose bumps prickled her arms in the stale air.

She was not alone. Eight other creatures were similarly led into the center of the room and chained to a pole. On her immediate left, about a foot and a half away, towered Sagittarius. Standing beside him, she could see how tall he really was. His grim face remained stoic as he was chained. She recognized Orion and Andromeda, other humanoids from cages near her own, but the others she had not seen before. She assumed they came from a different wing of the museum.

Just for a moment, her gaze met that of Sagittarius and she saw her same sense of embarrassment and shame was shared. She tried to give him a half-hearted smile and wished again she could speak with him. He nodded his head slightly and then winked. She was so surprised at the unexpected gesture that she almost laughed out loud. His red eyes glistened with a brightness and mirth she had never seen before and she wondered how different he would be if he were not kept sedated.

The Owner spoke with a flurry of hand motions and a bow before moving aside to watch from a corner. Then the Guests stood and dispersed through the room to approach each chained exhibit. Around and around, they appraised each bound creature with clicks and whispers and impassive, gawking stares. They brought out measuring devices -computerized scanners and thermometers and test tubes for follicles of hair and skin and blood and saliva. The long, malleable strips of measuring tape were wrapped around the bound limbs of each by cold, foreign hands and Jane shifted uncomfortably at the sudden contact. Closer and closer were they studied until the goosebumps on Jane's body were no longer due to the chill in the air but her unease at being handled and poked and prodded like a hamster in a science lab.

A man and a woman stared into her eyes and removed her muzzle to look at her teeth and under her tongue. They measured her muscles and her toenails. They used some kind of device to measure her bones and take readings on her internal organs. They projected a display of her entire digestive system before mapping her neural pathways. She was fascinated for awhile, until the man approached with a scanner and tried to remove her toga from her shoulder. She flinched back. The woman approached with a syringe and attempted to lift up her dress from her knees. The chains on her hands and feet and neck clanked as she fought against them. Then the Keeper beside her lifted a device to her neck. Her mind went blank and she knew no more.

When she next woke, she was back in her cage. At first, she wondered if it had all been a dream. However, the bandages over where samples of blood had been taken told her otherwise. That night, it all did come back in her dreams. Her sleep was full of test tubes and cold hands and quiet whispers. She woke with a start and the feeling that her skin was crawling. She tried to pull her toga a little lower down on her knees and she huddled herself into as small a ball as she could in the corner of her cage.

Chapter Text

It was not long after the xenological examinations of the humanoid samples in the museum that three-dimensional models of each species appeared in front of their cages. With a few presses of buttons, the curious museum patrons could discover complete anatomical projections of every major organ system of each exhibit. Skin, muscles, and bones could all melt away to show what lay beneath, all for the educational delight of the ravenous onlookers.

Jane would have found it fascinating - the sheer amount of data and the complex technology required to create such life-like projections was staggering - if it were not so very publicly displayed. Instead, she watched in morbid horror as throngs of guests sifted through full-color scaled facsimiles of her entire digestive system, followed by a complete rendering of her neural pathways. From the way her heart pumped blood through her veins to the very double helix of her DNA to a full color display of her reproductive system, it was all there for the eyes of all. Her humanoid neighbors around her were similarly exposed and she could not hide the sting of embarrassment that flushed her cheeks each time she had to face them after seeing their innermost processes revealed for all to see and gawk at.

It bothered some exhibits more than others. Leo, a woman covered in orange fur and a long, red mane along her spine from her head to toes, seemed nonplussed by it all. She even posed more dramatically, all her sharp, predatory teeth displayed in an expression somewhere between a grimace and a grin. Her audience each time responded by stepping back in a gasp and then cheering and growling back at her (or as much as a mimicry of a growl as their biology permitted). Leo reveled in the attention and called as much to herself as she could manage, posing for pictures and willingly displaying whatever anatomical feature her onlookers wished to investigate further.

Sagittarius, like Jane, despised the attention. He shrank inward and became even more aloof than he had been before. He did not try to draw ice paintings or notice her half-hearted attempts to communicate with him. Instead, he kept his red eyes closed as much as possible and only roused himself when something out of the ordinary occurred.

Life the in museum, while terribly mundane, was still frittered with events completely and totally out of the ordinary that shattered the mundane into shards of adrenaline. Sagittarius could not remain cut off from the outside world for long and he was forced to open his eyes, whether he wished it or not.

One row behind Jane was a humanoid creature she called "Lacerta." Jane could not tell if Lacerta was male or female or how much consciousness the creature possessed or if the sheen on its skin was perspiration or condensation or mucus. Lacerta was about as tall as Jane's waist, but twice as thick. Four limbs protruded as one would expect arms and legs to, but they were all of equal length and ending in webbed, hand-like digits. The entire creature was pale pink and lacked any sort of eyes or ears but instead had a set of coral-colored frilled gills around its neck and one narrow slit for what Jane assumed to be a nose. Overall, it reminded her of a very stubby, tail-less, bipedal salamander.

Lacerta was kept in a steaming cage with very dim lights and a three-inch-deep puddle of water on the floor. It ate with mouths in the center of each of its webbed appendages. Every time the lights came on full strength in the great hall, the creature began to twirl in a circle and flap its gills in such a way that it produced a rhythmic clicking sound. It fell motionless again once the lights dimmed. Every few weeks, the creature felt compelled to hop four times and splash water all over its cage before once again falling back into stillness.

Most of the time, each exhibit paid very little attention to their neighbors. In their tranquilized stupors, very little could rouse them to care about much other than meals or absolute novelty. However, the day Lacerta shrieked with enough volume to shake the sides of every cage in the hall, all heads and horns and eyes and faces and antennae swung towards the eyeless creature.

Sagittaurius' previously closed red eyes flew open and it did not take long before he not only paid attention but leapt to his feet and began to pound on the sides of his cage with enough strength to rattle the glass. He was not the only one. The three cages surrounding Lacerta also began to hoot and holler and pound in a cacophony louder and more terrible than any Jane had ever heard. An alarm sounded and grew in volume until it reverberated off the metal walls and tall, latticed pipework of the ceiling.

At first Jane could not discern what the commotion was about. She saw Lacerta's webbed fingers flailing and Leo began to climb the corners of her cage like a cat, but she could not see what they were upset by.

Then she saw it.

Bright green flashes of something moved through the air and descended both on cages and within cages, causing all chaos to descend wherever they touched. Jane recognized the green as the giant winged centipedes that now inhabited Ursa Minor's cage. They had somehow escaped and were now invading the cages of other creatures.

Jane's own panic grew as she watched the insects shift their molecular density to slip through the very glass of their cage without so much as a pause or a crack in the glass. Dozens of the insects, some as large as Jane's forearm, were alighting on the cages nearest to them and the glass of those cages proved just as ineffectual a barrier as their own had been. While the glass did not keep the insects out, it did a very effective job at keeping occupants trapped within, easy prey to the centipedes' powerful mandibles.

Lacerta's cage, located the closest to the now emptied centipede cage, was the first target for the predatory attack. Jane watched as Lacerta's soft, pink flesh was easily sliced into manageable pieces by three of the centipedes. Lacerta's eyeless face shrieked helplessly as its arms failed to tear the insects away. In a matter of minutes, Lacerta's limbs were entirely dismembered and its remaining head and torso wiggled in the water on the floor of its cage. Lacerta's head was soon buried in the many legs and wings of its still-hungry killers and Jane turned away before she could see the end.

Leo, instead of cowering away from the centipedes, used the corner of her cage to propel her on top of them. One after another, she gleefully devoured them with her sharp teeth until their neon wings littered the floor of her cage.

Four different centipedes breached the walls of Sagittarius' cage, but they fared little better than in Leo's cage. Each invader was quickly encased in a clear prison of ice. Before they could shift their forms and escape, Sagittarius sent thin pins of ice through each of their abdomens. They then were speared in place like all the preserved insects hanging on the display wall of the museum.

When the last centipede was vanquished, Sagittarius' eyes grew wide and he thrust his palms against the glass again, but this time he frantically motioned at Jane. She turned in time to see two of the centipedes land on the top of her cage, right over her head, and begin to enter.

She screamed. With her fists, she tried to scare them away by beating against the glass as loudly as she could, but they were not dissuaded by her efforts. The head of one centipede had just passed through the barrier and its mandibles were already snapping near her head when the creature suddenly let out a loud hiss, seized, and collapsed motionless onto the floor of her cage by her feet. She jumped to get away from it and bruised her head against the side of her cage in the suddenness of her movement, but the insect did not attack.

Outside her cage stood one of the Keepers, face unsmiling, clinging to a weapon in her hand which she brought to the head of the next insect seeking entrance. When she finished stunning it, she moved on to the next. The Keeper, now joined by dozens of others, ran from cage to cage, zapping the centipedes with a blue burst of energy from her long gun. Cage after cage, the centipedes hissed as if they were a fire suddenly doused with water and they fell to the floor in tangled heaps of sizzling, segmented limbs and wings. Within a matter of minutes, each centipede lay dead and the screams from each cage devolved into a chorus of soft whimpers and cries.

Various shades of bodily fluids marred displays and poured from freshly punctured holes in the bodies of hapless victims around the hall. Many creatures, while in pain, were salvageable and would recover from their injuries. Perseus, the pig-nosed reptile, had lost the better half of a foot, but was otherwise unharmed. Others, like Lacerta, were beyond repair and signaled the final extinction of their species.

The Owner's long strides as he entered the hall after the chaos was quelled lacked their typically unhurried ease. His jowled cheeks dripped into a furious glower as he took in the state of disarray marring his beloved collection. He paused in front of each cage, his frown deepening to something akin to a thunderclap. The throngs of Keepers scattered away from him as quickly as they could as he began shouting and cursing and throwing dead centipedes in their directions.

Before the clean up was complete, three Keepers had been locked in cages along with the half-eaten corpses of their previous inhabitants and another Keeper lay dismembered on the floor, the recipient of the greatest outpouring of the Owner's ire. The remaining Keepers flitted about on their light little feet as quickly as they could to shovel up the dead, right damaged exhibits, and tend to the many injuries of those who still lived.

Jane struggled to calm her heart as it threatened to jump out of her throat in the aftermath of the shattered monotony. She cowered as far away as she could physically muster from the centipede still on the floor of her cage. Despite its obvious death, it was still too close for her to feel at ease. She feared to move lest the creature resurrect and come to free her of some of her less than necessary limbs.

She felt, rather than saw, the concerned gaze of her neighbor. Sagittarius cocked his head to one side and motioned towards her with one arm. He nodded and repeated the motion. Not understanding him, she failed to respond until she saw him point at one of his frozen centipedes, mime eating his arm, and point to her again.

Are you hurt? She interpreted from his motions.

She shook her head and showed him her arms with a forced half-smile. She pointed at the dead attacker on the floor of her cage, stuck out her tongue in disgust, and then shook her head again.

He attempted a smile, or as much of a smile as he could muster with his bound lips, and sent another sheen of ice over the edge of his cage. With one sharp fingernail, he drew a happy face in the ice and below, very carefully, he mimicked her previous writing and scrawled out, "Jane".

She nodded vigorously and pointed at herself. With her lips, she spoke her name out loud, hoping that even if he couldn't fully hear the sound, he would catch her meaning.

He released another covering of ice. With one finger he pointed at himself and then he wrote some characters into the ice. She could only assume he wrote down his name.

Unfortunately, she didn't know how to read it.

Chapter Text

The Owner paced the aisles of exhibits with hunched shoulders and slow, staccato footsteps. In the aftermath of what Jane came to think of as "The Incident with Winged Death," the Owner walked as if gravity had increased beneath his feet or that he waded through day-old bubblegum. His horde of pristinely pink, short-skirted, pig-tailed Keepers scattered out of his way like cockroaches before his penetrating light. His voice gained two decibels of heat when he summoned them back to do his bidding.

Nothing brought him out of his glowering mood. Not the birth of another three-headed serpent nor the acquisition of twenty balls of fur (which so aptly resembled tribbles that Jane had to wonder if Star Trek had more real-life inspiration than she previously thought possible). His inspection of his museum continued as punctually and predictably as before, but each empty cage he passed only made his mood darken.

After the Visitors came, his mood improved.

Jane woke before meal time that day in that timeless, seasonless hall. Her ears perked up at the sounds which trickled through the museum like water through a crack in a desert cave.

Recognizable words.

For a moment she thought she was dreaming. She felt something akin to humanity at the delicious syllables which communicated meaning to her semiotically-starved consciousness...until she discovered the source.

The Aesir man and a woman strode through the central aisle of the museum with all the confidence of emissaries sure their whims would be obeyed. They wore full Asgardian armor under their traveling cloaks and they did not bother to notice the many living beings they passed through the maze-like exhibits.

"Will we return in time for the victory feast?" the man, the elder of the pair, asked through a thick, red beard.

The woman rolled her eyes. "I do not believe this will take long. The King has already made the arrangements. We are only the delivery service."

She knew them. Of course, she would know them. Her moment of exaltation fizzled like day old soda. They were speaking the All-Tongue - that mystical language that effortlessly translated all languages in existence. When they spoke, the chasm between signifier and signified dispersed entirely, regardless of which realms or species or planets or peoples they were communicating with. She spent decades in awe of it...only to be told she could never learn it and was not even permitted to try. It was another thing - like their technological magic and their traversable Einstein-Rosen Bridges - which they allowed the humble earthlings to gawk at and praise, but never, ever replicate.

"You are biologically incapable," they said, whenever she asked and insisted that she wished to try.

"How can you know that if no Midgardian has ever been allowed to try?" she asked again and again, but with no success. She came to wonder if they genuinely believed that, or it was just another way to make sure Earth gratefully stayed under their "protection."

Here, two of Asgard's most illustrious "protectors" were now walking past her cage, two rows away from her. It was the Lady Sif and the Lord Volstagg, the honored companions of the Aesir prince, Jane realized with a rush of humiliation. She gasped and turned her back to them as quickly as she could, hoping they did not notice her. Even if Jane had never crossed paths with the pair in Asgard, she would have recognized their faces.

The Lady Sif's face had plastered every newsreel, internet headline, and fashion magazine for a decade after the Asgardian envoys first burst into public view. Her clothing choices inspired global fashion from Paris to Buenos Aires-regardless of practicality or appearance. The heavy armor, while light to an Aesir, made movement difficult for weaker human women and even when replicates were made out of lighter materials, they constricted movement so much that they were banned in certain cities. Earth kids time and again were chastised for imitating Sif's hidden knives and swords...even blunt ones...and despite their protest, they were deemed "inappropriate decorations" at most school dances.

Jane first met the Asgardian warrioress in the great banquet hall in the palace in Asgard. Sif had been a stunning image of exotic gems and yards of gilded fabric. She gave Jane what was probably supposed to be a warm welcome, but any warmth in it was forgotten in the chill of successive interactions.

It was a historic day for Earth. The Aesir meticulously crafted their guest list for the first "Inter-realm Peace and Trade Alliance" conference. Guests were invited based on relative usefulness to Aesir objectives and their prestige on Midgard. Only the best, brightest, and most beautiful made the list and Jane spent the entire week feeling like she didn't belong. She warranted an invite due to her recent Nobel prize. Her work creating indigenous wormhole technology for earth gained the notice of Aesir ambassadors and they invited her to the exclusive feast. She jumped at the opportunity to visit another planet, regardless of the reason for her invitation then sat at dinners alongside prime ministers, princes, CEO's, and business executives.

Jane took advantage of the time to soak in everything and learn as much as she could about their technology and astronomy and eschatology and biology and anything else she could get her hands on…and she may have dissected a magic toaster or two, just for the fun of it. She was too busy overindulging her curiosity to feel self-conscious about her presence among so many of Earth's Rich and Famous….until the morning she shared breakfast with the pope. Then she decided she had better at least take a selfie or Darcy would never forgive her.

The earthlings wined and dined and paraded around the "Eternal City" and shown the "glory of Asgard" for a week. They were shown the finest products for export, a sampling of Aesir technological advances, and a full array of weaponry and then ushered into a forum on trade deals, treaty negotiations, and political alliances. At the end of the week, the Midgardian guests were sent back home to Earth to "tell the others" what they had seen and encourage more "partnerships" with Asgard.

Jane did not return home with the others. It was then she was offered the opportunity to "continue research in Asgard" and "refine her Midgardian science with Asgardian technology." It was an offer she couldn't refuse. If she had known she would never see Earth again, she would have packed differently. Her iPhone definitely would have had two chargers and she would have made sure to pack a photo of her entire family that last Christmas.

Not like it mattered now. In the low lights of the museum, she could easily see everything she owned: a semi-opaque white toga that fell from one shoulder to her knees over her ageless body. That was all she had...and even that was debatable.

Where had all her belongings ended up? Her notebook hurt the worst. Was it filed away in an Aesir vault, kept under lock-and-key so another Aesir could claim her ideas as their own (like her Nobel prize-winning work from Earth)? Or had her life's work been tossed over the endless expanse into the Void? Perhaps her notebook remained exactly where she had left it: under her pillow in her small room in the Observatory.

Not that she could do much with her notebook now. It was full of the dreams and theories of someone who thought she could change the world. She was now longer than scientist. Still, she wished she had it with her. She would have liked to read it. She would have liked to read anything. Her mind felt like it was disintegrating into Jell-O mush with so little to exercise it with. She feared her physical muscles were just as atrophied.

She hid her face in her knees, ashamed for the Aesir nobles to see her like this...reduced from Midgardian minion to zoo animal.

She doubted Volstagg would meet her presence with anything but ambivalent politeness and infuriatingly patronizing kindness. The large, cheerful man had barely noticed her existence but had, on occasion, proved a useful ally on a solitary night walk through the less palatable parts of the Eternal City.

The famed warrioress of Asgard was a different story.

The Lady Sif could withstand the weapons of a thousand enemies without flinching, yet be felled at a word or look of her beloved Aesir prince. She was impermeable, unshakeable, invincible...until it came to the sacred space in her heart in which she harbored her unrequited love for the heir of Asgard. He was her driving motivation and her weakness, her Achilles heel and her battle muse. Everyone seemed to acknowledge this except for the object of her affection, who barely noticed the woman as anything other than another soldier and honored companion-at-arms.

And that is how Jane Foster, Midgardian "research assistant", gained a formidable enemy in the ranks of the prince's most honored entourage. In Jane's last few years on Asgard, what she came to think of as "the beginning of the end," she was only too well-acquainted with the face and temper of the Aesir noblewoman. Jane found out the hard way that the temporary fancy of the Prince of Asgard carried with it in tow the ire of the formidable Lady Sif. Jane unintentionally gained both an unwanted admirer and a merciless enemy all in one unfortunate day and it made her last days on Asgard a living hell.

Jane would rather hide in a vat of those deadly winged centipedes than face the Lady Sif like this, in this place, stripped of the last remnants of her humanity. So, she hid her face in her knees and hoped the transparent glass would not give her away.

They did not see her, she thought as they passed by two rows away. They carried with them what appeared to be a rectangular lamp glowing with an eerie red light. Their footsteps and quiet whispers reverberated off the walls and echoed in the halls where most creatures, enjoying the lull in visitors, slept.

A Keeper skittered up to them to greet them with her arms clasped at strict, unnatural angles in front of her.

"We wish to see The Collector," Volstagg told her and her dainty steps and faux smile led them the remainder of the way through the museum to where Jane could just make out the tousled white tuft of the Owner's head.

The Collector. An apt title for the strange man. Jane thought to herself. That would make her part of his Collection. Somehow, that made it worse. A museum or zoo has an air of display for the common good and the education of the ignorant, but curious masses. A "collection" had a sterile, personalized quality about it. It reminded her of a hoarder who happens to allow others a peek into his treasure box before hiding it all away in a closet to gather dust.

The trio passed beyond range of her sight and hearing. when the Aesir returned, Sif no longer carried the red lamp. Sif's eye fell upon Jane from a row away and the corner of her perfect mouth curved into a vicious, delighted smile. The Lady Sif did not stop and she did not gain Volstagg's attention, but Jane new she had been seen...and left as she was.

As a trifle in a collection of the universe's cosmic Mad Hatter.

Jane noticed the blue man watch the visitors pass and when he caught sight of their faces, his expression morphed into one of such revulsion and unrestrained hatred that Jane knew, with absolute certainty, that Sagittarius recognized them. This was not generic prejudice for Aesir but personalized hatred for a past injury suffered at their hands.

Had they crossed paths on his world or in Asgard?

She did not doubt that if he were freed from his cage, blood would have been spilled by his hands. Jane couldn't decide if that bothered her or gave her a sick sense of satisfaction. She preferred not to think upon it further.

She tried not to think at all.

Jane never did not know what new trifle the Aesir brought their Owner, but it dominated his attention for weeks. In between his daily inspections of his museum displays, he brought the glowing box out with an almost obsessive regularity to analyze it from every angle. With scanners and magnifying glasses, he stared at it as if he were a master gem cutter and this the greatest diamond of his career. He gazed so deeply into its red glow that Jane wondered if it were some kind of psychedelic trance-inducing device.

The gleam in his eyes after was not one of improved mood and increased peace, but one stirred by an even greater hunger for something not yet obtained. His pacing worsened and his hair grew even more disheveled. A steady stream of uniformed officials and unkempt ruffians cycled in and out in shifts to speak in hushed tones and dark shadows.

Jane suspected the Collector sought to expand his Collection in a new way.

Chapter Text

Jane sat in a nondescript office where an Aesir man in a long purple robe perused a scroll. His grey beard fell almost to his ample belly and, as he read to himself, he chewed on the ends of the beard until they stuck together in a damp curl. She sat uncomfortably on the chair. Her short legs dangled off the too-tall chair as if she were a child in an adult's seat. She was not sure what this Lord Tyre wished of her or why he had summoned her to this illustrious part of Asgard. Heimdall had told her she was required to attend and to answer the man's questions and she would be rewarded for her cooperation.

She had little reason to refuse. It  was a break from the monotony of her everyday life - cleaning the observatory, fetching meals, and delivering messages for Asgard's Gatekeeper. This way, she enjoyed seeing the towering marble structure that housed many of Asgard's vaults and scholars. The gravity-defying water feature and gilded statues of long-dead warriors guarding each corner fascinated her. She must have spent a little too much time trying to figure out how the water flowed the way it did because Lord Tyre sent a servant to hurry her along to his office.

"Lady Jannike," Lord Tyre said as he welcomed in with a slight bow and a flourish of the feathered quill in his hand. "I am grateful for your assistance in furthering the greatest of pursuits, the acquisition of knowledge of our universe."

She shrugged and bit her lip nervously, wondering what sort of "knowledge" he could possibly want from a Midgardian. He invited her to sit and he shuffled through a stack of papers and books. Then he set a recording device on his desk as if it were the crown jewels and not a generic method of capturing sounds and speeches and Jane decided that she liked him. The hunger for knowledge she caught in his eyes echoed her own indomitable curiosity and she felt him to be a kindred scholar.

"Good lady, I have called you here today to record, for all posterity and generations, your extensive knowledge," he told her most gravely.

"My knowledge about what?" she asked. She wondered, for an instant, if she was finally going to have her past work on the Midgardian bifrost put to good use. She chided herself a moment after for such a vain hope.

"Tell me everything you can about Midgard. Everything you remember - your language, your stories, your songs, your holidays, your social structure, your division of labor - everything! I want to know it all!"

She opened and closed her mouth, overwhelmed by such a broad request, until Tyre chuckled and stroked the edge of his beard again.

"Forgive me! I am often chided for my overenthusiasm and unrestrained curiosity! Let us start from the beginning. Tell me, what is the name of the city on Midgard you were born in?" he  asked.

She nodded and began to answer his questions.

He called her back. Day after day, she sat in Lord Tyre's office until long after the sun had set, sometimes sharing meals with the zealous old scholar and answering his unending well of questions about the place she once called home. It was cathartic, in a way, to finally have someone care about the place she grew up and loved so very deeply. He listened, laughed, and shed his own tears along with her as she told her stories. For the woman who had, for so many years, gazed up at the stars and longed to study any place but the one on which she stood, she now realized how many years she wasted in not appreciating the land beneath her own two feet. From the vast heavens of the Realm Eternal, Midgard was barely more than a single glowing speck in the strongest of their magical telescopes. She could watch its rotation around the sun and its dance with the other planets in its solar system, but she could not see anything of the lives it contained on its blue, watery surface.

During their final session, Lord Tyre  gave her his warmest of thanks for the information she provided him.

"Just out of curiosity," Jane asked. "Why are you asking me all this? I probably am not the best source of information and I definitely don't represent all of Earth. I'm not even the best representative of my hometown. You will want to ask some others for their perspective."

"The king wishes to preserve a record of your culture before it is gone forever," Tyre responded as he rolled up his scroll and turned the recording device off. "We will maintain these recordings in our vaults for as long as Asgard stands so other students of the xenoarchaeology may delight in all you have shared. And you are the only source we have for such precious knowledge."

"What do you mean 'gone forever'?" Jane asked.

"I m ean just that. Did not you know? You are the only one left. You are the last of the Midgardians."

The Keepers furiously scrubbed and cleaned the glass of each cage, their exposed knees gaining callouses and blisters as they knelt to reach the lowest edge of each pane of glass. Jane could just make out their groans and grumbles as the hours bled on and the cages did not end. Floating ladders lifted the Keepers to some of the upper layers of cages suspended from the vaulted ceiling and the central supports around the main exhibit hall. Others were lowered to the ground level by the touch of a button. Buckets of water and scrub brushes lined each walkway as every single exhibit was thoroughly cleaned. No visitors disturbed their work, the doors remained shut, and small automated machines flickered up and down the floors, polishing the metal ramps and vacuuming up dust.

The Collector paced the aisles as well, sometimes pausing to chastise an unfortunate worker, other times investigating the overall appearance of an exhibit, but for the majority of the day, his nose was solidly glued to the pages of a book. Jane was surprised to see a real print and paper book in his hands instead of some sort of projected or digitized copy. She wondered if it came from a planet like her own and how many other material goods she would find on other planets that would be similar to the ones she grew up with. It was comforting to think books were not only to be found on Earth. She wondered what it was about and if the Collector preferred fiction to nonfiction or if it was simply a "how to care for your pet Midgardian" type book...similar to the "proper care and feeding of dragons" she had once stumbled upon in Asgard.

Jane had limited access to books on Asgard, but devoured the ones she could get her hands on. She had been furious when the Aesir refused her entry to their central library on Asgard.

"You cannot read our script," they told her. "What can you possibly wish for from the library?"

She begged and pleaded for years but only succeeded in gaining entry to the children's wing. She considered it a victory and spent months captivated by the brilliantly colored, shifting illustrations within each book. They pictures moved when she turned the page, making the illustrations come alive. She did not need to understand the written script to appreciate the pictures. The simpler words and concepts made it easier to begin to teach herself rudimentary information about their language, but the more she thought she learned, the more Heimdall only chuckled and told her she was a "clever mortal."

When he gifted her an entire encyclopedia of Asgardian astronomy, astrology, and constellations, she nearly wept in gratitude. The life-like images on each vellum page could be expanded with the touch of her fingers to whatever magnification she wished for with impeccable details. It described astral phenomena with greater insight than all of Earth's astrophysicists put together could create. She only knew that because Heimdall read her the first three chapters and she sat transfixed, spell-bound at the knowledge she had never even come close to claiming as her own through her lifetime of research.

But then another riot had broken out on Nidavellir's third moon, Heimdall's attention was drawn away, and he never found time to finish reading to her. She tried. On her own, she tried to translate the script into something she could understand, but there was no "English to Aesir" dictionaries around and she had to give it up.

She wondered if Heimdall's vision could see her now, leaning her head against freshly cleaned glass, her eyes half closed and her bare feet pressed against the opposite glass wall. She shuddered at the thought. For him to be able to see her...anywhere and at all times...made her blood run cold.

"I no longer have need of your services," Heimdall had told her on that last day. "You will be transferred to somewhere you will be more useful."

A slight prick on the back of her neck was followed by unconsciousness and she woke to find herself in a cage in a place she had never seen before. She was not immune to the veiled insult of his words. After decades as his "assistant," he dismissed her without any acknowledgement of how hard she had worked or how much she had given. She was simply sent away without a word of good-bye. Now she sat, caged in a museum, "more useful" than when she had tried to study the stars or wrap her mind around planets and galaxies and a glass wall lay between her and the closest book.

The Collector paced and read for hours. The furious cleaning frenzy around her stilled some hours after their meals were served. Then a Keeper escorted a small, eclectic group of visitors into the hall. These did not pause to gawk or ask questions, but walked with a purpose. She could not make out much about them from her perspective a few rows away from their intended route, but she caught enough to know these were most likely not academics or school children or wandering tourists. The Keeper was followed by a woman as green as the Wicked Witch of the West, but armed with plasma cannons instead of a broomstick. Behind her came a giant, walking tree, a grey and pink humanoid, a man that appeared so human that Jane assumed he must be either Aesir or Vanir, and some manner of furry biped whose tiny frame vanished behind the exhibit of embryos before Jane could identify more of the little creature. The visitors vanished into the central hall and only some indistinguishable murmurs of sounds and flashes of projected light could be seen from where Jane sat.

Jane had nearly drifted back to sleep when the entire hall vibrated around her and jolted her awake. A roaring, rushing sound like an out-of-control freight train or the shifting of a storied building during an earthquake engulfed her and her vision was blinded by an explosion of fierce, violet light. She did not have time to blink or react before she felt a pulse of power incinerating cages around her and threatening to overtake her next. Her first instinct was to cover her head with her hands as the hurricane force of devouring energy overtook her. Her last thought, before the darkness came, was relief that it would all finally be over and she would never have to wake again.

It was the cold that first roused her back to consciousness. Her entire body shivered uncontrollably as she forced her eyelids open. Even with her eyes open, she did not understand what it was they saw. Warring shades of grey and blue, white and red danced across her vision and she lifted one hand to try to rub her eyes. Her hand was stopped by a wall of ice. She felt her way along the smooth, unblemished barrier and she gasped as a cut on her finger froze to the surface. She pulled her finger off and tried to push against the ice, but it would not budge. She hit her fist against it, pounding against it as if it were a door she could open merely by knocking.

To her surprise, it worked. The entire covering of glass was removed in one piece, as if it were the lid of a sarcophagus and she the interned body within. A cloth-covered hand grabbed her own and helped her to her feet. She stared first into the deep sapphire blue of a familiar chest before craning her head to see wide, frightened red eyes. Sagittarius grunted something in a guttural voice before grabbing her again in the torn piece of fabric covering his hand. He pulled her arm so hard that she cried out before stumbling to follow after him. She realized, as she followed, that the cages which had not been instantaneously incinerated in the blast were now immersed in flames. The entire hall looked as though a bomb had been dropped in the center and the floors and walkways were littered with the grisly aftermath of the blast. Twisted ceiling vents, charred limbs, red-hot metal floor grating, and shattered glass made their frantic path of escape even more of a terror to Jane's soft, shoeless feet.

Sagittarius paid little heed to the many obstacles before them. His long strides more easily cleared the wreckage. He came to a frantic halt when he found a prone figure lying in the shadows of a metal shelving unit. The unruly white hair was spattered with blood and the sightless eyes were fixed on what remained of his beloved Collection. Sagittarius knelt and was about to turn their Owner onto his back when he caught the rise and fall of the chest and the eyes began to blink. Sagittarius frowned and with a sound like rushing water, he encased the Collector's torso and legs in solid ice. He then motioned for Jane to follow him again. When she could not climb over the slippery glacier now barricading the walkway, she attempted to go around. Sagittarius gave an impatient grunt, tore a curtain off a nearby wall, and wrapped Jane up like a human burrito. Without having to wait for her short, clumsy legs to catch up, he fairly sprinted the rest of the way across the museum with Jane held in his long arms. She tried not to think about what became of any of the others as they made their way to the door, which was now shattered and bent into nearly unrecognizable pieces.

The door. The door she had never seen the other side of. The door that led to, or that she hoped would lead to, her freedom.

Chapter Text

Jane bit back her disappointment when she realized there was no burst of sunlight outside the doors of the museum. There was nothing "natural" at all to behold. In every direction she looked, she saw mammoth metal scaffolds, dark and dank streets, and artificial lights as numerous as stars. It was a city, but one contained within a synthetic space without so much as a moon or a plant or a breath of fresh air. There were steaming ponds of a viscous liquid that resembled canola oil and stank of sulfur. Everything stank, actually. It reeked of unwashed bodies and putrid trash and forgotten corpses. Strange, alien beings loitered around flying ships and opaque windows and busy shops.

She momentarily panicked as she imagined remaining trapped for eternity in this cockroach hole of a city. She felt a bit melodramatic after when her companion returned to where he had stashed her in a corner of an alley. He withdrew a filthy cloak and draped it over her head. It fell to the ground and drug behind her as she walked, but it was warm and she was grateful for that. He covered himself with a second cloak and she decided she didn't want to know how he obtained them.

He motioned for her to follow him and led her through a maze of passageways. She did the best she could, careful not to step onto any of the piles of unrecognizable foreign matter littering the metal grating of the walkway beneath her feet. He moved as silently as a shadow. When footsteps or voices came too near them, he pushed her back into the ever-present darkness clinging to the walls. When he ensured they would not be noticed, then they continued again.

They walked for hours upon hours in this manner. Her atrophied muscles began to burn and ache and it was not long before her entire body began to shake. She grit her teeth and fought to continue following, fearful that if she proved too much of an encumbrance, he would abandon her to continue alone. However, when her head began to swim, she stretched out an arm to steady herself, but not soon enough. She stumbled and fell onto the unforgiving ground. Sagittarius knelt before her and watched as she tried to steady her trembling arms. He frowned. Then he lifted her up to carry her again. Even supported as she was, her head felt inhabited by a swarm of bees and before long, she was unconscious.

The next time Jane woke, she was lying on a cot. Bright lights blinked red and blue overhead and interrupted the dim light of the small space which housed her cot. The gentle thrum of engines filled her ears and vibrated through the cot supporting her weight. Her entire body felt as though it were on fire and she did not have the strength to lift her arms over her face. She cried out and stumbled over her own throat as she did. Quiet footsteps approached from behind her head and a dark shadow stretched over her body. A blue hand placed a cup of something sweet to her lips and gently held her head up so she could drink it.

She was asleep again before the cup was emptied.

This strange routine continued for an indeterminable period of time. There was little more to track the progress of time than in the museum. She knew she was brought some sort of hot broth over and over again. The sweet juice sent her to sleep again and again and each time she woke, the fire had receded from some limbs like shadows receding from the journey of the sun overhead. Her breathing, also, became less labored and the curiosity began to gnaw on her nerve endings instead of the burning pain. Sagittarius came and went from a doorway whenever he noticed her wake, but he was a silent companion and she startled more than once to find him near.

When she was able to sit up and hold the cup for herself, she had to bend her head to keep it from bumping against the low overhanging wall surrounding her on three sides. Her feet hung off the cot and she would need to jump to reach the floor. She tried to get out of the cot once or twice but her companion stopped her and gently pushed her back onto the cot with a shake of his head. She blew her breath out with frustration and swung her legs back and forth instead. She felt stronger, but she thought the probability of her collapsing again was higher than she would have liked.

The next time he came, he did not bring her a cup of juice, but a clear bag filled with a slightly fruity, diluted juice. The burning grew, but it did not become unmanageable. He watched her carefully with his head arched to one side and his long frame leaning against the wall. When she finished the juice, he covered his hand with a towel and took her hand in his. Then he helped her down from the cot.

With weak, shaking legs she struggled to stand upright, but she managed it. He supported her as she paced the tiny room - four steps to the right, four steps to the left. While his lips could only produce a tight, stitched smile, his eyes grinned broadly down at her. He pressed his hand to a glass panel on the wall and the silent door withdrew into the walls. He helped her through the doorway into what turned out to be the cockpit of a small spacecraft. Glass panels surrounded four chairs on each octagonal edged wall. Beyond, she could see outside. She gasped and her hand found its way to her mouth as she took it all in.

Millions of stars.

A multi-colored nebula glowed before her in all its brilliant wonder.

Constellations she had never seen spread across the heavens.

Planets drifted past her in their leisurely orbits around their own stars.

Tears trickled down her cheeks as she collapsed into the nearest chair with her hands pressed against the window. She forgot everything else in the universe for that moment and basked as contentedly as a cat in front of a warm hearth.

She nearly jumped when she felt a hand on her shoulder. Concern sank Sagittarius' face into an even deeper shade of blue and she realized he did not understand her reaction. She wiped at her tears with the back of her hand and gave him a wide, honest, cheek-shattering grin and motioned to each of the panels of glass.

"The stars! I never thought I'd see them again. They are so beautiful!" she said, knowing full-well he couldn't understand, but she allowed her emotion to overflow into words anyways. He shed a few layers of concern as he interpreted her response as one born out of happiness and not sadness. He continued to watch her as she shamelessly gaped through the windows, unwilling to turn her head away for fear of missing something or waking to find it all a dream. When he was convinced she was not losing her mind or about to fall apart again, he sat in the pilot's seat and tapped buttons on the control panel.

As incredible as travelling by Bifrost had been, Jane could honestly say she liked this better. While the Bifrost had been a rush of exhilaration and flashes of color and shattering of preconceptions, it robbed her of this: days upon days of touring the cosmos. She didn't bother to hold back her softly raining tears.

Her one lingering regret which itched within her rusty, neglected brain was that she didn't have her notebook. She would have given her right arm for a piece of paper and a pen so she could take notes along the way.

Sagittarius woke her. Was it days or weeks or months later? She couldn't tell. It didn't matter how long it had been. She was no longer trapped in a cage, surrounded by the forgotten curios of the universe, and gathering dust within her solitary existence. She could choose to eat or abstain. She could lay down or jump up and down. She could rummage through cabinets and storage bins within the spacecraft and hang upside down off the cot, just because she could. Sagittarius indulged her and only grunted in disapproval when she discovered what must have been a potentially dangerous item of some kind or another. Mostly, though, she sat in the co-pilot's seat in the cockpit and watched the stars. More than once, she fell asleep there, only to wake hours later, stretched out on her cot and covered in a blanket.

When he woke this time, the cockpit window revealed they were nearing the surface of a hazy green dwarf planet. She gasped and clapped her hands in delight. For all the time she had spent on Asgard, she had never been able to see the Realm Eternal from space and had to content herself with diagrams from books. Here, she was able to see the yellow, gaseous haze of the atmosphere that clung to a rolling, pitted expanse of green foliage. She had to remind herself to breathe as they descended. It was heavily forested with towering, umbrella-leafed trees steaming with vapor. They narrowly flew between two rocky canyons before landing beneath the mouth of a giant cave.

A panel on the side of the spacecraft opened a hatch in the back and a ramp descended onto a surface thick with moss. For a moment, Jane was overcome with fear, wondering if this atmosphere was compatible with her human lungs, or if she would take one breath and die. She didn't have time to fret about it because her lungs soon filled with the sweetest scent imaginable - growing things. She inhaled deeply and closed her eyes to take it in. It smelled so very alive. It was like wet clay mixed with morning jasmine and orange blossoms and grass after a rainstorm. It was different than Asgard or Earth, but after the unliving, unbreathing air of the Museum, it was heaven.

When her bare feet sank into the soft moss, she laughed in delight and knelt to the ground so she could feel it in her fingers. She pulled some up to examine the texture and marvel in the feel of something alive and not made of metal or glass. A grunt brought her back to her feet and Sagittarius beckoned for her to follow him through the cave. The cave proved to be more of a well-hidden tunnel. On the other side, hidden behind a thick canopy of vines, the tunnel opened into well-protected escarpment. A grassy meadow was surrounded on three sides by high rock formations and only the cave and a small break between the rocks across from the cave gave entry to the meadow. In the center, nearly hidden within the cliff face lay a grass-roofed bunker carved into the rock and descending below the ground.

With a bit of prying and cajoling at a side panel with a knife, Sagittarius forced the door to open. A rush of stale air mixed in with the scent of the meadow and Jane's eyes struggled to adjust to the sudden darkness. She did not struggle for long. Her companion felt along a wall until he found the means of turning on a row of lights embedded along the ceiling overhead.

It was a single room. A metallic table and four chairs sat in the center. Four bunks lined the farthest edge of the whitewashed rock wall. The far right was lined with shelves and storage cabinets and overflowing with crates and barrels. To the far left, a simple kitchen sat next to the bunker's only window. Heavy shudders kept out the light and the fresh air and Jane shuddered to think of how dark it would be if the door suddenly shut and locked them in without the overhead lights.

Sagittarius pulled out a chair for her and she sat. She was grateful. Her hands and knees were shaking so badly, she didn't think she could have remained standing much longer even if she wanted to. Despite her many footsteps pacing the spacecraft, she had hardly had the opportunity to develop her stamina and develop her muscles. The walk from the spacecraft to the bunker had not been long, but it had been long enough. She lay her head on the table and closed her eyes, enjoying the feeling of open, non-vibrating space and solid ground beneath her feet.

She heard the banging of cabinets and drawers behind her as Sagittarius perused their contents. Clanging of objects followed until he had compiled a stash in the center of the room. Before long, a plate of warm, but bland, food was placed in front of her. She was too tired to care what it tasted like and ate it without a second thought.

When she woke next, light poured in through the open door and window. A crash of metal against the floor startled her awake and she nearly knocked her head against the bunk bed directly overhead. She sat upright and jumped out of bed.

"What was that?" she asked.

Sagittarius was sitting on the floor, entirely surrounded by clutter. He must have emptied every single crate and cupboard while she slept and he was now glowering at a metal file in his hands. He threw it against the wall with a grumble and picked up another long tool made out of a glowing blue light with a serrated edge. He forced it under one of his metal bracelets and pushed against it with all his strength. He struggled and strained until all the muscles in his arms and chest quivered, but it made no difference. The bracelet did not shift or dent or seem to notice his efforts.

The wall farthest away from him was littered with bent knives, shattered pipes, and blackened rods. The blue-lit tool soon joined them with a resounding clatter. Jane walked to where he sat and knelt before him. His red eyes were fierce in their frustration and he turned away from her.

"Can I help?" she asked. She placed one hand on the bracelet and nearly cried out at how cold they were to the touch. He pulled his hand away with a grunt and shook his head vehemently while pointing at himself. In his outstretched palm, a small bundle of white formed and grew and branched out into any icy sculpture. He held it out and pointed and motioned to her hand again, all the while shaking his head.

"I get it. You're cold," she said. "Still, that's a neat trick. I wish you could tell me how you do it."

He let the pillar of ice fall onto the floor with a crash. It shattered into fragments that quickly melted into little puddles across the room. Then he walked to his pile of discarded tools and withdrew one. It was a sharp knife ending in a very fine tip. To Jane's surprise, he handed it to her. Then he sat on the floor before her and pointed to his lips. He opened his mouth just wide enough to show the seam of stitches binding his lips together.

"Oh, boy," Jane whispered to herself. "I guess it's worth a try."

Then she brought the razor-edge of the knife to his lips and tried to cut the first stitch.

Chapter Text

Yggdrasil's Day was celebrated once every two hundred or so years. Asgard hosted representatives of each of the Nine and a month was spent displaying the unique contributions of each realm. For the last thousand years, Midgard remained in happy ignorance of the other realms and thus the only representatives invited were those who accidentally fell through cracks in-between the branches of Yggdrasil and ended up scattered among the other realms.

Now, with open communications, an Asgardian embassy, trade alliances, and a ratified treaty, Midgard was formally invited to display all their grandeur in Asgard for the first time in "modern" history. The peoples of Midgard were told to share about what they most prided in their nations and an Asgardian committee would choose which would grace the streets of the Eternal City during the sacred festival days.

Preparations for the event began years before the first organizers and vendors arrived by Bifrost to begin setting up their displays.  B y this time, Jane had only spent five years or so in Yggdrasil's Crown. With wide-eyed anticipation, she watched from the Bifrost observatory as contingent after contingent of dwarves and elves and fire giants arrived. When the commencement of the opening day approached, she was nearly bursting in excitement.

As a resident Midgardian, Jane was asked to join the Midgardian delegation in the fifth quadrant of the festival complex.

"Of course! I'd love to," she had told Lord What's-His-Name of the festival committee. "What do I need to do?"

"It will be fantastic! A never-before-seen experience of life on Midgard! The inhabitants of the other realms have been barred from Midgard for so many millennia that they cannot even begin to contain their curiosity. The guests will flock to see all that Midgard has to offer. All you need to do is stay at the Midgardian Village, answer any questions that patrons address you with, and act natural. They wish to see life on Midgard as it really is," the man told her, his rosy-cheeked face glowing with his own contagious exuberance.

Tall walls and magical screens kept any curious onlookers out of the fairgrounds until construction was complete. When these were removed and the various performers, vendors, and facilitators were allowed entrance, Jane sprinted to the front gates in rapt delight.

Two statues of Valkyrie carved of stone guarded each side of the massive entry gate. Their uru swords gleamed in the sun with an almost blinding intensity. Once inside the gate, a fantastically decorated gilded palace and portico welcomed visitors from all the Nine Realms and beyond.

It di dn't fail to cross Jane's notice how much larger, grander, and more physically imposing the Asgardian display was or how everything about how it was built was created to remind guests of which place each realm belonged along the planes of Yggdrasil or that they, and only they, were the Crown.

It took Jane four days to explore each street and temperature-controlled quadrant. Stables carved of gems and inlaid wood housed the best and most beautiful of Alfheim's winged horses. Towering ice sculptures from Jotunheim glistened in the midday sun and refracted rainbows of light onto the Jotnar fur tapestries. The Muspel fire art moved and danced to create ever-shifting, ever-changing images. Vendors and craftsmen from Nidavellir set up their weapons, armor, jewelry, and magic-endowed tools for sale under purple and gold awnings.

In the farthest quadrant, on the smallest plot of land, the Midgardian Village began to fill up with representatives. It was a sight to behold and it stirred up nostalgia in Jane's heart like a spoon of sugar in lemonade.  It was a little taste of home.

The entry way to the Midgardian Village was an exact representation of the Arc de Triomphe. Within, a cobbled street ran through the heart of the Village and on each side, homages to the greatest architecture and art in Midgard were displayed in all their glory. On one side, St. Peter's Basilica, St. Basil's Cathedral, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, and the Akshardham Temple lined the street. On the other side, the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tour, Big Ben, and Christ the Redeemer were scattered between gardens bursting with the flora and fauna of the Blue Planet. In the far corners, an Egyptian pyramid, the Taj Majal, the Potala Palace, and Angor Wat cast shadows over where vendors' stalls and performance stages sat ready for opening day.

In the eastern side of the quadrant, imitations of Midgardian habitations had been created. Jane snorted when she saw what appeared to be a traditional Japanese house, but with tame wallabies roaming freely through the yard. Nearby, a wooden izba was being settled by a recently arrived group of Senegalese merchants. These set out carved statues of giraffes and elephants and colorful fabric for sale. Cambodian dancers practiced their performance on a stage built like an ancient Greek amphitheater.

Overall, it was a riot of colors and sounds and smells that warred for attention…not unlike Midgard itself. While each of the other quadrants exemplified a much more homogeneous artistic cohesiveness, it was only Midgard that dissolved into a beautiful cacophony of chaos. The Midgardian Village was also the only quadrant which had live exhibitions of daily life of inhabitants of the realm. No elves or dwarves paraded around faux huts and displayed how "their people" lived.

Jane was told to settle herself in a nearby yurt. She was given a brightly colored and embroidered hanbok and told to "act natural" and "make herself at home." A Maori and a Yoruba shared the yurt with her and were just as baffled how to wear their hanboks.

The Midgardian Village was, as predicted, a resounding success. When opening day came, hundreds of thousands of inter-realm guests flocked to the Eternal City. For weeks upon weeks, curious onlookers came to see and to shop, to vacation and visit. Jane and her companions answered query after query about life on the long-isolated realm.  They were proud to represent Midgard like this and experience a taste of the rest of the Nine.

Jane gave a final heave and the last stitch finally gave way. She nearly stumbled and had to steady herself on the table behind her.

"There it goes!" she said.

Blue blood poured from the torn incisions and dribbled onto the floor. The strange knife, now bent and twisted from its hours of toil, clattered onto the tabletop. She sighed in relief.

Sagittarius gasped. He opened and closed his mouth in a way that reminded her so much of the Tin Man that she wished she had Dorothy's oil can on hand to loosen his rust. His tentative stretching and testing of his mouth disturbed the open wounds and more blood poured over his punctured lips.

Jane grabbed the discarded towel from the table and handed it to him. He tossed it aside and instead rummaged through some of the crates until they produced a bag of clear liquid. He tore it open with his teeth and began to drink. Four bags lay empty at his feet before he attacked the stockpile of food.

Empty jars and boxes and cartons littered the table and floor by the time he finished. With a satisfied sigh, he gave Jane a real smile, his cheeks raising like a theater curtain to reveal each sharp tooth gleaming beneath.

"You look better," she said. The bleeding had stopped and tiny scabs of darker blue now plugged each wound around his lips.

He tried to vocalize a response but the grunted sounds his throat produced made him grimace. He placed his hands over his throat and shook his head.

"It's ok," she said. "We'll figure out some way to communicate. Or you'll get to hear me talking to myself a lot. I do that sometimes."

He gave her a curious stare but there was no spark of understanding in it. He went to another box. From within, a pulled out a knife and a laser gun of some kind. He showed her where the trigger button was on the top, thrust both weapons into her hands, and pushed for her to stand in the doorway. He was asleep on a bunk before she could even turn around.

She gawked at where he lay, blanket thrust on the floor, his massive frame curled into a ball on the narrow bed. She had assumed his species didn't require sleep. In the museum, it was hard to tell if anyone really slept or if they were all merely in a drug-induced lethargy. After so much time spent in flight without seeing him sleep once, she felt it was a logical assumption.

He must have needed it because he slept for a very, very long time.

She studied the weapons in her hands before straining her eyes to see into the meadow and beyond. It unsettled her to be appointed to guard their little bunker with a weapon. What were the threats she should look out for? Was it merely a precaution or did he know of something that would wish to harm them? What if something, or someone, came out of that cave - would she be able to differentiate between a friend or foe?

If she let her mind dwell on "what if's," then she was going to make herself paranoid. So, instead she took the opportunity to bask in the lukewarm sun bathing the meadow. She could not see the source but the available rays warmed her through and through, soul and body. A light breeze sent ripples through the tall grasses. Orange and purple flowers littered the meadow with splashes of color. The dark mouth of the cave was curtained with bright red vines.

She stared transfixed at every new flower and plant she could see. How long had it been since she last saw something that was alive and not sustained by artificial methods within a glass box? It was mesmerizing to see a wilted leaf and an imperfect, asymmetrical flower petal. She could smell the sweet, messy soil that gave it all life and sustained it a in a living, breathing biome.

She thought she could just make out the sound of water coming from somewhere...if it really were water and not something else. She didn't know what else could make that sound, but maybe alien planets had chocolate rivers or lava brooks or creeks made out of burbling vinegar or something.

She rather hoped it was water.

The shadows cast by the bunker and nearby rocks never moved. Not an inch. The yellow sky above stayed bright and warm and she could discern no evidence of the passing of time. Jane quickly realized she did not know if this planet would have a "night" at all. After the interminable night in the museum, constant daylight was a welcome change, but she wished she knew more of what to expect.

She didn't know much of anything now.

Was this Sagittarius' home? He certainly was familiar with the planet and knew his way around, but it didn't seem likely that a being adapted for the cold would naturally dwell in such a warm, humid climate. What place was this and who did the bunker belong to?

Her questions simmered and boiled within her and she sighed inwardly. She knew wouldn't be able to ask them and they would continue to bother her like an itch she couldn't scratch.

When her companion finally woke, he ate again. Then he took her weapon from her, directed her to sleep, and he disappeared into the tunnel. Exhausted, she complied.

When she woke next, a mountain of supplies littered the floor of the bunker and the meadow beyond. She recognized much of it as originating within the spacecraft. Blankets, food, tools, and materials were being organized into different piles and stored in crates in the bunker. Across the cave mouth, bright lights flashed from a welding torch as Sagittarius erected a barrier.

Curiously, Jane yawned and lugged herself out of the bunk. She walked over to where he was working and her heart stopped when she recognized what he was using. It was the metal plating of the spacecraft. He had torn the spacecraft into pieces and was now using it to make a wall. They would not be leaving this place anytime soon, then - at least not using that spacecraft. It was possible they would not be leaving at all.

When he was satisfied, he collapsed back into a bunk, created a curtain of ice around himself, and went back to sleep.

They continued this pattern of eating, sleeping, and sorting for a few dozen cycles. Sagittarius' eyes grew brighter and his motions more animated with his physical needs replenished. He tried again and again to rid himself of the bracelets, but the metal cylinders stubbornly remained.

It was a strange thing to be in such close proximity with someone she could not verbally communicate with. She remembered the year she spent in France during her undergrad, but Google Translate and Rosetta Stone came to her rescue there. Here, she relied entirely on facial expressions and motions and posture to communicate...and she was not sure they translated their kinesics properly.

After so much time in isolation, it was a relief to have someone to communicate with at all and she was glad she was not alone. Hearing another being breathe and walk through the bunker was a comfort, even if he was a towering blue man with swirls and ridges all over his body.

In one of the crates, he discovered a collection of identical black jumpsuits. Each had a logo of a green circle embroidered on the chest and they were made of a soft, but strong material.

Sagittarius tried to wear one. It lasted for a total of five minutes before he threw it off with a disgusted exclamation. He spent the next five minutes scratching at the designs in his skin. Then he took a knife to the jumpsuit and cut it into pieces. The end result was a pair of shorts falling to about the middle of his thigh. This seemed to please him.

Jane wondered if, like her toga, he had been dressed in clothes unfamiliar to him which left him feeling exposed. Actually, he behaved as though his entire body was unfamiliar to him, as if he were wearing a dragon skin coat he wished he could shed.

Jane did a little happy dance when she found her own black jumpsuit in one of the crates. It was a little big and she had to roll up the ankles and wrists, but it was not that blasted toga. She took that sheer scrap of white fabric that had clothed her for so long and tore it into pieces with a vehement delight.

Sagittarius gave her a breathy, guttural laugh as he watched her. He added his leather skirt from the museum to her pile of scraps. Then he gathered some dry grasses, a blow torch, and a bit of some kind of combustible liquid. The pair watched their clothes burn into ashes with wry smiles on their faces. Jane spit on the coals after, just for good measure.

Then Jane decided it was time to cut her hair. She found a mirror in one of the boxes under a bed. She hung it from a bunk bed and used a knife to cut off some of her unruly, long untended hair. She busily sliced away the dead hair but stopped when she caught his reaction in the mirror behind her.

He had been passing through the room when he caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror. He froze, momentarily transfixed. One hand rose and hovered over his cheek, as if seeing the reflection of a ghost. He hissed and glared at the face staring back at him. Then he turned and fled the bunker.

Jane found him hiding away in a crop of trees and covered by bushes. He was huddled in on himself in a small ball and the ground was covered with tiny white pebbles. The pebbles were melting. As she caught the shuddering of his shoulders, she realized he was weeping hail. With a gasp, he noticed his frozen tears and picked one up to look at it. He caught another as it fell. Then he threw it against the tree trunk with an expression of fierce rage on his face.

She placed a tentative hand on his shoulder but cried out at how cold he was. He swung around in a panic and bolted away from her, hiding himself deeper in the shadows. She let him be, but she wished she could have asked him why the mirror had upset him so.

She couldn't.

Chapter Text

After the historical celebration of Yggdrasil's Day, an abandoned storehouse near the city wall was converted into a kind of Museum of Midgardian Culture and History. Each of the architectural landmarks from the festival was relocated to fill the outer courts of the complex. Within the stone hall, art and artifacts from around Midgard were presented with Asgardian flourish. There were no people housed within, other than the occasional "traditional song and dance festival" that occurred during special diplomatic dinners or during the fieldtrips of Asgardian schoolchildren.  To Jane, it was fascinating to see what aspects of Midgard were displayed by the Aesir and which were ignored completely.

It was not long after the festivities of Yggdrasil's day ended and the various representatives from the Nine Realms dispersed that the festival complex needed to be cleaned. Heimdall relocated Jane to work on the clean-up team for its duration saying she would "prove more useful" there. She didn't mind so much. She especially enjoyed sorting through the exhibits that had been abandoned.  In one such rubbish pile in the Midgardian quadrant,  Jane came across a replica of Van Gogh's Starry Night. To the Aesir, the painting was called "not art" and "unevolved" and a "sign of primitive faculties".

Jane dug it out of the rubbish heap, wiped off the grime that it had acquired, and asked if she could keep it. The overseer was appalled that she wished to keep such a "horrid looking thing" and warned her to make sure it couldn't be seen from the Observatory. She didn't care. She clung it to her chest and hung it in her room, across from her window. No Aesir eyes would have to see it there and to her, it was absolutely perfect.

It was years later that a French businessman came to Asgard. He wore a neat grey mustache, and he carried an umbrella, though even the rain in Asgard only fell on a controlled schedule. Jane was delivering a parcel to the curate of the museum when she first came across the Frenchman. He was standing in the central courtyard, shielding the sun out of his eyes with a museum brochure so he could gaze at the Eiffel Tower. There he stood for nearly a half hour, as still as a post, except for the streams of tears flowing down his cheeks.

"Excuse me, are you alright?" she asked him, shifting the weight of the heavy parcel to her other hip so she could free her hand to shade her own eyes from the sun.

He withdrew a handkerchief and used it to mop his soggy brow and blow his nose. His gaze fell away from the Eiffel Tower and he looked at her with a wan smile.

"Oui, oui, mademoiselle," he answered. "It is just so beautiful. Paris has never been the same without it. Not a day goes by that I do not stop in the Jardin du Champs de Mars and wish I could see La Tour Eiffel watching over all Paris again."

"What do you mean?  Where did the tower go?" Jane asked, more out of dread of what his answer would confirm than out of actual curiosity. She carefully placed her parcel on the cobbled ground of the courtyard and crossed her arms across her chest when the Frenchman took too long to answer her.

He mopped his brow with his handkerchief one more time and pointed. "There she is. They told us she is 'preserved forever as a tribute to the achievements of Midgard,' and that it is a 'mighty honor to be relocated to the Realm Eternal,' but I think the greatest honor was seeing it as part of daily walk through Paris and knowing I was ours."

"I thought this was a replica...," Jane mused and stared up at the iron latticework towering over them both and her heart sank.

"Non. Les artefacts historiques originaux."

"You mean...the art...the basilicas...the pyramids...they were THE ORIGINALS?" Jane nearly screeched.

"Oui. They promised to send us copies. New York has a shiny, new Lady Liberty already, one that will never turn green and whose light will never go out, but how can you replace the Great Pyramid of Giza? No imitation can ever do it justice. Paris may have its own copies...but it is like replacing a diamond with a crystal. It would never be the same."

Jane was dumbstruck. The fury burned in her heart as she remembered the teenage Aesir inscribing their names into the stones of the pyramid and livestock being kept in Westminster Abbey. It was unthinkable.

She realized with a start that the painting she had pulled out of the trash was not a replica.

It was the original.

One more inch, Jane thought to herself as she held out a lock of her hair straight before her eyes. She made a tally mark on her notebook and bit the edge of her pen while she counted up the final total. That makes five. Ten inches total. That makes it about ten months.

She put her homemade tape measure down onto her bunk and sighed. She'd been on this strange planet for around ten months now.

Without changing celestial bodies or seasons or clocks or tides, she had nearly gone batty trying to figure out some method of calculating time. At first, she thought she could measure the growth of the grasses in the meadow outside the bunker, but the grass never seemed to grow or change. The leaves of the vines and the array of insects inhabiting them also never shifted in the slightest. They were always there, the same as they were on the first day she arrived. There wasn't even a cloud in the sky or a drop of rain to mar the perpetual sunless light.

So, Jane abandoned this method of time-keeping and tried to rely on her own biology's cycles to direct her. This, also, proved frustrating. For one, her circadian rhythm's predictability was hindered by the unceasing daylight and she had never been very good at remembering to take meals at regular increments. Her menstrual cycle would have been useful, but when the Aesir decided to tamper with her genetic code, they deemed the Midgardian cycle "maladaptive" and "fixed" that "evolutionary error" along with her "Midgardian biological decline into entropy." She would have appreciated more entropy in her physical being now if it meant she could find a way to measure change. But she remained as inalterable as the planet she now lived upon. There would be no wrinkles or grey hairs for another thousand years or more. This yawning expanse of years had, at one point, been an invitation to pursue her passion of study unhindered, but now that she was trapped under a starless sky, it was only another dream to store on a shelf of ironies.

Finally, in a desperate attempt to cling to some form of temporal analysis, she decided to rely on her hair. True, it was an imperfect method, but it was the best one she had at her disposal. It depended not only on her roughly estimated tape measure, drawn onto a broken strap, and her own ability to cut off her hair at exactly eight inches at regular intervals. The ritual gave her some semblance of ritual and time-keeping and that helped settle the frenetic anxiety she had felt building up in her when she felt trapped in a single, unending day.

Ten months.

It had not been an unpleasant ten months. It was simply routine...and quiet...and uneventful. But Jane was an astrophysicist. She liked routines and quiet. She just didn't always like uneventful.

Her companion and she took turns sleeping and keeping watch. They ate when they felt hungry, washed in the brook when they wished to be cleaned, and reorganized the shelves of supplies in their bunker at unnecessarily regular intervals, simply to have something to do to keep themselves busy. Jane, tired of wearing identical jumpsuits each day, picked apart threads from one of the stock of blankets and used these to embroider designs onto her jumpsuits. She had never been much of an artist, and her final product proved it, but it made her feel like she was wearing different clothes from time-to-time.

She also felt more like herself when she wore clothes covered with suns with happy faces or shooting stars around the collar. Sagittarius laughed a throaty, gruff sound when he saw her final result, but then he found her another color of thread from a box of old ropes he had under his bed. This ensured a few of her suns had sunglasses and kept her busy for nearly half an inch of hair growth. She sang while she sewed and despite her off-key melodies and interpretive, scattered memories of lyrics, it cheered her, filled the silence, and improved Sagittarius' mood to the point that he stopped pacing and sat to listen with a set of spoons to keep rhythm along with her.

Sagittarius' moods were difficult to comprehend. Some days, he sat on the threshold to the bunker, his head balanced on his fist, and his eyes fixed onto an indiscernible goal in the distance. He neither moved nor made a sound for what felt like hours. Then he'd suddenly jump to his feet and disappear into the foliage behind the bunker and pace for miles. Other days, he failed to get out of his bed and he sat there, staring at the slats in the metal bunk above him, lost within himself. Other days, he was as jubilant as an otter at play and nothing could make him be serious. He pasted on a wide, infectious grin, and spent the day trying to make her laugh with his antics.

But always, always, on any day and at any time, he was trying to remove the metal bracers from his wrists. And just as predictably, the bracelets confounded all his efforts.

The pair developed their own form of communication after so much time stuck together. They relied on gestures, simple sounds, drawings, and clumsy mimes. It was imperfect, but it worked and they could at least communicate "making dinner" or "going out back" or "you smell. Take a bath" or "I'm fine. Leave me alone."

It was in this manner that he taught her to play a board game. He had come across it in one of the boxes from the ship and it was obviously well-used by its previous owner from all the nicks and dings in the boards and pieces. It consisted of a three-tiered board made of four different colors in concentric circles with corresponding rings of colored glass game pieces. It took her two inches worth of time to even have a ghost of understanding the complicated rules. He was obviously well-adept at the game and she was a novice playing against a master chess player. When she did get the hang of it, his vicious smirk at each of his victories was only ever surpassed by the one time she happened to best him, and then he glowed with all the pride of a tutor whose pupil could finally be granted a new protractor instead of a pencil.

Jane tried not to think about the future, but she couldn't help it. What would become of them in this place? She worried what they would do when their stock of food had all been consumed. She tried to ask her companion about this. He scowled and became broody and then vanished for so long, she began to worry where he had gone. When he returned, it was with a giant carcass slung over his shoulder of a beast that resembled a cross between an overgrown anteater and a mammalian version of a crab. It would have been terrible, if it was alive, but it was now very dead and the smell of it wasn't much better. She worried it would taste just as foul as it smelled, but after Sagittarius had salted, smoked, and dried the meat, it was tolerable. For the time, their barrels of food were replenished, especially when Sagittarius began returning to the bunker with satchels full of vegetation and starchy tubers which, while she couldn't say they were delicious, were a step up from starvation and meant they could survive in the bunker after their preserved foods were gone.

These expeditions into the world "outside" their bunker took a toll on Sagittarius. After his first hunt, he came home so weary he could barely keep his eyes open while he skinned the awful carcass. Then, Jane noticed little streams of clear liquid dripping from each of the designs on his chest and forehead. When she pointed them out, his protruding brows rose and he stopped what he was doing to investigate. He frowned, then shrugged, and kept working. However, by the time his work was done, he was moving so languidly he looked as though he were wading through ankle-deep chewed bubble gum while pulling a wagon of anvils behind him. Finally, he vanished and she found him in the creek, which was completely frozen and wrapped around his sleeping form like a glass sarcophagus.

She felt a little guilty at the thought that she had "sent" Sagittarius to find them food and hoped he hadn't misinterpreted her meaning. His next trip, she tried to go with him to help gather or hunt or whatever it was he did out there, but he growled when he caught her following him. Instead of letting her accompany him, he picked her up by her shoulders in both of his gloved hands and set her down on her bunk, in the same manner as a parent chastising an erring child. He gave her an unmistakable instruction to keep watch over the entryway and she did not try to leave her post.

The entryway that never changed. She almost wished it would change. That something would happen just to punctuate the unending run-on sentence she found herself living in. Then she thought the better of it and realized if something were to happen, she'd rather it happen when Sagittarius was around than not and she settled back into counting her inches grow. They continued in their ceaseless charade, like two parallel lines which moved always together, but a little apart, into an unknown and indefinite unending.

Jane nearly reached eleven and a half inches when something did happen. Or the first of many somethings. In a sudden burst of sanitary inspiration, Jane decided to wash all the linens in the bunker. This took her the better part of three meals and when she was finally finished, her hands were completely raw from the harsh soap and the constant rubbing and her back was so sore from leaning over the brook to wash that she could barely climb the ladder to reach the roof of the bunker. She managed it after a significant amount of groaning and whining and set all her clean blankets on the roof to dry. Quite pleased with herself, she turned to climb down the ladder when her foot slipped on a rung and she fell.

It was a long way to fall and she was not looking forward to discovering just how far. Her cry of surprise was muffled when, instead of falling onto the grass ten feet below her, she was caught Princess-Bride style in a set of cold arms...and a face who looked just as surprised as her own.

Sagittarius grunted and then his eyes grew wide in panic. He fairly threw her from his arms and onto the grass. Then he bent down to appraise her bare arms where his own exposed flesh had broken her fall. No matter which angle he searched, he did not find what he was looking for and his eyes grew even wider than Jane thought was possible. He tentatively extended one finger to prod her bicep with as much hesitancy as if she were an electric current and he a fork. She held still, waiting for a shock of cold or pain or to spontaneously combust into blue alien ice fire, but nothing happened.

It was as mundane as guarding the entryway. And anticlimactic, really. She felt a cold prod on her skin like when her mother used to place a cold compress on her bruises after a fall and nothing more. He poked her arm again, but allowed his long, lean finger remain in contact longer. When there was no apparent harm done, he visibly exhaled. All the swirls of sapphire on his chest sank like a deflated balloon and he burst into a throaty laughter. When he wrapped his entire palm around her arm, his palm felt like the thick shell of a tortoise or the armored back of an armadillo, but he did not make her into an ice sculpture or a Midgardian popsicle.

She gasped in surprise when she found herself lifted from the ground, swung around in an impulsive embrace, and then set upright on the ground with a delighted wink over one red eye. Then Sagittarius sprinted behind the bunker and to the refuge of the brook.

He spent the next half inch playing (if it would not be undignified to call the actions of such a tall, formidable creature "playing") with water. He started by freezing it and then melting it again. This pleased him so much, he froze some into shapes. These shapes grew ever more elaborate until they were towering works of watery art which he then melted and evaporated into a mist. He felt so accomplished with himself that a brilliant, smug grin was glued to his face and chased away all the broody storm clouds for all the time he played. Jane watched his experiments with her own quiet amusement, wishing all the time she had the tools necessary to run tests on just how he made it work.

If she couldn't play science, she might as well join him in his ice art. It took a lot of overly dramatic hand motions and confused eye rolls before he understood she wanted her own block of ice, but he got the idea eventually and kept running his hand over her work to keep it from melting prematurely. After a lot of cold fingers and small cuts with her knife and concentrated lip-biting, she created her own masterpiece. Well, she considered it a masterpiece. Her interpretation of an Emperor Penguin might have resembled more of an oblong watermelon than the Antarctic waterfowl, but she decided it was art and tried not to compare her end product with Sagittarius' life-sized, exquisitely detailed rendition of a winged horse.

She wondered if that meant there were horses...or winged horses...where he came from and just how many similar species of animals and plants their home planets had in common.

She had just determined to keep developing her skills at ice-sculpting when the next "something" occurred and this one made her realize why Sagittarius had insisted someone always guard the entryway to their little haven.

The pair had just finished eating some kind of stew and were washing up when they heard the sound of an explosion. They rushed outside the bunker to find the carefully constructed barrier, forged out of their own ship, a smoldering mess of ash in the meadow grass. Three mismatched figures clothed in the exact same jumpsuits as were stored in the bunker emerged, each with a weapon in hand pointed directly at Jane and Sagittarius. With a series of shouts and a burst of light, they fired.

Jane decided that, when put to the test, she preferred "nothing" more than "something" after all.

Chapter Text

Midgardians were considered exotic - so small and soft and fragile. Jane was a curiosity on Asgard. Everywhere she went, her height alone gave her away and kept her from being able to hide her origins from the throngs of eyes watching her every move. Many were genuinely and sincerely curious, but other times, this quest for knowledge carried a bitter edge of self-aggrandizement within.

"It is just the way of things, Jannike. You were born to Yggdrasil's roots and we to her crown. We all have our place in the great Tree and that is how order is maintained. You have the unique opportunity to live in the Jewel of Yggdrasil instead of continuing in ignorance on Midgard. You have improved yourself by learning the ways of the Aesir. You are, without a doubt, the most fortunate of all Midgard."

She wanted to scream at him, but she couldn't. She'd tried once. It hadn't ended well.

The worst was when Aesir men told her she needed "protection from a man like them." She quickly amended that to "from men like them." When lingering stares and jeers were not enough, men with super human strength cornered her and tried to come even closer. She could not hope to escape them...and since she technically had no legal rights in Asgard, she was not optimistic of how it would end for her without assistance.

Voldstadt found her like that once, arguing and spitting on a group of Muspel tourists who came a little too close to her for her comfort. Voldstadt escorted her back to the observatory, much to her embarrassment and relief, and gave her what he considered to be very good advice.

"You need to accept an Aesir protector and carry his blade with you. Then you will be safe from these ruffians. As long as you have no protector, you are vulnerable and many will take that as an invitation."

She grit her teeth and refused to answer. She'd been offered "protection," of course, and kept turning such offers down so she could maintain whatever shreds of her dignity still remained.

"You, Aesir, pride yourselves on being so 'civilized' and 'morally superior' to us lowly Midgardians," she spat once in her anger and frustration. "But then treat women here like this."

"Women have the utmost rights and powers on Asgard," Heimdall began, in his usual, unflappable calm. She cut him off with an incredulous snort.

"But I...," she began, but did not get the chance to finish.

"You are not Aesir. You are Midgardian. Of course, you do not have the same rights as our women. Aesir women are innately superior and of exceptional quality. None would dare cross an Aesir maid for the retribution of the lady and her kin would be swift and deadly."

"So, because I am fragile and have a shorter lifespan, Aesir men can treat me as if I were no better than a whore, whether I agree or not?"

"Of course not. That would involve payment. You are not entitled to recompense for the privilege of knowing an Aesir man. The honor you are bestowed on by receiving their attentions is more than enough."

She furiously stormed from the observatory that day and hid. She refused to speak to Heimdall for a week, but he only gave her the most insufferably patronizing smile and did not so much as mention her silent treatment.

Asgard's gatekeeper, while both arrogant and proud, still had a modicum of dignity and a certain universal politeness which he begrudgingly included her in, Midgardian or not. He also had the respect and healthy fear of the rest of Asgard and uncannily near-omniscient sight which could track Jane's every movement, for better or for worse.

When he rescued her for a third time from a group of drunken youths in a back alley, he gave her an ultimatum.

"Accept my protection, carry my ceremonial dagger, and none in Asgard will dare to raise a finger against you," he told her. "This is the last time I will interfere."

There were provisions to this arrangement, of course. While none in Asgard would dare cross the woman who carried the gatekeeper's dagger, this also meant she "belonged" to Heimdall, and only to him. In order to avoid the unsavory attentions of any other in Asgard, it meant she had to accept the attentions of the gatekeeper. She knew, if she didn't choose to accept one of the offers she'd been given, she would soon, someday, no longer have a choice at all. Was the freedom to choose a terrible choice preferable to having no choice at all?

At times, during the decades that followed, she believed the gatekeeper developed a fond affection for his pet Midgardian. His role in the observatory was all-encompassing and isolated him from much of the social life of Asgard around him. He could not partake in the daily lives of the Aesir and he was, for all intents and purposes, married to his position. He seemed to gain a certain amount of satisfaction in her company and he reciprocated by throwing her crumbs of knowledge whenever the fancy struck.

This arrangement lasted until the day the shining crowned prince returned from some quest, jovial and half-intoxicated. By chance, Jane was unfortunate enough to be mopping the Bifrost and gained his unsought and undesired notice. The prince's curiosity was piqued when he heard of her origins and he requested her company that night...and the night after and the night after. Heimdall could hardly refuse the wishes of his prince any more than Jane could, but he could hold a grudge with more vehemence than he guarded the Bifrost sword.

The prince forgot about his exotic Midgardian conquest as quickly as the new horse he had impulsively acquired on Vanaheim. When Jane returned to the observatory, Heimdall's greeting was borderline frigid. The anger he could not unleash on his prince, he could pour out on Jane. He was convinced she threw herself in the prince's path on purpose. He chided her soundly for her "blackened honor" and he refused to "defend the honor of a woman like her" anymore. He asked for the return of his ceremonial dagger and barely spoke two words together to her after that.

Not long after, Jane woke in a glass cage.

A wall of ice absorbed the brunt of the weapon's rays, shattering on impact into a million tiny shards. Jane gasped as the weight of Sagittarius enclosed around her as a second barrier between her and the weapons of their attackers.

"Look! It's one of those Ice Makers!" shouted a voice, which Jane could understand.

"Those still exist?" came a second.

"How did it get all the way here? Their planet is three jumps away from this outpost," said the third.

"Well, he's obviously dangerous. Where's the little one? What do you think that one is? Asgardian?"

"No. Too small for Asgardians. Maybe an albino Zen-Whoberis?"

"Can't be. She's tiny."

"Maybe a child?"

Sagittarius cautiously rose off her, hands outstretched and grunted something to the trio. They each gaped at Jane in response and she rather wished she could hide behind her companion again to avoid their scrutiny.

"You must be joking. A Terran? How'd she get all the way out here?"

Sagittarius grunted a reply again, which their visitors appeared to have no trouble comprehending.

"Oh, we've heard of Knowhere. Rumor has it, its nearly bankrupt and out of commission after that last run in with an Infinity Stone. Still, that means you must have stolen that there ship and have illegally squatted on a Xandarian outpost eating all our stores of rations."

Sagittarius' hands illustrated his impassioned reply even as his body moved in front of Jane again to block her from the range of their visitors.

"Yeah, yeah. I don't blame you. It just makes our job more complicated. Look, if you promise not to skewer us with an ice sword, we will promise not to blast you. Let's see what we can do."

Sagittarius nodded and the three lowered their weapons. The all walked in the direction of the bunker, continuing to ask questions of Sagittarius as they did.

"Excuse me," Jane interrupted. "How can I understand you but not him? How can you understand both of us?"

The trio burst into laughter. "Oh, that's rich! This day just keeps getting better and better! They will love this down at headquarters! A Terran and an Ice Maker live together without a translator! What a time you must have had! How have you even survived here? Better yet, how did you even find this outpost? Hold on. We might have another translator or two back on our cruiser."

The smallest of the trio, a man with yellowish, scaly skin and bulbous blue eyes, vanished back through the cave. When he returned, he tentatively approached the pair with a pair of small circular devices in his hand the size of small ladybugs.

"Put this just below your ear," he said.

The pair complied. Their three visitors stood back to watch them from a distance with undisguised amusement on their mis-matched faces.

"Now what?" Jane asked. "Do I have to do something else?"

Sagittarius turned to her with a wide, genuine grin on his blue face. "Yes. Now you must tell me your name."

"Oh, wow! That's amazing! How does that work? Does it…wait, never mind. I'll ask that later. My name is Jane Foster. Wait, do you really understand me?"

"Yes, Lady Jane of Midgard, I understand you," he answered. His previous deep, guttural sounds now effortlessly became understandable to her mind.

Her face fell. "DO NOT call me that!" she said, louder than she meant to. "Do not ever call me that. I am Jane Foster, not Lady Jane and definitely not Lady Jannike. I am not the son or daughter of anyone anymore, and I am from Earth, not Midgard, not Terran, not any other name."

His face didn't display any motion other than one arched brow. She flushed with embarrassment. In their first true verbal communication, she reacted by yelling at him. Instead of taking in how strange it was to understand the words he was speaking and trying to learn more of her companion, she instead dwelt on the unpleasant reminds the words he chose elicited within her.

"I apologize, Jane Foster of Earth, I meant no offense. I take it your paths have crossed with those of the Aesir in the past."

"Unfortunately. If I ever meet another Aesir in my lifetime it will be too soon," she said, not caring if she was scowling at him now or behaving every inch as a petulant child.

He burst into laughter at that, a breathy, grunting sound. "For once, then, I am grateful that I am not Aesir."

"But you know about Asgard…and you greeted me like an Aesir….and I know you recognized the Aesir who came into that terrible museum. Did you spend time in Asgard?" she asked, struggling to piece together all she could from what she'd already seen from him.

"Nearly all my life," he answered.

"But you are…not like them," Jane said.

His face momentarily fell and before he grit his teeth. "No. I am not."

"Thank God! I like you all the better for it!" she said.

He barked out another laugh. "You are full of surprises, Jane Foster of Earth."

"Who are you? And how did you end up in that terrible place? And why did you get your mouth sewn up? And how long had you been there before I came?"

"Let us begin with my name...I am Loki, of Jotunheim and Asgard, son of no one."

"I think I like Sagittarius better," she answered.

"What is a 'Sagittarius'?" he asked.

"Your name. Well, what I named you. I needed something to call you besides 'blue guy' and that suited you. Better than Loki, I think."

"I see. Well, if we are going by the names we gave to each other in our nonverbal ignorance, then you will henceforth be referred to as 'Mortal'."

Jane stuck out her tongue at that and shook her head so vehemently that she nearly made herself dizzy. "Nice to meet you, Loki," she said. "I'd shake your hand, but I don't want to end up with frostbite."

"And I would request to kiss your hand, if I did not think you would threaten to behead me for sullying you with an Aesir custom."

Jane instinctively curled both of her hands into the pockets of her jumpsuit and grimaced. "Yeah. You are right. Maybe we should, I don't know, bump elbows or bow or curtsy or something safer."

"Or perhaps our new companions can teach us the appropriate way to greet in Xandar," he said and motioned for her to follow the trio into the bunker.

Gorm, Ryko, and Tal, the Nova Corps soldiers tasked with manning the small outpost, each sat on one of the metal chairs, bowls of steaming stew in their hands. Jane took the fourth chair while Loki (who she still called Sagittarius in her head) leaned against a bunk and took long draughts from his own cup.

"And this is where?" Jane asked, bubbling with excitement over finally getting some of her questions answered.

"The farthest quadrant of the Andromeda Galaxy. We don't make all the way to Bithring very often, maybe twice in a solar year," Gorm, the slightly yellowish man, said.

"How long is a solar year?" she asked.

"In your terms, approximately five hundred and thirty years, if I am calculating properly," Loki said, after catching the confusion of the Xandarians. "It would be my luck that you would meet upon us now."

"I think it might just be your luck. How much longer do you think your food stores could have held out here? It's definitely not enough for a hundred years, let alone five hundred," Tal put in. The five grey tentacles protruding from his head wavered when he talked and Jane could see a ridge of similar grey spiny growths in a ridge down his spine.

"How did you find this outpost?" Ryko asked.

Loki shrugged. "What habitable planets in Andromeda lack a Nova Corps outpost?" he answered.

"Huh. Good point," Ryko answered, once he considered it.

"It was more likely to have supplies than any in the Triangulum Galaxy. There isn't much there other than Ravagers and rubbish heaps."

"Again, good point," Ryko said.

"Now, if you come from Asgard, how come you need a translator?" Tal asked. "I thought everyone from Asgard has their own way of communicating across all the languages in the galaxies?"

Loki took another sip of his stew and held up one of his wrists. The silver bracelet glinted in the lights of the bunker and then he dropped his wrist again.

"The Collector had enough foresight to bind my magic completely before imprisoning me. The Asgardian means of communication relies solely on magic."

"Wait, is that why, you know, your lips were, uh, like they were?" Jane stammered out. Then she wondered if that was an appropriate topic to ask in front of their visitors. By the way Loki's expression turned stormy, she figured it probably was still a sore subject, metaphorically and literally.

"The Collector is nothing if not thorough. He ensured I would not be able to use any possible faculties to escape."

"Let me see those," Tal said. Gorm stood so Loki could sit and splay both his wrists in front of Tal. Tal began to pull tools out of a belt and fiddle with the devices, his stew left forgotten on the table in front on him.

"I've tried everything I could think of," Loki said. "Nothing worked. I think the All-Father himself helped design these."

Tal paused for a moment to consider Loki more closely. "What have you gotten yourself into that would get Odin All-Father so involved in your punishment?"

"Let's just say the All-Father did not appreciate my efforts to renegotiate the balance of power in Yggdrasil."

Tal gave a noncommittal grunt in response and returned to fiddling.

"You can't stay here much longer," Gorm put in.

"Obviously," Loki replied. "We required a safe refuge while my Midgardian counterpart regained her strength after her captivity and her system was able to rid itself of its dependence on the sedatives Tivan felt compelled to flood her with."

"Didn't you get them?" Jane asked.

"Of course. But my body did not form a dependence on them."

"Oh, you mean, oh. That's why I was so wonky after we left. That makes sense. Why didn't they impact you the same way? Don't tell me it's another one of those 'my body is stronger than yours' things. I'm so sick of being told all the ways my Midgardian body is inferior to everyone else's."

"You would prefer that I lie?" Loki asked.

"No. Yes. Maybe."

"Your eloquence astounds."

Gorm sighed and set his bowl down with an unnecessarily loud thwack onto the table. "I think now is as good a time as any for you both to tell us how you came to be here," he said. "Then we can decide what to do with you next."

"Of course," Loki said. He adjusted himself in his chair and, when Jane nodded at him to go first, he began his story. "Over a thousand years ago, I was born in Jotunheim…."

He trailed off when a metallic crash followed by a blinding light engulfed him. He gave a surprised cry of pain and looked down to see his wrists, dark and burned, but unbound.

"That did it," Tal said. "You just needed the right tools."

Loki gave a wide grin before his entire body was enveloped in a flash of shimmering green light. After it dissipated, Jane's companion could no longer be described as "blue."

Chapter Text

Asgard was the first to woo Earth's favor and they did so magnificently. When the first emissaries were sent to Beijing, they came with a wagon full of Asgardian technology which quickly revolutionized the combustion engine and satellite communication. At first, all Earth stood in awe, scratching their heads to discover just where these strange new ideas and materials were coming from. They did not have long to wait. During the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, billions across the globe watched slack-jawed as a rainbow prism crashed into the very center of the stage, leaving five towering figures behind.

"Greetings from Asgard! I am Prince Thor, son of Odin, a friend and protector of your realm. We have come to forge an alliance and open up trade with your realm, to learn from your ways and to share our knowledge with you. We come in peace, and we are honored to be welcomed by the good nobles of your realm," spoke the central figure, a tall, gloriously handsome figure who then proceeded to fly around the stadium and summon lightning to strike the stage. As if that wasn't enough, every single person, whether watching the broadcast in their home or live in the stadium, heard this message in their mother tongue and without the use of translators or subtitles.

The Chinese President followed up soon after, explaining they had taken the liberty in signing an interplanetary treaty and inter-realm trade agreement with Asgard on behalf of all Earth.

"Our world will never be the same again! They have means of curing some of our worst ailments. Malaria, cancer, HIV-AIDS will all be forgotten! They have sources of renewable, clean energy that will heal our planet and allow us to thrive. They can teach us methods of agriculture that will bring about the end of famine worldwide. This is only the beginning of what is to come!"

People were confused. People panicked. People rejoiced. For months, news reports around the world debated whether it was all a hoax. However, as Chinese embassies around the world began to receive their own Asgardian emissaries, it soon became clear that the Earth was not as isolated as it had once believed itself to be.

There were conflicts across the globe over the role China played as the representative of Earth. For a time, the U.N., the U.S., and the European Union fought valiantly to play the role of intermediary or to be allowed to create their own treaties and trade alliances with Asgard. Asgard refused.

"We do not have time to be bothered with your internal squabbles. China has the largest population, the most wealth, the most manufacturing and export, and the largest army. They will represent Midgard better than any other of your little kingdoms and so they will speak to Asgard on your behalf," their spokesman, Bragi, had said.

Asgard had some Aesir equivalent to "Lonely Planet" travel guides for Aesir travelling to Midgard, but it quickly became apparent that their handy survival travel guide was compiled some fifteen hundred years before… by scholars who had never actually set foot on Earth… and who relied exclusively on accounts of travelers who had only been to Scandinavia. This made initial diplomacy with the twenty-first century Chinese a bit interesting.

It started slowly. Asgardian merchants were few at first and tentative in the few items they brought for sale. However, as the globe slowly came to let go of their shock and initial fears, and curiosity began to boil, merchants found that "Midgard" could be a potentially lucrative market after all.

The Asgardian wares were fantastical. There was self-cleaning clothing that would never wear out, fade, or tear. Tools made of a metal that was sharper than a diamond and could conduct electricity better than gold. There were gemstones which glowed with ever-shifting flames within their hearts in a myriad of vibrant colors. There were bricks enchanted to withstand any hurricane wind or earthquake or fire, making buildings stronger than ever before. Then there were the books. Books from across the universe explaining worlds that Earth had never even dreamt of. When the pages were opened, the illuminated pictures came to life and the words shifted into whatever language the reader could understand, pouring out the universe's secrets.

Earthlings were invited to travel the stars and study realms across the universe. Soon, National Geographic had the palaces of Alfheim and the aquatic city of Vanaheim's fifth moon on its cover rather than anything as mundane and terrestrial as it used to showcase.

True to their word, Asgardian medicinal knowledge trickled across the globe. While some countries were hesitant to test the alien healing methods, those willing to experiment were transformed overnight. Deaths and illness dropped so dramatically that hospitals and mortuaries complained about the loss of business.

Earthlings called it the "Age of the Aesir" and hailed it as a new beginning for Earth, a kind of golden space age where so many of humanities' greatest ills were suddenly solved by their gilded alien allies. What fantastical allies they were! Past conceptions of aliens as strange, awful creatures with gangly legs and backwards elbows were dispelled and replaced with the inhuman beauty of the Aesir. Bullets could not puncture them. Sickness could not fell them. They could survive for years without sleep or food or water. All Earth was in love with them by nightfall and none so much as the crown prince.

News headlines, tabloids, and social media accounts were soon flooded with photos of the Aesir royal. He made the rounds, meeting with dignitaries, politicians, and leaders on each continent, always with that brilliant smile and glittering blue eyes that could make a woman weep with only a single wink. He was declared the "sexiest man in the universe" within a month, which sparked a heated debate on whether the Aesir could be called a "man" or not. It was obvious that the being in question loved every minute of it.

By the time Jane relocated to Asgard, Earth had opened up to permit Aesir ambassadors, merchants, teachers, and healers to come and share their crafts with others.  From Jane's post in the observatory, she could see all the people and goods that traveled across the Nine Realms via the Bifrost. While she preferred to study the movements of celestial bodies, her analytical mind couldn't help but collect data on the patterns of orbit of other kinds of bodies as well. Most of the time, her brain felt so under stimulated and underused in her regular duties that she let her thoughts wander. She collected data on everything - from the number of times Thrym's rooster crowed to the average rainfall during each of the crown prince's temper tantrums to calculating the average volume of water inexplicably pouring into the Void from the Asgardian ocean falls. She found more intellectual energizing through tracking interstellar trade than from the rooster and so she carefully watched which tradesmen came through the Bifrost each day and what kinds of wares they brought with them. She could also eavesdrop on the news and small talk they shared with Heimdall and these little discourses provided more information than any of the "official" news sources she had access to.

She was the most eager to receive the merchants travelling to and from Earth. These were her primary means of communication with her friends and family back home. For awhile, letters and notes trickled through, giving her precious glimpses into the planet she had once called home. Gradually, even these stolen remnants of her old life evaporated away until they were replaced with silence.

One day, a merchant came from Earth with dozens of crates of fruit. They were unlike any she had ever seen on Earth before and her curiosity was piqued.

"What are these?" she asked the merchant and motioned to the brown, bumpy, oblong fruits.

"Vanaheim Citrus," he answered with a smug grin. "The Vanir used to hold our purse strings in their teeth, they did. Just because they are the only realm that can grow this here fruit, they think they can rob us like Ravagers. No longer. These here fruits can grow on Midgard. They do better than grow, I tell you, they thrive on Midgard. I've never seen them grow so well. The Vanir are as angry as bilgesnipes in spring, they are. Their prices have fallen by half and they can do naught but weep and gnash their greedy little teeth!"

"Can I eat one?" she asked. The fruit had a pleasant, almost cinnamon-like scent exuding from them which was quite appealing.

"No, my Lady! They'd send you right to Valhalla. These here beauties are right toxic, till you ferment them with Alfheim painted mushrooms, that is. Then, I tell you, they make the finest ale on this side of Yrrgdrasil! The Vanir ale was so pricy that none but the lords of this land could taste it, till now."

The Vanir ale quickly became Asgard's greatest export to all the Nine Realms. They grew the Vanaheim Citrus on Midgard, then brewed the ale on Asgard. Cheap Midgardian land and labor lined the pockets of Aesir investors with more gold than even their flying boats could carry. They walked around like proud peacocks, boasting of their foresight and good luck in stumbling upon such a venture.

Earth initially benefited, as well. The trees did grow well and farmers quickly replaced orange and lemon trees with the Vanaheim Citrus. However, the Nine Realms proved very thirsty. Farmers were only too glad to increase production and increase their profits. The extra income this trade raked in could help purchase all the Aesir imported goods that Midgard suddenly craved. It also helped support the burgeoning population. With so many diseases and human frailties eradicated, the population on Midgard exploded exponentially and nations scrambled to adjust to populations which suddenly stopped dying. The international trade with Asgard was hailed as the "way of the future" and nations across the globe allowed orchards to multiply.

Midgardians enjoyed the sun just as much as the Vanaheim Citrus and inconveniently condensed their urban populations in some of these warm, sunny regions. The Asgardian pockets were deep and Midgardian lifespans were short, however, and so it was an easy matter to buy up properties as soon as they hit the market. Not even Midgardian billionaires could compete with Vanir ale profits and soon the skyscrapers and suburbs of São Paulo, Valencia, Hunan, California, and Florida were razed in order to plant more orchards.  However, this meant vast swathes of Earth's most fertile, warmest agricultural lands were devoted to growing a crop that no one on Midgard could eat. Not even the birds or insects or squirrels could stomach the toxic fruit and so the orchards were essentially ecological deserts.

In order to accommodate the growing exportation of produce in more energy-efficient manner, Asgard required Midgard to create a specially designed portal. This would transport produce immediately to a sister portal in Asgard, all with a fraction of the expenditure of the Bifrost. Midgard easily agreed and took out loans from Asgard in order to finance the expensive portal. It was assumed that the profits made from the Vanaheim Citrus trade would more than cover the costs of the portal, in time. For a few years, the investment seemed a wise one. Until Vanaheim, in retribution for their falling profits, organized an inter-realm boycott of Asgard and all Midgardian products. This led to a rapid economic depression and extended trade agreements, undercutting Midgardian profits and benefitting Vanir farmers.

Overnight, Asgard stopped buying Vanir Citrus. The fruit rotted on the trees and not even the worms in the ground would touch them. Farmers stared in forlorn dread at the thousands of acres of fruit that no one on Earth could eat and that no one in the Nine Realms would buy. The subsequent downturn in Earth's economy was so great, the only way the farmers survived was by learning to brew Vanir ale themselves and then selling it on the black market. There were more than enough businessmen across the Nine Realms who had less scruples than those espoused by the Aesir Crown and were more than happy to exchange the Alfheim mushrooms for the completed ale.

They were also more than happy to import Asgardian mead to Midgardian markets. While the Vanir ale remained toxic to fragile Midgardian constitutions, Asgardian mead proved much more tolerable. The All-Father forbid the sale of Asgardian mead to Midgard. "It's for their own good," he declared. "Their self-control is lacking. Our mead is too strong for them and it will cause them nothing but harm."

Midgard was nothing if not willing to pay for products that the All-Father forbid them to buy and the black-market sale of Aesir mead flourished, almost compensating for the loss of citrus profits. The mead was sought out for its symbolic value and prestige as much as for its taste and effect. As claimed, the mead was far stronger than any beverage on Earth, but this only delighted its patrons more.

It was a costly rebellion. It quickly became apparent that the mead was not only horribly addictive to Midgardian bodies but caused complete liver failure after only a year or two. Midgardian governments tried to abolish the trade of the mead, but the lucrative trade proved difficult to end. Midgardian appetites for extraterrestrial imports remained higher than ever and production of some Midgardian products had ceased. How could Midgardian textiles compete with indestructible, self-cleaning Asgardian cast offs? Clothes that could survive millennia led to the collapse of all cotton, silk, and linen production. Terrestrial construction materials were allowed to rot on shelves in favor of the much more permanent imported bricks and tiles. The trade in mead helped keep the struggling economy afloat, for a time. But with the loss of the citrus trade, Midgard not only lost its primary income, but Asgard began to demand repayment of the loan.

"You asked for the portal," the Midgardian spokesman reminded their Aesir diplomat. "You needed it for your trade it citrus. You stopped buying our citrus. How can you expect us to be able to pay for the portal?"

"Asgard cannot be faulted if your realm is unwise with your finances," the Aesir diplomat responded. "The loan must be repaid on schedule."

Soldiers and swords soon followed to ensure repayments occurred immediately. There was very little choice but to comply.

From Jane's perch in Asgard, she heard the merchants complain. The hundreds of thousands of acres of land they held were not bringing them the profit they desired and the Midgardian farmers who they hired to keep the orchards failed to pay their yearly taxes.

"If we wait another century or two, perhaps the market will shift again," they told each other. They did not need to uproot their costly orchards or bother selling their landholdings. They would simply let the orchards grow wild until they could be made profitable again. In the meantime, those pesky Midgardians were no longer buying as many Aesir products as they used to, citing economic hardships, and Midgard was truly turning into a as dismal a venture as they always believed it to be.

"Well, that is an improvement," Loki said. He held his hands out before him and looked over them carefully, his grey green eyes glittering with satisfaction. The blue had been replaced with a mild peach. Dark hair fell down to his shoulders, and layers of black, green, and metal armor blossomed over his body. He gave a sigh of such relief that Jane tried to bite back her disgust and disappointment. He looked, in clothes and manner, exactly like an Aesir.

"It doesn't look like an improvement," Jane bit back, forgetting for a moment that everyone could hear her. At Tal's laugh and Loki's frown, she blushed and stared down at the table.

"You would be the first to think so," Loki said.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to... ugh... I am just used to...," she began before fumbling into silence.

"I have gathered you hold no warmth for your former protectors, Jane Foster of Earth. Forgive me if the form I am most familiar with inhabiting proves such a disappointment to you."

Her embarrassment only intensified so she was more than relieved when Tal intervened and asked Loki to continue his story.

"As I was saying, I was born on Jotunheim, but I was raised on Asgard. My biological father died before I was born, and my mother soon married an Aesir merchant who was residing on Jotunheim. When the Ice War began, travel restrictions were placed on all Jotun and my mother begged her husband to bring me with him to Asgard. He placed an enchantment on me, so I appeared Aesir and did as she asked. He promised to bring her next, once he could find a means to smuggle her in. She died in during the invasion of Utgaard and all trade between Jotunheim and Asgard was suspended, so the Aesir merchant could not return. He kept me as his own and raised me on Asgard, never once knowing of my birth or my mother.

"When I came of age, my father told me all and I was distraught. I… I suppose you can say that I did not react well. You see, after the Ice War, the Aesir despised the Jotuns and held no fondness for the place of my birth. In addition, it happened to be that my birth parents were the former king and queen of Jotunheim. My elder brother came to the throne after my father's death and my existence was a threat to the new king. So, my mother went into hiding to keep me safe. While in hiding, she met her Aesir husband. Her marriage to the Aesir would not have been received well, but theirs was a love match and those are seldom made out of wisdom or convenience and my stepfather was a man who seldom kept with tradition.

"When my father told me all this, I was angry at everyone and everything for a time. I traveled the realms, as my father had done, conducting business in the manner he had taught me, but in truth, it was to allow myself the time I required to come to terms with all I had learned. When I returned to Asgard, I broke into the weapon's vault, stole the Casket of Ancient Winters, our most sacred Jotun relic, and returned it to Jotunheim. I supposed I hoped to set myself up as a kind of savior and find the acceptance there that I never felt I had in Asgard. The Jotuns, however, were just as proud and stubborn as the Aesir and they rejected me outright, as well. They nearly had my head for the Aesir ways about me and my brother saw me as a threat to his rule. They banished me from Jotunheim before I could so much as formulate an ice sword.

"However, I could never return to Asgard, either, or I would risk execution for treason. I continued travelling the realms at will for a time, until I was captured by a Titan who was as mad as a rabid ice hound and had worse tempers than a fire giant on Jotunheim. He sent me to Midgard to steal another relic, the Tesseract, from where the All-Father had hidden it. Well, the Aesir are not renowned for their mercy and when I was caught, they meant to execute me. I am not sure whether it was a curse or fortune which caused my fate to pass with that of the Collector. Somehow, he found out my true origin. He paid a heavy price to Asgard to preserve my life and allow me eternal imprisonment to be served in his thrice-cursed Collection instead. The Collector stripped me of my magic, bound me in all ways, and forced me into my natal form. I know not how many years I resided on Knowhere until the Collector was fool enough to play with Infinity Stones himself."

"So, you escaped with a Terran and came here?" Tal supplied, finishing the loose ends of Loki's tale.

"As you see us," Loki answered with a solemn nod.

"Why?" Jane asked. "I mean, why did you bring me with you?"

"You preferred to stay as you were?" he asked, one eyebrow arched in a way so familiar that she could recognize Sagittarius beneath the face of Loki.

"Definitely not. I never thought I'd be able to get away from that terrible place. I just don't understand why."

He pursed his lips and clasped his hands on the table before him while he considered his answer. "For all the ceaseless days and years and decades I spent trapped in Knowhere, you were the only being who did not cringe when you looked upon me. You did not avoid me or show any fear. You simply... saw me. I found I... owed you a debt and had no wish for you to discover what further fate would befall you in Knowhere. Besides, any mortal who could possibly raise that amount of ire in the Lady Sif must be a worthy companion."

"I'm glad," she said. She hoped the warmth in her eyes and the earnestness in her voice communicated all the gratitude her words could never adequately express.

"Well, it may interest you to know that Asgard is no more," Gorm said. When Jane and Loki turned to him in surprise and question, he continued. "It's as true as the asteroid cloud over Hirel. You know how they've always had their internal squabbles over which of their pampered children of Odin would rule? Well, the stories say they all had enough. The All-Father finally died off. The Princess Hela declared war on Asgard when her younger brother was given the throne instead of her. She recruited Muspelheim on her side and made sure no stone was standing by the time she made her own way back to Helheim. She'd rather tear Asgard to the ground then see it given to her brother. The Aesir that survived the wrath of Hela all went to Midgard and have declared it the New Asgard. Thor is king there now. They are building a whole new empire, though it's a might humbler than the old Asgard. After the Titan had his day, not many of the Aesir were left."

"Thanos?" Loki asked. "He was successful, then?"

All three Xandarians spit on the ground and then rubbed their feet in it and spoke a curse over the name and lineage of the Mad Titan. It was Ryko who answered, though he spoke with great hesitation, and he refused to speak Thanos' name.

"He nearly destroyed Xandar before he took out half of the universe. A few Aesir and some Ravagers tried to stop him, but, well, they didn't."

"I'm sorry. I'm confused," Jane interjected. "What do you mean he 'took out half of the universe'?"

"Just that. With a snap of his fingers, one half of all living beings in the universe turned to ash. There was no rhyme or reason to it. They vanished at random and none were exempt."

"But, but, wait, so did they come back?"

"No. Didn't you hear me? I said they turned to ash. Gone. Vanished. Never to return."

"Oh...oh," Jane said, a shudder running through her shoulders at the thought of it.

She began to think of what would have happened if Sagittarius had suddenly vanished, leaving her alone in that bunker. While it was true, she most likely could have survived on the food and water there for an extended period of time, the thought of returning to the stark, utter isolation sent a cold chill from her head to her toes. She thought of their hours of games, the ice sculptures, the shared watches, and just how much more endurable his silent, steady presence made everything. Even her life in captivity as a museum exhibit became a shade or two less horrendous by his presence in the cage next to her. To have him vanish in a pile of ash before her would have left her here, completely and utterly alone. She quickly blinked back her tears.

Jane could not contain herself any longer and she broke the heavy silence that had fallen on the room. "Then, why... how... I don't understand. Why are we both still here?"

"Why are any of us still hear?" Tal answered. "Those of us who survived, are we the lucky ones or the ones cursed by fate? Is it destiny or divine retribution that means we keep on living while all the others are gone?"

She inhaled deeply and considered this for a few moments before she answered. "I suppose it depends on what we do with the lives we still have."

Loki's face remained unreadable, but she felt a gentle nudge on her foot. She gave an answering push of her foot against his and let their ankles remain, their shared warmth a reminder that they were both still here, both still alive, for whatever unfathomable reason.

"Typical Aesir," Loki scoffed. "When Jotunheim seeks to conquer Midgard, the Aesir nearly raise Jotunheim to the ground in punishment, but only so that they can be the ones to conquer Midgard. Now they are dwelling on Midgard, the very same crime they accused the Jotuns of desiring to commit. Tell me, how fare the Midgardians?" Loki asked.

"There weren't any left," Jane whispered. "By the time I was sent away from Asgard, they were all gone. For nearly a century, they were ok. They were struggling, but they could have made it, even with all the soldiers Asgard sent for their constant rebellions and uprisings. But then the Muspel flu came. A merchant came to Earth with a case of it. We had no immunity. It took out sixty percent of the population before Asgard bothered to dig their vaccines and treatments from their archives. By the time they managed to send their first shipment of vaccines, only ten percent of the population remained. Asgard sent all their regrets and condolences, of course, but the damage was already done. I don't know what became of the ones who remained."

"Xandar heard rumblings about Asgard's treatment of their little protectorate," Tal said. "But by the time the slow-moving council on Xandar got into even putting Terran on their list of things to discuss, the Midgardians were already gone. Well, except you, I suppose."

"Except for me. I was told that I am the last of my kind."

Tal gave her a sad smile. "Does that mean you are the luckiest one of all? Is it a blessing or a curse to be the last one standing?"

"I don't know yet," she answered. "I'll let you know when I find out."

"Well, as asylum seekers, Xandar can probably give you refuge. We've rebuilt enough to have established at least some modicum of order. You had better come back with us to speak to the council," Tal said. "For there, you can set about finding a new home. You might even be able to return to Terran, if you wanted to."

Jane shook her head. She imagined just what Earth, the place of her birth, would look like once the Aesir rebuilt it all and turned it into a place like Asgard. For all Asgard's gilded towers and shimmering fortresses, it had never been her home and she had never belonged there. To think of all Earth now becoming like Asgard was another loss, like finding out an old friend is gone. She preferred to keep her memories as they were. Afterall, she was the only one living who still could remember them.

"No. I think I'd rather make a new home somewhere else," she answered.

Tal nodded. "And you? I do not know the situation in Jotunheim, but it may be improved from the last time you were there, especially with Asgard no longer interfering in their affairs."

Loki pressed his hands together in front of his mouth for a moment. Jane could still see the faintest traces of scars running along each side of his lips. Slowly, he shook his head and turned to meet her eyes. "I would prefer to begin anew as well."

She felt another tap of his foot against hers. At the unspoken question in his eyes, she smiled and gave a slight nod of her head. Then she felt his hand, no longer cold and blue but so very warm, slip into hers. She gave a gentle squeeze in response.

They may be the most unlikely pair in the universe, each a singular representation of their species, but they would not be alone. As far as new beginnings went, Jane knew it could be worse.

Maybe they could even settle somewhere that provided a better view of the stars.

The End