Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Hour one down.

Alexandra sighed and nervously poked at the airplane screen facing her. The man to her left gave a little snort before sleepily changing his cramped position against the window. For a moment, she covetously eyed him. Sleeping on planes was—for her—akin to breathing underwater, but luckily her crippling anxiety ensured she was never without her share of nightmares. With another sigh, her vision slid back to the screen.

The deceptively friendly airplane-shaped beacon showed that they were still somewhere over Nova Scotia, the dotted line etched across the North Atlantic and stretching out of frame, onward for thousands of miles, before it presumably terminated at Heathrow.

As if sensing her despair, the airplane gave a little wiggle, slopping a bit of liquid from her seatmate’s still filled cup of Coke. With a spike of adrenalin, Alex fished out a dissolvable clonazepam from her hoodie pocket, ripped into the packet with her teeth, and hurriedly licked at the powdery tablet.

As its sweetness spread across her tongue and her heartrate slowed in Pavlovian response, she glared at the map as if it was the source of all her woes. Of course, it was her fault. She had broken up with Christian (never mind that his obsession with all things geek and his indifference to all things relationship had driven her to it), and she had planned a Stella-Got-Her-Groove-Back-esque vacation to the UK, necessitating the transatlantic flight in the first place.

The plane rattled again. With nerves jittering anew, she unbuckled her seatbelt and made her way down the aisle. Several long minutes elapsed, each one seemingly punctuated by a new shudder of the craft around her. By the time it was her turn for the toilet, her hands were trembling, and she dashed inside without a care for the lingering unpleasantness of passengers before her.

The mirror reflected her visage back far too brightly for her liking, and she grimaced when she saw the paleness of her skin, the tightness around her blue eyes, the limp set of her long red hair. Influencer she was not.

For the umpteenth time that trip, she heaved a full-body sigh. Forgoing the facilities, she instead slowly washed her hands and tried to avoid eye contact with herself. Finally, after several all-too-short seconds of precious isolation, she slid open the bathroom lock.

The aroma of cooking food hit her nostrils. They’d be serving dinner soon. While she was hardly excited about vegetarian airplane food, at least it would break up the monotony of the flight, and her face slightly brightened. She began plodding back up the aisle, swaying from the drug and exhaustion and latent anxiety and knocking into more than one seat along the way.

Two rows to go, and the plane dropped.

Alex slammed into an armrest as unsecured luggage and people skidded across the hull. She shrieked, bitter adrenalin coating her tongue. Red ‘fasten seatbelt’ signs suddenly flashed down the cabin rows.

“Folks,” the pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “We’re experi-”

The plane dropped again. Alex flew to the other side of the aisle, nearly in someone’s lap, screams and cries pouring forth from terrified passengers. Another jolt, and she tripped backward, her head ricocheting off something. And then she fell.

And fell.

And fell.

Lights streamed around her, distorted images, trees, buildings, people; the warm aroma of baking bread and the pungent stench of stale vomit; a baby resting gently on her chest, a rough hand over her mouth as she screamed, fire licking up her legs and smoke heavy in her lungs, coughing, laughing, a man nuzzling her neck murmuring loving words, freezing cold and snow sticking to her eyelashes, admiring her suddenly curvaceous body in a mirror, pounding bass as she ground against another woman on a dimly lit dance floor, sweat streaking her forehead as her strangely masculine hands gripped a cock attached to her hips, neck jolting as a car slammed into her bumper, tears running down her face as she hung up an old rotary-style phone, sleet pounding against a windowpane, the warmth of a fire, the tear of flesh as a knife ripped open her hand; thin oxygen, she struggled to breathe; voices, screams, murmurs, music and the lap of ocean waves and the buzzing of cars and barking dogs and screaming babies and a rippling brook and a blaring television and pure light and endless darkness and nothing, nothing, nothing—

—she collided with the ground.

Laughter and screams faded in her ears until the world was silent. She lay supine, staring up at a hazy, grey sky. She blinked and it was nighttime; blinked again and her view was obscured by a canopy of lush, green trees.

It smelled of rain. A strange bird of gold and spotted emerald cawed to her from a nearby branch. She stared at it, mindless, dull. The bird squawked and fluttered away, her eyes not tracking the movement. There was nothing, nothing to latch onto, nothing to reanimate her mind.

It was green, and it smelled of rain.

Gradually, awareness of her body returned. Her fingers began to tingle, her left hip began to ache. She sucked in a deep breath and shuddered, able to feel her staccato heartbeat and the rapid expansion of her lungs. She closed her eyes. Counted to five.

Her eyes reopened on a blue sky.

“Ma’am, are you alright?”

Alex blinked a few times, her limbs trembling, before she groggily rolled her head toward the direction of the male voice. Her vision was wrong, the scene before her muted and fuzzy and clouded by a strange, acrid, burning smoke. She squeezed her eyes tightly closed and opened again.

The scene hadn’t changed.

“Ma’am?” A tall, muscular man came into view. Alex scanned his features, the dirty blond crewcut, the bright blue eyes and square jaw, and an uneasy feeling began creeping up her spine. He suddenly stopped in his tracks, eyes wide and darting downward to examine the ground as a red flush filled his cheeks. “Uh, ma’am, you’re, uh…you’re naked.”

She frowned at his words, glanced down at herself, and saw that he was correct. With a little shriek, she sat up and spun around, knees pulled to her chest, hands trying to cover everything of importance as her head suddenly, violently ached at the motion.

The strange man continued to blush, his eyes sternly focused down. There was something about his boyish embarrassment that caused that niggling feeling to deepen, and despite her own mortification she took the moment to further examine him.

He was wearing a bizarre outfit, blue and white armor—an entire exoskeleton, really—with a giant silver star over his chest that seemed to scream ‘target’. Impractical, she thought. And familiar. Weirdly familiar.

Then it hit her.

“Captain America?!”

Her eyes, blown wide with terror, raked over every inch of the strange man in a desperate search for a different answer, but he only confirmed her horrified suspicion with a slow nod. His hand reached out in front of him in a vague attempt to calm her down, his eyes still not meeting her body.

“Are you hurt, ma’am?”

Rapid breaths tore through her chest. Around her she saw only carnage, broken glass and shattered concrete, blood and something slime-like, twisted metal, strangely glowing shards, dust clogging the air. Wind whipped at her hair, and she realized she was high up, extremely high up.

She looked back at him as the color drained out of her face. “Why the fuck are you Captain America?”

He blinked in confusion at the question, but to her it couldn’t have been clearer. The plane must have crashed, somehow, somewhere, and one of the rescuers was dressed like Captain fucking America? He wasn’t Chris Evans, that was for damn sure, but a strange sort of facsimile with the wrong spacing between his eyes and thinner lips and brighter eyes and…Christ it was strange, like a celebrity impersonator on steroids.

“Can someone grab something to cover her with?” the bizarre cosplayer called out.

As she gaped at him in stunned silence, she gradually grew aware of who he was talking to, a huddled mass of people behind him, features vague in the smoke-filled air. One of them, a redheaded woman in a tight black suit, walked toward them, her eyes trained on Alex, a blanket in her hands. Seeming a bit hesitant, the other redhead quickly handed her the item and took several steps away.

As she wrapped the blanket around her nude form, Alex’s overtaxed mind slowly began putting together the pieces on the woman as well. She glanced at the five others still standing in the background. Well, four people and… and… was that supposed to be the goddamn Hulk?

Alex jumped to her feet, immediately swaying at the drop in blood pressure. Capt… No, whoever the fuck was dressed like Captain America took a cautious step toward her as did the nutso woman pretending to be the Black Widow, while in the background some idiot dressed like Iron Man raised an upright hand in her direction with a vaguely menacing blue light glowing from his palm.

She wrapped the blanket tightly around herself. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Ma’am, if you’ll just calm down,” the Captain America-wannabe little shit condescended to her. “We can help.”

She shook her head, the motion roiling through her entire body. “What the fuck? Why are you dressed like the Avengers?”

The blond stared at her uneasily for a moment before tossing a look at the faux Widow. “What…did you call us?”

Alex gripped at the fabric between her fingers, waves of nausea and confusion and terror ripping through her. What was going on, what was going on!

“You,” she said in a near shriek that hardly formed beyond her gasping breaths and gestured toward the group with a hand she saw was dirty and covered in blood. “Steve Rogers, Natasha, Tony Stark, Thor, Clint, the freaking Hulk…” she trailed off, squinting a bit to identify the tall, dark-haired man at the back of the group as those in the forefront suddenly began murmuring to one another. “Even Loki? Why are you doing this? What the hell is going on!”

Not-Steve took another step toward her, his arm outstretched to grasp hers. “I think you better come with me,” he said in what she assumed was meant to be a gentle voice but to her ears sounded like the detached sort of calm a serial killer might wield as he strangled a woman to death.

“Don’t you fucking touch me.”

His arm dropped back to his side.

“Hey, uh, Dorothy?” not-Tony called out as not-Steve took a step to the side. Her eyes darted from the toy soldier to quickly scan the new speaker—elements of RD Jr., sure, but again the facial structure was off, the goatee not quite as sleazy as it had been in the movies—and swiftly returned to not-Steve as he took another step toward her side. Notasha, too, seemed to be circling her slowly in the other direction.

In response, Alex took a step backward, and suddenly everyone’s hands flew up in the air, a collective “Don’t!” shouting at her in multiple voices.

Alex froze in place. Nervously she glanced behind her and saw…nothing. Or rather, the edge of nothing. The floor just ended, dropping into empty space. She was on top of a skyscraper, and in the distance she could see smoking buildings, hear the peal of sirens, smell fire on the wind. Not-Steve inched closer, and that time she didn’t react, her body going numb.

“This is the Chitauri attack,” she murmured in a dreamy voice, a flash of movement catching her eye as not-Loki’s head shot up at her words. “This… It’s not real.” She met not-Steve’s consoling gaze as quiet, confused, terrified tears shimmered over her eyes. “This isn’t real.”

His hand slid gently around her bicep and gave her a slight tug toward him. She allowed him to propel her forward, through what her brain groggily placed as the wreckage of Chitauri ships and Tony Stark’s destroyed penthouse.

Not-Tony met her gaze, and whatever he saw on her face caused him to lower his glowing hand, a strange expression flittering across his features. They mostly seemed to relax a bit then—Notasha rolling her shoulders, not-Clint lowering his bow—except for not-Thor, who regarded her with a perplexed look, and not-Loki, who stared at her with a deep, pondering frown.

Not-Steve helped her sit in a sleek, deeply uncomfortable chair, one of the few non-destroyed bits of furniture in what was once not-Tony’s living room. There was a massive hole in the concrete floor, presumably where not-Hulk had pummeled not-Loki just moments earlier.

She stared at the indentation, then glanced at the group to let out a slight, hysterical laugh. “I’ll have that drink now.”

Not-Loki’s head cocked to the side while not-Tony’s brows furrowed together. “You’ll what?”

She looked at the playboy billionaire—actor? cosplayer? lunatic?—and gestured toward the scene’s villain. “He wants a drink, I definitely want a drink, and you did offer.”

Not-Tony’s eyes narrowed at her, then shot toward not-Loki. “What sick shit are you pulling now?” Not-Loki looked baffled at the accusation as not-Thor lifted his hammer and turned to his younger brother to say something in a foreign language.

Not-Tony’s eyes shot back to Alex’s as the light at his palm began to glow again. “Who are you? Are you working with him?”

Her eyes darted between the various players, the hysterical cry still tickling up her throat, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. Then her gaze unfocused, her brain completely disassociating as she whispered to herself, “Nightmare. It’s a nightmare.”

“Hey, Dorothy, I’m talking to you,” not-Tony began to shout, a feminine voice softly encouraging him to calm down. Not-Tony shook off Notasha’s comforting hand and strode over to where Alex sat, not-Steve stiffening beside her as he uneasily regarded the billionaire. “You drop onto my deck out of fucking nowhere, completely naked, you know who we are, you know what we’ve said, and you’ve got about ten seconds to start explaining before I lock you into the same cell as Reindeer Games over there.”

“Tony,” not-Steve softly started.

“No,” not-Tony shot down, a single finger shoving into Alex’s face. “Start talking. Now.”

She looked up at him. It was uncanny, really. Like if someone described Tony Stark to a police sketch artist and the result was turned into a man. Similar enough that there was no denying who he was meant to be and altered enough that she knew it wasn’t real.

“I think I’m dead,” she whispered. His head jerked back in surprise. “Or… In a coma… Or something. This isn’t… It can’t be real.”

She glanced around the room again, the strange not-Avengers group assembled before her. “I was on a plane. There was turbulence, and it was bad, and then I just… I kept falling… And… And…”

She trailed off, took a shuddering breath, and tightly closed her eyes. “And either the plane crashed and I’m dead and this is some fucked-up afterlife, or I hit my head and I’m in a coma somewhere and this is my brain pulling a Sopranos.”

“What’s a Sopranos?” not-Steve questioned.

Not-Tony ignored him and instead regarded her with a softer expression. “How do you know who we are?”

“This is so stupid,” she muttered to herself. “This is a movie. It’s a… You’re a bunch of characters in a movie, and my idiot brain has dropped me into the middle of it, probably the last gasp of brain activity as my oxygen supply is cut off, and I don’t even know why because I don’t even like Marvel that much.” She shook her head in annoyance. “I really would like that drink.”

Not-Tony pursed his lips for a second, then glanced toward not-Steve. The two of them seemed to wordlessly communicate for a moment before not-Tony turned back to her. “Sure, kid. What’s your poison?”

She shrugged in response, and he walked over to the bar. Clint and Natasha were whispering together, heads close but eyes shifting between her and Loki. The Hulk—not quite as large as the films had made him out to be but also far more pungent as she could smell his thick sweat from across the room—was pacing behind them, muttering to himself. Thor seemed to have lost interest in her and was instead focused on Loki, Mjolnir gripped threateningly before him.

And Loki—not Loki—was ignoring everything else and staring straight at her. The intensity of his blue-eyed gaze brought a shiver to her spine as she wished out of everyone that he was his actor and not the creepy doppelgänger standing before her.

Tony placed a glass of whiskey into her hands, and she gratefully took a gulp as he reclined on the still-intact coffee table, sipping from a glass of his own.

“Tony,” Steve started in a warning tone.

The billionaire cut him off with an annoyed wave of his hand. “Yeah, I’m good, boy scout, just want to have a chat with our new friend here.” Steve seemed to sigh, then hesitantly walked away. “So, a movie, huh?” Tony said to her as the drink swirled in his hand. “I’m the star, right?”

She rolled her eyes. God, it was so stupid. “Yeah, kind of.”

He considered that for a moment, nodding to himself. “Who plays me?”

“Robert Downey, Jr.”

That made him laugh, and he nodded again. “Not bad. Little drugged out, but alright.”

“Pepper is Gwyneth Paltrow.”

“Ooh,” he breathed. “That’s good.” He took another sip. “What else do you know about Pepper?”

Clearly not a master interrogator. “She’s barely in the films. And I’m not a spy, or working with Loki, or whatever you think… Jesus, you’re in my head.”

“Okay,” he slowly started. “Let’s pretend I believe you. Sure, what you’re saying is impossible and makes, you know, no sense, but sure. Go with it for a second. A movie. What happens next?”

She frowned at him and took a long gulp of whiskey before responding. “You go get shawarma.”

He froze with his glass halfway to his lips. For a long moment he only stared at her, then slowly lowered his hand. “What else.” It didn’t sound like a question, more an expression of wonderment.

She answered anyway. “SHIELD comes to collect the scepter. Thor takes Loki back to Asgard. And… There’s like, some time travel, but that’s in a sequel and doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“What do you know of Asgard?” Thor’s voice suddenly boomed.

Alex shook her head as his words violently echoed inside her still-aching skull. Jesus, he was loud. “What do you mean, what do I know? Nine realms, Odin, Frigga, Heimdall, the Bifrost, which, like, isn’t it destroyed now? Or just the bridge is? I never really understood how you were able to get here…” she trailed off as she realized both Asgardians’ postures had changed, and they were eyeing her with open interest.

Thor’s shattering voice reached her ears again. “Are you a seer, my lady?”

“A see…” she trailed off. It was clear she wasn’t getting anywhere with the humans, so maybe being some mystical psychic would give her more credence with the Asgardians. The Asgardians. Jesus, what the fuck was happening to her brain? “Yeah, I guess so.”

Tony looked between Thor and her, seemingly considering something. “Okay,” he finally decided, the projection of his voice making it clear he was addressing the group. “Here’s what we’re going to do. Dorothy here and Rock of Ages are going in the Hulk-proof holding container downstairs, and the rest of us are getting something to eat. Can’t think on an empty stomach.” He made a move to take Alex’s glass, and she quickly downed the remaining liquid before wearily handing it back to him.

Ten minutes later Alex was somehow highly tipsy—tipsy? after a single drink?—and thankfully clad in an ill-fitting but still-welcome tank top and pair of sweats, the former scrounged from Pepper’s drawers and the latter a cast-off pair of Tony’s. Less thankfully, she was deep underground and locked into a plexiglass cube kitted out with a bench, a prison-issue toilet paired with a privacy screen, and one very tall, very menacing demigod.

“Play nice, now,” Tony had said with a smile before gently pushing her—and sending her drunkenly stumbling—into the cube.

“Loki,” Thor warned in that same booming voice that made Alex wince. “Leave the Midgardian alone.”

Loki responded by giving a slow, dark smile. Alex felt a fresh surge of adrenalin, though it was tempered by her strange buzz. Still, she pressed herself against the farthest wall as the door to the hallway closed behind the departing superheroes. Loki waited a beat, his eyes meeting hers in the reflection of the plexiglass wall.

“Well now,” he said with that same serpentine smile. His voice was low and sultry and strangely accented—not British as the movies, but also not not British; it was as though his accent was an amalgamation of every native English speaker on Earth. “I do believe you and I should have a chat.”

She stared right back at the reflection, willing herself to stay strong. It was a dream. A bizarre, hyper-realistic dream, a nightmare no doubt dredged from her memories of fighting with Christian and his stupid obsession with Marvel. Or maybe she was just drunk.

“I have nothing to say to you.”

He fluidly spun around on his heel to meet her gaze full on. “Oh, little pet,” he oozed with menacing calm. “I did not say you had a choice in the matter.”

She was struck by the vividness of his blue eyes, the telltale hue of the Mind Stone’s power. Great. Her brain had stuck her in a cell with an addict coming off a high and desperate for his next hit.

“You’re handcuffed,” she pointed out, slurring slightly over the words despite her best intentions. “And you’re also not real, so-”

His hands were on her throat so quickly that her eyes didn’t even register his movement.

“Do you deny my existence now, worm?” he hissed as his cool fingers wrapped around her windpipe.

She sputtered in surprise, her own hands going to his in a vain attempt to pull herself free. His tightened in response until she felt her lungs begin to heave, real terror clawing at her ribcage even as her nails clawed uselessly at his forearms.

His aquiline nose nearly touched hers as his beautiful, terrifying face filled her vision, his eyes incandescent. “I am a god, and the rightful ruler of this realm, and the only choice left to you pathetic mortals is whether to submit or die.”

He held her there a moment longer as she silently gaped at him for release, her chest tightening beyond pain into searing agony. Then, just as suddenly as he had set upon her, he dropped his hands.

Alex crumbled to the floor, gasping, wheezing, not able to suck in cool air rapidly enough for her arid lungs.

Loki turned sharply on his heel and walked over to the small bench, taking it as his seat as regally as if it were a throne, while she continued to sputter and writhe on the floor.

After several seconds, he took in an audible breath of air himself, then glanced at her with a vaguely repulsed expression on his face, his eyes rapidly losing the unnatural sheen.
“Oh, come now, mortal,” he said in a voice tinged with disgust as Alex’s coughing continued, spittle dripping out of her mouth. “You cannot truly be that feeble. I scarcely touched you.”

She ignored his words as she continued to fight for air. After a long moment she recovered enough to sit up, then scamper backward until her back hit the corner of the cell. Silently she stared at him, eyes wide, heart hammering, throat burning as though choked with ash.

She had felt that, really felt it, the dizziness at the lack of air and the darkening vision and the panicked, desperate terror of her amygdala pumping sickening stress hormones through her bloodstream. She had never felt anything like that. Not a dream, then. A coma. Had to be.

That, or Hell.

Alex pulled her knees protectively to her chin and continued to warily eye Loki. He cast a dismissive glance her way. “As you have finally concluded your theatrics, you may proceed.”

“Proceed?”

He let out an exasperated sigh. “Are you simple, girl? You are mortal and yet have knowledge beyond this realm. How?”

She hesitated. “You won’t believe me.”

“Tell me.”

“But you’re not-”

“Tell me,” he interrupted in a frighteningly dark tone that made her wince. “And know that if you think to deceive me, you are even more foolish than you appear, which would be remarkable indeed.” Her eyes narrowed slightly, which seemed to perversely amuse him. “I suggest you adhere strictly to the truth.”

Alex continued to direct an atmosphere of fear his way even as her eyes remained in a glare. “I was serious upstairs. I was on an airplane, and something strange happened, and now I’m stuck in this hellscape of a Marvel movie.”

“What is a ‘marvel movie’?”

“It’s…” How the hell to explain it? “A movie is like a play, only it’s recorded so you can watch it whenever you want. And a Marvel movie is about superhero characters created by writers who work for a company called Marvel.”

“And you believe I am a character in one of these plays?” He sounded affronted.

“Yeah… Yes, but not just you. All of you. Tony and Captain America, and Thor, and the stupid freaking Hulk, and… And this, this thing happening right now,” she gestured aimlessly at the room, “is all in one of those movies.”

“That is utterly ridiculous.”

She wearily eyed him. “I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

“I did not say you lie,” he countered with another glance her way. He was silent for a moment, those sharp, handsome features pulled in a pensive frown. Suddenly he leaned forward, tilting his body as he did so, until he was directly facing her. His manacled hands settled on the ledge of his knees. “You mentioned the Chitauri. What do you know of them?”

“Not too much,” Alex answered slowly. He seemed to have calmed down for the moment, but she had no idea how he would react to her next statement. “I just know they were given to you as an army… By Thanos.”

Loki’s back went ramrod straight, his scowl all at once turning menacing. Alex’s own back stiffened in terrified anticipation. “What do you know of him?” he asked in that same low, dangerous voice.

She didn’t dare take her eyes off him. “He’s a Titan, I think?”

His own eyes narrowed. “You know far more than you say.”

“I…”

That unnatural blue tint began to rise again in the gaze across from her, and she hurriedly spat out, “I know about the Children of Thanos, and I know he’s looking for the Infinity Stones.”

That time, there was no visible reaction. “And what do you know of the Stones?” His voice remained lethal.

“I know there are six of them scattered throughout the universe-” she stopped herself from adding that she knew where each of the six were. He seemed to catch her hesitation and that blue tinge began to rise again.

She quickly added, “Your scepter contains the Mind Stone and the Tesseract contains the Space Stone.” That knowledge seemed to momentarily placate Loki, his eyes returning to their normal shade of blue. Quietly she offered, “And I know that when Thanos finds all of them, he’ll use them to erase half the life in this universe.”

Loki’s voice remained low. “You know that, do you.”

It wasn’t a question, but she responded anyway. “I watched it happen. Many times.”

He stared silently at her for several long minutes while she cowered beneath his gaze, too terrified to look away. Finally, he asked, “What are you?”

She blinked in surprise. “What do… I’m a human.”

His black tresses weaved around his face as he slowly shook his head. “You are mortal, but you are not of this realm.”

“I am, though,” she argued, then frowned. “Well, I guess not this realm, but like, Earth. Midgard. I’m from Midgard. Only on my Midgard, this is all just a thing people watch for entertainment and not something that has actually happened. None of this is real.” She said the last words with a catch in her breath, remembering how the accusation had set him off just minutes prior.

But instead of flipping into homicidal rage, Loki simply shook his head again. “Your words make little sense and yet you do not lie.” A line creased between his brows as he considered her with surging interest. “Tell me, how does this marvel movie of yours end?”

“Okay,” she slowly started, trying to collect her thoughts, desperately sorting through the countless hours she had spent in that world at Christian’s behest. "So there are a lot of movies. This isn’t the first one and it isn’t the last, and plus there are tv shows now, but…” she trailed off as she could sense she was losing him. “This particular movie ends with Thor taking you to Asgard and the audience finding out the twist that it was really Thanos behind everything. And the Avengers go have shawarma.”

“Which is…?”

“Like this stacked hunk of rotating, cooking meat.”

His features morphed to repulsed. “Your realm finds entertainment in mastication?”

“No, but it was a throwaway line, and they turned it into a scene and… It was actually pretty funny.”

He continued to stare at her. “What else do you know?”

“I mean, I know a lot, Loki,” she said in an exasperated tone, momentarily forgetting the coiled viper sitting across from her. “I know Thor got banished to Earth and fell in love with a mortal. I know you sent the Destroyer after him. I know what happened after. But I’m guessing you don’t want to talk about most of that.”

“No,” he agreed in a cool tone, those deadly eyes still locked on her. “I will concede that you are sufficiently knowledgeable about the past. But what do you know of the future?”

A thousand scenes flittered through her mind: Frigga dying, Odin dying, Tony’s death and Vision’s death and Natasha’s death and Jane’s death and… Loki’s death. A fresh wave of nausea overtook her. “I know enough,” she whispered.

He considered her for a moment, his features completely unreadable. “You think of coming terrors. Tell me one.”

She stared back at him with pleading eyes, but he only coldly returned her stare, wearing her down until she finally confessed, “I’ve seen Ragnarök.”

Not a muscle on his face moved. “How does it happen?”

“It’s… I don’t think I should say.”

“Ah,” he said with an annoyed sigh, his manacled hands lifting off his lap as he rolled his eyes. Huffing, he slouched back against the wall. “I am to once again play the villain, I presume.”

“Not really… It’s more complicated than that.”

“Explain.”

“I really don’t think…” she trailed off as he resumed his previous, confrontational stance. “Look, your moth- Frigga is a seer, right? So-”

“Do not presume to know who Frigga is,” he cut her off in a hiss.

She winced, her neck throbbing with residual pain. In a slow, careful voice, she restarted her train of thought. “Okay. Um. Seers are shown things, right? Possible futures? Or parts of possible futures? But if they tell others exactly what they saw it might change how things happen… Right?”

He didn’t contradict her words and so she continued. “So if I tell you how something as big as Ragnarök happens, it might happen differently, or not at all, or maybe me telling you ends up being the very thing that causes it to happen. That doesn’t sound like a great plan.”

Once again, he quietly, coldly, considered her. “You are new to your art.”

“Uh yeah, no kidding,” she replied with a nervous laugh.

“Your utter lack of anything even beginning to resemble proficiency is hardly a mark in your favor.” Alex swallowed tightly at that, and he again sighed and slightly relaxed his stance, muttering mostly to himself, “And yet you do not lie.”

Slouching once more against the wall, he cocked his head to the side. “Answer me one question, then, and do not dare deceive me.” She nodded slightly, her stomach twisting angrily in anticipation. Although his face remained stoic, his voice dropped ever so slightly as he asked, “Do I ever become a king?”

She returned his stare, careful not to avoid his eyes. “Yes.”

There was the faintest whisper of a smile at that, followed almost immediately by a slight frown. “Of which realm?”

“You said one question,” she huffed, once again forgetting with whom she was dealing.

But instead of threatening her, or strangling her, that same whisper of a smile reappeared. “Clever mortal,” he murmured to himself with a slight tilt of his head. “Very well, seer, I believe you.”

Chapter Text

Alexandra and Loki were sitting in silence an hour later when Tony and Thor returned to the cell. Loki had apparently lost interest in her abilities—or, more worryingly, was busy ruminating on how best to exploit them—and had ceased peppering her with questions, opting instead to close his eyes and rest his head back against the plexiglass, breathing softly, no doubt feigning sleep.

The returning superheroes had both shown clear surprise at the near-amicable scene before them, with Loki sitting comfortably on the bench and Alex still on the floor, her knees no longer pulled protectively to her chest but instead stretched out along the ground.

“Alright, Dorothy,” Tony started, and she couldn’t help but roll her eyes at the continued nickname. “You’re with me. Snape, time for you to get off my planet.”

Loki frowned in confusion, but Alex cut him off before he could say anything. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

All three men whipped their eyes to her, and she inadvertently shrank back at the attention. “You got something you wanna say, kid?”

“I…” she trailed off, wondering what the hell her next move should be. If Loki was imprisoned in Asgard, he’d be in the cell when the Dark Elves came, and Frigga would die, and then later Odin would die, and… “I think I should go to Asgard, too.”

Loki snorted at that, while Thor shook his giant blond mane. “My lady, no Midgardian has set foot in Asgard for a thousand years. I regret that you would not be welcome.”

“Yeah,” she slightly stammered. “But I’m a seer, right? So doesn’t that make a difference?”

Thor frowned as though confronting a particularly vexing algebra problem. Tony was less fazed. “Kid, frankly, you show up on my doorstep talking horseshit, and we just left you alone with the bad guy for an hour and you don’t have a scratch on you, so sorry but you’re not exactly credible right now.”

She turned to look accusingly at Loki. “No scratch, huh?” she muttered at him, red marks surely gracing her throat, a strange tickling vibration on her neck.

He returned her look with a blank expression. Even with the manacles, apparently he had enough magic to conceal her bruises and spare himself the additional wrath of his brother. For a moment she considered calling attention to the apparent weakness in his bonds and her own mangled neck but ultimately thought better of it. Probably best to stay on Loki’s good side.

With an annoyed shake of her head, she looked back at Tony. “So if I go with you, what happens?”

He shrugged. “I’m sure SHIELD will figure out what to do with you.”

“Seriously?” she spat. “Fucking SHIELD? The same assholes who just tried to nuke New York?”

Tony seemed to take pause with that for a moment, then shook his head. “Look, I don’t know what weird little project you have going on,” he gestured between Loki and Alex. “But it’s above my paygrade. Fury can figure it out.”

“There’s no project… If we were working together, why wouldn’t I come up with a better story than goddamn movies?”

“I guess espionage isn’t your true calling.”

“Oh my god,” she muttered as she cast her eyes upward. “This is so fucking stupid.”

“Well, we agree on that one, Miss Cleo. Now come on.” He started to unlock the plexiglass door while Thor gripped his hammer in preparation for any move from Loki.

Alex begrudgingly stood up. Casting another glowering look of heat at Loki, she began heading for the open partition. When she had just started to cross the threshold, the dark prince’s smooth voice rang out, “She does not lie.”

Alex froze mid-step. She spun back to face Loki and found him unmoved from his position on the bench, his features bored, his eyes focused dully on the plexiglass directly across from him.

“Yeah, well, lie or not, she’s still SHIELD’s problem,” Tony countered from behind her. “Get a move on, sweetheart.”

A darkly amused smirk flittered across Loki’s face as he gave a slight shake of his head. His voice became one of muted exasperation as he sarcastically murmured, “Behold the intellectual capacity of this realm’s brightest mind.” He shook his head again, leant his head back against the wall, and closed his eyes.

“Says the psycho with the god-complex who was just handed his ass by this realm’s bri-”

“What do you mean, Loki?” Thor interrupted. “Speak plainly.”

Loki shrugged, eyes still closed. “She does not belong here,” he said, as if it was the least interesting comment in the world.

“Okay, this tall, dark, mysterious thing may work on your planet,” Tony huffed, and Alex felt him reach into the cell to grab her arm. As he pulled her out of the doorway, he continued, “but here on Earth we know you’re full of shit.”

Loki smirked again but otherwise made no movement.

Tony rolled his eyes and began to drag Alex to the room’s main door. “Ow, Jesus,” she hissed, his grip so tight on her skin that she winced. He gave her a peculiar side eye but did not release her, and she winced in pain again.

“Tony, wait,” Thor called, holding up a hesitant hand toward the pair while his eyes remained on his imprisoned brother. “Loki, explain yourself.”

Tony rolled his eyes again. “You have got to be kidding me. He’s clearly stalling for time, probably so his side piece can do whatever it is she’s gonna do.”

“Side piece?” Alex indignantly repeated. “First, I have a fucking name, and sec-”

“Surely not even you are that dense, Thor,” Loki continued in the same detached voice, clearly ignoring Tony and Alex in favor of continuing his machinations with his brother. “One hardly needs the sight of Heimdall to see that the girl is not of this realm.”

Thor looked to Alex with confusion heavy on his face. “Are you truly not of Midgard, my lady?”

“Alright, playtime’s over,” Tony stated with evident irritation. “Let’s go, kiddo.”

Loki gave a little huff of grim amusement. “A true innocent—perhaps the only true innocent in the Nine—and you would turn her over to those who do naught but slay her kind.” A low, dark chuckle escaped his lips as he rolled his eyes upward before once again closing them. “Rather makes one wonder who was fighting whom today.”

“Hey, asshole,” Tony suddenly snapped. “You’re the one who just dropped down on my planet to rain carnage, so you can zip it with the slaying talk.”

“Bold words from a weapons manufacturer,” Alex couldn’t help but murmur.

The hand on her bicep tightened. She let out a little yelp as Tony shot her a heated look. “Reformed,” he responded with an annoyed smile. “And it sounds like she can take care of herself, so we’re done here.”

Again, Thor halted them. “I yet require the lady to speak in her defense.”

“Come on, Point Break,” he loudly sighed as his head cocked upward to look at the ceiling. “You’re going to listen to him now? After what we just went through? He’s playing you!”

Thor considered that for a moment, then slowly shook his head. “I wish for the lady to speak for herself.” Tony sighed loudly again and began a retort that was immediately cut off by Thor. “Please, my friend. Let her speak.”

Tony muttered something under his breath in response, head shaking in disbelief, but said nothing further. Thor turned his gaze—though seemingly gentle, still nearly as unnerving as Loki’s—to Alex. “My lady, does Loki speak the truth? Are you of Midgard?”

Alex glanced at the lunatic in question and found his form unmoved, his eyes still closed. Her choice was to hitch her wagon to Loki—an unhinged war criminal who clearly had his own (almost certainly nefarious) reason for wanting her to come to Asgard—or let herself be thrown into the midst of SHIELD. What a shitty, shitty choice. Goddamn her stupid brain.

“No,” she stated, meeting Thor’s gaze head on just as she had done for Loki. “I am not of Midgard.” Over Thor and Tony’s shoulders, so only she could see, Loki’s lips quirked up in a small smile.

“Oh, yeah, this day just keeps getting better,” Tony sarcastically droned. He released her arm to pinch at the bridge of his nose. “What’s next, your little dog…”

His voice trailed off as his eyes opened and focused on her arm. She followed his gaze to see five finger-shaped marks glowing an angry red against her skin.

“Yeah,” she muttered. “I told you you were hurting me.”

“I didn’t do that!” Tony chirped in his own defense, eyes going wide and glancing back-and-forth between Alex’s bruised arm and Thor’s intensifying gaze. “I… I didn’t do that!”

Thor’s posture shifted ever so slightly in front of her. “You have injured a prisoner in your care.”

“No!” Tony wildly countered, eyes glancing around and falling on the still-unmoved Loki. “It’s him! He’s doing this!”

“My friend,” Thor started, though that time the term held no real warmth. “The manacles which bind Loki’s wrists also entirely suppress his power.” Once again, Alex held her tongue at that. “He is not harming the girl.”

“Then she’s fucking doing it! I didn’t hurt her!” Tony’s accusing eyes met hers. “I didn’t hurt you.”

“No, you’re right,” she sarcastically retorted. “Five giant-ass bruises on my arm don’t hurt at all. Why don’t you give me a black eye, too?”

Tony could only sputter in response.

Thor shifted once again, placing his body directly between her and Tony. “I believe you to be an honorable man, and I would gladly once again fight by your side. But if even you cannot be trusted with the girl’s safety, then I cannot permit SHIELD to gain custody. I have seen their savageness with my own eyes.”

“I didn’t hurt her!”

“As Prince of Asgard and Protector of Midgard, I assert my claim to the seer,” Thor announced in a tone so commanding even Tony froze. “The girl is not of this realm and will not find safety on it.”

“Thor, Jesus, she’s-”

“For the sake of friendship, I implore you to offer no challenge. I have no wish to quarrel with you, but if you stand in my way, it is a fight you will not win.”

“You’re seriously going to throw down over some chick who clearly-”

“My friend, please,” Thor insisted in a gentle but firm voice. “Do not make war over this.”

Tony shook his head in disbelief. His incredulous gaze settled on Alex’s, where it steeled slightly. “Fine,” he yelled as he threw his hands up. “Bring the ticking time-bomb home with you, what do I care? She’s your problem now.”

Two hours later, the gang plus a contingent of SHIELD agents had loaded up into a series of black SUVs to make the few-mile trek to Central Park. Alex ended up in a car with Steve Rogers, still dressed in his Captain America drag; Tony, donning a no-doubt-insanely expensive dark blue Henley and black slacks; and a briefcase containing the Tesseract, the case secured with a seatbelt in the seat next to Tony, its sides steadily pulsating in and out as though the object inside was breathing.

Alex considered it for several seconds—a strange thrum in her chest, a high-pitched whine just hovering at the edge of her hearing spectrum—before shuddering and turning to look out the window. Through the tinted glass she witnessed both absolute mayhem—partially collapsed buildings, overturned cars, fires, blood, bits of broken bodies, both human and extraterrestrial—and the unbreakable resolve of New Yorkers who were already beginning the laborious process of reclaiming the city.

“Yo, Dorothy,” Tony called from the seat across from her, all three bodies suddenly jerking to the right as the car swerved to avoid something in the road. He winced at the motion, then met her eyes with a smarmy, untrusting sneer. “Impressed by your boyfriend’s handiwork?”

“Boyfriend?” Steve repeated in shock, turning his body to face her head on from the seat beside her. “Who... Loki?”

“No, not Loki,” she interrupted before Tony could respond. “Not anybody. Look, I know you don’t believe me. I don’t even believe me. All I can tell you is I am also from New York, but in my city, in my reality, the Chitauri attack is a scene in an action movie. It isn’t real life. The CGI doesn’t even hold up that well anymore.”

Steve started to question the meaning of ‘CGI,’ but Tony cut him off. “Still horseshit, but okay. You know the plot. Prologue through epilogue. Explain to me why you’re throwing in with the film’s antagonist.”

She considered that for a moment. “There are a lot of films. This is the first time the Avengers get together, but there’s more than a decade’s worth of sequels. In this moment, in this film, you've seen one part, one side of the antagonist. But what you don’t know yet is that there are other, far worse, forces at play than Loki. And you don’t know the series of events that led up to the invasion. And, like, maybe you should devote some time thinking about how you won in the first place.”

Alex paused, both Steve and Tony staring at her. She turned to the Captain. “Isn’t it terrible strategy to try to push your entire army through one single pinch point?”

Steve gaped a bit. “I... It wouldn’t be my first choice, no.”

“Okay, kid, I see what you’re saying,” Tony jumped in. “But the machine Selvig built with the Tesseract was only designed to open one portal.”

“Yeah,” she agreed with a shrug. “It was designed that way, but nothing said it had to be. Wouldn’t it make more sense for it to instead open multiple points all over the city, or even all around the globe?”

Tony’s eyes narrowed slightly before he turned his head to stare pensively out the window.

“Wait now,” Steve slowly began. “Ma’am, do you mean to say that Loki was never trying to win this battle?”

“Cut it with the ‘ma’am’ okay? I’m not eighty. And my name is Alexandra.”

“I’m sorry, ma- Alexandra.”

“You don't need to apologize, just don’t... And all I’m saying is that there’s more going on than either of you know about. Steve, you went to sleep in the ‘40s and woke up in a SHIELD facility 70 years later. You don’t think you might be in the dark about some stuff?”

Steve seemed perturbed by the thought.

“And Tony,” —the billionaire warily side eyed her, head still turned toward the window— “you just found out like, this week, that extraterrestrials not only exist but have access to this planet. You don’t think that that means there are literal worlds of different motivations and antagonists that you’re not privy to?”

The two men were silent, considering her words. Finally, Tony asked, “Then why go to Asgard? Why not stay here and help us prepare for all those antagonists?”

“Well, you did try to turn me over to SHIELD earlier today.”

“Eh,” Tony shrugged. “I’m a lovable rascal, what can I say.”

They arrived at the designated spot within Central Park about fifteen minutes later. Each SUV unloaded until she and Thor, Banner, Natasha (Clint was conspicuously absent), Tony, Steve, Maria Hill, three black-clad SHIELD agents armed with impressive-looking weapons, and a disgruntled, manacled, gagged Loki were all meandering over a plot of scorched grass.

Steve handed the briefcase to Thor. The remaining Avengers said their goodbyes to the blond god as Loki glared from the sidelines and Alex hovered nervously a few feet from him. When all pleasantries concluded, Thor beckoned both her and Loki to him. Alex stood beside Thor as he opened the briefcase, gingerly pulling free the Tesseract from inside, and the strange twisting in her chest seemed to weirdly intensify. Then Thor heavily wrapped one meaty arm around her waist, looped his other through Loki’s bound wrists, and called to Heimdall.

A split-second later, the space cube flashed.

Or maybe everything but the cube flashed.

Oxygen sluiced from Alex’s lungs as sheets of color rained before her eyes so heavily that her vision turned into one never-ending rainbow. She shrieked a little with what air she had left before pressing her face into Thor’s side. There was a sensation of movement, but in which direction she couldn’t tell. Her body seemed to spread unnaturally outward, and just as she realized her feet were no longer standing on anything, she snapped back to herself, and the movement stopped.

Heart pounding in fear, she peaked one eye open.

Before her was a sprawling, golden room. Dozens—no, hundreds—of wheels hummed along the outer walls; an orchestrated wedding of cogs of every size, slotting together in maddening speeds, the death-defying swan dives of an endless loop of fasteners sliding in place, of waltzing away. The gears spun to-and-fro around the room, a lyrical purr of metal seeming to swallow every other sound.

The floor was illuminated by concentric circles that rippled outward from a central, raised platform with six steps. At the top, nothing remarkable apart from a strange, shimmering cone of metal housing a single, giant sword.

But it was behind the dais where Alex found her eyes drawn. A multi-paned window that seemed to move between the interlocking gears and stretch upward to a point beyond seeing. And through that window, the swirling luminescent blues and oranges and reds and greens of distant nebulae violently slashing across the utter void of deepest space.

It was beyond comprehension. Colors she didn’t think had ever existed before that moment scattered beyond all she could see, crackling and glowing and dancing in the blackness of space. Alive. Absently she dropped her grasp on Thor and began walking toward the dominating space-scape, unwilling to look away, unable to even blink, lest she lose sight for even a moment of the vastness, the endlessness, the utter enormity of the vision pirouetting before her.

“My Prince,” a deep voice resonated somewhere to her right, but she didn’t look, didn’t even process the words. Within those splashes of color, stars and planets and perhaps the very building blocks of life were being formed, the cycle of creation and destruction playing out on a cosmic scale, playing out before her very eyes.

She wasn't worthy of it.

Tears suddenly pricked at her eyes as she was awash in her own insignificance in the daunting face of the universe, at the trillions of lives that would live and die for all of time, in that realm, in that reality, in that dream from which she just couldn’t wake.

Something cool yanked her arm.

“It’s so beautiful,” she dreamily whispered in response. “So beautiful I can hardly breathe.”

It took several seconds of undigested awe before she was able to tear her eyes away from the window, and when she did, she was shocked to find it was Loki’s fingers gripping her skin. She met his dark, narrow stare with a look caught between the dewy gaze of a sated lover and the unfocused, glazed-over eyes of the truly empty, and as their gazes intwined, Loki’s irises flashed into something gentle.

A shared moment of awe.

A shared moment of utterly soul-destroying bewilderment.

Then darkness hardened in the visible features on Loki’s face, the stark rapture fading, his hand flinging her arm out of his grasp as though it had been an errant hair caught on the fabric of his suit. In clear irritation, his head jerked to the right and demanded without asking that she follow.

Loki led Alex to where Thor and another man of enormous height and width, with skin of burnt bronze and eyes of astoundingly vibrant gold, stood in conference.

“Ah, the New One,” the new man greeted her with a fluid bow. “It is my honor indeed to meet you, Lady Alexandra.”

“Hi, Heimdall,” she bashfully greeted in return, and the man gave a slight smile at her recognition. “It’s an honor to meet you, too.”

Loki scoffed, and those beautiful golden eyes flashed something dangerous as they darted to the man. “My Prince,” Heimdall acknowledged, though even she could hear the sarcasm dripping on the words. “Your return will be a welcome sight for Asgard.” He glanced meaningfully at Loki’s bound wrists, and Loki shot him eye-daggers in return, unable to voice his no-doubt clever riposte.

“All together once again,” Thor said brightly as he slapped both Heimdall and Loki on the backs, either ignoring or completely missing their shared animosity. “I feared I would never see the day. Now let us onward to Asgard!”

An Asgardian skiff was waiting on the other side of the observatory, just to the right of the beginning of the rainbow bridge. Beyond that, Alex could see the swirling ocean, the glimmering city, the peaks capped with snow on the horizon. It was as the movies had pictured, but so much more beautiful in person. The salt of the sea, the sharp, low creaks of the bridge moving and absorbing the wind, the tingling breeze on her face.

She fought down another wave of tears as Thor grandly helped her into the hover boat. The Einherjar already on board warily eyed her as she stepped aboard; at Loki’s arrival, they fastened more chains to his arms and legs. She shivered at the terrifying warriors, the clanging of metal and cracks of leather armor, and tried to keep her distance as much as the narrow craft would allow.

Her eyes darted back and forth as the boat raced over the water, trying to take in every sight, every sound, every smell. She was on an alien planet, for Christ’s sake! Even if it was only a hallucination, even if it was a dream, every single moment brought her senses alive and shook her with the feeling that she was experiencing something no other human ever had.

At one point, she glanced back at the others. The guards had their eyes on Thor as the elder brother regaled them with his latest exploits. And Loki—his eyes were locked on her.

Alex shivered again and whipped back around. But even turned, she could still feel his eyes on her, assessing her, plotting, conniving. Furious at him for putting her in that position—furious at her brain for conjuring up such a ridiculous scenario—she pointedly turned once more to face him.

Their eyes met, and Loki’s glower nearly bowled her over. Yet, she held firm, staring him down, pretending he was just another obnoxious-as-fuck lech on the subway. After a moment of their staring contest, he arched an eyebrow. In return, she rolled her eyes and made a show of turning her back on him, as if she didn’t care in the slightest how absolutely terrifying he was.

 Stupid alien prince.

Alex barely clocked the rest of the journey to the shimmering fortress at the edge of the city, too focused on the feel of Loki’s gaze on her skin and the effort to keep herself from responding to take in anything else.

Once they entered the castle, Thor hesitated beside her. “My lady,” he began in what she assumed he thought was a low tone but still rattled the edges of her brain. “Perhaps we might offer you new... garb, before your audience with the Allfather.”

Loki snorted underneath his gag as Alex glanced down at herself. Sweatpants several sizes too large and cinched unflatteringly tightly at the deepest indent of her waist, low-cut black tank top, the garment somehow both too small and too large with a final undignified flourish of no bra.

Mortified, she nodded without meeting Thor’s gaze. “That’d be great,” she managed. She glanced at Loki, his eyes amused and belittling, and she sighed, turning to Thor. “Just don’t let Odin make a decision on that one yet,” she gestured at Loki, who looked affronted at her casual reference. “I know a few things that may change his mind.”

Thor gravely nodded. “I will do my best.”

That was all she could hope for, she guessed. A tall, thin, blonde woman suddenly appeared beside Thor, and he gestured a bit dismissively toward the newcomer. “Helena will see to your needs,” he announced, then he, Loki, and the guards disappeared down a corridor, leaving Alex alone with the other woman.

“I’m Alexandra,” she said with an attempted smile.

The blonde gave a small, but not unkind, nod in return. “Come with me, m’lady.”

A few hours later, Alex was freshly scrubbed—good lord, she had accumulated a lot of dirt and blood on her body—and resplendent in a buttery-soft light-blue gown offset by a silvery, flowery brocade along the bodice and silver threads along the cuffs and hems. Her long red hair had been tamed into something resembling a French braid that stopped halfway down her head and fell into long curls along her back. A light rouge pinkened her lips and cheeks, and the charcoal at her eyes brought out her azure irises.

“Can this be the same maiden I met this morning?” Thor teased when he arrived to retrieve her from the guest chambers she had been inhabiting.

Alex blushed despite herself. “I guess I clean up okay,” she demurred.

Thor’s massive head cocked to the side, as if he didn’t quite understand the phrase. Then, with a smile that looked a bit forced, he waved her forward. “The Allfather awaits.”

Her stomach clenched at the thought. As they meandered through giant stone hallways and past golden tapestries, she began to firmly regret her decision to come to Asgard. “What happened with Loki?”

Thor seemed to grimace. “At my urging, Odin awaits your testimony. But he is destined for the dungeons, I fear.”

Alex didn’t confirm his suspicion.

The throne room was massive, multiple stories high, with giant arched buttresses sweeping upward to a golden mural of Odin’s exploits, his family, his rule. Smirking to herself, she remembered what was hidden under the pretty lies, and the knowledge somewhat steeled her. In her profession, unexpected knowledge was always a tremendous advantage.

Thor bowed at her side, his eyes directed toward the massive dais at the end of the room. It seemed to climb upward for an eon before settling into a platform upon which a giant gold throne sat, and upon that, Odin.

The Allfather’s single eye fell immediately to Alex, and she nervously curtsied before the white-clad god.

He wasn’t particularly large—at least not compared to Thor—but his presence was near overwhelming. She could feel energy boiling off him, rushing down the steps like a molten river, its rapids sharply bursting against her body, flinging her against pointed rocks, pulling her feet backward in an undertow of malignant power. It nearly smelt of sulfur, of some noxious chemical reaction that seared through her nose and down her windpipe until she was desiccated.

And that one eye seemed to pierce right through her, as though he could see her every thought, see into her very soul.

Alex bowed her head in deference, not able to maintain eye contact with such an intimidating force. It wasn’t so much Anthony Hopkins as Odin, but rather Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter.

Odin seemed to harrumph. “I am Odin, King of Asgard, Protector of the Nine Realms,” the aging deity announced in accented English. “And you do not belong here, Midgardian.”

“No more than a goat belongs at a banquet,” she couldn’t help but retort, her brain spiraling between reality and whatever the holy fuck the Marvel nonsense was. “I know.”

Someone snickered off to her side even as Odin seemed to struggle to choose his next words. “You know your place, then,” the Aesir cyclops finally decided. “And yet you have sullied my realm with your presence: Why?”

Alex’s cheeks heated at his taunting. “I am a seer-”

“I know what you are, girl,” Odin interrupted in a sharp tone, and she couldn’t help but shrink back. “We have our own seers: Why should we care about the visions of a Midgardian from another existence?”

Alex nervously glanced at Thor, who was standing stiff beside her. No help there. “May I speak with you privately?”

“You will not make demands in my court, Midgardian. Say your piece and return to from whence you came.”

A soft sigh escaped her even as her throat threatened to close with anxiety. It wasn’t real, he wasn’t real. Steeling herself as much as possible, she decided to gamble. After all, all she was at risk of losing was a very bizarre corner of her no-doubt already fading mind.

“I have come to warn you about Ragnarök.”

Thor audibly choked, and the clusters of guards she suddenly clocked off to her left began conspiratorially whispering.

Loki, ungagged but still chained, stood judgmentally in the wings, his clever, probing eyes never leaving her form. She couldn’t quite put her finger on why, but somehow Loki’s silence was far worse than all the tittering of Asgard.

Odin banged his spear once upon the marble platform, and as the sound painfully reverberated around the room, everyone silenced. “You warn of a legend known for generations,” Odin spat. “Such arrogance in one so small.”

Alex gritted her teeth. With eyes pointedly directed up at the golden ceiling and still able to feel Loki’s mocking gaze nearly as much as Odin’s awful magic, she returned, "Is it not also arrogant to ignore the past?”

Thor uncomfortably shifted his weight. “My lady,” he softly cautioned.

“You impudent girl!” Odin growled. “You dare instruct me within my own palace, as I sit upon my own throne? After I have sent my son and heir to war on your kind’s behalf?”

“We're grateful for that,” Alex slowly tried to change tact. “And I am attempting to return the favor by sharing with you what I have seen.”

That seemed to momentarily calm the deity. “Ragnarök is Asgard’s concern, not yours.”

Alex sighed. What a stubborn old prick. Goddamn her brain was annoying. “Allfather,” she said in as calm a voice as she could muster. “The actions of today may directly lead to Hela’s return.”

Odin stiffened.

“And if she returns, the only way to save the people of Asgard will be to destroy the land of Asgard so that she can no longer draw her power from it."

It was probably her imagination, but Odin seemed to breathe more heavily at that. For several moments, nobody spoke. “You have seen this?” he finally questioned, his sharp gaze drilling into her, the air around her heating to an uncomfortable degree.

Somehow, she knew that if she were to lie, he would feel it. “Yes, I’ve seen it. And it will lead to events even more terrible than Ragnarök.”

Odin stared at her for a long time. “Then what do you propose, mortal?”

Alex drew in a shaky breath as his power, sharp as needles dragging against her skin, continued to encircle her.

“The chain of events begins today,” she started, trying to keep the anxiety, the desperation, out of her voice. “It begins with your sentencing of Loki.”

The man in questioned jilted at that, the chains on his arms and legs softly rattling. Alex looked at him briefly, saw his dangerously dark expression, and turned back to the king with a tight swallow. “So I propose... I beseech you to take this into consideration for Loki’s sentence.”

Odin harrumphed again. “Perhaps he will have the axe, then.”

With a nervous gulp, Alex shook her head. “I don’t think that’ll help,” she softly argued, even though she wasn’t entirely sure of the validity of the statement.

The king eyed her. “A perplexing prophet,” he finally declared, looking a bit riled. "Here, then, is my proclamation: Loki Odinson, Prince of Asgard,” Alex glanced at Loki, who rolled his eyes at the titles, an infuriating little smirk on his face. “For your crimes against the Realms, I, Odin Allfather, cast you out of Asgard.”

Alex winced as Loki’s chains softly chinked with his surprise.

“Where you once attacked Midgard,” Odin continued, his eye hard on his wayward son. “Now shall you aid in its protection. You will work to restore that which you have destroyed, for as long as it takes to find redemption.”

Alex chanced a look at Loki; his jaw was tightly clenched, as were his still-manacled fists. He radiated hatred.

“I leave you your powers only so that you may aid their cause. But you shall be stripped of your self-rule.” Odin paused, then turned to Alex, whose eyes widened in foreboding.

“You, Alexandra of Midgards Here and Wide, shall serve as Loki’s warden, ensuring he only acts at the behest of your kind. I grant you power over him.”

The god’s hot, sharp magic suddenly splattered all over her body as splashing oil burns, sending her loudly gasping at both the sensation and the sentence.

Loki was equally incensed. “You cannot possibly be serious,” he argued even as Odin’s magic seared through Alex’s entire form. “Leaving me to the whims of an idiotic mortal-”

“Silence!” Odin shouted. The room went quiet. "You have done this to yourself, Loki. You can neither harm her nor other mortals, unless she gives you leave. You shall adhere to her spoken orders, compulsory, whatever they may be. You shall stay within her domain. You are hereby bound.”

“Odin-”

“It is done!” Odin thundered. Gesturing to the guards, he declared, “Return the prisoner to the Bifrost.”

As Loki was dragged away still sputtering, Odin turned to Thor. “You will accompany them to Midgard and ensure safe quartering.”

Thor bowed. “Yes, Father.”

“And you.” Odin turned to Alex, a mighty glare on his ancient face. “You are an impertinent, foolish child.”

Alex nodded. “I know,” she softly agreed.

He gave a slight snort, then waved her away. “Be gone, then, and do not dare return.”

She nodded again, curtsied, and then followed Thor down the long corridor after Loki.

Just as quickly as she had arrived in Asgard, Alex found herself being shuffled off of it. She and Thor stepped into the observatory at the end of the rainbow bridge to find Loki sulking against a wall, unchained, Heimdall and his mighty sword itching for the opportunity just two paces away.

“Hi,” she ventured as she and Thor joined the dark prince.

A vicious sneer carved into Loki’s face as his anger seemed to physically pierce her. “Ah yes,” he greeted with dripping sarcasm. “My savior.”

She nervously swallowed. “I didn't know he would do that.”

“Your sight has grown dark, has it? How fortunate to be prisoner to the mercurial visions of such a hapless fool.”

“Loki,” Thor cautioned in a low tone.

“Do not attempt to hide your glee,” Loki snarled at his brother. “To see me so dishonored at the behest of a brainless mortal child.”

Thor sighed. “You have dishonored yourself.”

Loki ignored him. Those savage eyes turned back to Alex, and her stomach uneasily flipped. “And how dare you presume to speak for me to Odin. You sniveling halfwit, spewing your thoughts as though they have any weight outside your own vacuous existence.”

“Loki! You will treat the lady with respect!”

Loki scoffed. “‘Lady,’ indeed. She is no more a lady than I am-”

“Than you’re a prince?” Alex interrupted in a sharp tone, both frightened by his anger and enraged by his words. “I guess now that you’re banished, that’s technically correct.”

Absolute hatred flashed over Loki’s features. “You mewling quim-”

Alex started to laugh, and Loki froze mid-sentence, his head tilting to the side. Thor, too, looked perplexed.

“Sorry,” she said with a half-forced giggle intended to needle him. “I’m sure you were going somewhere with that, but the casual misogyny is fucking ridiculous given the circumstances. Plus, you know, I already heard you say it to Natasha. Maybe get some new material.”

As Loki shot her ice daggers, she turned to Thor. “So are we going back or not?”

“Yes, my lady,” Thor returned with a smirk at Loki’s expense. “Let us to Midgard!”

Chapter Text

Alex stumbled onto Tony’s still-destroyed balcony, bursting from the colorful, oxygen-less swirl of the Bifrost for the second time. Her stomach turned nauseous, but as Loki emerged a split second after her, she swallowed it down with a disgusted face. No freaking way was she giving him the satisfaction.

A minute or so later, Tony emerged from behind the cracked glass partition to his penthouse, a perplexed look on his face. “Maybe call next time, Point Break,” he started to address Thor. Then, noticing Alex and an extremely petulant Loki trailing behind the blond god, his right hand shot up as his left pressed a button dangling at his wrist.

“You’ve got about five seconds to get Klownzilla and Rosebud off my balcony,” Tony stated as red metal plates began rapidly assembling about him, the arc reactor in his chest glowing blue. “Before I blow them back to outer space.”

“Wait, my friend,” Thor countered in his trademark boom. “We mean you no harm.”

Loki scoffed, and a moment later Tony made good on his threat by firing one shimmering pulse from his extended hand. Alex flinched for the impact, and when it didn’t come she peaked open an eye to see Thor had easily absorbed the laser using Mjolnir.

“Please, Tony,” Thor pleaded. “I only wish to speak.”

“Sorry, Point Break, all out of soliloquies over here.” Another pulse burst forward directly into Thor’s easy deflection.

“You do not understand,” the blond god began to argue only to be cut off by another shot of laser for him to bat away.

“Lumbering oafs,” Loki muttered behind her.

Alex glanced back at the dark prince. “And yet they still beat you in battle, so what the hell does that make you?” His eyes narrowed in haughty rage, but before he could respond she turned back to Thor and Tony, raised her hands high over her head, and yelled, “Sanctuary!”

Even with his helmet on, Alex could practically see Tony’s frown as his head dipped to the side. “Huh?”

Alex took a cautious step forward, then another to move out of Thor’s protection. She heard the god gasp at her vulnerability as she repeated in a semi-strong voice, “Sanctuary.”

Tony’s head tilted even further. “You’re kidding, right?”

“Not really,” she slowly drawled as she took another cautious step toward him. “Can we talk?”

Tony seemed to debate something a moment, his metallic head moving back and forth between her and the Norse gods behind her. “Fine,” he gritted out after a moment. The open palm facing her rolled into a single pointed finger. “You. Just you. Hagrid and Snape stay outside.”

“Okay,” she agreed as she carefully lowered her arms. She glanced at Thor. “You good with that?”

Thor gave a firm, if cautious nod, and Alex left the brothers for the disputable comfort of Tony Stark.

Once seated inside Tony’s upended living room—complete with massive, Loki-sized hole still ripped into the flooring—Alex began recapping their visit to Asgard. To his immense credit, the billionaire let her speak without interruption, at least until she got to the... bond.

“Uh, gonna use my safe word here, Mistress Pain,” Tony said with a frown, his open hand cutting through the air and her words. Her nose wrinkled at the new sobriquet. “What do you mean, you’re tied together?”

She half-shrugged, half grimaced in response. “I know; I don’t really get it, either. But Odin linked us together somehow, and now I’m like the de facto warden of Loki.”

Tony’s features were, in a word, skeptical. “Kid, no disrespect—well, a little disrespect—but what the hell could you do to stop that psychopath?”

Her true crime brain sat up like a dog expecting walkies. “Technically, I don’t think he’s a psychopath... Probably a narcissist, though some of that probably comes from just being a prince...” she trailed off as Tony’s eyes narrowed. “Anyway, so Odin more-or-less cursed Loki with the inability to harm a human, unless it’s warranted. And it seems he gave me the sole ability to make that determination.”

“Perfect,” Tony smarmed. “One bad case of PMS, and the city's annihilated.”

“JARVIS,” she called out into the ether, and Tony sat back in disbelief. “Can you make sure Pepper gets a copy of this conversation?”

“Uh, no,” Tony cancelled with a shake of his head as a disembodied British voice began to respond. “Ignore that, JARVIS. You,” he spat, pointing accusingly at Alex. “Paws off my AI.”

Alex rolled her eyes. “Anyway, long story short, Loki can’t go anywhere without me. He can’t hurt anyone-”

“Without you,” Tony supplied.

“-and I guess I can control him.”

“You guess.”

“No, I mean, I think I also have the ability to control him. It sounds like if I give him a direct command, he is magically compelled to obey me."

Tony’s face lit up. “Whoa. Are you saying you can make him say or do anything?”

She shrugged. “I guess. Odin said it was compulsory, but I haven’t tried it out.”

“Jesus, kid, next time lead with that.” He paused, then grinned. “Methinks we need a demonstration.”

“Methinks not,” she said with another wrinkle of her nose. “It’s mind control. It’s gross.”

“Tell that to Barton.”

“Tell that to Loki,” she countered in a huff. Tony frowned at the cryptic nature of the remark, and she found a heavy, metaphorical weight suddenly pressing against her chest. Trying to preserve the god's right to his own abuse story as well as set some boundaries between what she knew and what she was willing to tell, she declined to elaborate. “Look, what I’m saying is, he’s basically harmless.”

“Harmless,” Tony repeated in disbelief, mulling the word over for several seconds. “Okay, then what?”

“Huh?”

“What’s this got to do with me?”

“Right,” she slowly said. He warily eyed her, and she coyly shrugged. “Guessing you already have an idea?”

“Nope,” he returned with a shake of his head. “Sure don’t, because you’re a smart enough kid, and you know there’s no way in hell I’m quartering a deranged war criminal and his not-quite-as-nutty parole officer.”

“You think I want to be tied to a deranged war criminal? I’m here because I have nowhere else to go. We can’t stay on Asgard because... Well, suffice to say that road goes downhill, and I’m not going to survive on another planet. It’s gotta be here.”

“Well,” Tony countered with a dismissive shrug. “I’m sure SHIELD can help with accommodation.”

“SHIELD’s handlers tried to nuke New York.” When that statement didn’t as obviously resonate with Tony as it had the previous time, Alex added, “And I happen to know that Fury had a way to stop this before Loki even got to the city, and instead he guilt-tripped all of you into risking your lives when you didn't even have to. And besides, Loki knows things about how the universe works that nobody else on this planet knows. Do you want to use that knowledge yourself to better mankind, and, you know, make a few more bucks, get showered with accolades from around the world, or do you want it to go to SHIELD and probably to war?”

Tony was worryingly quiet for a solid thirty seconds. When he finally spoke, he did so as he leaned forward and steeled his face into something resembling ‘used car salesman’. “Alright. Here’s my offer, one time only. You and Alice Cooper can hide under my floorboards, if he works for me, and actually shares that knowledge, and if you agree to testing so we can find out what brand of special you are, and if he steps out of line even once, or if you do, your asses are in the first wardrobe back to Narnia.”

She nodded. “Agreed.”

“And you tell me what you know about Fury.”

“Okay.”

“And Prince of Darkness stays in the Hulk Ward when we don’t need him.”

A frown tightened her brow. “That’s shitty.”

“He killed hundreds, so no, in my book it’s not nearly shitty enough.”

“There’s other reasons... Look, I don’t trust him, either, but if you want him to actually work with you, you’re going to have to give him something more than a plexiglass cube.”

“He’s lucky to even have that.”

She met Tony’s eyes directly. “Do you believe people can change?” When he only glared in response, she continued. “Of course you do, because you changed yourself, right? Doesn't he deserve the same opportunity to see the error of his ways?”

“Pretty sure he already saw that error from the back of one of his alien horses as he was destroying my hometown.”

“I’m just saying, maybe he needs to get to actually know humans in order to empathize with them. Maybe like how you got to know your friend in that cave, and how that changed you.”

Another dark look overtook Tony’s face, and she feared she had pressed too far. And yet she added, “Maybe he has more to offer this world than just blowing things up.”

Tony pursed his lips in minor annoyance, then rolled his eyes. “Whatever, kid. Fine. Banner stays here, too.”

“The Hulk?”

“You wanna stay or not?”

With a tight swallow of another retort, she again nodded. “Agreed.”

Tony stared at her with a frown for a second. “Great,” he finally declared as he hopped to his feet. “Bourbon? I’m starving.”

Alex confusedly glanced outside at the still-rising sun. “Isn’t it like eleven am or something?”

“Ten.” Tony stuck his head out the glass door to address the brothers still loitering on his doorstep. “Alright, come on in.”

Thor grinned and gladly traipsed into the living room as Loki—sour look permanently etched on his features—slowly followed. “You better be housebroken,” Tony quipped.

Loki fumed but said nothing. Pleasant change of course.

Thor took a seat on the couch, the furniture creaking unhappily at the imposition. “My friend,” he started as he took the drink Tony offered him without a second look and downed it in one. “We have come here today to strike a bargain-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony interrupted with a hand-wave as he passed another glass to Alex, who stared at it with a frown. “Dorothy and I sorted it.”

Both Thor and Loki shot her looks. “I see,” Thor ventured with a frown. “What were the terms?”

Tony reclaimed his original seat, pointedly not offering a drink to Loki, who continued to hover by the doorway. Sipping on the liquid, he shrugged. “You know, the usual. Harboring wanted criminals in exchange for knowledge to help mankind.” He took another sip. “Gotta know, though. What happened to you asserting your claim to 'the seer’? I thought she wasn’t safe on Earth.”

Thor glanced at Alex. With a half shrug, she declared, “Don’t think Asgard was excited to have me, either.”

Tony snickered. “Shocking.”

Several hours—and several drinks, of which Alex only drank one and was still feeling muddle-headed—later, Tony and Thor had hashed out the finer points of the arrangement. Loki continued to sulk in the corner, not speaking a word, as the two other men brought the newly arrived Bruce Banner up to speed.

“Yeah,” the newcomer hesitated as he eyed the room. “Don’t think I’m ready for whatever the hell this is.”

Tony ran through the bond, whatever it was, and conscripted Bruce into joining guard duty of Loki. After he got over his initial shock, and the faintest flare of green over his skin, Bruce settled into a more scientific mindset as he took a seat by Alex.

“You’re not crazy,” he said to her after several minutes.

“Probably debatable,” she returned with a slight stumble over the words. Goddamn, did Tony lace his drinks with turpentine?

Bruce snickered at that. “Well, welcome to the circus.”

“Thrilled to be here.”

"So you really jumped through time, huh?”

“Not time,” she corrected. Her head was starting to hurt. “Although maybe in a way? But mostly universes, I think? Or probably just an aneurysm.”

“Huh.” He considered that for a moment. “The amount of energy it would take to create an Einstein-Rosen Bridge not just through our space-time but all space-time would have to be... indescribable. Maybe vacuum energy could influence formation in the quantum foam, but that’s so experimental we don’t even have words for it. Were you a quantum physicist?”

“No. I work for the UN F-triple-C.”

Bruce blankly stared at her.

“It's a UN entity for climate change. I negotiate policy to address the global response. Have a bit of an environmental studies background, and I’m aware of quantum physics, but I’m certainly not a physicist.”

“Got it. Strange.”

“Isn’t climate change a thing here?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah, Tony’s taking care of that. I meant that you dropped into an inter-universal wormhole basically out of nowhere. What was happening right before?”

She half shrugged. “Turbulence.”

“So you were in your seat?”

“No, I was in the aisle.” She frowned for a moment, thoughts a bit hazy. “I hit some seats and luggage was falling down, and then I think I hit my head on something, and that was it. Just pain and this long blur of different… realities? Like I was suddenly dancing in a club, or driving a car, or in a fire, like actually burning. I could feel and hear and see everything, just scene after scene until it finally stopped, and I was here.”

“That’s… wow.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel now?”

She shrugged again. “Dunno. Tipsy. Fine.”

“Yeah...” Bruce trailed off with a frown, then lifted his voice to address Tony, who was drunkenly carousing with Thor. “Hey, I think we should take some precautions here. You know, a human from another Earth is probably going to have a different microbiome than us. Probably different immunities.”

Tony nodded and waved his hand dismissively in the air. “Yeah, yeah, she’s a pin cushion; she already agreed.” Alex wrinkled her nose with distaste at the description. The billionaire ignored her and shouted over to Loki, who had taken up residence on a bar stool with a thoroughly displeased look on his face, “You too, Snape. Got myself a couple of guinea pigs to play with.”

Loki looked affronted, and also like he didn’t exactly know why he was affronted. But before he could speak, Bruce cut in, “Yeah, tests are great and all, but I’m talking right now. She could be, you know... infected.” He tossed an apologetic look her way.

Tony considered that for a single moment of quiet inebriation, then leveled her with a pensive glare. “It cannot be called our mother, but our grave.”

“Or just Alex,” she muttered.

“Or Patient Zero,” Bruce supplied with a worried grimace on his face. “I think we gotta talk quarantine.”

A few hours later, Alex found herself relegated to another of Tony’s creepy underground chambers, a sparsely furnished ‘airborne infection isolation room’—cell, really—that was only accessible from the corridor and after clearing several hurdles of PPE checks, disinfection, and the requirement that Alexandra don her own respiratory mask before entrance. Bruce had successfully completed such requirements to join her in the sanitized, bleak enclosure that was to be her home for the next few... weeks?

Alex sat on the edge of the little cot, clothed in a thin cotton gown—her lovely Asgardian clothes were immediately sent to the incinerator—as she wheezed through a mask and Bruce’s gloved fingers found the vein in her arm to draw tube after tube of blood.

“This is so stupid,” she muttered as he replaced the vials sucking her life fluid from her body.

“Sorry.” Bruce’s voice was muffled through his hazmat attire. “Better to be safe than sorry.”

“Not you; I get that. I’ve been through a pandemic, and I'm not overly keen to start another. They’re... rough.” She trailed off, thinking of lockdown, thinking of the desperate calls with her parents in Baltimore, her sister and brother-in-law in DC; how they’d put together a plan for reunification if the country went full apocalyptic, while field hospitals spread out over Central Park and an impromptu morgue semi-trailer set up directly across from her apartment building in Brooklyn.

Alex bit her lip, unresolved and forever unaddressed PTSD from those first few weeks slamming through her.

Eventually her thoughts caught up with the actions in front of her. “What’s stupid is that this isn’t even real. What in the actual fuck is my brain doing to me?”

Bruce pulled the last vial free and slid the needle from her arm, pressing a wad of cotton to the wound before covering it with a bandage. He considered her for a moment, his kind brown eyes a bit hazy through the rhythmic breath fogging the plastic face shield.

“On the pandemic front, anything particular I should be looking for?” He wiggled one of the blood vials for effect.

She stared at her blood squishing around the clear tube. “Coronavirus. It’s SARS-something. They finally got a vaccine, and I had two doses of it. Plus a few boosters. It kept mutating.”

Bruce suddenly held the blood sample at arm’s length before carefully depositing it on a plastic tray. “You ever catch it?”

She snickered. “Yeah, I mean, New York was ground zero for a while.” She shot him a sharp glance. “Wait, did you guys have 9/11?”

He frowned through the fog. “Terrorist?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Huh.” She mulled on the repercussions of that for a few moments.

“So... You caught it?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Once, verifiably. But I probably had it before then, before they had figured out tests for it. It was pretty scary.”

“Great. So, I’m in a room with an inter-universal petri dish.”

Her mouth shrugged as her hands rolled until they were both palms up, questioning. “Big new breakthrough in medical science? Yay?”

Bruce half-laughed, half-snorted. “And I thought I was weird.”

“Hey!” she exclaimed with a slight laugh. “Don’t be uni... vercist? Unicest?” Her nose wrinkled. “Nope, that’s gross. Timeline bigot? Any of this work?”

“I take it back,” he said with another snort-laugh. “You might be crazy.”

“Yeah, well,” she dismissively sighed. “You’re in my head so not a lot I can do about it, unless you wanna get me a q-tip to jam around in there.”

He began examining her eyes, ears, and throat. “From, you know, experience... You might have to start considering the possibility that this is real.”

“Yeah,” she sarcastically spat as he held down her tongue with a depressor. After saying ‘ahh’ a few times, she continued. “Just what Occam’s Razor says, right? The most complicated, most phantasmic, most... idiotic explanation... That’s the right one.”

One of the scientist’s gloved hands made a few notes on an iPad, and yes, she could clearly see the branding denoting it as a ‘StarkPad,’ but she had to cut the fantasy off somewhere. He gave a noncommittal shrug. “Just saying, Occam’s Razor doesn’t account for everything. Sure as shit didn’t account for me.”

She sighed. “Again, you are in my brain. I am in a hospital bed somewhere and this is all one overly convoluted mind fuck as they pull the plug. You are a few spurting neurons clinging to their last moments of activity before I fade into... fading.”

Bruce’s expression pulled wistfully. “That sounds nice.”

“Right?”

He shrugged again as he collected his various accoutrements from the clinical visit. “I guess, then, my question is this: so what?”

She thought for a moment, then frowned. “Huh?”

“Let’s say you’re right. These are the last gasps of your dying brain. So what? Don’t these moments still matter?”

“I mean... no?”

“Then at what point did they stop mattering? You can see, and feel, and hear, and taste, and touch, right? You can think. You can experience. How is it different from the last moments on that plane? How is it different from any moment in your life before then? You’re still living, right? Even if you doubt the reality you’re in, you are engaging with it. You’re having a conversation with me, right now. What’s the difference?”

For several perplexed moments, she considered his words. “Didn’t know one of your Ph.Ds. was in philosophy,” she finally managed.

The doctor bashfully shrugged. “I dabble.”

“Nerd.”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “Yeah. And I guess that makes you either the nerd who gets what I’m talking about or the nerd who dreamed up this whole conversation by herself.”

She shook her head. “Going with option C: I fell asleep while The Matrix was on, and it’s worming its way into my subconscious.”

He grinned. "I think I’m gonna like you.”

“Oh man,” she replied with a grin of her own. “Famous last words.”

“I don’t doubt it. Alright, I’ve got some work to do. You gonna be okay in here?”

She blinked at him, then gestured to the bare room in which lived the cot on which she sat, a mostly private shower/toilet facility, and a bare metal desk. “What more could a girl want?”

He skimmed the room with a frown. “Yeah... I'll get you some stuff. Anything else I should know?”

“Eh,” she shrugged. “Not allergic to anything. My world anything, anyway. Up to date on my vaccinations, and again, my vaccinations. And occasionally massive anxiety. Big believer in clonazepam. Oh, and I’m a vegetarian.”

“Got it,” he murmured as he made notations on the tablet. “Guessing dosages will be different here, but we’ll figure it out. How are you feeling right now?”

“Mostly okay? I’ve got a bit of a headache but that could be from, you know, literally anything.”

He snorted. “Right.” A few more notes went into the tablet. “Okay, I’ll run some tests, and we’ll go from there. You should try to rest.”

As he spoke the words, exhaustion that had been building behind her eyes and likely contributing to her headache suddenly sank into each crevice of her body, pulling her down onto the thin mattress on which she sat.

“Yeah,” she agreed, then frowned. “Hey, so what happened with Loki?”

Bruce dismissively shrugged, still writing on the StarkPad. iPad! “Hulk cage.”

Her nose wrinkled. “No, Tony and I talked about that. It’s shit.”

All his materials in hand, Bruce took a step backward to the door. “Don’t know about that,” he said with another shrug. “But Thor said Loki can’t leave your... What was it? Your realm?”

“Domain.”

“Right. Domain. And yeah, we don’t really know what that means or how far it extends, so for now, he’s down here.” Bruce’s head tilted to the far-left wall. “At least while you are.”

Her eyes turned to study the wall, something unpleasant coiling in her innards. “Wait. You mean he’s stuck in that cube for what... two weeks?”

“Something like that.”

She frowned. “It’s worse than in here, and there’s nothing to do in here.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bruce sighed, taking another step backward toward the first antechamber as if he couldn’t wait to get started digging through the peculiarities of her blood. “I said I’ll get you some stuff. StarkPad, tv, you know. Entertainment of some sort.”

She looked at him, then looked back at the dividing wall, imagining she could see Loki sitting unmoving, blankly staring, just on the other side. “He needs something, too, okay?”

Bruce blinked. “No, not okay.”

Alex huffed a sigh before refacing the slowly escaping scientist. “Just give him a book or something.”

Bruce whirled to walk to the door with a scoff. “You think he’d do the same for you?”

“Fuck no,” she retorted, and Bruce’s steps stilled. “But there’s a difference between punishment and torture.”

For a moment, he didn’t move. Then, with a soft sigh, he murmured, “You’re right,” before giving her a little wave and disappearing through the first-stage airlock to leave Alexandra alone with the suddenly doubting, baiting, anxiety-inducing, what-if'ing, ruminating inner dialogue of her own confused and exhausted mind.

The warning bells went off about 12 hours later, alerting Alexandra that somebody was entering her protected room. Sitting on the cot with her knees pulled to her chin, she yanked her mask over her face and curiously watched as a fully PPE-laden Tony Stark made his way into the small chamber.

Once entered, he glanced around with a clear frown echoing through his plastic hazmat face screen. “Yeah. JARVIS? Get a chair in here. A nice chair. Footrest. You know the drill.”

“On it, sir,” the electronic British voice responded.

Tony turned his attention to Alex and gestured for her to make room on the small substitute bed. With a slight huff, she dragged her body into the far corner, allowing the billionaire access to the rest of the cot.

He sat down with a weary sigh. “Guess I didn’t plan for this,” he muttered to himself, his loose palms bouncing off his knees. For a moment he only glared at the opposite wall, then he turned to face her. “So,” he started, then stopped, frowned.

Alex frowned back at him as she reactively drew her knees even closer to her chest.

“Guess you weren’t lying,” he finally managed after several seconds of hard staring.

She shrugged, a bit unsure to what he was referring. “Yeah.”

“Another universe, huh?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why the change of heart?”

It was his turn to shrug, and once again he turned back to face the opposite wall, the very barrier which she had determined divided her from a certain errant Asgardian prince.

“You have an elevated rate of carbon-14 in your body,” Tony started, still pensively staring at the opposite wall. “No surprise. Everyone post-1950s exhibits elevated levels. But your carbon-14 is different than our carbon-14.”

Something flipped unpleasantly in Alex’s stomach. “What do you mean?”

Tony shrugged, still not meeting her eyes. “Different half-life, for starters. The isotope looks the same, but it doesn’t behave the same. We don’t know what to make of it, so for now, we’re going with the information we have. And since there seem to be alien races, why not alien universes, too?”

“Huh,” she softly offered, her eyes un-focusing as she attempted to file his words into her working knowledge of current reality. Or knowledge of her current brain-scape. “What am I supposed to do with that?” she finally whispered.

Tony side-eyed her, then gave a small, helpless, honest shrug. “Kid, I don’t know,” he murmured. “But we’ll figure it out.”

She blankly nodded. “Yeah.”

“I mean that,” he said with a bit more force. His encapsulated form twisted to fully face hers on the narrow gurney. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through right now, Alexandra,” he murmured, and her eyes darted to his form at what had to be his first utterance of her actual name. “If you really fell through reality... I just...” he trailed off into a loud clearing of his throat.

They met gazes. Tony cleared his throat again. “I got you, kid. I don’t know why you’re here, but I think I believe that you don’t know why, either. So I promise you, we’ll figure this out. Okay?”

Alex swallowed back a sudden, unbidden welling of emotion. “Okay.”

Tony nodded once, then held out his gloved hand in greeting. “I’m Tony Stark, by the way. Nice to meet you.”

With a slight smile, Alex took the proffered appendage. “Alexandra Weston. Alex. Thanks for having me.”

“Oh, I always help a damsel in distress. Especially one who has the dirt on Fury. Please tell me you know what happened to his eye.”

Alex laughed. “Oh, man, you’re going to love this.”

The next morning as Alex ate the breakfast that had been delivered through a miniature airlock built into the wall beside the main entrance, she leafed through that day’s New York Times.

The headlines were wild: “HUMANITY ATTACKED: World Leaders Meet in Berlin to Discuss Global Response,” “NEW YORK RECOVERS: Congress Approves $780b Package for State and Local Aid,” “International Queries Increase Tally of Missing and Dead,” “Mayor Appoints Taskforce on Defending New York Against Extraterrestrial Terror,” “NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION: Introducing Children, Gently, to the Universe’s Horrors,” “PROFILES ON SUPERHEROES: Tony Stark/Iron Man,” “WE ARE NOT ALONE: Teams of Scientists Review Recovered Alien Technology—and Recovered Aliens.”

And, of course: “LOKI OF ASGARD: What We Know About the Terror Ringleader So Far.”

She snorted as she skimmed the column’s slapped together biography on the sort-of super-villain complete with everything that could be cobbled together from Norse mythology. A few years prior she had visited Norway with a friend, and she and Alison had giggled themselves silly as an amateur historian dressed in traditional Viking attire had regaled their tour group with some of the weirder episodes of Norwegian lore. She could virtually feel the real Loki’s indignation at his portrayal.

She had just finished her toast when the warning sounds went off. With a last sip of coffee, she pulled on her mask and waited for Bruce to make his way into the room.

The doctor lumbered in, carrying a large tray, and she could see multiple vials and needles resting upon it.

“It’d probably be quicker to just open a vein and bleed me into a bucket.”

Bruce came to a halt, blinking once in surprise. “Well, that’s... graphic.”

She gestured to the newspaper. “Alien autopsies in the New York Times kind of makes squeamishness a moot point.”

“Yeah,” he half-sighed as he set the tray on the metal desk, since adorned with a tv screen, a StarkP- iPad, a few random paperbacks that suggested Bruce had gone into a Barnes & Noble and bought whatever was being promoted on the first table, and Tony Stark’s new, luxurious leather massage chair complete with footstool.

“Anyway,” Bruce continued as he perched on the ottoman. “These are for putting stuff in your body, not taking it out.”

“There had to be a less creepy way of saying that.”

“Wasn’t ever really known for my bedside manner,” he retorted with an apologetic shrug. “These are vaccines. Whole host of them, and probably similar to what you got as a kid, but they’ll help protect you against the pathogens of this reality. Guessing they’re going to hit you a bit harder than usual, so you may have a fever, chills, that sort of thing. I’ll get you a tea kettle and orange juice and other things. Stay hydrated.”

“Okay,” she agreed, dragging out the syllables, as she wearily eyed the multiple items on Bruce’s tray. “How many we talking?”

“Oh, you know,” he said by way of apology. “We got influenza, Hep A&B, couple pneumococcal, couple meningococcal, MMR, varicella, HPV, Tdap.”

“Um. Isn’t that way too freaking many at once?”

“There’s no limit on number of vaccines in a single sitting. You’ll be fine. Just, you know... Take it easy for a few days.”

Alex glanced at the sparse space. “No problem there.”

“Yeah, sorry. Left arm?”

She sighed. “Yeah, might as well jack up the non-dominant hand.” She pulled the short sleeve of the hospital gown over her shoulder and stared into the distance as Bruce began preparing the first injection.

“What’d you end up getting Loki to do?” she asked to make conversation, the last word catching as Bruce stuck a needle into her arm.

A peculiar coldness leaked into her bicep. “Bunch of romance novels.”

She snickered. “I guess that’s technically entertainment.”

Bruce laughed as he removed the needle and prepared the next dose. “I don’t think he agrees.” Alex smirked. “And he definitely wasn’t amused that it was your idea.”

“Whoa,” she exclaimed, both from the fresh pain of the second jab and Bruce's words. "Romance was your idea. I just said he needed something to do.”

“Yeah, he didn’t like that, either,” Bruce confirmed before switching into a truly terrible approximation of a British accent. “As if a witless mortal has any insight into a god’s needs. Tell that clucking hen to see to her own brood rather than her dull, imagined concerns for the fox who lurks beyond her roost. He is not friend, but foe, and she would do well to impress that concept into her foolish mind.”

“What a charmer,” she sarcastically drawled, then winced as another needle forced its way through her skin. “What’d he do with the books?”

“Burned them.”

“In front of you?”

“Yep. Snapped his fingers and up they went.”

She laughed. “Oh, so he wants you to think he burned them. He probably actually magicked them away into his inter-dimensional pocket to put on a little show for you. He is bored.”

“Maybe,” Bruce noncommittally pronounced as he added another Band-Aid to her arm. “Wait, inter-dimensional pocket?”

“Oh yeah, he’s got all kinds of things stored in there. When you go back, tell him-”

“Oh, no, I’m not going back.”

“What? Who’s feeding him?”

Bruce’s gloved hand made a bit of a shrugging gesture. “We took him a bunch of MREs at the beginning and left him to it.”

“Well, that’s disgusting.”

“Disgusting? He basically just said he was going to eat you.”

She shrugged. “Eh, he’s a theatre geek playing to his audience. Tell him that--”

“Aw, come on,” he interrupted with a groan. “Don’t make me the go-between.”

“I’m happy to go say it to him myself, if you want to let me out of here.”

“You still got ten days,” Bruce reminded her, and she stared at him as he shifted uncomfortably under her gaze. “Geez, fine, what?”

A little triumphant smirk bloomed on her face, hidden behind her medical mask. “Tell him that it’s interesting he went straight to an animal metaphor given all those stories about him shape shifting into a mare and getting knocked up by a stallion. I get why he’s so angry if he really had to give birth to an eight-legged demon horse.”

Bruce gaped for a moment before nervously laughing. “Think if I say that he’s going to set me on fire.”

“I’m kidding,” she said with a snort. “Even though it is the story. Anyway, I’ll just send him a book through you.”

“He doesn’t want books.”

“Yeah, he does, he’s just been a drama queen about it.”

“I just don’t think he’s gonna take it well.”

“Well, too bad. He can’t hurt me. Or anyone else.”

“Yeah, that’s the hypothesis,” Bruce agreed before jamming yet another bit of metal into her body. "But we haven’t tested it, and I’m not really excited to start.”

“Uh, we have tested it. He wanted to kill me the moment we landed back on Earth. He definitely wanted to shove Tony out the window... again. But no murder so far.”

“No murder so far,” Bruce repeated with eyes bugging wide. “I gotta say, I’m feeling less and less inclined to keep him on this planet.”

“We're kind of a package deal, I’m afraid.”

“Yeah.” He sat back with a sigh, finally done with the injections. “My sympathies.”

Alex smirked, then grabbed one of the titles off her desk—The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Favoring her non-mutilated arm, she jotted a quick note on the inside cover—“Maybe the fox should worry more about the dragon circling above.”—before passing the paperback to Bruce.

He begrudgingly accepted the item. “He’s just gonna destroy it.”

“Maybe. Sucks for him if so; I’m sure he’d find a lot of parallels to his own life in it.”

“Yeah, murder and mayhem. Great.”

She smiled. “I promise you there is more to Loki than meets the eye. Not saying it’s all good, but he’s not a mindless killing machine, either.”

Bruce gathered up his materials and made his way to the exit. With a final shrug, he muttered, “Gonna have to take your word on that one,” before leaving her once again alone.

Chapter Text

Alexandra had been free from the sub-sub-basement quarantine cell for five days and was beginning to settle into her new living space in Stark Tower. The 93-story skyscraper was a strange hodgepodge of a building, broken down into sections that were both on- and off-limits to her.

The ground and second floor were seemingly dedicated to tourists and built like a cathedral—no doubt a church of which Tony saw himself as the main deity—with a massive atrium framed by pillars that skyrocketed upward into soaring buttresses, interspersed by twenty-foot windows that allowed natural light to pour in, sparkle along the mica granite floors, and fill the space with the overwhelming feeling of grandeur.

Or, at least, so she’d seen on the insipid ‘Stark TV’ default station running on a loop like a bad hotel welcome channel on her television. With an intergalactic criminal as her literal sidekick, Alex was not particularly welcome to roam the building at her leisure.

However, she’d seen that housed within the atrium were cafes and souvenir stores, and beyond that, Stark! Science and Discovery, the official museum dedicated to the accomplishments of the Stark family, from Howard’s early clandestine work during World War Two all the way to Tony’s recent creation of the new element arc reactor. Interactive features included 'formulating’ super-soldier serums, exploring every inch of the 1943 Stark Expo in startlingly advanced virtual reality, and trying out the ‘Iron Man Experience’—a full-range-motion ride with immersive special effects.

Alex had laughed for a solid minute when she heard about that one. Jesus, Tony loved himself. Good marketing, though.

She also learned that Stark Industries as an entity didn’t start until Floor 3. There was the usual reception area, additional security checks, and perks for the employees, including a staff gym, subsidized cafeteria, daycare, and huge presentation theater used for official Town Halls, guest lecture series, and even the occasional movie night.

From there, the building rolled into run-of-the-mill offices up until Floor 70. Among those were the IT department, human resources, media and marketing teams, R&D; everything a business leading in aeronautics, robotics, nanotechnology, and clean energy could need.

Floors 70-80 and, conversely, Sub-Basements 1-5, were the secret stuff; at least, secret in terms of Stark Industries. Alex hadn’t been made acquainted with anything housed on those floors—though she’d made assumptions on the basis of Tony’s sweeping omissions—and was probably better off for it.

Floors 81-90 were the really secret stuff. Tony’s own R&D playground filled multiple stories, and the various wings he had created for his own use—the ones that weren’t in the sub-sub-basement like the Hulk cage or quarantine room, anyway—stretched over those nine levels. And beyond that, Tony’s extravagant penthouse ruled for three stories on top of it all, complete with balcony and helipad in various stages of repair.

Floor 86 was where she and Loki were to earn their keep. Tony had converted one of his private labs into a dual-use space, with one side dominated by whiteboards and hologram technology and giant screens for Tony’s theoretical—in both senses of the word—work with Loki, and the other side stuffed with diagnostic machines and biochemistry sets and other laboratory equipment for Bruce to play around with Alex’s genome, or whatever the hell he intended to do.

The constant drilling, sanding, hammering, creaking, restoring of the entire building was something she had mostly gotten used to, a mere background noise that only occasionally reminded her that her brain had created one hell of a thorough illusion.

It was on Floor 82 that Alex found herself residing. It was a level populated almost entirely by unused apartments, and while Tony had not provided an adequate answer for why he had an entire story of empty living spaces, Alex was pleased to find her new one-bed, one-bath tastefully furnished, with an excellent—albeit acrophobia-inducing—view of Midtown West and the sunsets beyond.

It had been unnerving seeing herself in a bathroom mirror for the first time in that world. She hadn’t clocked it in Asgard, surrounded as she had been by a planet entirely alien to her, but in retrospect she had looked younger than that sallow creature who had reflected back to her in the airplane bathroom. The oddness of her physical form only continued to perplex her in her new mirror within Stark Tower, as though a decade or more had been shaved off her nearly 40 years, with even scars and cellulite she had gleaned in the proceeding decennium erased from her skin.

Further evidence that it was all a dream.

Even further evidence could be found in the farcical listing of her floor’s fellow tenants: Bruce the freaking Hulk Banner and Loki of Asgard.

With the tether between Alex and the petulant demigod still untested, Loki had been placed in the apartment directly across the hall from hers. Bruce was on the same side as Loki but two units down, having refused to share a wall and risk overhearing whatever Loki got up to behind closed doors.

Securing Loki in the apartment had been Alex’s first use of the power—such as it was—that Odin had forced upon her. With her voice taking on a register she didn’t understand and yet one that felt right, she had forbidden Loki from leaving the apartment, be it physically or in one of his non-corporeal double forms, unless she, Tony, or Bruce opened the front door to permit him egress.

Loki fumed at her the entire time, which she supposed meant the words had done their job.

Alex knocked on Loki’s door their first morning of ’work.’ After several long moments of waiting, she began to grow annoyed, until she remembered Loki couldn’t open the door himself. With another gentle rap to hopefully announce her presence, she pressed her thumb on the bio-reader and opened the door a crack.

“Hi,” she called in a slightly wavering voice. “You ready to go?”

A long silence greeted her. “Loki?” she cautiously tried again. “We need to go upstairs.”

Another beat, and then the cracked door flew open all the way, ripping the wood out of her hands. Loki loomed on the other side, glowering, his black hair curling around his shoulders like tendrils of smoke, his blue eyes cold and cutting a path down his aquiline nose to pierce her with pure disdain. He wore Asgardian leathers, not quite his battle armor—and thankfully no helmet—but it was clear that he wished to convey an air of both superiority and aggression.

Alex’s eyes widened at his fearsome disposition, but she steeled herself against taking a step back. Plenty of men at the UN had tried dominating her with their physicality, and she usually won. “Good morning,” she greeted in a faux-sweet tone as she forced her features to somewhat relax.

Loki’s scornful gaze narrowed even further. “The only thing good about this morning is the promise that it must eventually end, and in so doing will rid me of your kind’s suffocating presence for a few more precious hours.”

She tightly swallowed as she gave herself an internal pep-talk. She could handle him. He was cruel and frightening, yes, but the television show had confirmed beyond a doubt that his behavior was a defense mechanism, a fearful attempt to retain some shred of control in a rudderless world.

It was often her defense mechanism, too, which rather made sense given she was still 99 percent certain the entire reality existed in her deteriorating brain.

“Okay,” she murmured, drawing out the first syllable in a way she hoped annoyed him. “Guess you’re not a morning person. Come on, and I’ll introduce you to the Midgardian delicacy of coffee.”

“A ‘Midgardian delicacy,’ what a truly contradictory proposition,” Loki huffed with an eye roll. “This coffee of yours is no doubt swill, and even that is likely overstating things.”

She smirked. “Oh, it’s definitely going to be swill the way I make it for you.” Loki glowered at that, and her smile brightened in victory. “Now come on, we’re late.”

“I am a prince of two realms,” he haughtily retorted. “I am never late; only those who seek my presence are.”

Her smile dropped into a sigh. Drawing on her years of negotiating on behalf of the planet, she softly commiserated, “I know. You’re literally a prince twice over, born and raised into wealth and power I can’t even imagine. The culture shock you feel going from palace life to an apartment block in Tony Stark’s building must be immense. You're used to giving orders, and now you’re in a position where you’re compelled to obey them, and I’m sure the fact that it’s mortals making the demands makes it even more egregious. You are in a difficult position.”

Loki eyed her, his features neutral but his gaze hard. “I do not require your pity, mortal.”

“I don’t pity you, Loki. Pity implies you have no agency over your own life, and despite what’s happening right now, you obviously do.”

Not a whisper of his expression changed. “You are an imbecile.”

“Jesus,” she spat with a sharp, disbelieving laugh as she mentally tossed aside any attempt at diplomacy. “Fine, be an asshole, if it makes you feel so much fucking better. Just because I can see things from your side doesn’t mean I agree with your version of events or your shitty, shitty attitude about it. And you’re the imbecile if you think otherwise.”

A warning flash sparked in Loki’s eyes. Leaning forward into her space, his upper body towering over hers and reducing her to a fly caught in his web, he said in a low, dangerous whisper, “You may have stumbled your way into some small amount of power, you wretched little creature, but it will not last, and when it is gone you will be at my mercy. So, for now mind your tongue and know your place, and perhaps on that day I will show you a modicum of leniency.”

The phrase ‘know your place’ irked her more than she could put into words, and so she gleefully threw it back at him. “But right now, I do have the power,” she reminded him with a little smile. “So really, it's you who should know your place; at least, that is if you want to continue to enjoy the relative freedom of your current situation. I am very happy to make a call to Heimdall and put you back in an Asgardian cell where you can rot away for the next however many hundreds of years, if that’s really what you want.”

He gave a dark smirk of his own. “Doltish cow, you have already shown your hand in that regard. You do not want me in that cell any more than I desire it myself.”

“Maybe not. But the difference is, this is real to you. But to me, this is one long, weird, very ridiculous dream that I’m either going to wake up from or die in, and so when it comes down to it, it doesn’t really matter one way or the other what happens to you, or Ragnarök, or anything else in this stupid universe. I want to be comfortable while I’m in the dream but beyond that?” She gave a careless shrug that seemed to slightly rattle him. “Beyond that, I really don’t give a fuck.”

Loki slowly straightened, removing himself from her space as his eyes scanned her face, clearly looking for any deception. When he seemed to determine that she was telling the truth, his features once again wiped clean. “I wager you will care once those terrors you have foretold start coming true.”

“Eh,” she said with another shrug. “Hopefully I’ll be awake by then. Now can we please go upstairs already?”

He eyed her for another long moment before seeming to slightly slump. “By the Norns,” he said to himself with a sour expression pulling his lips downward. “Odin wages war and is rewarded with a kingdom; I scarcely hint at the same and am cursed into servitude for an inept band of mortals.”

“Main difference is that Odin won his war,” Alex breezily responded as she began walking down the corridor, deciding she didn’t really care if he followed or not. Testing the bond’s tether would be interesting, at least.

Loki must have considered the same, for a few seconds later, she heard him begrudgingly trudge behind her.

“Any explanation I might provide would no doubt turn to dust in the dull-witted wasteland that is your mortal mind,” Loki icily spewed at Tony from his perch behind a holo-screen, his long fingers flicking an equation away with a gesture of disgust.

On the other side of the partially divided laboratory, Alex met Bruce’s gaze, and they both rolled their eyes. It had been a little over a week since Loki and Alex had entered serfdom, and every day had played out in a near-identical fashion, with an egomaniacal blowout between Tony and the dark prince and damaged eardrums for Bruce and Alex.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re one of the universe’s great thinkers,” Tony sarcastically returned. “Remind me, which part of your grand plan involved house arrest under my roof?”

Loki sneered. “Your presumption that I did not foresee such a possibility only further solidifies the foolhardiness of attempting any theoretical explanation to one such as yourself. I shall not waste precious breath chronicling the ways of the realms to a creature with no hope of comprehension.”

Tony glowered for a moment before he yanked his head back to squint across the room at Alex. “Uh, little help here?”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe try talking to him like the prince he literally is rather than one of your subordinates.”

Loki perked up at that, evidently both surprised and delighted by her presumed support. “Yes, Anthony. You would do well to treat your betters as such.”

Tony answered the comment with an eye roll. “Yeah, thanks for that, sweetheart. Maybe wanna try a different tact?”

She blankly stared back. “What do you want me to do?”

“You know, the thing.” When Alex only continued to stare, he sighed. “Manchurian Candidate his ass.”

A creeped-out shiver rolled down her spine as her face contorted in a grimace. “Gross, no. I’m not going to become a brain rapist just because you two don’t play nice with others.”

Tony’s face darkened. “Seem to recall we had a deal, Dorothy.”

She could feel her own face darkening in response. For a moment, she considered her next move. “Okay, I need ten minutes alone with Loki.”

Loki’s gaze whipped to her, a cruel smirk on his face. “Oh, pet,” he purred. “I am sure you would hardly last five.”

She ignored him even as her cheeks tinted with embarrassment. “I’m serious,” she said as she looked meaningfully at Tony and Bruce in turn. “Ten minutes. Get out of here.”

Bruce sighed, making no effort to talk her down, and slid off his raised chair. Tony watched him walk silently out of the room, then turned back to Alex. “If he tries anything, you know... Don’t die.”

Her lips pursed together in annoyance. “Thanks.”

Tony hesitated for another moment, warily regarding Loki, who only met his concerned gaze with an evil little smirk. Tony glared, then sighed himself. “Your funeral, kid.” With that, he too left the room, the door shutting loudly behind him.

At the billionaire’s departure, Loki swiveled around in his chair to fully face Alex, vicious delight carving ruts into his features. “Well, well,” he crooned in a low tone that certainly did not ricochet between her legs. “Now that you have me all to yourself, whatever will you do with me?”

=Again, she attempted to ignore his cruel flirting. “Can you make sure JARVIS doesn’t hear us?”

His dark grin widened. “Now I am intrigued,” he declared in a voice of caramel and velvet. “Tell me, pet, in this sordid little scheme of yours, am I to be the hunter or the hunted?”

She attempted to keep his words from affecting her, but it was like keeping the rain from falling. His cruelly sensual tone poured over her, his smirk alluringly wicked and mesmerizing. Unable to stop her flush from deepening—which seemed to amuse him to no end—she said in as steady a voice as she could muster, “Alright, fine, if you didn’t do anything to JARVIS, that’s on you. Here’s the thing: you need to find a way to work with Tony because if you don’t, you’re going back to Asgard, and if you go back to Asgard, you’re going to end up killing someone you love.”

Loki’s grin faded as a faint wave of green piezoelectrical magic rippled past her. “Oh, believe me, mortal,” he darkly started. “The oaf’s death would be a most welcomed occasion.”

“You know that’s not true, and I wasn’t talking about Thor.” She waited a beat as Loki’s brows furrowed in confusion. “Frigga.”

Every feature on Loki’s face wiped blank. “You are no seer.”

She ignored the claim. “You’re in one of Asgard’s cells, and a group of invaders breaks in through the dungeons. You want some mischief, and I think you think you’re sending them to Thor or Odin, but... you’re not.”

“You lie.” His voice was flat, unemotional.

Her hands raised in a helpless gesture. “Do I? I mean, you would know. Am I lying?”

His jaw began pulling with a minuscule tightness. “Then you have misinterpreted that which you have seen.”

A mirthless laugh, more like a bark, pressed out of her lips. “It’s pretty fucking unambiguous, Loki. She almost kills Malek- their leader, but before she can, the guys you accidentally sent her way show up, save their leader, and stab her to death. And you don’t even find out until after the funeral because you’re still rotting in that cell.”

The tightness moved to his eyes, before a careless sneer set into his lips. “Then she dies,” he said as though the words meant nothing to him. “We all must, eventually, and-”

“Loki,” she spat, and real shock colored his face as she dared interrupt him. Good. “The last thing you say to her is that she’s not your mother.”

The dismissive smirk evaporated. He considered that for a moment, then slightly shook his head. “Then I simply will not direct the invaders.”

“I’ve changed things by telling you, by even being here. What if now they go that direction on their own, and you interfering would actually lead them away from her?”

“Perhaps,” he softly—almost so softly she didn’t hear him—conceded, a pensive expression on his face, his eyes focused on the tabletop. A thought occurred to him, and his gaze lifted to hers. “You came to Asgard to prevent this. Why?”

"Because Frigga doesn’t deserve to die.”

“A truth, and yet there is plainly more.”

“Yeah, like Ragnarök.”

“And that other you mentioned: Hela? What role does she play?”

“I’ve said enough,” she uneasily countered, not willing to offer further insight into the future until she had to. That information was on a need-to-know basis.

He stared back at her, hard, direct. “You have implied that I initiate Ragnarök in order to prevent this Hela’s return.”

“I don’t think that’s quite what I said.”

He continued anyway. “You say you came to Asgard to prevent Frigga’s death. To prevent Ragnarök. And yet all you have done is change the manner of my imprisonment. I must either be of great import to the fate of an entire realm, or you have taken a rather obsessive interest in me, though I suppose I could not fault you for that. It must be difficult for a mortal to meet a god and not be forever altered by the experience.”

She snorted. “Not everything is about you, Loki.”

“No,” he mused. “Though all the interesting things are.” She huffed out an annoyed sigh, and he answered with a faint exhalation of his own. “Very well, seer,” he pronounced, his face muscles relaxing as he regally straightened in his seat. “I shall attempt to work with Stark, though surely you must know how fruitless of an endeavor that will inevitably be.”

A smirk pulled at her lips. “Just keep us from getting kicked out, okay? I really like my apartment.”

An exaggerated, histrionic eye roll that likely could be seen from Asgard answered her declaration. “Of course you would find such menial accommodation not only adequate but superlative,” Loki theatrically groaned. “Though I suppose when one knows only inferiority, even the coarsest rag would be praised as spun silk.”

She couldn’t help herself from grinning. Goddamn, but his melodramatics were amusing.

A vexed frown deepened on Loki’s face. “Are you too daft to realize I am insulting you, mortal?”

That made her laugh. “Sounds more like an indictment of yourself and your sheltered, spoiled upbringing.”

The vexation continued. “Not moments earlier you suggested Anthony address me in the manner befitting my station.”

She shrugged. “I contain multitudes.”

That response appeared to leave Loki genuinely dumbfounded, and he didn’t say another word until long after Tony and Bruce had returned to the room.

A few days later, Alex started to notice something peculiar—well, even more so—about interacting with Loki. While he was never cordial, he at least had the capacity to maintain a conversation—albeit one peppered with insults and torturous flirting—without edging into outright hostility. But every now and then, something would snap, and he would turn downright poisonous, lashing out at anyone in his vicinity.

It seemed to go beyond mood swings. And eventually she began to realize that his spiraling temper tended to coincide with weird, brief… trances? Wherein his features wiped blank, his tongue went silent, his eyes unfocused, and his entire body froze in position. It never lasted more than a few seconds, but when he returned, he was an unbearable nightmare of viciousness and venom for hours.

It had been perhaps most noticeable one night early on when she was returning Loki to his apartment for the evening. As she had moved to open his door, she had suddenly found him paused in mid-step a few paces back, his eyes wide and staring forward unfocused, his jaw muscles slightly twitching.

“What’s up?”

He hadn’t replied, and she looked him over more carefully. There had been something like fear pulling at his eyes, something like a prayer moving softly across his lips. His hands had been at his sides, the long fingers clenched tightly into fists.

“Loki?”

When he had only continued to stare at an unseen void, she had taken another step toward him. Her voice became stronger, louder. “Loki.”

Then he suddenly blinked, his black tresses brushing against his shoulders as he shook his head, the muscles still twitching along his throat.

In a flash he relaxed, his features wiping clear and expressionless.

“Yes?” he finally responded. The tone was bored.

“What the hell just happened?”

Not a line on his face changed. “To what are you referring?”

“You just froze for like five seconds.”

A moment of silence lapsed before he replied. “You are mistaken.”

“No, you looked scared. Are you okay?”

At that, acid leaked into his veins. His stoic mask dropped as his eyes dangerously narrowed. “Watch your tongue, mortal,” he had spat with no small amount of malice. “An ant claiming to have insight into a god's disposition would be laughable if it were not so impudent.”

She took a beat to consider him, the frown remaining deeply etched into her features. “It's okay to be scared.”

A feral glint shimmered over his eyes, and Alexandra’s stomach turned, knowing in that moment he had very likely wanted to hurt her. So before he responded, she murmured, “Good night, Loki,” and gestured toward the open door.

“Yes,” had been his taunting response, his voice unnervingly even as he had stepped into the darkened room and swung around to menacingly glare down at her. “Sleep well, you little fool, for I shall make it my mission that you never again have a moment of peace for the rest of your pitiful, meaningless existence.”

Even the memory of the interaction sent a chill up her spine. Like the Hot Priest could sense in Fleabag, she knew Loki was going somewhere, was interacting with something in those few moments. And although she had no evidence, she guessed it had to do with the Mind Stone, Thanos, or both.

How to address it, though, continued to remain a mystery. And so, as Bruce tested non-covalent chemical reactions with her Bizarro-World DNA and Tony and Loki held an almost amicable discussion on the structure of Yggdrasil, Alex took to the internet to learn what she could about supporting a trauma survivor.

While there were certainly helpful bits, nothing precisely told her how to talk to someone who didn’t want to talk, which she guessed was the point. Deciding her only move at the moment was to let Loki know he had a safe space if he should ever decide to come to her, she paused that research and hopped over to the New York Times for her daily reading of The Onion-esque news stories.

Every day, the paper spotlighted a few victims of Loki’s attack, both those missing and presumed dead and those formally deceased. Called ‘Portraits of Humanity,’ it was heavy reading, and she typically could only manage a few lines of each person’s biography, a quick scan of their photo, before it inched too closely to reality, and she had to move on in favor of more absurd headlines.

The first one that day was of a teenager named Jose Gutierrez, 18 and due to start his freshman year at NYU that fall. The accompanying picture was of him at a Yankees game, grinning from the bleachers with his arm around an older, smiling woman—presumably his mother. So young, so peaceful, so full of promise.

With a tight swallow, Alex flicked to the next profile.

Alexandra M. Weston.

Alex stared at her name as all breath evaporated from her lungs.

At 27, Alexandra Marie Weston was well on her way to building a life anyone would envy. The mother of one had recently returned to her position with the United Nations after taking extended maternity leave to care for her beloved daughter, Eleanor, and she and her long-time partner, William Clark, were settling their new family into a split-level starter home in Lake Ronkonkoma—

The words bled together as Alex’s eyes unfocused. Scrambling for any point of reference that made sense, her gaze fell on the accompanying picture. Her freckled skin. Her long hair. Her slight dimple in her left cheek when she smiled. Her little scar above her eyebrow, won in an impromptu fight with the edge of a table when she was three or four.

Her face.

Her.

Everything went numb. Everything. Her vision, her hearing, her nerves, her brain.

Her.

Numb.

Suddenly she was standing. Suddenly she was walking out of the room. Suddenly she was in the hallway, pressed against a wall and sinking to the floor as her legs gave out and her tingling hands grasped at her shoes and her breath came quickly, so quickly, too quickly, too quickly.

Numb.

Pain.

Excruciating pain.

She might have yelped as she tightened her grip around herself, her torso convulsing and her limbs vibrating and her breath hyperventilating and her vision tunneling and her heart pounding so rapidly that a shooting, searing pain began palpitating in her chest and spurting outward into her extremities.

A shadow crouched down beside her. “Are you ill?” The voice was smooth and refined and didn’t seem to care about the answer much one way or the other, but it didn’t matter anyway because the words were rapidly lost in the rushing din of blood pounding in her ears.

“Can’t breathe,” she gurgled through a throat closing on itself. “Can’t breathe, can’t breathe.”

“Slowly now,” the unruffled voice declared. “You can breathe.”

“Help,” she burbled, her tongue too large for her mouth. Pain in her chest. Heart attack? The stray thought sent her adrenalin through the roof, dovetailed with anxiety that left her muscles clenched to the point of rigor mortis. Death; was she dead?

Alexandra Marie Weston was well on her way to building a life anyone would envy.

Alex seized up with a guttural shriek as her body twisted with disassociation. Her nails ripped into her ankles, she saw the blood, but all she could feel was terror.

Something lifted her upward, but she had no sensation, nothing beyond the struggle to breathe and the ripping, burning agony of each heartbeat.

“You are in control,” that refined voice echoed around her. “It is only your mind that you fear. Your body is safe.”

Alex thrashed. No, no, no, her head kept shaking, erratic, panicked. “I died,” she gasped out in a wavering, high-pitched tone. “I died!”

“You are alive and healthy,” the low voice returned. “What you are feeling is merely your mind making sense of your reality. Take control by focusing on your breathing.”

Alexandra Marie Weston

Her hand shot outward, finding reciprocal flesh and digging her nails into it. The other form did not react. “I can’t breathe.”

“Yes, you can. You are breathing right now; you have never stopped breathing. Slowly now. Gather the air in.”

Alex rolled into a ball on her side; something firm and giving was beneath her, perhaps the cushions to a sofa. She continued to clench the other’s flesh between her fingers. The skin felt cool, and she tried to slowly inhale.

“There you are, mortal,” Loki—she only then realized it had been him the whole time—softly encouraged. “No harm will come to you. Just breathe, and rest, and reset your mind.”

“Here,” another voice she vaguely recognized as Bruce’s joined the conversation. “Xanax.”

Alex’s free, shaking hand darted out for the medicine, only to be swiped away by Loki.

“She does not need your meddling potions.”

“She’s having a panic attack, Loki.”

"Precisely. It is in her mind, and in her mind she can overcome it.”

“That’s... Yeah, that’s not how mental health works. She can’t just magic herself better because you said so.”

“She is not a slave to her errant thoughts and feelings. She can take charge of her own mind.”

“Sometimes humans need therapy and pharmaceutical help before-”

“She is more than capable of calming herself and changing the direction of her thoughts.”

“She-”

“Fuck,” Alex burst out, nearly hyperventilating, the tremors in her muscles so fierce that pain radiated up and down her arms, while the sharp pressure in her chest only increased. Her throat was tight, so tight, and she knew she couldn’t breathe. “Pill! Give me the pill!”

Loki cast a disappointed look down his nose at her. “You do not need it.”

Her thoughts were spinning so rapidly that she couldn’t formulate a retort. Instead, she wordlessly held out her trembling, open palm, still clutching what she saw was Loki’s bare wrist in her other hand. Bruce swiftly handed her a small yellow pill, followed by a glass of water.

It took several attempts to manage to get the pill down, so certain was she that her throat was too tight, that swallowing wouldn’t work, that she was too weak to even hold the water.

When she was finally done and curled back into a ball, Loki sourly eyed her. “You will never master your fear if you hide away from it after only a few moments of confrontation.”

Again, she didn’t respond, trying to focus on her breath that was still coming fast, so fast, too fast.

“Man, leave her alone,” Bruce defended her. “You don’t know-”

“Nor do you,” Loki interrupted. “You do not help her by enabling her retreat from her own mind. Is that the directive of all the healers of this realm? Dull the senses so thoroughly that the patient is little more than an animated shell? It is a callous approach if so.”

“What’s callous is you just standing idly by while she’s having a full-blown crisis.”

“I was attempting to assist her, you ridiculous little creature, and she was on the path to recovery before you arrived.”

“Stop,” Alex wheezed, adrenalin spiking and coating her tongue with acid. “Not helping. Either of you.”

"Sorry,” Bruce softly apologized, while Loki only huffed and slunk across the room to lean against the wall with his arms crossed in blatant sulking.

Alex struggled to sit up on the couch. They were in one of the back areas of Tony’s massive lab, kitted out with three desks that had various electronics littering every surface, a few chairs—mostly also covered with hunks of metal and draped cords—and a half-complete robot-looking thing about four-feet tall and hunched in the corner opposite of Loki.

She pulled her knees to her chest and pressed her forehead to her knees, closing her eyes and shakily attempting to bring her breathing under control, at least until the Xanax kicked in.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Bruce’s question seeped through the fog still clogging her brain.

She gulped in a breath as a little microburst of anxiety hotly scratched over her spine. “I died."

“By Bor’s Beard, mortal,” Loki peevishly spat, and even without looking she could see the irritation on his face. “You are plainly alive. Stop this nonsense at once.”

“No,” she squeaked out, even as Bruce started in again on Loki. “Here. The day I arrived. I died.”

The argument of the two men stopped. Pressing her face even more firmly into her legs, her lungs stuttering for breath, she added, “It’s in today’s New York Times.”

There was some rustling, followed by several long, heavy seconds of silence. “Jesus,” Bruce finally breathed.

“Mortal,” Loki started in a tone that was still haughty, still annoyed, and yet had softened slightly with understanding. “That was not you. It was an echo, one possible version of your being. But not you.”

Alex’s brain vibrated as her head shook. “But it was- She was the one who belonged in this universe. I don’t.”

And then, at long last, the dawning realization that had been gnawing at the back of her brain for days like a particularly tenacious termite finally bored its way through her defenses and sent her whole careful construction of reality crashing to the ground.

“Jesus, fuck,” she weakly screeched as tears poured down her face and her nails clawed into her hair. “This is real. Jesus fucking Christ, this is real. How can this be real? This isn’t real, this isn’t real!” She trailed off, breathless, repeating the last words over and over again.

Her sister. Her niece. Her parents. Alison, who was always up for a trip anywhere in the world. Tim and Jessica, her go-to happy hour buddies. Sasha, her annoying but passionate boss who had helped craft her career. Her sister. Her parents.

Every one of them. Gone.

“Fuck. What the fuck, the fuck.” Her body shook with fresh waves of anxiety, of panic, of terror, of disassociation, of complete and utter psychosis.

“Easy, Alex,” Bruce softly murmured, and then said something else, possibly left the room, but she couldn’t react, her thoughts bouncing from her reality to the Marvel reality, from dread to disbelief, from mania to catatonia.

Weight shifted beside her on the couch. “Mortal, look at me.” Loki’s tone was soft and yet commanding.

“I can’t,” she whimpered as her entire being, from her limbs to her chest to her mind to her soul, bucked and flailed in desperate denial of what her senses were telling her.

Loki seemed to shift on the couch, and she suddenly felt pressure on her left ankle. “What do you feel?”

She gasped for air. “I don’t know. Everything hurts, fuck, I don’t know...”

“No.” The pressure at her ankle increased, and she unconsciously kicked at it. “There it is,” he murmured, and his honeyed voice seemed for once not to be purposefully antagonistic. “You can feel this, yes?”

He sharply gripped her ankle again, and she irritably kicked a second time. “Stop it.”

“I will stop when you tell me what you feel.” He punctuated the words with another tight pinch.

“Knock it off,” she snapped, her head lifting from her knees to glare at him.

His sharp blue gaze met hers. “I will stop,” he calmly repeated, his face that infuriating, placid mask. “When you tell me what you feel.”

She angrily wiped at the tears on her face and whipped her head toward the wall, her long red hair falling to shield her face so she wouldn’t have to continue looking at his deceptively handsome features. “I feel like I want to punch you.”<

Loki huffed; it might have been a laugh, but she didn’t even care. “Concentrate, pet, and I might let you attempt just that, if only for the brief amusement it would provide.” The pressure at her ankle eased slightly, then tightened once more. “Focus on the sensations at your ankle and tell me what you feel.”

Alex huffed herself—and hers definitely was not a laugh—before angrily setting her jaw. “I feel you squeezing my ankle, and it’s really annoying.”

“Excellent,” he murmured, and a bizarre little thrill that was entirely unwanted pulsed happily in her brain. “What else?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. The temperature of your hand, I guess.”

“What is the temperature?”

“Warm but... cooler than my skin.”

“Good. And what do you feel in your legs?”

“I... My muscles hurt.”

“Do you feel the fabric of your trousers against your skin?”

“No.”

“Try.”

She bit back an irritated response and closed her eyes, attempting to concentrate. “I guess, yeah,” she confirmed after a few seconds. “The jeans feel stiff and are pinching at my knees from the way I’m sitting.”

“Good.” Loki flicked his hand off her ankle as though the touch had been distasteful and sat back, reintroducing several inches of space between their bodies on the shared couch. “You feel reality.”

She glanced at him. “I don’t know if-”

“Mortal,” he interrupted with a silencing side-eye. “You are back to yourself. Do not run off searching for other avenues to depart when you have only just returned.”

She considered that for a moment, then slowly extended her sore legs to the floor. Suddenly she was aware of just how much her body ached, of how completely exhausted she was. She realized she could sense Loki sitting beside her, could just smell the soft, smoky, wintery scent of his skin. Without looking at him, she murmured, “Why are you helping me?”

“Helping you helps me,” he replied with a disinterested shrug. Rising to his feet, he shot her a blank look. “At least until I find a way to sever this ludicrous bond and rid myself of you completely.”

Cool. Right back on form, then. She exaggeratedly rolled her eyes, and without another word, Loki departed the room right as Bruce walked back in.

Bruce watched him go with a frown, then cautiously looked to Alex. “You okay?”

Her head fell back against the couch. “Loaded question.”

“Right... So, hey, I got you another Xanax.”

“I’m good,” she muttered, her heart still making little flutters, but nothing she couldn’t handle. “Loki helped me through it.”

Bruce blinked in surprise. “He did? Why?”

“Because, at the end of the day,” Alex began with a sigh. "Loki is an unmitigated asshole.”

Chapter Text

The monotonous days continued throughout the summer, with Tony wielding a theoretical problem at Loki and Bruce wielding an all-too-real needle or blood-pressure cuff or full-body scan or some other medical horror at Alexandra. The four had settled into something of a routine, and although Alex wouldn’t call their working sessions friendly, the sharp bite of distrust had dulled considerably.

They’d even had some positive outcomes: Tony’s daily, interpersonal interaction with the architect of the attack that had nearly taken his life weirdly seemed to alleviate the worst of his PTSD;

And the science boys had determined through math they insisted was basic, but that Alex couldn’t hope to understand, that the Marvel universe had slower gravitational acceleration than her own, which meant that with all other things being equal, in the current world she had roughly only 85% of the mass of someone the same size and build as herself, explaining her ridiculously low tolerance and comparable fragility;

And Loki had laughed at one of her jokes. Or coughed. Either way, she was taking the win.

Alex had parted ways with the dark prince a few hours before. As had become her ritual, she had taken Loki a helping of her dinner that evening, left it inside his doorway after a polite knock announcing her presence, and then settled in for the night on her own couch. Sometimes he ate it (or threw it away), and sometimes he refused, but either way her conscience was moderately clear.

It was best not to let her mind wander when she was alone, but those intrusive thoughts found harbor in the quiet evening. And even Tony’s ode-to-megalomania of a building couldn’t entirely beat back the suffocating heat of a sticky New York August night, which left her restless.

Alex flicked through a few tv stations before ultimately deciding it was too weird to watch shows that were almost as she remembered but with disturbingly minute differences, such as the Lois of that reality’s Family Guy sporting brown hair rather than the red she knew so well.

So, instead, she did what had become another ritual of sorts: curl up in the fetal position under the crisp new sheets and wait for sleep to finally take her.

She was in her old high school, walking down the corridors that wound down and around and back again in a way they couldn’t possibly have in reality. It was a dream, and a familiar one at that. She didn’t know why her subconscious so often brought her back to that place; it hadn’t even been remarkable the first time when she’d lived it, and each subsequent visit brought further diminishing results.

Although she recognized it for the dream it was, she also recognized that she was looking for something, likely items to pilfer to help survive the apocalyptic wasteland that no doubt faced her outside the educational fortress—so many of her dreams were set in such a landscape. And so dutifully she walked on, down another set of stairs, opened a locker, pressed the back until it gave way and slid through into a different corner of her mind.

Onward and down, and around, tiles and lockers and classrooms. Beige; everywhere was beige and empty.

Until it wasn’t.

Then it was blue.

Not the bright blue of the noon sky, nor the fresh, clear blue of a shallow stream. No, it was midnight blue, although naming it as such seemed an unnecessary insult to one of the loveliest times of the evening, for there was nothing lovely about what she saw before her.

Thousands of black metal spikes curved from the spot beneath her feet and sliced into the space above, row upon row stacking and coiling together to create a tunnel that was metal and yet alive, as though she stood upon the spine of a skeleton and its ribcage wrapped around her, trapped her, devoured her. A cold, suffocating blue weighed down every joint and pillar and coalesced on the floor, pooling around her feet and rippling outward with each step she took.

Dread. That sickening, scrambling, consuming existential dread that could only be unleashed by the unholiest of thoughts, by the cruelest of nightmares. She didn’t want to move; she couldn’t move.

And then she heard the screaming.

Once she had made the mistake of watching a PETA undercover video of a cow slaughterhouse somewhere abroad, animals shrieking in terror as workers brought sledgehammers down on their brethren, animals groaning in agony as they were beaten again and again until they finally died. She had promptly vomited, become a vegetarian, and banished that memory to the very depths of her psyche so that she might once again know peace.

The screams down that hallway were worse.

Alex remained frozen for several seconds, petrified and panicking. The bellowing deepened into a ghastly howl, and the bass reverberated in her ears on and on and on until she felt overcome with nausea. Without her permission, her feet began shuffling toward the sound even as the rest of her strained to retreat.

Step by step, she made her shaky way to a room on the left of the spinal-column hall, realizing the horrific yelling was coupled with an incessant screech, high and growing louder, sharper, until it filled her brain with notes at a pitch even higher than her range of hearing and her entire body ached from the psychic torment.

As she rounded the massive doorframe, she froze.

Loki, prone and suspended in air by unseen bonds. Sweat dripping down his dark tendrils, arms outstretched, muscles straining, back bowing in agony. His naked skin flashed, the porcelain beauty of his Aesir form momentarily replaced by the ridged, azure otherworldliness of that of his Jotun, before just as quickly slamming back into paleness, resting for a moment, and then ripping back to Jotun once more.

Emerald energy seemed to leak from him, collecting in a shimmering pool beneath his writhing form that distorted his image, projected back one even more grotesque, even more curdled with pain, until it was seemingly forced by some unnatural hand to arc away and bleed backward along the metal flooring into the shadows.

Alex could do nothing but gape. Each time the change tore through Loki, his extended arms shook in pain, his tendons popping, his neck muscles bulging, a shuddering groan that seemed to seep out of his every pore reverberating around the oval, dankly blue room. She scanned the ceiling but could see nothing holding him up, no apparatus from which he was hanging.

Movement to the far right of the room caught her eye, and she froze again.

Ebony Maw.

The spindly, unbelievably tall, sickly featured humanoid had not noticed her presence, so focused was he on the fly currently in his web. His long fingers pressed together in front of his chest in a calm motion as he spoke to Loki in a detached voice and a language she couldn’t understand. Rather than an interrogation, though, it seemed to be torture simply for torture’s sake, as the grotesque charcoal-grey alien was clearly uninterested in any response Loki might offer up.

The horrible metallic screeching that invaded her pores and ran rampant behind her eyes seemed to be emanating from that thing, seemed to pulse with each breath he took until her agony was in synch with his form, until her eyes were dripping tears and her stomach clenched and her intestines shook and her entire being was full of phlegm and vomit.

She had to stop it.

Quickly her eyes darted around the circular room, hoping against hope for a gun, a knife, a pipe, a rock, anything. But the space was barren.

She set her sights on the metal ribs constructing the skeleton of the corridor. Putting her weight against one, she began to push, shove, hang, anything to break it free and wield it as a weapon against the ongoing torture.

A phantom lasso wrapped around her waist and yanked her forward.

Before she could process what was happening, she found herself suspended in air before Ebony Maw himself, tied up by an unseen force that coiled around her like a boa constrictor.

The creature considered her with a curious head tilt for a moment. Then, reaching one of his antennae-like fingers toward her, he poked her in the middle of her forehead. Alex winced at the slight pressure. His leathery skin felt warm, too warm, and she realized in that moment that she couldn’t usually feel anything in her dreams.

Ebony Maw tilted his head again to look over her shoulder to address Loki suspended behind her. He said something in that same unknowable language that she could barely process over the whining, shrieking presence that had overtaken her entire form.

A moment later, Loki responded, his voice sounding shredded but cool, as though he were uninterested in the topic.

Ebony Maw’s head tilted once more. In a flash his hand shot out, wrapped around Alex’s entire skull, and pulsed.

A sharp, splintering pain radiated over her cranium, and she let out a loud squeal as a blinding light seared behind her eyelids, as thousands of pins began to drive their way toward her brain from every direction and that screeching sharpened to a single point, until it was the only thought she had, until

she seized up, fell,

sputtered on her back on top of dewy grass.

Silence.

Ringing ears dampened into a dull buzz. Tall, green reeds stretched toward the purplish sky above her, the blades long and thin and swaying in a breeze. Her head dazedly rolled to the side. A black pole lay beside her, and her hand—fingers feeling swollen and useless as though they were encased in a mitten—grappled for it.

A shadow appeared over her. Panicked? Predatory. She gripped the pole handle and swung with a scream. Halfway through the arc her eyesight stuttered,

and the world became darkly blue just as the screeching returned and the pole’s axe head ripped through Ebony Maw’s jaw.

The alien spluttered in surprise and staggered backward. A thud resonated behind her, then something cold and emerald and staticky rushed over her body. Suddenly an arm was hauling her to her feet, pulling her close.

It was only when she clutched back at the form that she realized it was Loki, and then everything went dark.

Alex’s eyes shot open with a heaving gasp. For several seconds she lay silent in the dark night, unmoving in her bed beyond her panting breaths and staccato heartbeat. One frantic hand came to her chest, and then she stilled again.

She was naked.

And laying on top of the covers.

With a woozy head and ears still ringing, Alex stumbled to her feet and furiously clasped the robe hanging on the back of the bedroom door around her body. She quickly made her way down the apartment’s short hallway, her hand dragging against the wall for support, before she burst into the brightly lit communal corridor and began banging on Loki’s door.

“Loki!” she screamed, her fist pummeling the wood. “What was that? Loki!”

She continued hammering as her legs became weak, and she slid to the ground. Her vision was muted, sounds were dark, but she could just make out the form of Bruce hovering over her, yelling. The door opened and she rolled forward, face-planting on the wooden floor.

Alex’s eyes blinked open. Above her was a slate-grey ceiling; industrial. Groggily she lifted her head and peered around. The isolation room. Sighing, her head fell back to the pillow.

“Hey there,” the disembodied voice of Bruce filtered into the room. “How you feeling?”

Her eyes closed. “Like someone attacked my head with a weed whacker.” She swallowed tightly, feeling nauseous. “What happened?”

“Uh, yeah... Was hoping you could tell me.”

A long, slow breath expanded her lungs before gently releasing. “I think I jumped universes again.”

“You think?”

She shook her head and immediately regretted the movement. “What’d Loki say?”

“He, uh... isn’t exactly forthcoming.”

Typical little shit. “Can I talk to him?”

“Yeah... Soon?”

She huffed out a sigh. “Am I in here for two weeks again?”

“Sorry.” There was a long pause. “So... What happened?”

Alex sighed again. “I was dreaming, but then I think I wandered into Loki’s dream somehow...” She momentarily trailed off as she swiftly debated how much to share.

Not knowing what locked corner of Loki’s mind she had inadvertently opened, she opted to go with as little as possible. “We were on a spaceship, but then I hit my head and I jumped universes while in his dream, into a field or something, and then I jumped back into his dream, I guess? It happened so fast. And then Loki woke us up.” She paused, considering her words. “I think so, anyway. I know I came to on my bed, like above the covers, and naked, and I know I didn’t go to sleep that way.”

Several seconds passed as Bruce digested that information. “Pretty weird,” he finally concluded.

“Weirder than turning into the jolly green giant when you get angry?”

“About the same.”

“Super reassuring.”

“Yeah, well, you found yourself in a pretty weird timeline. Sorry about that.”

That made her brain click, and she softly responded, “Yeah, I did. Twice.” They were both silent for several seconds until she asked what was to her the obvious question. “Why did I come back here?”

“We’re not even sure you jumped yet,” Bruce cautioned, though she could tell even by his faceless voice that he was as perplexed as she was. “Yeah... I’ll go get Loki.”

About ten minutes later, the warning alarm signaled the imminent arrival of a guest to her isolation ward. Alex dutifully masked up and tightened the robe she was still wearing around her otherwise-nude body.

Loki appeared at the doorway. He had evidently chosen to forego any sort of preventative outer clothing as he was clad in a dark-blue tunic and black, leathery trousers, his hair unusually frazzled but clearly brought into order by his strict hand into falling along his shoulders, and he strolled into the room with a dour look, casting his eyes around the quarters.

“What a paradise compared to the barren landscape in which they have me detained,” he grumbled to himself as he traced a long, idle finger over the large television screen. “They cosset you as much as a newly birthed babe.”

Alex ignored his griping and gestured to the Tony Chair. “Have a seat.”

He shot her a long look that clearly said he had no need of a formal invitation, then frowned. “What in the Nine are you wearing?”

Alex glanced down at herself. “Robe?”

“A robe for your face, is it?”

“Huh? Oh, the mask. It’s so I don’t inadvertently infect you with anything.”

Loki took the proffered chair in a slouch, his legs spread wide in a masculine display of lazy power. “As I told the beast, your weak mortal germs are of no concern to me.”

“Fine,” she grated out as she ripped the mask from her face. Tossing it on the desk, she evenly met his gaze. “Tell me what happened.”

He huffed in disinterest, his features carved into immutable marble, his returned stare cool and giving nothing away. “You had a dream which you believed to be real,” he coldly started even as a faint green wave of magic rippled outward from him, no doubt to seal off the room from JARVIS’ eavesdropping. “And like a sniveling child, you ran for the safety of your guardians rather than face it alone.”

“Jesus, Loki,” she grumbled with her eyes shooting heavenward as she angrily shook her head. “Can you please not be an insufferable ass this one time? I was there. You, and Ebony Maw, and-”

“Wherever you think you were, pet,” Loki lowly ground out as resentment tightened around his eyes, the only visible reaction on his face. “Is of no concern to me, nor anyone else. Hold your tongue.”

“I have held my tongue,” she retorted. “I didn’t tell Bruce what happened in your nightmare, or whatever it was, only that I went into your dream, jumped, came back into the dream, and you woke us up. I didn’t tell him what I saw.”

He shrugged, still playing up his affected disinterest. “You saw nothing of consequence.”

A frown creased her brow as a thought clicked in her brain. “Jesus,” she softly breathed, her expression morphing into something toeing the line between sorrow and compassion. “Is that where you’ve been going every time?”

Loki blinked in confusion as his dark head jerked slightly with surprise. “What?”

“You kind of space out every now and then,” she gently responded, then caught herself on the likely unfamiliar colloquialism as he frowned. “I mean you seem to go into these brief trances. Like you’re interacting with something else, somewhere else. And when you return to yourself, you seem... upset. Is it Ebony Maw and that torture chamber each time? In the movies you-”

“Do not wield your precious marvel movies to make a mockery of me, you whited sepulcher,” he hissed as he leaned forward like a periscoping snake, his eyes sharply, suddenly narrowed, anger twisting into his features. “You know well what I have endured.”

Alex’s lips parted in muted shock, and it took her a moment to collect herself and make sense of what he was saying. “Last night was the first time I ever saw it, Loki. The movies don’t show what happened to you between you falling from the Rainbow Bridge and you arriving on Earth. It's... hinted at, but that’s all. I didn’t know you went... there. And I didn’t know you were still going there.”

Those distrustful, hard blue eyes bored into hers for several seconds. Then, with a slight relaxation of his pose, he waved an impassive hand. “It is of no matter.”

Her stomach twisted unhappily at the idea that he was dismissing his own systematic torture. “You were really there last night, weren’t you?” she whispered as she continued to put the pieces together. “It wasn’t a dream.”

He only stared at her in response, neither confirming nor denying her words.

She took it as confirmation, anyway. “Then was I really there, too?”

Again, he did not speak.

Regardless, she continued. “If I was really there, then did I really hit him with that axe? Is he dead?”

The chance to belittle her was enough to break through his shell. “Of course, he is not dead, you simpleton,” Loki finally spat with an eyeroll. “As if a weakling mortal could inflict a fatal blow on such a being. Not even I could overtake him, and I am powerful well beyond the scope of your imagination.”

Her lips pursed together in wordless annoyance. “Well, I did hit him, didn’t I?”

“A scratch,” he snorted in response. “At best.”

“It was enough to break his hold on you. Or... It was, right?”

Loki eyed her with a vaguely annoyed look of his own. “I broke his hold, pet. You were merely a momentary distraction.”

Another piece fell into place. “Wait a minute. Did you pull me into that... dimension... on purpose? To distract him?”

"Do not be ridiculous,” he chided as he sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. One hand flew off its opposite bicep in a questioning gesture. “Why would I seek the aid of a hapless mortal? You were far more likely to die than to provide any assistance.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Yeah, and that would’ve probably broken Odin’s stupid bond. So really a win-win situation for you.”

“Foolish child,” Loki muttered with another eyeroll. “Odin’s bond could never be broken by something as pedestrian as mortal death.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“And I care not what you believe.”

She sighed. “Fine. Can you at least tell me if I jumped universes again?”

Loki’s hand lifted from where it rested atop the opposite arm as he gave a nonchalant shrug. “I suppose it is possible.”

“You suppose?”

“I have neither the empirical data nor the inclination to make a determination one way or the other.”

She smirked slightly, attempting to goad him. “Oh, so you don’t know, and you have no idea about how to find out.”

Those dangerous blue eyes sharpened. “I know far more than your stunted, underdeveloped brain could possibly comprehend.”

“And yet you don’t know what did or didn’t happen right before your very eyes.”

Loki huffed in annoyance. “My concern was not precisely with you at the time.”

That was probably as close as she would ever come to an admission that Loki didn’t know something, and so she took it as a win. “Whatever. Do you think you’ll be pulled back there?”

His eyeline went behind her, as though he were looking beyond into the realm of dreams and psychic interference. “No,” he finally, softly decided.

“Good.”

His eyes suddenly snapped to her as though he couldn’t comprehend the meaning of the word. With a frown, she added, “What he was doing was horrific. I’m glad he can’t get to you anymore.”

A small knit appeared between his brows for several seconds before wiping away. “Is that all, then?” he finally asked, clearly not interested in providing her with more information.

“Apparently.” The conversation on her return to the Marvel universe would have to wait for another day, and she shifted on the stiff cot to face the television screen. “You wanna watch something?”

She didn’t know why she asked it. And in her periphery, she could see Loki staring at her with heavy confusion, attempting to figure her out. Trying to ignore both him and her sudden burst of anxiety, she clicked on the television and channel surfed to Nat Geo. A rerun of Catacombs of Palermo was on, and she settled back as a spread of Italian mummies filled the screen, with Loki’s eyes darting in bewildered surprise between her and the macabre scene.

Neither of them spoke for several minutes as the voiceover told them one of the world’s best-preserved corpses was stashed away beneath a Capuchin monastery.

Finally, after a long while, she saw Loki readjust himself in the World’s Most Comfortable Chair™ and slowly, cautiously lift his legs up to the accompanying footstool. She did her best not to look directly at him, but out of the corner of her eye she could see the morbid interest growing on his features, and she had to stifle a smile.

“This is grotesque,” he finally murmured after several long minutes.

“Yeah,” she agreed without turning away from the screen. “You want some tea?”

His eyes equally maintained their focus. “Yes.”

Chapter Text

After Alex's—and Loki’s—two-week long bout in isolation, she returned to her apartment and settled once more into the strange cadence that had become daily life. Unfortunately, immediately upon her release, Bruce—the closest thing she had to a friend—had gone to Asia for reasons with which Tony wasn’t entirely forthcoming and wouldn’t be back for a few weeks.

And so she slid from one kind of deprivation to another, dutifully collecting Loki each morning, depositing him in the lab where he and Tony would half-collaborate, half-fight-to-the-death, and end her evenings with a tray of food for Loki and blank, terrified staring at the television for herself until sleep—or alcohol, or the Xanax Bruce had left behind—finally brought her to slumber.

Something had switched once more in her brain after her foray into Loki’s mind, or memory, or altered dimension, or whatever the holy hell it had been. The more she ruminated on what had happened, the less she understood it, until her grasp on what had been real—what was real—slipped through her fingers, melting away like fresh snow on the pavement.

The Marvel world was real. But it couldn’t be. She had entered another dimension through Loki’s dream. But that was impossible. How could she exist without having been born; how could she live in a reality where she was already dead? How could every one of her memories from before her jump be of experiences that never happened and of people—loved ones and strangers alike—who never were?

And, most importantly: could she ever get back home?

It was too much to confront.

And so she snapped out of confrontation completely.

If the two remaining men noticed her descent into a disassociated state, neither commented. Whereas Bruce would’ve cautiously prodded at her days’ long silence, her vacant expressions, in his absence there was only a swelling void of social isolation.

Tony was too absorbed in his own mental challenges, or his own furious feats of brilliance, or, more likely, his inability to say anything that could possibly resonate with her situation, to attempt engagement.

Loki probably simply didn’t care.

And so Alex plodded through the days and sat numbly through the nights, knowing her brain was on the brink of something cataclysmic and not having the will to care.

“Yo, Dorothy!”

Alex blinked at whatever she had been mindlessly staring at—one of Bruce’s reports on her unique bloodwork—and blankly glanced up from her usual seat in Tony’s lab.

She met the billionaire’s eyes, an annoyed expression on his face. When she only stared at him, he gave a loud sigh. “I'm starving. Lunch. I’ve said it five times. Go get it.”

Without a sigh, or a shrug, or any emotion at all, she turned back to the report. “Get it yourself.” There was no heat to her tone, nothing but a dull lilt of the words.

Nevertheless, Tony was incensed. “Listen, sweetheart, you’ve only got one job most days, and right now you’re not even doing that, so the least you can do-”

“Do not speak to a lady in such a tone,” Loki’s cool, low timbre interrupted. Her eyes darted up in surprise—honestly, she’d mostly forgotten he was even there—to see the dark prince perched at his usual stool, his arms folded non-threateningly on the tabletop before him even as his eyes narrowed and locked onto Tony.

Was Loki... defending her? If her emotions weren’t so desensitized, she might have been flattered.

Despite his glare in return, Tony immediately backed down. “It’s lunchtime, kid, and you know how I am about-”

“-being handed things,” she completed. “I know.”

Without another word, she rose to her feet, gave Loki a head nod to follow her, and walked toward the elevator in silence.

Loki leaned against the hallway waiting for the elevator to take them to Tony’s penthouse. He hovered close but not over her, his arms drawn together behind his back, his black Asgardian trousers and finely woven, soft, brown tunic looking absurdly regal beside her. His head tilted, his ebony hair shifting along his jawline.

“You are in a pet, pet.”

“Am I.”

Her voice remained even, her gaze focused straight ahead on the waiting elevator doors. As they dinged open, she wordlessly stepped on, Loki following with the hint of a frown tightening his features.

“You have suffered from a fit of peevishness for many days,” he said as she pressed the button to Tony’s floor, letting her finger linger for a half-second so that her fingerprint could be scanned. “It is growing tiresome.”

She shrugged, not taking the bait, and he let out a slight, frustrated puff of air.

“What is it, mortal? You are behaving in a manner most unlike you.”

“You have no idea who I am,” she softly responded as the doors dinged open.

Before she could collect the pile of sandwiches and chips waiting dutifully on the credenza in the locked foyer (placed there each day by some unknowable server), he stepped out, snatched up the items, and returned to the car with an eye roll.

“I have been made to suffer your company for countless days, now, and you are hardly a complicated species. I would wager I have more than a modicum of insight into your psyche.”

When she again only shrugged, Loki’s face briefly went apocalyptic before settling into some strange mixture of exasperation and agitation. They returned to the lab floor without speaking, Loki occasionally airing his annoyance through a huff or a loud shift of the platter of food he held, but otherwise they didn’t again engage, not even when the food was laid out, not even when Alex turned her nose up at eating—which riled Loki as much as it seemed to concern Tony—not even when the day was done and Alex returned Loki to his room.

But there, Loki paused at the doorway before entering his chambers, which took Alex a moment to comprehend in her disassociated, vacant mind.

She gave him a blank stare. “What?”

A dark frown flittered on his face. “Are you ill?”

“No.” She paused, then shrugged as she fully considered the question. “Or yes. It doesn’t matter.”

He leaned slightly closer, his expression for once appearing truly serious. “You have been different since the night with Ebony Maw.” His tone was nearly hesitant. “Do you feel his hold on you still?”

His blue eyes were hooded and concerned; or at least, the expression would’ve read as concerned if it were anyone else. His skin was taut, his thin lips pressed tightly together. He seemed genuine. It would have been a pleasant realization, if she could find any emotion within her.

“No,” she murmured. “I don’t feel Ebony Maw. I don’t feel... anything.”

He blinked in surprise, but before he could respond, she gave him a gentle nudge into his apartment and started to close the door. “Goodnight, Loki.”

His long, strong fingers wrapped around the edge of the door to push it back open. “We are still speaking, mortal.”

“You’re speaking.”

“Yes, and it is becoming a rather maddening experience. Tell me what is wrong.”

Her gaze raised to blandly meet his. “What’s wrong,” she softly repeated, then gave a limp shrug. “Everything I had, everything I was, is gone. I no longer have a past. I don’t have a future now, either, because I technically don’t exist. It’s all so... meaningless.”

“You are bound to a god. That is hardly meaningless.”

It could have been anything. She had been on the verge of a breakdown for days, her mind stranded on an island and waiting for rescue. She hadn’t meant for her psychological explosion to be public; she certainly did not want one of the spectators to be Loki, with his snide comments and elitist attitude and overall cruelty.

And yet, something in his words made her snap.

“This isn’t about you,” she shouted, her voice catching with thick emotion that positively infuriated her. “My life doesn’t have meaning because of you. I had a whole fucking life before, and it mattered because it mattered to me. And it’s nothing... I have nothing now, except a fucking spoiled, narcissistic, man-child for a goddamn sidekick, and that is about the last thing in any universe that gives a life meaning.”

Loki watched her tirade with a placid mask of indifference. When she concluded, he looked at her for several seconds with an unreadable gaze.

Then he gave the slightest, most infuriating, most slap-able, most ire-inducing smirk of all time. As absolute fury raged across her features, he slowly closed the door, his mocking words of “Goodnight, mortal,” swallowed behind the wood.

Alex stared at the closed door with so much anger bubbling up inside of her that her stomach threatened to heave. She wanted to scream at him, force her way into the apartment and claw at his eyes, rip at his hair, damn him with righteous fury.

But all she could do was burst into tears. She made it to her apartment, slipped inside, then collapsed on the floor with shuddering gasps, her soft sobbing fading down the hallway.

The night had been horrible. Alexandra had spent most of it in painfully heaving sobs, contorting her body with silent racks of tears and frantic screams into her pillow.

Right, her pillow. It wasn’t hers. She hadn’t purchased it, and even if she had, it would’ve been bought with the money of Tony Stark, the fucking Ironman.

There was little she could do to break her obsessive loop with nothing to ground her that didn’t immediately bring her back to the fact that her reality was no longer hers.

She called the billionaire that morning to take a sick day and was relieved when he offered no resistance to her need to see to her mental health. But about an hour later as she was staring down her third mug of coffee, a knock echoed at her door.

She cracked it open to find Tony on the other side.

“Hey,” he greeted, his features suspiciously neutral as he looked over her puffy, tear-worn face. “Can I come in?”

Alex glanced down at herself. She had put on fresh clothes—after crying in the shower for about forty minutes—but beyond that she was barely presentable.

“Yeah,” she said anyway as she opened the door for entry, sighing as she did so. God, her head hurt.

Tony strutted in, glancing around the near darkness—she had never bothered to open the drapes that morning—as he put a heavy grocery bag on her kitchen island.

“Love what you’ve done with the place.”

She flicked on a light, then twisted her still-damp hair into a sloppy bun. “Is this an intervention or something?”

“Kinda.” Lifting a dozen mini cupcakes out of the bag, he placed the plastic box on the counter with a slight shrug. “Pepp said chocolate was a cliche for a reason.” He then removed a carton of orange juice and a bottle of champagne and placed both beside the cupcakes. “And I said, ‘so is alcohol.’”

Alex made a show of looking at her watch-less wrist. “It’s not even ten am.”

“Yeah.” Tony flicked the orange juice with a pleased look. “Breakfast.”

She stifled a smile as she collected two wine glasses from the cabinet. “You are an extremely bad influence.”

“That’s the best kind.” He mixed the mimosas as she collected plates and napkins for the cupcakes. “Sorry for snapping yesterday. It wasn’t about you.”

“Ah,” she said as she took the drink he handed her and gave a gently teasing smile. “Hypoglycemia?”

“Sure,” he agreed with a self-deprecating turn of his mouth. “Let’s go with that.”

They clinked glasses. Alex took a small sip—it was clear Tony had made hers weak, but she knew it would still pack a punch—then gave a self-deprecating grimace of her own.

“I’m sorry for... you know, my whole general vibe recently.”

Tony waved at her apology with a frown and a large gulp of mimosa. “Bygones. So what do you do for fun in here?”

They spent the next thirty minutes drinking in her living room, listening to classic rock, and playfully arguing over the best vocalists of all time, until JARVIS suddenly interrupted their good-natured ribbing with a bright beep.

“Mortal,” Loki’s disembodied snippy tone suddenly droned over JARVIS’ speakers. Alex froze in mid-sip, having completely forgotten about the petulant prince across the hall. “If this is some childish retribution for yesterday, it is beneath even you. Fetch me at once.”

Tony burst into laughter. “Ooh,” he cooed in a lilting falsetto. “Lover’s quarrel.”

She threw a pillow in Tony’s general direction. Then, turning her attention to where she presumed JARVIS’ microphone was, she said to Loki in a voice that only slightly slurred, “And calm the fuck down, highness. We’re not working today.”

“Working,” Tony mouthed at her with air quotes.

Alex held up her middle finger with a giggle. “Enjoy your time off.”

There was a beat of silence. “Am I to gather,” Loki said with evident annoyance. “That you and Stark are using this time to carouse like common buffoons rather than undertake your daily duties?”

“Common as a cold,” Tony breezily agreed as he topped up the champagne in his glass. “Thanks, JARVIS.”

The system shut off, effectively hanging up on Loki, which both made Alex laugh and feel a weird pang of guilt. Tony eyed her over the rim of his glass as he sat back against her easy chair. “I think he was jealous.”

She shrugged, the guilt overtaking her mirth. “It’s not like he’d ever say it, but he’s got to be lonely.”

Tony huffed. “Join the club.”

“Yeah.” She raised her glass toward Tony, who returned the gesture. “Should we invite him over?”

He almost spit out his drink and descended into several seconds of fitful coughing. “No,” he replied when he’d recovered. “Let me rephrase: Fuck no.”

Tony stayed over until about lunchtime. Alex stumbled into her room for a drunken multi-hour nap afterward, and when she woke, she found that although a hangover headache was creeping along her skull to join her stress headache, her mood had dramatically improved.

Later that evening, she remembered how they had treated Loki earlier, and shame added to her headache. She also hadn’t provided him with dinner the night before and given they hadn’t gone to the lab that day, he hadn’t had lunch, either. She knew he didn’t require as frequent meals as humans did, but a day without still felt excessive.

And so around seven pm, Alex knocked on Loki’s door. She waited a beat, opened the door, and placed on the floor a plate of spaghetti—not her finest work, but carbs had sounded amazing—a bottle of champagne that Tony had left behind, and the two remaining chocolate cupcakes. And, beside it all, a note that simply read: Sorry.

Alexandra collected Loki the next day without comment. It wasn’t until they were in the elevator and it had just dinged for the lab’s floor that the dark prince spun to her, all black leather leggings clinging to the muscles of his thighs and the swells above, human-style long-armed dark gray shirt pulling at his muscular chest as though the fabric had never before encountered such a priceless specimen, and he bent close behind her, his breath brushing the wisps of her unbound hair.

“I did not intend your tears two nights ago.”

Alex hesitated in her step off the elevator, then forced herself to continue walking forward. “I didn’t intend to exclude you yesterday.”

Loki huffed as he trailed behind her to the lab, the snooty tone indicative of how much he cared about the company of mortals.

And yet, somehow, something had clearly changed.

That evening, Alex was feeling both lonely and open to Loki’s peculiar form of interaction, and so she found herself in front of his door around six pm.

With a soft breath, she tapped a knuckle against the wood. Then, after a moment, she unlocked the bolt with her fingerprint.

“Hey,” she called without pressing the door open farther than a crack. “I was wondering if you wanted to eat dinner like normal people tonight? Like, together?”

A deliberate silence met her question. Even in the limited time they’d been acquainted, she knew enough that a silent Loki was a problematic Loki. But before she could begin to stress, a fluttering, droning presence disturbed the air behind her.

“Are you attempting to court me, pet?” Loki’s silken voice murmured right against her ear.

She jumped despite herself and heard him hum in amusement as she twirled around to face him. “Jesus,” she hissed as her pulse skyrocketed. “You can't creep up on people like that.”

He lazily reclined one shoulder against the hallway. “And yet it appears that I did precisely that.”

She made an annoyed gesture at the open door. “Only because I let you out of your lamp like some demented genie.”

“Mmm, yes,” he agreed in a filthy tone that was likely only to needle her further. “Rub me the right way, and I shall make your wish come true.”

“Why the hell do you know that reference?”

He saw the heat on her face and smirked at his victory. “A lovely, half-clad girl writhing on a beach begging for release? I may be a god, but even I am a man.”

Alex wrinkled her nose in disgust. “She’s like eighteen in that video, you pedo.”

She was sure Loki didn’t understand the insult, but he annoyingly shrugged anyway. “A woman who celebrates her sexuality is appealing at any age, pet. You could learn from it.”

The heat re-flared on her face as her jaw angrily clenched with fearful vulnerability. “Alright,” she muttered. “I’m the idiot who was trying to be nice to you, so I guess this is my fault. Back in your bottle, Christina.”

Loki didn’t budge, though she could sense the satisfied smirk that was no doubt just below the surface. “You are such a prudish little thing.”

“No, I’m not,” she returned with venom, feeling exposed, raging against dozens of similar memories of negging males at bars and meetings filling her brain. “Being pissed at your constant harassment is not the same thing as being a prude, and you can fuck off right now with that alpha-male, incel bullshit.”

If there had been the beginning of a smirk, it fully dissipated with her words. “You are not exaggerating your anger,” he murmured with a hint of surprise.

“Gee, you really are clever," she sarcastically bit back, the sharp slice of intimacy exposing her, wounding her. “Whatever. Goodnight.”

As she spun to walk to her door, he reappeared in a flash of green in front of her. A perplexed look marred his features, and his head tilted slightly to examine her as she huffed in frustration. “You would leave me unencumbered in this hallway?”

“Bruce will be back tonight and will probably think you tried to escape so yeah, wander freely, highness. The Hulk could use the exercise.”

The confusion sharpened into displeasure as his face lowered down to hers. “Were I at my full strength, I could level this building and every being in it with the merest flip of my wrist,” he said with venom of his own. “Never forget that, little pet.”

“Could, but can’t,” she shrugged despite her rising adrenalin at his evident anger. “Talk a big game but...” She trailed off, a barb about impotency on her lips as his features turned stony with building rage. A tense swallow forced its way down her throat, taking the insult with it. “Anyway. Goodnight.”

He stared down at her for several incensed seconds, then swallowed himself and regained his royal posture, his hands lightly held behind his back. “You said something about dinner?” he offered in a sedate tone after another moment.

She let out a disbelieving laugh and was about to rail into him for thinking she was going to make him a meal after that spat, but once again something in his features had her hold back. The incredulous amusement wiped from her face, and she attempted to even out her voice as he had. Apparently, they were making up.

“Yeah. If you want to join me, you can. But I haven’t started cooking yet.”

Although it looked like it took all his willpower not to be a little shit, he gave a slight nod. “I accept.”

Of course, he accepted; how else was the bastard going to eat? Yet once again she held her tongue. “Okay. Give me like an hour to cook.”

“I will assist.”

She blinked in surprise at that, and he gave a slight shrug in response. “I am certain that I know my way around knives more than do you.”

“Yeah, throwing knives.”

A muscle twitched at his lips. “Throwing, chopping. The principle is the same.”

She considered him with an ever-so-slight smile of her own. “Okay,” she slowly relented. “Come on, sous-chef.”

He stepped aside to allow her to swipe her thumb and unlock her door. A sudden shiver crept up her spine as she felt him waiting behind her. Inviting Loki into her apartment was nearly on the same level as asking in a vampire, and the hint of real danger wasn’t lost on her as she turned the knob.

As she walked in, she left the door open behind her in invitation and headed to the kitchen without looking back. Anxiety began to claw at her as she heard him slowly creep in. Maybe it had been a bad idea, having him over. She could virtually feel his assessing eye roving over the open floorplan, taking in every nook and cranny that he could.

She heard the door click closed as she began nervously pulling ingredients to set on the kitchen island. As her eyes darted upward, she saw him prowl into the living room and curiously run a finger over her meager selection of books before drawing one forward to fully examine.

“Yeah, go ahead, dig through my stuff,” she muttered with no real heat in the words. “You don’t get invited into many homes, do you?”

“Is that what this is,” he idly mused as he replaced the book to examine the few other personal possessions she had acquired over the months. “A home?”

The questioned sucker-punched her, sudden tears filling her eyes to the brim as her brain pulled up memories of her mother helping her hang pictures in her very first apartment, of she and her sister Beth painting the walls of her to-be niece’s nursery, of loud, drunken, ridiculously fun Friendsgivings at her Brooklyn second-floor walk-up.

Alex spun to face the sink as she quietly tried to compose herself, knowing he hadn’t meant anything malicious by the remark and desperate to keep any sign of weakness from him.

Christ, it had been a terrible idea inviting him over.

Absently she rinsed off both a red and green bell pepper, trying to will herself to calm down as the cool water ran over her fingers. Her tongue pressed at the roof of her mouth, right behind her front teeth, until the tears abated.

When she finally faced him once more, he was sitting on a stool at the island, back straight, hands laced on the countertop, silently considering her.

“What?” she defensively challenged, hating even as the word left her mouth how pathetic it made her sound.

Loki’s face was serene, and the eyes that met hers were oddly... sympathetic. For a moment he didn’t speak, choosing to instead hold her in his bizarrely knowing gaze before finally raising one hand in deference.

“What is my first task?”

She mutely stared back at him, the strange gentleness in his expression scrambling with her thoughts—Loki wasn’t gentle to anyone.

After a moment of the question hanging unanswered in the air, Alex shook herself out of her confusion and put the peppers in front of him before adding an onion. “Do you know what these are?”

He picked up one of the peppers and sniffed it slightly, then turned the onion over with a dismayed squint at the dirt on the outer skin. “I do not.”

And so she quickly ran down how to clean and cut the vegetables before providing him with a cutting board and gesturing toward the knife block beside the refrigerator. “I presume you’ll want to choose your own knife.”

An actual smile brightened his face, and she rolled her eyes even as a small smile appeared on her own. Quickly he was at the utensils and testing each one with some amount of reverence.

“Surprisingly sharp,” he declared as he eyed her from beneath long, dark eyelashes. “Does that not concern you?”

“Haven’t cut anything off so far.”

He made his selection before returning to the stool with a perturbed look on his face. As he balanced the weight of the one he’d chosen—a nice, midsized santoku knife with a scalloped blade—he let a hint of concern leak into his voice. “You are very fragile, you know.”

She tossed him an irritated frown as she opened a plastic carton of Roma tomatoes. “Yeah, I know I’m not a freaking Norse god, but I’m not fragile, either.”

As she turned to place the tomatoes in a strainer in the sink, she heard him begin to chop behind her. “Perhaps not in spirit,” he agreed in a thoughtful lilt, as though he knew his next words would anger her and he was attempting to soften the blow. “But in flesh, you cannot deny that even for a mortal you are particularly delicate.”

She rinsed off the tomatoes and took a breath before turning to respond. “Fine,” she relented with a loud sigh. “I’m delicate. What’s your point?”

Concentrating on his work, his head only tilted slightly. “It would perhaps behoove you to give more care to your physical form.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And what does that mean?”

“You need not be combative,” he calmly returned as he finished his final chop, three neat piles of diced vegetables on the board before him. Damn, that had been fast. His eyes lazily rose to meet hers. “I am merely reminding you that this is not your realm, and you cannot behave in it as though it were so.”

“Uh, okay,” she said with an irked eyeroll. “Three things. One, you are always combative with me so I will be as combative as I want in return; two, like I could forget for a fucking second that this is not ‘my realm;’ and three, spit it out. What is your point?”

Loki’s lips pursed together in a sour look. “You are simply exhausting.”

“Point?”

“Were you so consistently antagonistic in your native realm?”

Her eyes shot toward heaven. “Point?”

“I must say, I am surprised you have anyone to mourn there if so.”

That time the word ground out through a clenched jaw. “Point.”

Dark locks shifted to frame his face as he leaned forward against the counter, pulling her gaze into the tractor beam of his own. “My point, pet, is that you can be exceedingly foolish with your own safety—an excellent example of which is this very moment—and I would prefer it if the creature with whom I am bound had a shred of self-preservation.”

“Oh,” she huffed with understanding. “You’re worried about you.”

“It would be precisely as foolish on my part not to be.”

“Well, if that's your concern, then it kind of negates any threat you might pose to me, no? So we can take that piece off the board.”

“That is an extremely bold assumption on your part, and there are dangers beyond me, as you well know.”

Even though she knew exactly what he meant, she couldn’t help but needle him. “What, my kitchen knives? They’re not sentient, you know.”

He let out a slight, exasperated sigh. “Absolutely insufferable.” Those blue eyes caught hers once more before he visibly, surprisingly relented, sliding back on the stool. “Very well, I have said my piece, and I leave the matter in your no-doubt-excellent care. What is my next task?”

About an hour later, Alex spooned spinach ravioli out of gently boiling water and into two bowls. Even though she was still mildly annoyed with him, she gave Loki most of the pasta before drizzling their freshly made tomato sauce over the dishes and setting the chinaware onto the island beside a loaf of just-baked garlic bread and an opened bottle of red table wine.

They began to eat in silence, seated beside each other on her kitchen stools and both looking everywhere but at the other.

“So,” Alex finally started as the uncomfortableness of the situation began tickling up her throat. “How is it?”

“Tolerable,” Loki smoothly returned. Then his eyes darted to her; he saw her scowl and his face brightened. “You really are too easy of a target, pet,” he added with a slight smile. “There is hardly any sport to be found in teasing you.”

When Alex only continued to level him with a look of murderous daggers, his smile turned into a full-blown grin. “My, but you are a needy little thing.” Then the grin wiped from his face even as amusement continued to pull at his eyes, and his voice lowered, turned silky. "This meal is simply divine, darling,” he praised in a deep purr as she attempted to remain stone-faced through the new barrage of overwhelming testosterone. “So much more succulent than anything to be found on Asgard; a symphony of flavors tantalizing my tongue. I will be thinking of it—and you—long into the evening.”

She rolled her eyes even as her traitorous cheeks flushed, and he laughed again. “Is that not what you want to hear?”

“I like ‘darling’ a lot better than ‘pet,’ anyway.”

“Which only ensures that I shall never say it again.”

“And you called me insufferable.”

“Yes, it was as true then as it is now.” He took another bite of pasta and thoughtfully chewed. After swallowing, he tilted his head toward her without looking. “I am still perplexed by the texture of this so-called ‘pasta,’ but otherwise it is quite good, and you already know it to be so. You need not seek my approval.”

She hummed in annoyed agreement. “Here on Midgard, we call it ‘fishing for compliments.’”

Loki’s lip twitched upward as he caught the self-deprecation in her words. “Ah, so she does have some humility after all.”

“Hey,” she cautioned with a little laugh as her head shook in amazement. “You don’t get to talk to me about humility.”

Helping himself to another slice of garlic bread, his blue gaze side-eyed her. “And she returns.”

Her eyes rolled for the millionth time. Wordlessly, she poured him a glass of wine, set it beside his plate, and began pouring her own. He watched her movements with a blank face.

“That is one of the things to which I was referring, by the by.”

“What?”

He gestured to her full glass with the bread in his hand, keeping his features frustratingly neutral. “That. You are not in your realm. Alcohol impacts you differently here.”

Her cheeks turned pink at the accusation. “Wow, really? Aren’t you supposed to be a hedonist or something?”

“You deflect, but it is merely one example of many. Shall I enumerate?”

“I thought you ‘said your piece,’” she argued, complete with air quotes.

His eyes fell on her hands, clearly confused. “Was I meant to interpret something by that gesture?”

“They’re air quotes. I am sarcastically quoting something at you. I thought you said, ‘your piece.’”

Her fingers curled once more in the air as she spoke the sentence, and morbid fascination fluttered over his features. “This realm is absurd,” he concluded after a moment, his head shaking. “And do not pretend that you thought the matter resolved.”

She sighed before taking a very small sip of her wine. “Can we not? I don’t want to fight.”

“Then do not argue, merely listen.”

She sighed again, then waved her hand for him to continue as she took another, much larger, swig. The irritation almost visibly radiated from him, and she couldn’t help but smirk. When he didn’t speak, she met his hard stare with a poorly masked thrill of defiance.

“I’m listening.”

A dark look washed over him. “You should not test me, pet,” he warned in a dangerously soft voice.

That sent a thrill of a different variety shooting through her. “I’m not afraid of you.”

“No, you are not particularly afraid,” he agreed, the dark look retreating into one of annoyance. “Because there is scarcely a single sensible thing about you.”

Alex sighed loudly but didn’t otherwise speak, and again she made a motion for him to continue. A small, satisfied smile appeared on his face. He seemed to test her, not speaking for several additional seconds, likely to see if she would challenge him.

When she didn’t, he appeared vaguely relieved. “As I said, alcohol tolerance is but one of my concerns. You wage war with everyone who has the misfortune to find themselves in your presence, and although I certainly respect the impulse, you do not give enough thought to those whom you provoke. Odin, for instance.”

“Uh, I saved you from Odin-”

He cut her off by holding up one long finger. With narrowed eyes, he regarded her for a moment, that finger hanging silently in the air. Then he inexplicably bopped the tip of her nose with said finger. She grimaced at the chastising gesture, gentle though it had been, and he ignored her displeasure in favor of taking a sip of his own wine.

He continued when he determined that she wasn’t going to interrupt him again. “Odin was as likely to imprison you as he was to send me here, and you have already admitted you knew not what his final decision would be. You were reckless, little mortal, as were you when you encountered Ebony Maw.”

He shot her a warning look as her lips parted to counter, his hard blue eyes virtually daring her to defy him. Her jaw clenched as her lips closed, and Loki smirked.

“There,” he crooned in a low, sultry voice. “Is it not so much better to submit?”

Her eyes blew wide. “You little-”

“I admit,” he cut her off with a laugh, both hands flying up, open palms toward her, in supplication. “That was unnecessary. Amusing, and your skin turns the most fascinating shade of pink, but unnecessary.”

“You’re a dick.”

“Whilst I do not fully grasp the term, you have in the past directed it at Anthony and so I am appropriately admonished. Where were we? Ah, yes, Ebony Maw. I see how much you want to dispute this one, and I imagine I know the points you wish to make, so let us move beyond such squabbling. If you ever again see him or any of the Children of Thanos—whether it be in a dream state or not—you are to immediately run in the opposite direction. He now knows you and I have a connection, and far worse, he witnessed your travel between realities. You will be a source of immense fascination, and that is perhaps the most dangerous position in which any creature could be. If there is a next time, run.”

Although he kept his tone light, she could sense the real fear in his words. So instead of arguing, she merely nodded. “Okay.”

His head cocked as if he didn’t trust her compliance, then he slowly nodded in return. They continued eating with little communication—an occasional jibe in one moment, an exceedingly rare neutral comment in another—until Alex removed their dishes and tidied up the rest of the kitchen. Loki watched her the entire time, not outrightly offering to assist, but also not putting on any airs that he was above such labor, either.

When she had finished loading the dishwasher, she turned to face him. They stared at each other for several seconds, he still sitting at the kitchen island with fingers calmly interlaced before him and a placid expression on his damnably handsome face, she with her lower back pressing into the counter behind her and her hands nervously playing with the dishtowel she had just finished using.

“Well,” he finally began, and she was sure he was going to excuse himself for the evening. “From what I have gleaned, it is traditional to now gather in front of the play-box and bask in its tepid entertainment for a while. Is that so?”

Alex bit back a surprised laugh. He wanted to stay. How freaking strange. “Yeah,” she amicably agreed as she tossed the damp cloth onto the island before her. “There’s probably something on the History channel that won’t drive you nuts.”

He clearly didn’t know what the sentence meant but gravely nodded anyway. “Then I am in your hands, pet. Lead the way.”

She grabbed the open wine bottle and ushered him to her couch as her brain obsessively, histrionically plucked out dangerous, antagonistic moments from both the movies and their time together like tissues from a Kleenex box, tossing them into her conscious mind, then dropping them flutteringly to the ground while a new one emerged.

Loki joined her on the sofa, his wine glass in hand. Wordlessly he refilled both their glasses—hers noticeably less than his but the gesture was still appreciated—and then sidled himself into a position of comfort against the left couch arm.

Alex likewise draped herself against the right, flipped on the television, and wondered what the hell she was doing with a literal war criminal sharing the sofa in her living room.

Another tissue-thin memory thrust before her eyes, drifted out of sight.

She took a sip of the freshly poured wine. Fuck it, fuck her, but she was lonely, he had so far been (moderately) polite, and goddamn but he did look good sitting beside her. She brought her knees to her chest, took another sip, and decided for just one fucking moment to not let her hyperactive brain get the best of her.

An old—very old, for her—episode of Ancient Aliens filled the screen. Several minutes of silence elapsed as they both watched in disgusted intrigue as the voiceover explained a Lebanese temple’s resemblance to an alien craft landing pad.

Loki was incredulous. “Do you mortals actually believe this nonsense?”

"Not most people.”

“Then how do such blatant lies find way into your daily entertainment?”

"Money, mostly,” she responded with a shrug. “Do you wanna watch something else?”

Several uninterrupted seconds passed. “This is absurd.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there a way to increase the volume at which they speak?”

Smirking, Alex pressed the up button. “Better?”

“Yes.” He considered the television for several minutes, shaking his head in disbelief and lips permanently glued to his wine glass.

“Your kind is ludicrous,” he declared after another five minutes, and refilled his wine glass without his eyes ever breaking away from the screen.

Alex fell into something of a routine with Loki after their initial dinner. Although neither of them outrightly asked the other, they began taking the evening meal together every night. Sometimes Alex would cook with Loki’s assistance, other nights they would order delivery and Alex would introduce the alien prince to the vast culinary landscape of Midgard—he was particularly fond of sushi. And even when it was simply leftovers, they ate dinner together and afterward reclined on Alex’s couch for an hour or two of television.

She was still moderately freaked out by the whole living-in-a-different-universe thing, and so she kept herself doped up on a steady supply of low-dose Xanax and relegated their viewing habits to shows that had existed pre-2012. Loki’s invasion had done quite a number on entertainment, and the divergence between her known programming and that of the Marvel universe was so vast that she tumbled into a near-panic attack when she confronted it for too long.

Luckily, Loki didn’t know any better, and she delighted in switching between shows he would perhaps actually appreciate—mostly found in the realm of the History Channel, Nat Geo, and, oddly, the Weather Channel—and ones that absolutely baffled him.

“What do you think of that?” Loki softly questioned as they were watching one such show—Futurama—late into the evening.

Alex sent a look cascading down the couch to where he sat at the other end in his typical regalia of a fine dark blue tunic coupled with black trousers, his legs spread and arm draped over the back, dominating the space with his body.

“What do I think about what?”

The arm stretched out toward her lifted slightly off the couch as he gave a head tilt toward the television. On screen, in one of the weepier episodes of the series, Fry was realizing his brother had lived an entire life without him in the past.

She considered Loki’s question as tears pooled in her eyes. She knew the episode front to back, having relied on the humor and the known quantity of early seasons of Futurama for years whenever she had found herself overwhelmed by anxiety. And yet, in all those viewings it had never hit her in quite the same way.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, staring straight ahead at the screen so that she didn’t have to face Loki, and yet looking beyond the television so she didn’t have to face the show, either. “I had a—have a sister. Beth. I guess I hope she’s thinking about me.” Her voice caught, and she swallowed down a tense, deliberate gulp, pleading for it to take the festering emotion with it. “But I don’t want her mourning me forever like Fry’s brother does.”

Neither of them spoke for several long seconds.

“It is good to be mourned, I think,” Loki finally offered. “For we only mourn the loss of what we have loved.”

Alex bit her lip, desperately fighting back tears. With a half-hearted smirk, she murmured, “What is grief, if not love persevering.”

Loki’s head tilted toward her. “That is rather lovely.”

She smirked again as she forced down another wave of rising tears. “Yeah, it is. I didn’t write it.”

He considered her for a moment. Then, in a slow, deliberate tone, he cautiously started, “In that newspaper article about your... echo?”

“Variant,” she offered, even as she stiffened at the memory.

“Variant,” he gently agreed. “It mentioned a child. Did you...?”

Alex shifted uncomfortably against the cushions. “No,” she murmured, still staring into the distance and willing herself to ignore the episode’s soul-crushing ending notes of Simple Minds. “No kids. Will was my boyfriend in college, years ago. He wanted kids. I wanted to get my master’s degree and travel the world. We stuck it out together through grad school but after that I still wasn’t ready to settle down, and he was, so we broke up.”

A sad smile pulled at her lips. “I guess this universe's me figured out a way to have both."

Loki was very quiet for several minutes, and she forced her wandering mind to concentrate on the commercials suddenly blaring in front of them as she strong-armed her threatening tears to abate.

“Do you regret the end of your romance?”

Alex blinked, turned to look at Loki. He hadn’t moved, his eyes directed toward the television set. “Honestly, I haven't thought about him in a long time,” she said with a shrug. “We broke up about ten years ago. Gone through a few other guys since then.” She inwardly rolled her eyes at the memory of Christian. “One pretty recently, actually. I think it was my latest ex that broke my brain into its current configuration.”

“How so?”

“He’s the one who was obsessed with Marvel, not me. I was just along for the ride.”

“You have not spoken of him before,” Loki noted with a quick glance at her face. “Did he mean much to you?”

She breathed in slowly, deeply, as she considered the blunt question. “No,” she finally concluded. “I guess he didn’t.”

Loki hummed in understanding. “But the previous beau, for him you do still pine?”

She blinked in surprise again. “I...” she trailed off to really consider the question. “No, I don’t. I did, for a long time. But I don't think we would’ve been happy together in the end. Maybe this universe’s me was. I hope she was, actually. But I wouldn’t have been.”

Pausing, she turned to face Loki more directly. With her arm resting on the back of the couch, just a few inches from his, she leaned her head into her open palm. “Why do you ask?”

Loki shrugged, whatever emotion had been building on his face wiping clean. “You have the air of a woman in mourning.”

“Well, I did lose my entire universe, you know.”

“And you have found a new one.”

“‘Found’ is putting it a bit delicately.”

At that Loki smirked. Tossing a glance her way, he philosophized, “Better to be found than lost for eternity.” Then, with a devilish grin, he added, “And you certainly could not have ended up in a better position than here with me."

Her eyes playfully narrowed. “That’s definitely debatable.”

“I see, little pet,” he lowly crooned, and even though she fought with everything she had, she could not prevent a slight, enamored tint from pinkening her cheeks. “Do tell, what position is it that you would prefer with me, then?”

“Don’t be a creep.”

Loki’s grin blew wide. “What is that clever saying of your ancients? Ah, yes. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Oh, two could play that game. Her brain raced for a moment. “You speak an infinite deal of nothing.”

Absolute delight curled around Loki’s eyes. “Give thy thoughts no tongue."

“Do you not know I am a woman?” she questioned as she fought back a giggle. “When I think, I must speak.”

A sharp, surprised laugh pleasantly trickled out of Loki, bringing a smile to Alex’s face as well. “Well played, mortal,” he grinned.

With a little half-nod of acceptance, she teased, “There's more to Shakespeare than Hamlet, you know. And more to literature than Shakespeare.”

“Our selection of Midgardian texts was rather lacking on Asgard, I suppose,” he conceded with a hum. “Do share your recommendations on correcting the error of omission.”

Alex let out a little laugh in surprise. “Oh, wow, I am the wrong one to ask. You need a lit professor for that.”

“Nonsense,” Loki dismissed with a wave. “You are more than capable of suggesting books. I expect a list of no less than ten when we meet tomorrow morning.”

“Uh, are you giving me homework?”

“A perplexing term, but given the context, yes, I believe I am. Ten titles, tomorrow.” He gave a slightly cruel smile as she stared at him half in shock. “And as I am quite familiar with how slow mortal minds work, I suggest you return me to my chambers now so that you may get started.”

The next morning, Alex ‘greeted’ Loki at his door—that was, opened it to permit his admittance into the rest of the hallway—and immediately shoved a piece of paper into his hands.

“There,” she announced without ceremony. “Ten books. Don’t bring it up again until you’ve read them all.”

The evident pleasure on Loki’s face was distractingly alluring, and the way his thin lips pressed together as he scanned the titles was nothing short of mesmerizing. “Charlotte’s Web,” he began reading out in a tone that tickled every erogenous zone in her brain before stroking down her throat, her breasts, her abdomen, her thighs. “The Handmaid’s Tale. The Eyre Affair. Silent Spring. The Devil in the White City. The Killer Angels. Ender’s Game. Story of Your Life. The Plague Dogs. The Witches.”

“Yeah,” she uncomfortably mumbled as he gave her an amused, questioning look. “They’re not necessarily the best books ever written, and it’s an extremely hetero, Anglo list, so don’t think they represent humanity writ large, but they all mean something to me so... There you go. Ten books.”

“I thank you, Alexandra.”

Alex’s spine straightened at what had to be his first ever voicing of her name. Of course, he made the simple four syllables into a veritable feast on his tongue, licking over the consonants, purring over the vowels, and sending her thoughts spinning toward sexual gratification.

His voice dropped half an octave before continuing, “And I am most eager to devour your tomes.”

“Great,” she uneasily replied, distracted by his mouth, distracted by his unusual warmth, distracted by the general Loki of it all. “We can chat after.”

“I look forward to it,” he sweepingly replied with the same grandeur as a duke addressing a lady-in-waiting in a romance novel. With a little flick of his wrist and the faintest puff of green, the list vanished into the ether, and Loki smirked at her surprised blink at his actual magic trick. “Now shall we onward to the laboratory?”

“Don’t think we have a choice,” she muttered as her insides twisted in confusion, pulled between his courtliness in that moment and his near monstrosity countless other times.

The dark prince grinned, as he was wont to do, and her entire body seemed to scream at her to move closer to him as her skin heated, became aware, grew wanting. What the fucking fuck, hormones.

She forced down a tight swallow, plastered on a likely obviously fake smile, and nodded toward the hallway. “C’mon; the sooner we’re done up there, the sooner we can leave.”

“And the sooner we may once again be alone,” Loki’s low tone came in response. “I like the way you think, pet.”

“Stop calling me that. I’m not a pet. And it’s a gross term anyway.”

“Oh,” his baritone rumbled, and she didn’t know if she wanted to press against him or push him into the open elevator shaft. Possibly both. “But a docile little companion such as yourself could scarcely be referred to as anything else.”

Elevator shaft. For sure. “Technically I own you,” she reminded him with a sniff as they stepped into the lift. “And if you don’t watch it, you’re going to get yourself neutered.”

He hummed. “Is that so? Tell me, how will you do it? Will you peel off my attire, push me to the ground, and straddle my bare form with blade in hand? I admit I am rather curious to see how that would play out.”

Alex’s entire being went red. “You are such an ass.” She punched the button for the lab’s floor with dual flutters of adrenalin and anxiety rippling through her belly.

She might as well have told him she was desperately in love with him by the way he grinned at her denigrating words.

“And you, pet, are simply delightful.”

Chapter Text

After a few weeks of pestering, Alex had worn Tony down enough with her pleadings and evidence toward Loki’s positive—sort of—rehabilitation to secure a few hours outside the tower. Tony insisted both he and Bruce be in attendance—an easy enough capitulation—before begrudgingly agreeing to a night on the literal town.

It was the first time they would be leaving Stark Tower since returning from Asgard almost five months earlier, and Alex was nearly vibrating with anticipation.

Loki, on the other hand, was decidedly uninterested in the excursion.

“Whatever would we do?” he groused as he finished off that night’s dinner of vegetable enchiladas with beans and rice. Licking a stray bit of sauce from the corner of his lips—and no, she was not at all focused on the pointed slither of his tongue—he pushed the empty plate back a few inches to rest his elbows on the island tabletop. “Your townsfolk do not wish to see me.”

“Well, yeah, you couldn’t look like you, but I presume you have a way around that?”

She placed the dirty dishes in the dishwasher before turning back to face Loki. A thin sheen of palest green rippled around his body. “The hell’s that?” she gestured toward him with a frown.

He smirked as his hands theatrically rolled with grand presentation. “My ‘way around that’.”

“Huh?”

“I am cloaking myself as another.”

Her frown deepened. “You’re flashing a green light around you. It’s not exactly subtle.”

It was Loki’s turn to frown. “What do you mean?”

“Come on,” she muttered with an irritated shake of her head. “I'm serious. Don't you want to get out of this stupid tower? I do.”

The little crease in his brow darkened. “I am projecting an image so that we may do precisely that.”

“No, you’re sparkling like one of the shitty vampires from Twilight.”

Not understanding the reference but clearly appreciating the frustration in her tone, Loki flicked his hair back with a gruff sound. “I am projecting an image.”

She rolled her eyes, having no idea what his little game was and not caring to play along. “Whatever. Just tell me you can do something when we go out on Tuesday.”

“I am doing that something right now.”

The indignant hitch in his tone caught her, and she turned back to face him with confusion. “Are you serious?”

Loki stared back through the faint shimmer, his features reflecting bewilderment back at her. “Can you truly not tell?”

“No. I mean, I can see the shimmer of your magic, but that’s all.”

His eyes shot wide, his black brows rising nearly to his hairline. “You can see my magic?

“Well yeah,” she confirmed with a lilt of puzzlement. “It’s always this cool, green, staticky thing. Isn’t it?”

He mulled on that for a moment. “Not precisely, no,” he finally concluded, his brows lowering into a sharp frown. “It seems Odin’s bond has additional mischief yet to be made known.”

It took her a few seconds to fully absorb his words. “Do you mean only I can tell when you’re using magic?”

He shrugged, one muscular shoulder rising in feigned disinterest. “I suppose it may be your unique character and not simply Odin’s bond,” he mused in a tone that clearly aimed to demonstrate his indifference toward the subject. “That would perhaps explain why Ebony Maw could not access your mind.”

Alex’s nose wrinkled. “Gross; is that what he was doing?”

Loki hummed a vague response. “Perhaps as you are borne from a world truly without magic—not merely a realm that has lost its connection as has this Midgard—such feats impact you differently.”

Something about the reminder that she was fundamentally different and always would be and even basic acts like having a glass of wine or interacting with the universe’s inhabitants would affect her in ways that couldn’t be predicted; something about the knowledge that she would never again feel at home; something about the truth of her predicament; something about it all sent a horrified shiver up her spine, her thoughts whirling in turmoil, an aching cry of despair swelling up her throat.

She quickly turned to the innocuous company of the refrigerator in an attempt to bring her creeping terror under control. “You want ice cream?” she distractedly murmured as she poked around the frozen goods, letting the chilled air breeze over her skin.

Loki was uncharacteristically silent for several seconds, but she dared not face him, lest the evidence of her sudden dread splash across her face for all to see.

“That would be lovely,” he finally said in a soft tone that was completely at odds with her own cascading panic.

“Great,” she managed after a few seconds of careful breathing, still not turning to face him.

As she pulled down two bowls from the cupboards, the air shifted beside her, and suddenly Loki was there to reach up to the shelf she had to stand on her tip toes to access.

“Rest,” he offered, still in a bewilderingly gentle lilt. “Have a seat and permit me to serve.”

It was totally unlike him and yet she didn’t fight it, opting to instead wordlessly return to her bar stool and watch him move about her kitchen as though he was as familiar with the space as he was his own chambers. It was oddly sweet, comforting, to see a fierce demigod performing basic domestic tasks on her behalf, and for a few calming moments Alex forgot her building fears and simply let things be.

“I will mask myself,” he told her, his black hair shifting across his face as he deliberately slid a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream across the island counter to her. “And you shall have your night out.”

She took the offered spoon from his hand with a small nod. “Thank you.”

His blue eyes drilled into her for a moment. Then he, too, nodded, and they dug into their respective scoops with equally pensive stares directed anywhere but at the other for reasons she couldn’t quite explain.

“You know,” she started after a moment as his gaze pulled to her form and she waved the ice cream spoon toward his general direction. “This whole thing with the magic... I could sense it with Odin, too.”

A dark eyebrow arched with clear interest. “Do explain.”

“Yeah,” she continued, then frowned and shook her head. “I mean, it was different. With you, I can see it. And feel it, like it makes the hairs on my arms stand on end. And now that I really think about it, there might also be this very faint buzz, kind of like the whine of a fluorescent light that won’t quite turn on. Although that noise is just for a split second.”

She paused with a grimace. “With Ebony Maw, it just kept going. This high-pitched electrical noise that seemed to expand into everything and wouldn’t let up. It was awful.”

Loki watched her intently as she continued.

“With Odin, it was different, but it was awful, too. I don’t think I could see anything with him or hear anything, but there was this wave just pushing off from him and breaking against me over and over again.” She paused as her hand idly continued the rolling motion. “I don’t know how to explain it, but his magic was all sharp edges and raw and heated. It was just... Maybe this is weird to say, but it felt almost childish, like a horrible toddler ripping the wings off flies or something. Like there was no thought to it beyond the concept of power.”

She glanced at Loki, who was staring at her with an intensity that nearly made her blush. “Does that make sense?”

For a moment he only stared, his expression, while not a mask of indifference, unreadable all the same. “Yes, I believe it does,” he confirmed in a soft, strangely mesmerized tone.

"And you find that in contrast to my magic?”

Nodding, she licked the back of her spoon. “Yeah, for sure. Yours is... I guess subtle is the best word? Ebony Maw’s was just that horrible noise that I couldn’t get away from, and it kept getting louder and louder until I wanted to blow my brains out, like it dominated everything. Yours is cool and sort of gently washes over things. And it seems more directed, more thoughtful. It isn’t everywhere and I don’t notice it when you’re not actively using it. Or at least, I don’t think you’re actively using it. It doesn’t insist upon itself, if that makes sense.”

“Yes,” he murmured in rapt attention. “Once again, I believe I do understand.”

She finished off the last bite of ice cream, then gestured toward the dessert still melting in his bowl. When he only continued to stare at her, those sharp blue eyes locked on her form, she shifted uncomfortably. “How do you experience it?”

Loki didn’t waver for another moment, then flicked his head back with a deep intake of air, his black tresses dancing around his pale skin. “I suppose in much the same way,” he explained after quick contemplation. “Though it is an entirely separate sense for me, not one of the five to which your kind are supposedly limited. Your brain appears to have cobbled together some manner of perception using only the tools at your disposal.”

She smirked self-deprecatingly at that. “I mean, isn’t most of the human brain just cobbled together?”

A slight smile flashed on his face. “Yes, you are indeed a remarkably adaptable species given your lowly origins.”

Alex smirked again. “So if you have a sensory mechanism purely for magic, then if someone was using magic to mask themselves, would you see the mask or them as they really are? Like would the mask affect your other senses?”

“It would depend on the skill behind it. Different magics have different characteristics, of course, in line with their wielder and their purpose. It would require a particularly adept mage to fool me.”

“But then why can I still see you through the mask?”

He huffed slightly. “Yes, it is a mystery.”

“Maybe you need to try harder,” she gently teased.

He huffed again, though another whisper of a smile softened his features. “Perhaps it is you who needs to be less perceptive.”

Two nights later, Alex’s knuckles lightly rapped on Loki’s door as she anxiously smoothed the fabric of the casual, pastel blue A-line dress she wore. She gave herself—and Loki—a few moments before opening the door.

The dark prince appeared on the other side, dressed in a button-down dark blue Oxford, black straight-legged jeans, and classic brown loafers. Goddamn could he pull off the Midgardian casual look. Her breath caught as she watched him blatantly scan her over, his eyes perfectly offset by the shade of his shirt and his dark hair carefully coiling around his neck as though it were carved from ebony.

When his eyes continued to rove her body, she nervously tilted her head. “What?”

“It is nothing,” he returned as he finally brought his gaze to her eyes. “Apart from your time in Asgard, you have cladded yourself in naught but rags, and I had simply forgotten that you have the capability to appear presentable.”

His voice was teasing, and she huffed with a shake of her head. “And for one wonderful moment, I forgot you were an ass,” she shot back in semi-playful challenge. “I guess we both have a lot to remember.”

“We do indeed,” he pleasantly responded, clearly ignoring her baiting. A slight green shimmer settled over his form, and he crooked his head at her. “Still nothing?”

“Green glitter.”

His dark brows arched in a frown. “Peculiar.” For a moment, he ruminated, then seemed to shake himself out of the revery. “Regardless, let us see what Midgard has to offer.”

Stepping outside of the building—breathing unrecycled air and feeling the damp slap of humidity—almost brought tears to Alex’s eyes. The pavilion in front of Stark Tower was scattered with people—strangers! sweet anonymity!—and was goldenly illuminated by both the setting sun and the twinkling streetlights clicking on as darkness settled over them.

Alex directed her head upward to look at the sky as its azure deepened to navy. With the city’s light pollution, the crescent moon was the only viewable astronomical body, but she was used to that, and she took comfort in the normalcy of it all.

She closed her eyes and simply existed, concentrating on the wispy breeze against her skin, the murmurs of other people, the sirens wailing in the distance.

Home.

“What an overbearing assault on every sense,” Loki groused, immediately toppling her transcendence. “Does all of Midgard breathe such fetid air and suffer from such piercing cacophonies of unmitigated noise?”

Alex sighed as Tony ushered the quartet down the sidewalk and Happy Hogan rather begrudgingly trailed after. She wondered how much the bodyguard/confidant knew; Tony had distractedly made introductions as they had gathered in the lobby, dubbing Loki as ‘Luke’ to the demigod’s obvious distaste.

“It’s the City,” the billionaire shrugged as he continued rushing them down the street. “What do you want?”

“Asgard is also a city,” Loki—Luke—retorted, and Alex shot him A Look to remind him to keep the Aesir talk to a minimum. He caught her expression and rolled his eyes, then gestured in disgusted confirmation as they passed a giant pile of trash collecting rats and various odors on the edge of the sidewalk.

“Yeah,” Alex and Tony dismissively replied in unison as Bruce—a few steps ahead—jumped with a yelp, narrowly avoiding something questionable on the pavement.

“How does your kind live like this?” Loki continued as he fluidly seized Alex's arm and gently yanked her in his direction to avoid the same pile of yuck, then immediately released her. “Simply repulsive.”

They got to the Wheeltapper pub a few minutes later. It was a Tuesday, but someone from Tony's team had called ahead anyway to reserve the entire back patio.

Alex shot him a slightly annoyed look as they stepped into the empty space, and he shrugged, unfazed. “You’re out of the building, kid. Take it or leave it.”

The foursome chose their seats at a table in the middle of the open air as Alex glanced at the other empty chairs with a wistful sigh. The bar, with its relative proximity to the UN and its unbeatable proximity to the subway, had been one of her frequent happy hour haunts. It was typically lively, deafened with music and conversations and general merriment. The version before her, however, was dull, peopled only with those she already knew, and one of the walls was partially collapsed with a halfhearted traffic cone placed before its crumbling exterior, likely the result of the battle earlier that year.

But still. She was out of the Tower. And that was certainly something to celebrate.

Loki, presumably still maintaining his Luke persona based on the ever-present green shimmer around his body, settled into a more relaxed state once he realized no other mortals would join them in the small courtyard. In a positively cordial conversation, Bruce helped him pick a beer that might be to his liking.

Happy had left them once they had stepped inside, and Tony was entirely focused on his phone, effectively reducing their party to three.

Their drinks arrived without issue. Loki had settled on a Brooklyn Lager, which he deemed acceptable as Bruce dove headfirst into his Guinness. Tony brought his ridiculously priced Scotch to his lips with eyes never leaving his screen.

“Is the city less offensive now?” Alex teased as she nursed her white wine.

Loki took another sip of beer with a shrug. “Perhaps in the smallest degree of differentiation, for I have yet to detect any open sewers in the immediate vicinity.”

“Wow,” she sarcastically lilted as she and Bruce shared a smirk over their drinks. “We might make a New Yorker out of you yet.”

That time Loki shot her A Look. “Do not press your luck, mortal.”

She and Bruce laughed—Tony let out an amused puff of air about fifteen seconds after them, attention not once breaking from his work—and Loki draped his arm over the empty chair between himself and Alexandra. “Are all Midgardian taverns of the same ilk?”

“Most of the ones in this part of town don’t have outdoor seating like this, but yeah, pretty typical.”

“Are you familiar with this establishment?”

“Yep.”

Bruce pulled a quizzical expression. “You’ve been here before?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed with her own confused look. More than been there before; it was right on that patio that she and Christian had first drunkenly, sloppily kissed as Jessica had loudly ‘ooohed’ in the background. “I mean, I walk right by it on my way to and from the UN.” She paused. “Or at least, I used to.”

Bruce stared at her for a moment, then shook his head in wonder. “Sorry,” he bashfully said as he turned back to his drink. “Just forget sometimes that you’re from here but not from here.”

Alex swallowed down a tight, unexpected tension. “Right.”

“I have read your books, by the by,” Loki abruptly announced, pulling her out of her sudden mental tailspin. “Quite a melancholic selection. It is no wonder you are so familiar with Hamlet.”

“Yeah,” she agreed with a sigh. “My craptastic brain typically has just one setting.”

As Loki frowned while he attempted to piece together her meaning, Bruce tilted his head. “Books?”

"Luke here”—Loki huffed at the sobriquet—"wanted an intro class to human literature.”

"Oh yeah, like Gulliver's Travels, Shakespeare, that sort of thing?”

“I am no plebeian,” Loki groused at Bruce. “I am adequately familiar with Shakespeare.”

“Uh,” Alex reminded him. “I told you there’s more to Shakespeare than Hamlet.”

“Yes, and as I just said, I am adequately familiar as it is,” he retorted with a hint of teasing smile before turning his attention to the doctor. “Alexandra provided me with ten titles of her choosing. They were dour tomes nearly to a fault, but overall were not the worst dribble ever forced upon me.”

She lifted her glass in mock cheers before taking a sip. “A recommendation worthy of a book cover. Jasper Fforde will be so proud.”

“Yes, that was the odd inclusion,” Loki agreed. “The others were so rife with existential despair. The tone of that one was significantly more lighthearted, although it was positively steeped in the author’s pomposity. Dueling gangs making war over the true identity of Shakespeare: Truly, what is that, beyond an exercise in self-satisfaction?”

“Uh, it’s called world building, and it is amazing, not masturbatory.”

A small smile twitched on his lips. “Vulgar but indeed fitting.”

“Whatever,” she sniffed with a slight smile of her own. “What’d you think of the others?”

“You have a rather bizarre fascination with violence for one so skilled in the art of diplomacy.”

Alex inwardly stuttered at that. She was sure they had never spoken about her previous job, which meant not only was he actually listening when she had held such conversations with Bruce or Tony, but he remembered as well. It was more than a little shocking, especially given part of her imagined he viewed her as little more than background noise, like a rain machine or bedroom fan.

“Well,” she said with an amicable shrug, attempting to downplay her surprise. “The flip side of diplomacy is war.”

“Ah. You do not seek the brutality, but if it arrives, you revel in it.”

A soft, startled laugh escaped her, and she took a sip of wine to cover it. “I don’t revel in it.”

“That was not a criticism,” Loki returned with a head tilt and assessing gaze. “It is necessary to embrace such darkness from time to time.”

“Jesus, that’s bleak.”

Loki smirked again. “They were your chosen tomes, pet. I am merely commenting upon your selection.”

They stared at one another for a moment as Bruce watched them with a frown. “Okay,” the doctor cut in after several silent seconds. “What were these other books?”

Alex opened her mouth to respond, but Loki cut her off, rattling off all ten titles, complete with authors, from memory. As she stared at him with another shocked burst of some unidentifiable emotion, he mused, “Although each had its own merits, I was most impressed with Story of Your Life. The linguistic theory was at times laughable, but the metaphysical questions were rather astute.” Loki shot her another almost-teasing look as he added, “At least for an underdeveloped species such as yourselves.”

“And even more high praise,” she sarcastically teased back, already feeling the effects of the wine. “Hate to tell you this, but I think you’re beginning to like Midgard.”

“Yes, rather as much as I enjoy the inane nattering of an uneducated adolescent.”

Alex smirked, then began to giggle as a thought popped into her brain. “Oh my god, I’m just imagining your angsty teenage poetry right now, and it is spectacular.”

For once, Loki took the jibe in playful good nature. “If you think ill of my poetry, I encourage you to cast your imagination toward Thor’s.”

She burst out laughing. “Oh Christ, yes. ‘This is my hammer, this is my gun; one is for fighting, one is for fun’.”

Bruce snorted through his beer as Loki gave a sharp, surprised laugh of his own. “Again, vulgar but quite fitting.”

“Maybe I need to add some actual poetry to the list,” she mused even as she continued to giggle. “The Waste Land would be on brand.”

“Or The Raven,” Bruce countered.

She grinned at him. “Paradise Lost.”

Bruce smiled back. “The Divine Comedy.”

At the same time, their jaws dropped and eyes met in mutual understanding. “Beowulf,” they spoke in unison before devolving into giggles.

Still laughing, she glanced at Loki to find his gaze fixed on her form and his face pulled into a peculiar expression, as though he was rapidly trying to add up all the bits of information he had about her and couldn’t quite come to the solution. The mirth died on her lips.

“Perplexing,” he finally murmured, not wavering from his careful inspection of her face and sending a nervous flutter up her spine. She stared back, unable to look away but twisting uncomfortably under the flagrant scrutiny.

Bruce again broke the spell between the two as he idly shook his empty mug. “I’m ready for another. Anyone else?”

Tony gave a loud sniff and raised his own drained glass without eyes ever lifting from the phone, the only acknowledgment that he was still sitting there. Alex watched him for several seconds as Loki and Bruce again discussed beer options. Part of her got the feeling that even if Tony really was engrossed in another project, he was still recording the entire conversation for later review.

Duplicitous little bastard.

The conversation moved on from books to television shows—Loki again commenting on the often-dour nature of her chosen entertainment with an almost-fond smile that she couldn’t quite work out—and from there, mentions of Futurama spring-boarded into a long discussion on theoretical physics. Alex had been enough of a nerd in her own right to have a somewhat-firm grasp on the nature of string theory and other quantum weirdness, but when the topic then mutated into one on quantum math, she again checked out and returned her attention to Tony.

“So what’s so fascinating that you can’t put down your phone for five minutes?” she huffed at him.

“Nag says what?” he swiftly returned, fingers clacking on the miniature keyboard.

“Wha-?” She cut herself off when her brain caught up with her mouth. Tony triumphantly smirked, still not looking up, as she narrowed her eyes. “Dick.”

“Ah, yeah, there’s that famous diplomacy I keep hearing about.”

She balked for a moment. “Are we in a fight or something?”

He finally looked up, stared meaningfully at her—at least, surely he thought he was conveying something with the look, but what it was alluded her—and then returned to his phone. The waitress placed a third whiskey in front of Tony, who graciously thanked her before giving another side-eyed Look to Alex.

“That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain,” he softly quoted as he held the glass to his lips.

“Oh,” she responded just as quietly, only half-understanding. “Am I Claudius or Hamlet in this scenario?”

“Kid,” he sighed, then took a long swig. “Don’t be either.”

For the rest of their time at the Wheeltapper, and even hours later as she attempted to fall asleep that evening, Alex’s mind ricocheted between two surprising and uncomfortable truths: Tony was afraid she was becoming friends with Loki, and she was in the process of precisely that.

Chapter Text

The dog days of summer had finally given way to the comparatively cool opening bell of autumn. Fall was Alexandra’s favorite time of year, and she was looking forward to enjoying the city without the stickiness of August weighing her—and Loki, for he was even more averse to hot weather than she was—down.

It had taken weeks, but Tony had caved enough to her three-point plan of attack—use of objective criteria (hard evidence of Loki's good behavior), influence of a third party (Bruce, who was sympathetic to her cause), and rewards (agreeing to give up more information on SHIELD as gleaned from the Marvel movies)—to finally, finally allow her to leave the building unescorted.

And not necessarily with Loki, either. Testing the length of their tether had been an accident initially. After a particularly poor night’s sleep, Alex’s brain had switched into autopilot, and she had dazedly wandered to the lab—four floors up and on the other side of the building—without first collecting Loki from his apartment.

Tony had been in LA with Pepper at the time, and when Alex and Bruce realized what had happened, they’d debated for a solid fifteen minutes on the merits of telling Tony, or Loki, or neither at all. Ultimately, however, they’d determined they—*cough* Bruce *cough*—were terrible liars, and that the truth would come out eventually, and so they had broken the news to Tony and Loki, in that order. The latter had been thrilled, the former horrified, and Alex caught somewhere in between.

After that, she and Loki started testing the bond without sharing that information with Tony. Using StarkPhones—Alex had given up her ‘iPhone’ affectation since it meant nothing to literally everyone else in existence—they had remained on an open line as Alex rode up the elevator floor by floor, stopping at each to discuss whether either felt anything.

“I can sense you, of course,” Loki had reported over the phone as she hovered at Floor 88. “But there is no difference.”

She punched the ‘door open’ button so that nobody else could call the car. “What do you mean, you can sense me?”

A pause. “Can you not sense me? Sense the bond?”

“No? What do you mean?”

“Oh, naturally,” Loki groused with a loud sigh. “You, who can see and hear and feel all manner of my magic, cannot in any way sense the most pervasive and consequential magic affecting you.”

“Sorry.”

A loud sigh once again crackled over the line. “It is not your fault,” he told her, as though she had actually been apologizing. “It merely seems that I am alone to bear the brunt of Odin’s madness.”

"So what does it feel like?”

“A pressure, I suppose,” Loki had claimed in a dismissive tone that told her he was not interested in discussing the point any further. “One that will no doubt intensify should I stray too far from your skirts. Try another floor.”

Soon they had exhausted the extent of the distance the elevator could take them, barred as they were from the lower stories. But once Tony had capitulated to Alex’s request to leave the building unescorted, all bets were off.

“Twenty-two,” Alex murmured quietly into the receiver, a dark-skinned man of about her height dressed in an immaculate pinstriped suit—he had boarded on Floor 29—standing beside her.

Loki hummed his understanding in her ear, the vibrations sending visible chills over her skin and a flush to her cheeks. She glanced at the other passenger, gave him an embarrassed smile, and forced her eyes to the floor.

“Anything?”

“Pet,” Loki scolded over the phone, and even though she despised the term his tone did something very uncomfortable to her lower region. Jesus, the hormones were ablaze that morning. “Do you really think I would not mention it if I did sense a change?”

She flushed again, that time for feeling stupid. “Well, it’s weird, right? And for the last time, stop calling me that.”

The elevator suddenly came to a halt with a ding filling the still air. Four more people joined the party, three men of varying degrees of white skin and varying suits of blue, and one petite brunette.

“Sixteen,” Alex softly reported under the chattering of the new woman. “He said ‘domain,’ right? Maybe that means the entire planet?”

“Nothing would ever be so simple with Odin,” Loki sourly countered. “There is a limit, and we must discover it.”

But when the ground floor arrived, and Alex stepped out into the golden-lit atrium full of bustling businesspeople, groups of tourists, and bored-looking security guards, neither she nor Loki felt any change beyond a minuscule increase to the pressure Loki apparently experienced.

It was a game-changing revelation. But it was also there that the experiment had to end, as Alex didn’t dare step outside the building completely alone, lest her movements be reported by JARVIS to Tony, and so she returned to their apartment floor wondering what the hell it could mean.

The next afternoon, Alex had prepared Tony for what would be her and Loki’s first foray into the city unescorted. Yes, she would check in every fifteen minutes. Yes, she would answer the phone any time Tony called. Yes, they would go only to dinner, there and back, no side ventures. No, they would not deviate from the agreed-upon route. And so on.

Alex picked up Loki from his apartment just before seven. As usual, she cracked open the door—Loki’s ability to leave on his own accord was still a bridge too far for Tony—and waited for the dark prince’s appearance as she nervously glanced down at herself.

It wasn’t a date. Of course it wasn’t a date. Neither was prepared to let Tony know about their ability to separate, and they’d already been eating dinner together for weeks. Eating in a new environment was merely the natural progression of the habit.

And yet.

Tony insisted on paying her for her assistance in the lab and given she had virtually zero expenses (take that, student loans!), her bank account was a tidier sum than she had ever imagined. As such, she had picked up numerous items from Valentino’s Spring 2012 Collection, including the dress in which she was loitering outside Loki’s door.

It was a black, ankle-length lace number with a low, wide-cut V neckline that would abide no bra (genetics had already made such garments virtually unnecessary) and a cinched-in waist that fell to a slightly flared skirt, giving her a tastefully feminine outline complete with the ever-illusive feminine pockets. The shoes were black heeled sandals, her toes showing off her scarlet at-home pedicure.

Couture was not her natural element, and so she had ripped off the runway model’s look, too, pulling her auburn curls into an appealingly messy braided crown and keeping her makeup light and pink.

As she reminded herself to keep her shoulders back so the neckline didn’t gape, Loki pulled open the door. They met eyes, and he started, a tiny pause, a little double take that was likely entirely meaningless and yet pulled the air from her lungs. Then, collecting himself, he lazily reclined against the doorway.

“You have done me a disservice, pet,” he chided as his eyes freely—too freely—roamed over her, a devilish smile pulling at his lips. “Given your usual state of dress, I had assumed the evening meal to be a typically casual affair.”

Her eyes dropped to take in his attire. A gorgeous, Italian-made linen suit in olive green, single breasted, coupled with a white linen shirt open perhaps one button too far and imitating her own neckline to reveal the smooth line of his throat and the strength in his chest. The trousers fitted closely around his thighs, pulling along with the muscles as he moved, no doubt revealing something else if she looked too long. His usual brown leather loafers completed the outfit and appeared to have been freshly polished.

She glanced back up at him, his serpentine smile framed by the long, soft waves of his dark hair, offset by the brilliant blue of his eyes. As he waited for her to respond, he continued to blatantly ogle her, her skin both melting and freezing every place his line of sight fell.

She sighed. “You know you look fine.”

“Fine?” he repeated in mock horror. “Am I so abhorrent to you?”

“Oh my god,” she grumbled as she began to walk away. “You are such a child.”

“And I see you are just as lovely from the back as you are from the front.”

Alex spun around with her cheeks flaring to find him still lounging against the doorway and clearly staring at her ass. “Can we please just go eat?” she half-whined, half-pleaded.

Loki made a show of raising his eyes to meet hers. “I think perhaps I should remain," he dramatically sighed. “For I am not but a toad beside your incomparable form.”

“Oh my god. You know you’re fucking hot, Loki, okay? Do we have to play this game?”

He launched off the door frame with an utterly delighted smile. “Hot, is it? What precisely does that mean in this context?”

Her head shook with something caught between annoyance and humiliation, and she turned around to mutely head toward the elevator.

Loki bounded beside her, suddenly bursting with energy. Walking backward at her pace and staring down at her with a knowing smirk, he remarked, “It must mean something beyond simply pleasing to the eye, what with your pinkened cheeks”—he teasingly flicked a finger toward her face, grinning like a hyena as she batted him away—“and your vulgar qualifier. Do share, for I am most intrigued.”

She punched the call button with more force than necessary. “It means shut up, or I’m going to punch you.”

“Oh, but you would only break your hand, my fragile little pet. Spare yourself the injury and tell me what you mean.”

Alex closed her eyes, suddenly regretting every life choice that had gotten her to that point. “I am never wearing nice clothes again,” she muttered to herself.

Loki’s voice dropped to its sinister range. “Oh Alexandra,” he cooed, his head dipping down toward her ear, his breath caressing the bared skin of her neck, goosebumps tingling down her spine, breath catching in her lungs. “You need not wear any clothes on my account.”

The doors opened and she elbowed him as they stepped inside, Loki laughing as he returned to his normal height. A green shimmer fell over him a moment later, and when he saw that she noticed, he grinned again.

“Do not fret, my dear; although the other mortals may see a stranger, I would never deprive you of the form you find so terribly pleasing.”

“Uh, I can see through your bullshit, not the other way around.”

Loki smirked with such force that Alex momentarily wondered if he could not only read her like an open book but read her mind as well, and she spent the rest of the elevator ride twisting and turning over how much she had given away.

It hadn’t been difficult getting Loki to the restaurant. Initially she had feared he would immediately wander off like an errant child, see something shiny and be forever lost to the swarming crowds. However, it turned out he was too fixated on torturing her to pay attention to anything else.

“That one,” he gestured with his chin, his damnably handsome face beaming with glee. “Is he hot?”

Alex followed his eyeline to see an olive-skinned man of average height and strong build. Cute, but hardly dripping with sex. She sighed and repeated the same word she had given half a dozen times already. “No.”

Loki hummed, his eyes skimming the passing humans. “Her?”

Her eyes flicked to a blonde in a beautiful red summer dress. While she was pretty enough, her body was slamming to an extent that Alex’s own heterosexuality for a moment questioned itself.

“Yeah,” she confirmed. “She's pretty hot. Can we drop it?”

Loki was unperturbed. “Then it does not simply mean attractive, unless mortals use a different framework to gauge such things.”

“Uh huh,” she noncommittally offered as they came to a stop at Park Avenue Tower. “We’re here.”

Loki glanced up at the skyscraper. “Another tower.”

“Yeah, but we’re on the ground floor, at least. Come on.” She directed him to the awning, where Loki held the door open for her and it certainly didn’t make her swoon.

The maître d’ checked Alex's name, then led them into the restaurant. Loki’s head dropped down toward her ear. “Him?”

“No,” she sharply whispered. “Stop.”

The devil beside her grinned, his hand coming to rest on the small of her back as they walked up the three steps to the main dining room. Heat nearly exploded through her body as he held her close to him, as if he was bizarrely marking her as his territory.

It still wasn’t a date.

But she was suddenly aware that she could smell the fresh, wintry scent of his skin, a pleasant hint of smoky cologne. Her brain went blank apart from the inner chants of ‘step, step, step,’ a prayer to prevent herself from tripping.

Loki seemed to hesitate when the maître d’ helped Alex into her seat, a slight frown on his face. After the menus had been delivered and the other man departed, Loki’s eyes followed.

Still glaring in his general direction, Loki leaned toward her over the linen-clad table. “Was that not bold of him?”

Alex sent a check-in text to Tony before looking up. “What, the chair thing?”

"Yes, the 'chair thing.’ You are my responsibility, not his.”

“Responsibility?” she repeated in a huff. “That’s nice.”

He shot her a sour look. “Do not be difficult. I am your escort for the evening, and it is my responsibility to see to your needs.”

“It’s not meant to be a power play; it’s just something nice restaurants do.”

"I do not care for it.” He cast one final withering look toward the entrance, then brightened as he lifted the menu. “What manner of cuisine is this, then?”

“Scandinavian.”

Loki’s eyes flickered to her. “Am I familiar with it?”

“Kind of. It’s food from the part of the world you used to visit. Like Sweden, Norway, that area. It’s called Scandinavia.”

A little knit appeared between Loki’s eyes. He glanced at the menu again, then flicked his eyes over the other guests. “I remember it rather more rustic.”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s not turkey legs at a Ren Faire. It’s twenty-first century Michelin-starred haute cuisine.”

Loki’s lips pursed in mild annoyance. “Plain speaking, please.”

Her smile vanished, at once presuming he hated the entire concept and feeling like a fool for even trying. “Well, obviously palates have changed in a thousand years,” she said with a shrug, attempting to pretend like she didn’t care. “And like, we use forks now. But these dishes are inspired by that region as it is now. And Michelin Stars are awarded to restaurants for outstanding food. Anyway.” She paused to awkwardly return to the menu. “I just thought it’d be nice. Something different.”

“It was an excellent choice,” Loki said in a soft tone after a moment.

She looked back at him, saw the apparent honesty on his face, and flushed. Not able to stand the weird, sudden intimacy, she joked, “You might want to save your praise until you try the food.”

There might have been the vaguest flash of disappointment on his face, but it morphed into an amicable smile so quickly she might’ve imagined it. “Yes,” he agreed as he skimmed the options. “What in the name of the Norns is a ‘Tasting’? Is tasting not the point of the entire establishment?”

Eventually, they settled on three courses each. For Alex, the sole vegetarian option in each column made her decision for her, and so she ended up with a hazelnut soup followed by an entrée amusingly called ‘kroppkakor’—dumplings of potato and mushrooms—and capped off with a chestnut crème brûlée. And, of course, her single glass of wine.

There was a set price for three courses, but Loki naturally wanted to upgrade every dish beyond that, presuming the more expensive option to be the better one. They argued for several minutes, until Alex whipped out her StarkPhone to read off the ingredients of ‘toast skagen,’ and Loki conceded that he could let the mayonnaise-shrimp concoction pass.

Instead, the dark prince settled on a smoked salmon starter followed by the outrageously expensive Wagyu dish and both the up-priced goat cheese parfait and the up-priced raspberry cake for dessert.

Though what did it really matter, with Uncle Tony in effect paying for everything.

Life was weird.

Loki insisted on placing both of their orders, noting Alex’s selections through a lot of passive-aggressive “my dining partner will have...” as Alex wordlessly shook her head at him.

Ordering ordeal over, and Loki sipping on his first glass of wine—he had also opted for the wine pairing—they considered each other for a moment. Loki’s expression was gentle but unreadable, those clever blue eyes roving over her.

Alex resisted the urge to check that her neckline hadn’t slipped and instead had to break the tension. “Do they have restaurants like this in As-, I mean at home?”

He considered the question. “Not precisely. We do have dining establishments, of course, but they are more akin to taverns than, as you say, haute cuisine. For the lower classes.”

She giggled. “Snob.”

“It is simply a matter of fact,” he said with a shrug. “If one lives in a castle, one has little need to seek outside amusements. Chefs and the like will come to you.”

Static images of Asgard’s wealth burst through her brain. “Yeah, I guess,” she inelegantly said, suddenly feeling like a plebe herself. “Then what’s your favorite food?”

Their starters arrived. As she sipped on her soup—who knew savory hazelnut was so freaking delicious?—Loki devoured the salmon with evident reverence on his face. “This,” he murmured as he lifted a bite on his fork for illustration. “Would be toward the top of that list.”

“See, aren’t you glad I talked you out of that mayonnaise thing?”

"Do not gloat. It is unbecoming on a lady.”

“Oh,” she said with a snort. “Good thing there aren’t any of those around here.”

His eyes twinkled with amusement at her self-deprecation as he watched her take another careful spoonful of soup. When she glanced at him, his features darkened slightly, and his gaze locked on to her lips as she drew them over the utensil before watching her swallow. At that, she jerked back, suddenly realizing she was unintentionally fellating the spoon.

“Oh no, do not stop,” he said in one of his bedroom tones, his heated gaze trailing over her face and down her neck. “You are painting a rather alluring picture for me.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Mortification bloomed not only across her cheeks but her chest as well. “Can you not be you for like ten minutes? Please?”

He gestured to himself with a vaguely churlish expression, indicating the perpetual green shimmer around him. “I have been not but someone else this entire evening, pet. Who else would you prefer me to be?”

“Um, a gentleman would be a good start.”

“I am a consummate gentleman,” he retorted with a hint of genuine surprise. “Do you jest, or have I truly affronted you?”

She sighed. “No, I’m not mad. But you don’t have to harass me all the time.”

“When have I ever harassed you?”

“Seriously?”

He stared back for a moment, as if attempting to grasp her meaning, before sighing with a half shrug, his hands lifting off the table with the motion. “Very well, yes, at the beginning,” he finally conceded. “But of late, I have not. I would not.”

“Then what is it you think you’re doing all the time to me? You don’t act like this around Tony or Bruce.”

He gaped in a silent loss for words as a waiter replaced their dishes with their entrees, barely acknowledging the sommelier as he was poured a new glass of wine. When the waitstaff had vacated, Loki leaned forward, his elbows on the table on either side of the plate of Wagyu. Those lovely thin lips pressed together for a moment as a frown skittered across his features and his head cocked ponderously to the side as he considered her.

“Would you prefer it if I engaged with you in the same way I engage with them?”

She shifted uncomfortably under his steady, assessing gaze. “No.”

“Then to what do you object?”

Sighing, she picked up her fork. “Just forget it.”

Loki didn’t move. “I have aggrieved you, and I wish to know how.”

She poked at the dumplings with disinterest, appetite fading as the conversation became unexpectedly strained. Might as well lose her dignity, too. “It’s just... sometimes I can’t tell if you’re teasing or if you’re belittling.”

“With you specifically?” She nodded, and his head dipped curiously to the side. “It is teasing, pet, nothing more.”

Her eyes shot to him in a glower. “Oh my god, really?” When he gave her a look of blank confusion, she gave a loud sigh through her nose. “‘Pet.’ It's a demeaning term, and I hate it, and you know that. And it’s not like you would ever use it on Bruce.”

“Certainly not, but then I would also never refer to you as a lumbering beast.” Loki gave his own slow, sharp exhale. “It is not meant to offend. But offend it does, and so I will cease usage. Does that satisfy you?”

She skimmed his features, still seemingly honest, and gave a nod. Loki skimmed her right back. Then, with a single nod of his own, he turned to the slab of beef presented before him, knife and fork eagerly in hand. Alex stifled a laugh at his obvious excitement as he dug in, sighed, and closed his eyes.

“I was wrong,” he murmured in a tone of near ecstasy that was disturbingly alluring and made her weirdly envious of a hunk of dead cow. “This is the top of the list.”

She couldn’t help but giggle. “Now you’re putting on a nice show for me.”

He caught her eye in sudden confusion, then winked when he registered her teasing. “Darling, if you wish to have a show, I am more than willing to oblige.”

She giggled again even as her eyes rolled and her cheeks heated. “I find it really hard to believe you were ever a part of polite society.”

He considered her with a thoughtful expression as he chewed. “I suppose I was not fully a part of it, no.”

Something tight twisted within her. “I didn’t mean-”

“Oh, I know your words contained no malice,” he interrupted with a dismissive shrug. “Despite your fierce exterior, you have a very gentle heart.”

Another heated wave over her skin. “Probably not gentle enough.”

He murmured an unknowable response as another bite of steak slipped between his lips. There was a beat after he swallowed, then, “No, you are a rather bewildering confluence of too much compassion coupled with too much contempt. It is vexing.”

She could’ve taken it as a mild slur against her character, but instead she just gave another laugh. “Right back at you.”

A deep frown pulled his features as his head kicked back in surprise. After several silent seconds, he slowly said, “There are few in any realm who would mistake me for a man of compassion.”

She smirked. “Notice you didn’t push back on the contempt point.”

“I did not, for I know who I am.”

Alex brought her glass of wine to her lips, considering him. “I think you are a rather bewildering mix of too much self-esteem and not nearly enough of it.”

Again, that introspective, pondering frown. His own wine came to his lips as he softly mused, “Right back at you.”

They finished the meal nearly an hour later. Alex paid the bill with a credit card, the premise of which flummoxed Loki, and the two stepped into the pleasantly cool evening. Without asking—without appearing as he gave it any thought at all—Loki slipped out of his suit jacket and draped it over Alex’s shoulders. The faint notes of his cologne, of his skin, of him, filled her nostrils, and she nearly fell off the curb.

Loki regaled her with ridiculous stories of childhood mischief as they trotted through Midtown East, following the precise route Tony had previously decreed. By the time they reached Stark Tower, Alex was nearly doubled over with laughter and Loki was bursting with remembered delight.

When they reached Loki’s door—and after Alex had sent a confirmation message to Tony that they had safely returned—Loki leaned against the wall, hands in pockets, and tilted his head to speak to her.

“Did you have an enjoyable evening?”

Still giggling, she teased, “Moderately.”

He huffed a laugh. “I suppose that is the best I can expect.”

“Did you?”

Winking, he teased back, “It was tolerable.”

She smiled as she shrugged off his jacket and handed it back to him. "You are more than welcome to pick the next restaurant.”

“Oh ho, the next restaurant, is it?”

“Uh, yeah. Now that we can eat out, I don’t have to cook anymore.”

"That is true,” he mused, eyes still playful. “A blessing for us both.”

“Hey!” she chided through giggles. “Only I can say that.”

He gave a smile in return before the mirth on his face faded. “In truth, I do not wish to venture out for every meal. It is...” he trailed off, seeming to search for a word that wouldn’t offend her.

“It’s a lot,” she softly supplied. “All the people, and the noise, and the pollution, and just... everything. I can’t do it every day, either.”

His gaze brushed over her as he nodded. “Then you will collect me at our usual time tomorrow?”

“Yep.”

“Excellent.” He pushed off the wall, then gave her a half bow. “Thank you for the splendid evening, my dear.”

Not ‘pet’. Good start. “You’re very welcome, your alien highness.”

He pursed his lips together in annoyance, but there was hint of fondness there, too. “Ridiculous creature,” he sighed as he walked into his apartment and flipped on the light. “Sleep well, little mortal.”

Late the next morning as Alex ran the vacuum, she heard something that sounded like a knock. It was too light to be Bruce’s, too unfamiliar to be Loki’s. With a frown, she shut off the machine and pulled open the door.

Pepper freaking Potts was revealed on the other side, and Alex did an uncouth double take in surprise.

“Oh,” she ungraciously murmured. “Hi.”

The lovely strawberry blonde grinned. “Hi,” she returned with a faint laugh. “I thought we should finally meet. I’m Pepper.”

Alex stared at her in mute confusion for a moment. “Hi,” she finally said. “I’m Alex.”

“I know.”

They were both silent for several seconds until Alex remembered her manners. “Yeah, hi,” she needlessly repeated for a third time. “Come on in.” She scooted to the side, allowing the tall woman to gracefully slide into her apartment, leaving the soft scent of vanilla, tonka beans, and florals in her wake.

“Would you like a drink?” she asked the far more glamorous woman as she closed the door and moved toward the kitchen.

“Sure,” Pepper returned with a cheery lilt. “Scotch?”

Alex stifled a surprised bark, turning the sound into an unpleasant gargle. “Oh, um,” she hemmed and hawed. “I actually don’t have anything that hard...”

The other woman tossed her a beautiful grin. “Kidding. I’d love a glass of water, though.”

They sat down on her couch as Alex handed Pepper her glass. She accepted it with a soft thanks and took a sip as her eyes scanned over Alex’s nervous form. Pepper left her hanging for several seconds, assessing her as she drank her water, then finished the sip with a satisfied sound.

"So,” she finally started, and Alex uneasily eyed her, completely unsure of what was to follow. “Another universe.”

Alex blinked in surprise. “Oh. Yeah.”

Pepper blinked in return. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

The other woman nodded, held the glass lightly on her lap as she suddenly leaned purposefully forward. Her soulful brown eyes latched onto Alex’s with heavy empathy. “Oh, honey,” she softly said, and it was as though she had seen right through to Alex’s soul. “You’re going to be okay.”

Alex didn’t know what to make of that. Neither did she know what to make of Pepper setting up a visit to the nail salon for them both later that week, nor the restaurant recommendations for where Alex and Loki should go next. The other woman seemed determined to be a friend to Alex, and she couldn’t help but let her.

They spoke for over an hour, and when Pepper finally left—with the additional promise that they would have Thanksgiving together—Alex realized she hadn’t felt so normal in six months.

A few weeks later, Loki and Alex sat in the Stark Tower cafeteria, Loki staring out the rain-streaked window as he idly devoured chicken stir fry and Alex quietly munched on a falafel pita. They both had brought books, though Loki had seemed to abandon his reading material in favor of wallowing in a snit over all of human creation.

“I had not thought it possible,” he grumbled between bites of vegetables. “But the blaring cacophony outside these walls has somehow grown even more deafening than normal.”

“Yeah,” she murmured in distracted agreement as her eyes reread the last sentence of her book, 11/22/63. “It’s UNGA.”

Several moments later, Loki loudly huffed, and she glanced up from the tome to find him half-glaring at her. “What?”

“That was not a satisfactory answer.”

“What wasn’t?”

“What did you mean by that horrendous nasal sound?”

“Huh?”

He exaggeratedly rolled his eyes, which only deepened her frown. “Unga. Explain.”

“Oh. The United Nations General Assembly. Acronym is UNGA, pronounced uhn-guh. It’s an annual meeting of world leaders to discuss priorities for the coming year, and since there are so many high-profile people in town, the police close roads so they can better protect the dignitaries as they travel around. We’re just a few blocks from the UN so there’s a lot of traffic and a lot of motorcades with sirens and police escorts and whatnot.” She paused, considering. “Honestly, if you had just waited a few months and attacked during UNGA you could’ve taken out like half the world leaders in one go.”

Loki appeared mildly annoyed at that last observation. “I was not precisely focused on such issues at the time.”

“Yeah, clearly.”

He pulled another sour expression. “Do you mean to say you wish that I had attacked a gathering of your realm’s leaders?”

“It’s not my realm,” she said with a shrug as she returned to the King novel. “And I’m just saying, it’s shitty planning on your part.”

Those clever blue eyes were at a loss. “You are the most ridiculous creature I have ever had the misfortune of meeting.”

“Not so ridiculous that I don’t know the value of reconnaissance,” she teased as she found the paragraph she had been reading.

Later that afternoon, giggling herself into a stupor, she sent Loki a new book for his collection: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

Loki was deep into that very tome when Alex found him lounging on a couch in the floor’s common room several days later. Tony had finally given up the pretense of keeping Loki in a cage and permitted the dark prince to travel about the building at his leisure, though the clear presumption was that Alexandra would, by necessity, be in the same general area.

“Hey,” she gently interrupted Loki’s reading. “I’ve got an appointment, so I’ve got to go out. Since the science boys are still in DC, do you want to go out, too, or do you want to try staying here?”

He slowly turned a page. “Where is ‘out,’ precisely?”

“Well, you can’t come to my appointment, but you could go to a bookstore or something.”

“I have a book right here.”

A wave of mild relief fluttered over her. "Okay, stay here and call me if you feel anything weird.”

As she walked to the elevator, he called out in half-interest, “What is the appointment?”

Her stomach clenched. “It’s just a woman thing. Don’t worry about it.”

Unfortunately, nothing got his attention more quickly. Flicking the book into his weird subspace realm, he sat up with interest, his grey V-neck pulling across his muscular chest in a very distracting way as he lifted an arm over the back of the sofa.

“What do you mean, a woman thing?”

She pretended to shrug in disinterest. “It’s just a thing women sometimes do.”

“Ah. I am intimately familiar with female bodies and deeds, as I have taken the form from time to time. You may tell me.”

"It’s personal, Loki.”

Wrong thing, again. Suddenly zeroed in on her and her alone, his rabidly probing gaze dragged over every inch of her as she struggled not to show her tension. “Do not be inscrutable, Alexandra, it does not suit you. Now tell me what the appointment is.”

“It’s personal.”

Loki considered that for a moment, then shook his head and rose to his feet. “I feel duty bound to accompany you.”

She rolled her eyes and turned down the hallway without waiting for him. “You’re such a freaking snoop.”

“Hardly,” he responded behind her. “You’re a delicate little creature, and I cannot in good conscience send you out into this violent realm alone, particularly when I have no knowledge of what it is you are to encounter.”

“Oh my god. Fine. It’s called waxing. It’s a thing some humans do to remove hair.”

He stared at her auburn waves in shock. “Why in the Norns would you wish to remove your hair?”

“Not head hair,” she exasperatedly explained even as she inwardly cringed at the intimacy of the discussion to come. “Body hair. Some people get all their body hair removed, some people just get it removed from certain body parts. Some people don’t do it at all. It’s not a big deal.”

“I see.” For a moment, he seemed blessedly disinterested, until another thought occurred to him as they stepped onto the elevator. “And from where are you having hair removed? “

She rolled her eyes. “My legs. But it’s not any of your business.”

As other people quickly joined the elevator ride, Loki paused the conversation. But as soon as they were in the atrium, he continued. “Why may I not attend this appointment with you?”

“Uh, because I don’t want you in the room as they’re ripping hair out of my body.”

They stepped through the revolving doors to emerge outside precisely as a motorcade rolled by. Alex continued to march down the street, thankful for the sirens and flashing lights that provided a respite from Loki’s prying. It was only a two-minute walk to the waxing spa, and they made it inside before he could ask another question.

Alex checked in, confirmed her appointment for a Brazilian and lower legs—furiously hoping Loki didn’t catch the first word—and took a seat as the prince in question carefully looked over each of the products on display with an expression amusingly caught between fascination and abject horror.

Twenty-five minutes later, Alex was done, and her next appointment booked. Loki said a suspiciously pleasant goodbye to the girls at the front desk—naturally, they gave breathless, flirty farewells in return—and followed Alex mutely out the door.

It wasn’t until they were on the street that his demeanor changed, and his face lit up with a Cheshire cat grin. She could virtually feel the amusement sluicing off him.

“What?” she challenged in a bone-weary tone. “You snooped, didn’t you?”

He oozed delight. "I merely asked those wonderfully helpful girls to explain the differences between the various waxing options. However was I to know that the ‘Brazilian’ would be so... involved?”

Her cheeks burned. “I told you it was none of your business.”

“Yes, and you know me better than that by now. Tell me, how do they remove all the hair?”

“I am not having this conversation with you.”

He ignored her. “The girls made it sound quite intimate indeed. Is there touching involved?”

She came to a sudden stop, Loki avoiding crashing into her only by the grace of his speedy reflexes. “A deal, okay? I will tell you whatever you want to know, but you will not discuss this with Bruce or Tony. Not about me. Not ever. Okay?”

Loki pulled a solemn expression and reached out his hand. “I accept your terms.”

As she rolled her eyes and shook his hand, Loki burst into another grin. “Oh, my dear, I'm afraid this has addled you to the point of foolishness. A gentleman—a prince—such as I would never discuss a lady so crassly to others. Especially not with the likes of Anthony.”

Her eyes narrowed at him. “You better fucking not.”

One hand raised over his heart. “Upon my honor.”

“God of Lies.”

He hummed and resumed walking. “Even I have my limits.”

They ended up back at Alex’s apartment, where she upheld her end of the bargain—such as it was—and regaled an almost dangerously entranced Loki with the intricacies of waxing hair from the genitals as she stir-fried tofu and vegetables. The meal had been at Loki's request, having deemed the cafeteria version of the dish an utter disgrace compared to hers, a statement which would have been a lot nicer had it not been sandwiched between discussions on pubic hair removal.

He demanded to know how the waxing happened, step-by-step, taking in each new description with an amount of bewildered excitement that, again, would’ve been adorable if not for the topic at hand.

He grilled her on why she chose to undergo such a process, growing frustrated when she had nothing to say beyond the truth: that it was her own personal preference.

Then he asked to see the waxing results for himself and devolved into low rumbles of laughter when she, bright red, threw the wok spatula at him.

Thankfully, though, the inappropriate discussion was paused during the actual dining, and even during the hour of television that followed. It wasn’t until Loki was returning to his rooms for the evening that he again brought up the appointment.

“Those girls were helpful in another area as well,” he told her as he walked across the hallway to his apartment and opened the door.

A groan escaped her. “Oh Christ, what else?”

Loki smirked, catching her gaze and holding it, his eyes like magnets, the mischief on his face turning decidedly darker, his melodious baritone vibrating between her thighs. “I believe the phrase they used was, ‘intensely sexually desirable.’”

She snickered. “Phrase for what?”

The seductive pitch of his voice lowered even further. “Why, ‘fucking hot’ of course.”

Alex froze as Loki’s heated expression continued to bore into her. When she couldn’t even think of a reply, let alone voice one, Loki smirked again.

“Goodnight, Alexandra,” he murmured, his mesmerizing gaze not dropping until the door closed in front of him.

Chapter Text

Loki was waiting for Alexandra in the shared hallway the next morning, leaning against the wall, arms tightly crossed over his chest, his eyes directed at the floor with a perplexed expression.

“Hey,” she slowly greeted as she shut her door. “What’s up?”

It took another moment or two before his head tilted toward her in recognition, though he continued to keep his eyes on the ground.

“Your kind are masochists,” he finally offered in return.

She leaned against the wall across from him, a frown of her own pulling at her features. “How so?”

He was silent for another beat, then shook his head and relaxed his posture. “It is nothing.” Pushing himself forward he began walking toward the elevator.

Alex didn’t move. “Hey,” she called out to his slowly retreating form. “Masochists, why? What did you see?”

She had recently introduced Loki to the wide wonders of the internet. They had started off G-rated enough, and Loki had utterly devoured Wikipedia, his obsessive need for knowledge nearly meeting its match with the near-endless supply of encyclopedic listings.

Though, he had not been amused when he stumbled upon the Loki (Norse deity) page.

But other than that hiccup—during which he had raged about many things, though none more so than his supposed depiction in an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript that had reduced him to something of a hideous court jester—he had taken to the internet as well as his mythological version took to knots and webs.

Lord only knew what other virtual avenues he had traversed in his private time. “You didn’t find rotten.com, did you?”

He spun on his heel to face her. “What in the Nines are you talking about?” he glowered. “I am referring to you, you ridiculous thing, and your macabre ‘appointment’ of yestermorn. Do you care not one whit for the pain you have caused?”

She glanced at Bruce’s door, mostly confident that he was still in DC but lowering her voice all the same. “You mean the waxing?”

“Yes, of course,” Loki groused with hands raising and dropping in exasperation. “For one as fragile as yourself to willingly undergo such a painful procedure is absolutely asinine.”

Although a blush filled her cheeks, she also felt her lips beginning to twitch in a smirk. “Wait. How do you know how painful it is?”

“How could it not be?” he breezed over, and his quick deflection made her smirk turn to a full grin. “Once again, your thought toward self-preservation evaporated the moment-”

“You tried it!” she interrupted in glee. “Oh my god, you tried it, didn’t you?”

Several seconds of flustered silence as Loki gazed at her in shock. “We are bound,” he petulantly retorted, offering no further explanation.

“Please tell me you didn’t use boiling wax,” she managed out through bursts of laughter.

Loki glowered but did not respond.

“Oh my god, Loki!” She fought to control her mirth. “You just need it to be sticky, not hot hot.”

He ignored her, though there was the faintest pink to his skin—a shocking development indeed. “It was nevertheless an unwise procedure for one such as yourself to undertake.”

“Did you burn yourself?”

“I am speaking about you.”

“Maybe you should go to the hospital.”

He rolled his eyes with a huff and spun back to the elevator.

The day rolled on as usual as they plugged away on independent projects in Tony’s lab, though Alex couldn’t help but note with faint amusement the amount of times Loki shifted his position in his chair. Although she was dying to ask him about it, his evident embarrassment held her tongue.

At the end of the day, they returned upstairs, debating whether Alex had the capacity to jump with intention.

“I mean, maybe,” she offered with a shrug. “I don’t feel like I meant to, but it obviously was helpful to jump when I did with Ebony Maw.”

And at that, Loki suddenly... not quite froze, but stuttered. A pause, an uncharacteristic shuffle of his feet. As though he had stumbled over the bare ground as she so often did.

It was perhaps her imagination. And yet, she couldn’t stop herself from softly asking, “Hey, are you okay?”

When he didn’t respond, she debated. His strikingly cool blue eyes had gone dim and pulled with tension, and although he continued his forward momentum down the hallway, it was almost as though he were stroking out again—going into that other dimension ruled by a hell-invoking Ebony Maw.

But it couldn’t be that—he had told her that connection was severed, and he had seemed so sure of it.

Although, he was the God of Lies.

“Loki?”

His head shifted slightly toward the sound of her voice, but he was clearly elsewhere.

Alex reached a gentle hand toward him, just brushing the side of his arm.

Loki flinched back with a frightful snarl, spinning toward her as knives materialized out of the green ether.

Alex shrieked, pulling away in shock, backing into her door as she took a defensive position.

His body moved toward her, his chest heaving and muscles tense, his eyes wild.

“Loki,” she shakily whispered as her hand grasped behind her back for the door’s fingerprint scanner, shrinking further into it even as she tried to remind herself that he couldn’t hurt her.

Oh.

Her brain clicked with understanding. He was having a flashback. It wasn’t about him hurting her; she needed to show she couldn’t hurt him.

“It’s okay, Loki. It’s just me. It’s Alexandra.” Slowly she eased her hand from behind her back and held both in front of her, palms open so he could see she wasn’t armed. “You’re on Midgard with me. And you’re safe, I promise.”

She didn’t know what precisely made it into his addled mind, but suddenly he blinked, that terrifying grimace easing from his features as he scanned her posture and then his own.

The knives disappeared.

They both remained silent for several seconds, each trembling.

Then, Loki took a staggering step backward as his features morphed to confused guilt. “Alexandra, I-”

“It’s okay,” she interrupted as she attempted to relax her own countenance and bring her suddenly rushing heart under control. Her hands moved back to her sides, leaving herself vulnerable so he could see she still trusted him. “I think I get it.”

He eyed her again, his own hands lowering, though obvious tension still stiffened every muscle. Then his gaze dropped to the floor, and he took a step back toward his own door. “I will leave you.”

His voice was shredded, and dripping with both uncertainty and shame, and her heart broke just a little.

Turning her back to him so he could once again see her continued trust, she opened her door. “You can if you want. But I'm going to have a nightcap—sorry, an evening drink—and you’re welcome to join me. If you want.”

Loki hesitated, his eyes darting toward her and then back to the ground. Without waiting for his response, she edged toward her open door, intensely aware of his utterly confused presence orbiting just behind her. She flicked on the lights, as normal as normal could be, and made her way to the sparse liquor cabinet.

Selecting two tumbler glasses, she glanced up to see him hovering in her doorway, looking rattled, despondent... unsure.

With a slight smile, she tilted one of the empty glasses toward him. “Whiskey? I’m crap at scotch but I think it’s a decent bottle, if you’re willing to try it.”

Loki inched beyond the doorway as though he had never set foot in her quarters before, something blank and disoriented and heart-shatteringly innocent playing across his features. The expression—the haunted expression—made her throat constrict.

She poured them both a glass. “Bottom’s up, right?”

The Loki she knew—the ethereal, divine, vain persona she had come to care for—seemed for a moment to regain its footing. With a bit of an eyeroll, he sauntered over to her, all dark brows and narrowed eyes, and snatched the proffered glass from her hand.

“You mortals have the most ridiculous sayings,” he ridiculously said as he made his way to the couch and sat down with a regal flourish.

The itch of worry that had been scratching up her spine abated with his return to himself. “I suppose you toast to the Valkyries or something?”

Loki scoffed. “Hardly. A simple ‘skål’ would suffice.”

Alex amicably lifted her glass toward him as she walked to close the door he had left open. “Cheers, then.”

“Cheers,” he hesitantly agreed, then settled himself against the cushions.

She sat at the other end of the sofa. “What do you think about just music tonight?”

“Music?”

“Yeah, I mean...” she trailed off, then directed her general demeanor toward whatever nook or cranny in which Tony’s inscrutable AI resided. “JARVIS, can you play Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812 Overture?’”

The mechanical British voice indicated its agreement as those blue eyes once again regarded her with some emotion that she could not even begin to bring herself to comprehend.

Instead, she murmured to Loki without looking, “This is a celebration of overcoming an enemy. They seemed to be invincible, and yet the resistance held firm and won. It is jubilation at winning and despair over what’s already been lost and... and survival. Survival and hope.”

His eyes flickered again to her, and if he caught her meaning—which he probably did because he was, after all, Loki—he didn’t speak on it. But that was okay. He didn’t need to speak on it at all, and she wanted to show him as best as she could that trauma was both universal and nothing to be ashamed about.

After a few further moments of him staring at her with clearly mixed emotions, he finally unfocused on visual stimuli to concentrate instead on the auditory.

They were dead silent through the piece, apart from Alex’s shuddering, emotional breaths, and the nearly imperceptible gasp Loki unconsciously made when the cannons started firing. For the briefest moments over the refrain, their eyes met, and for an even briefer moment Alex was transported to Heimdall's Observatory, the spinning cogs and dancing lights and thunderous nebulae, Loki’s strange blue gaze upon her, their shared experience of existing.

She blinked away with tears in her eyes and shakingly took a sip of her whiskey.

As the song ended and the last drumbeats faded away, neither spoke. And when it was completely silent, Loki only lifted his gaze toward hers, caught her eyes, and gave the vaguest of smiles. She stared back at a complete loss of what it could mean, and yet it only felt right to return the gentle expression.

At her soft smile, Loki’s own widened, before he ducked his head out of her eyeline and took a heavy swig of liquor.

“I did not know mortals had it in them,” he finally, half-mockingly observed.

She snickered. “Don’t get used to it. That kind of genius only happens once in a generation.”

“And so then there is Shakespeare, this Tchaikovsky fellow, and you.”

She nearly spat out her drink, a sharp laugh on her lips. “I think you mean Tony.”

“I know what I meant, as it is what I said.”

With a tightness threatening her stomach, terrified he was belittling her and yet not sensing it was so, she murmured, “I am not a genius.”

His addicting, penetrating look bored into her for a moment before glancing away. “You are certainly once in a generation, if not even more rare.”

Sniffing slightly, she dipped her head to him in deference. “I guess that’s true.” He vaguely nodded his agreement before she turned her gaze fully to him.

“No, wait. That’s true for everyone. Nobody else in this universe exists who is quite like me—not anymore, I guess—but then there’s obviously nobody else who exists who is quite like you. You are once in a lifetime. Once in a universe.”

Something shattered across his features, briefly, intensely, and her eyes shot to her half-full drink, suddenly recognizing how much she had imbibed and, more than that, how much she had said. And yet, as a faintly disoriented, faintly innocent tint reclaimed his features, she realized she did not want to take her words back.

And so she let the somewhat weird, somewhat revealing confession hang there as she steadily took another sip of her drink. “JARVIS,” she called to the ether. “Play Mozart’s ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’.” She looked at Loki and winked. “Another genius comes out to play.”

They listened to classical compositions for the next hour, Loki increasingly astounded—and, of course, personally annoyed—to discover the range and complexity of mortal music. By the time they concluded with Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries,’ he was in a fit.

“This,” he cried, nearly a bottle of scotch in by that point and perhaps starting to feel tipsy. “Your kind has this, and yet all day I am subjected to the screeching inanity of Stark’s ‘rock’ music?”

“Yeah, I mean, they both serve their purposes.”

“Yes,” he drawled with an exaggerated frown as he dumped the remainder of the whiskey bottle into his glass. “The purpose of art, and the purpose of imitating the crass shrieking of a mindless animal in heat.”

They were sitting close together on the couch, and Alex had finished her own single drink ages ago. Without fully thinking through the motion, she slipped the refilled glass from his hand, took a sip, and returned it to him.

“Uh, ’Bohemian Rhapsody’ is art,” she countered after swallowing the liquid.

He blinked at the drink clutched in his fingers for a moment, as if weighing whether he would tolerate her presumptuous action or not, then turned back to her with eyes rolling to heaven. “I shall not hear that argument again.”

“Yeah, because you know I’m right.”

“No, because I shall not waste precious breath quarreling over such a preposterous thesis.”

"Right, your preposterous thesis that all rock music is bad. I’m glad that we agree that you’re wrong.”

He eyed her, humor pulling at his eyes as well as something... darker. “You purposefully misstate my words.”

“Maybe it's just that your silver tongue is turning to lead.”

Another flicker of... something. “You would do well to watch your words, little mortal,” he quietly warned, the humor still softening his face but his voice low and dangerous and heated.

A little thrill, tempered slightly by the whiskey she’d consumed, tickled down her spine and into the space between her thighs.

“Or what?”

“Oh, darling,” Loki softly breathed, his blue eyes locked on hers and the edge to the words flicking against her cunt. "The things I would do to you.”

She was wet in an instant. His dark gaze devoured her for one second, two, perhaps a million, her heart hammering in her ears and her body tense, before the prey part of her mind finally sensed the warning in his predatorial scrutiny and fumbled around for a way to ease back from the precipice.

And yet, she was still tipsy, and her mind and lips weren’t entirely synced.

“Maybe another time."

Loki’s head shifted ever so slightly, as though her response had caught him off guard. He held her captivated in his stare for another moment, then nodded and sat back, taking a sip of whiskey and breaking the spell.

“Go on, then,” he said lightly, though his careful eyes no longer met hers. “Play your ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as I know you are eager to do.”

She smiled, though her heart continued to pound, and a moment later she felt flushed as her somewhat-inebriated mannerisms caught up with the situation at hand. A tight swallow pressed down her throat, steadying her, before she called out the next song to JARVIS.

The next day was Saturday, so with Tony’s permission (more of a formality at that point, really), Alex and Loki headed to Bryant Park.

There was pop-up farmer’s market filling the green space, and she watched Loki with a smile as he questioned vendors on their products, soaking up all the knowledge they could give him. Although it was still just September, the air had turned with a chill, and Alex bought them both a cup of hot chocolate while they people-watched from the sidelines.

“There is so much life here,” Loki commented with genuine inflection to the word.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s always a busy park, but in the winter they turn it into a Christmas market and that space in the middle becomes an ice-skating rink, and it’s just… joyous. Little kids everywhere and people buying gifts, and friends hanging out with mulled wine. It’s really magical.”

He glanced at her with a small, kind smile. “You rarely speak with such enthusiasm,” he gently teased.

“It’s the best time of the year,” she shrugged with a smile of her own. “I don’t own a monopoly on enthusiasm for it, trust me.”

“Oh, I do.”

She blinked and turned to him, but he offered her nothing more, only continuing to scan the crowds with that same gentle smile.

Next was, obviously, the highlight of the day and probably the closest she had seen to pure, unbridled joy on Loki’s face – a stop into the New York Public Library.

He disappeared into the stacks so quickly it was like an animated cartoon, spinning feet and a puff of dust and then he was gone. Alex left him to it, wandering around at her leisure and window shopping at the gift store.

When he found her again two hours later, he appeared sated, though she eyed his empty hands with suspicion.

“Nothing you want to borrow?”

Inscrutably blank eyes returned her gaze. “Nothing at all.”

She sighed, knowing she had tricked herself with that one—of course he hadn’t wished to “borrow” but he surely had wished to “steal”—and led him back to Stark Tower for the evening.

Alex woke up the next morning with an achiness that defied description. Everything hurt: her back, her muscles, her head, the space behind her eyes. Eventually she fell back asleep, a restless, tortured sleep that somehow left her even more exhausted.

She and Loki had originally planned for another excursion into the city, but instead she collapse in a miserable pile on her couch and stared blankly at the television screen for a few hours, until she withdrew once again to her bed.

Around four pm, Loki knocked. Hauling herself to her feet—a struggle in itself—she made her way to the door and permitted his entrance. She had already prepared him for her sickly state over JARVIS, and yet he still appeared surprised at her condition.

“Sit down at once,” was all he could manage.

She rolled her eyes but complied, returning to the couch, her knees drawn to her chest and her head resting against the back cushion. A shuddering breath exhaled as she closed her eyes.

“What would you care to eat?” Loki’s muted voice dully forced its way beyond her throbbing body and into her brain.

“Soup.”

“What soup in particular?”

It took her a moment to find the strength to respond. “Just soup.”

He possibly tutted at her response, but she was in no position to hear it if so. The couch shifted slightly, and she blearily opened her eyes to see him sitting beside her. “I’ll infect you,” she protested, and he responded with a withering glare.

“Do you care for the television?”

“That’s fine.” She weakly nodded toward the remote and again closed her eyes.

Seconds later—at least, it felt like seconds later—Loki was gently nudging her awake. “You need to eat,” he commanded as she blinked in confusion. “Come to the dining area.”

Somehow, the food delivery had already arrived, and Loki had transferred their meals out of the disposable packaging he so loathed and into her dining ware. A small bowl of steaming, creamy liquid had already been ladled out for her.

She could smell the Thai spices and her stomach was at least interested, if not actually hungry. With a murmured thanks she slid into her seat and began to sip the deliciously spicy and tart Tom Kha.

She nearly sighed with gratitude. The soup was divine—just what she needed—and she was touched to see he had remembered to order hers with tofu rather than chicken. In her aching, muddled head, a warm feeling of being cared for tingled over the pain. Wordlessly she swallowed down the delicious contents, not sure she trusted herself to speak in her near delirious state.

Loki—looking regal as ever even as he perched on a narrow barstool beside her—just as quietly devoured his entree, some cashew-chicken stir-fry that he appeared pleased with.

“Do you find it acceptable?”

“Yeah, it’s exactly what I wanted. Thank you.”

He gave a short nod, and certainly her mind was playing tricks on her because if he wasn’t him, she would’ve sworn her mild praise had tinted his cheeks.

Perfect though it was, she could only finish half the bowl before her aching body refused to stay upright any longer. She waited until Loki, at least, had finished, then pressed her head restlessly against her palm. “I need to lay down.”

“Of course.” In a split second he was on his feet, gathering up their dirty dishes.

She half-waved, half-shrugged at him. “No, it’s okay. I’ll clean it up tomorrow.”

Those blue eyes fixated another withering glare upon her. “You certainly will not. Retire to your room at once and I shall see myself out.”

“It’s okay-”

“Now, mortal,” he interrupted in his most authoritative tone, and—lord help her—it did make her sit up and take notice as something awoke deep between her thighs. “I shall not say it again.”

The part of her brain that normally would’ve taken umbrage at being ordered around was too exhausted (it certainly couldn’t be too aroused) to argue, and so she shakily rose from the barstool. Catching his eyes and hoping he heard the true gratitude in her voice, she said, “Thank you, Loki.”

“Yes, yes,” he dismissively responded, even as his expression relaxed into one of fondness and he waved her toward her room. “Sleep well, little darling.”

It was still dark out when Alexandra awoke with a raspy, wheezing breath, her back and lungs aching with the struggle to breathe. She started to rise from her bed, not entirely sure where she was going, and just as quickly collapsed into a heap on the carpet below.

It was cold. So very cold. Her teeth chattered and her muscles clenched as she coughed and hacked and gasped for air, all the while pulling herself toward the bathroom. With struggling hands, she yanked off her clothing—it felt damp, but she could hardly focus—and then crawled into the shower and turned the heated water on full blast.

She continued to cough, continued to contort, but the humidity eased the strain in her lungs as the heated pressure began to relax the muscles along her spine. Curling into a ball beneath the stream, one arm over her head to give herself some room to breathe, she listened to the pounding of the water and the rattle of mucus in her chest until her eyes closed.

“Alexandra!”

Her eyes blinked open beneath her arm, a sudden light burning her retinas. She stuttered in confusion, her lips moving soundlessly against the sheen of water on which she lay.

“Are you injured?”

The voice, male and accented, seemed unusually frantic.

Alex groggily lifted her arm, wheezed against the puddle of water that was suddenly not a puddle at all, but the dry porcelain of her shower floor. There was a slight electrical shudder along her skin as it magically dried and her bareness was covered by soft pajamas.

“What?” her phlegm-disguised voice rasped out as disorientation flooded through her.

In a flash she was sitting up with a warm blanket wrapped around her, Loki crouched down and holding her steady with anxious, darting eyes that seemed to search every inch of her head on a continuous loop.

“Did you fall? Jump again?”

Her head rested against the tile wall as her eyes again drifted closed. Christ, her back hurt. “No,” she whispered, even that movement ripping at her insides. “I’m just so cold...”

Loki didn’t speak again as he helped her to her feet and inched her exhausted body back down the hallway and to her bed. As she gratefully collapsed against the mattress, Loki’s hand brushed against her forehead, then pulled back with a frown.

“You say you are chilled?”

She curled into a ball with a whimper, clasping the blanket—was it a fur blanket? how odd—as tightly as she could around her frail body. “Mmm hmm.”

He considered her for a moment, that frightful frown remaining on his face, then reached for her phone resting on the bedside table. “I shall speak with Banner.”

Alex was vaguely aware that he had left the room. After a few seconds, she heard his sharp, haughty voice laying waste to whomever had the unfortunate position of answering his call.

Coughing—hacking, really; a deep, thick, heave that reverberated through her lungs and out again—she gathered the strange fur-like blanket closer to her shuddering body and closed her eyes.

“Alexandra.”

Impossible to tell how long it had been. Her bleary eyes opened and met the weirdly fervent blue gaze of a hovering Loki. “You must come with me.”

She groaned, her voice a pathetic scratch. “Why?” she pressed in a hazy, sleepy, sick tone.

“Banner has made arrangements with the building’s clinic. Come, now.”

Alex groaned again as Loki impatiently lifted the fur-thing off her body. Shakily she pulled herself into a sitting position, her chin ducking down against her neck. “I have to change.”

The words had not been independently formed, but apparently Loki understood her anyway. “There is no need for formalities. We are merely to visit level 60.”

Feeling halfway between fainting and crying, Alex wearily stumbled to her feet. “Whatever,” she breathlessly agreed, the word turning into a hacking gasp.

He gave her a moment to recover; then, with arm firmly settled into the slot at her waist and pulling her to him in a manner that was both highly unusual and highly... distracting... he directed her out of her apartment, to the elevator, and finally to the strange half-clinic, half-hospital, all-opulent medical facility operating out of Stark’s 60th floor.

A dark-haired woman with a short bob greeted them at the entrance desk. Alex leaned onto Loki’s shoulder and closed her burning eyes, not thinking until much, much later that she should have been the one to direct the conversation. Instead, it was up to the dark prince to say whatever he said before they were shown into a typical bare-walled patient’s room.

Alex stumbled away from Loki and more-or-less collapsed onto the medical recliner taking up the majority of the room’s footage. Paper rustled beneath her cheek as her head nestled into the padding and her eyes closed.

She didn’t know what he was doing, but she could hear Loki quietly moving around the space, the tiniest chink of metal as he lifted glass containers to inspect their contents, the near-invisible pad of his feet against the multi-purpose floor tiling.

It was only a few seconds—or perhaps hours, as she had clearly nodded off in the interim—before a swift knock broke the silence and the door creaked open.

Alex cracked open an eye from her huddled position and saw a man enter. Blearily, wordlessly, she watched as the faceless doctor took her vitals, probed her body, did whatever it was that doctors did to determine illness. When he asked about her family history, she only shrugged until he grew visibly frustrated with her non-answers and Loki’s (Luke’s) blank looks of support.

Then the grim news came that she had not only the flu but likely bronchitis as well, and she was sent away with multiple pharmaceuticals containing the notation that Dr. Banner had requested reduced doses—again, neither Loki nor Alex responded to the doctor’s clear, suspicious reaction to the bizarre request.

Back in her room minutes later, Alex sunk into the blankets as Loki’s clever eyes scanned each of the medications with a ponderous frown between his eyes.

He nudged her awake sometime later. “You are meant to ‘take’ this with food.”

She blearily pulled herself against the pillows, and Loki placed a thick pill on the bedside table before handing her a warm mug. “It is the broth of last night's soup. I presume that will be enough to overcome whatever ramification an unfed stomach might induce?”

Alex nodded as her nostrils took in the sharp scent of lime, garlic, and onion. “It’s perfect.”

After she had sipped enough to his liking, he handed her the pill with a glass of water. She dutifully swallowed both, and as her aching eyes gazed up at him, he seemed to shift uncomfortably, his eyes darting toward the pillow beside her. “I trust you are well enough for now?”

She continued to stare up at him, that tickling feeling of being cared for darting over her scalp and down her spine. “Yeah. Thank you, Loki.”

Those fretful blue eyes slid to hers, then immediately focused away, as though he were uncomfortable by the intimacy. With a short, swift nod, he gathered up the remnants of her meal. “If you need me again, I shall be in the other room.”

She whispered another note of thanks, but he didn’t acknowledge it, too concentrated on removing the cup and pill bottle from her vicinity. In a flash he was gone, the door closed, but after a few moments she could hear the murmur of her television set.

Again, her heart swelled with received affection, and then she mightily coughed, inhaled another drag of cool water, and fell asleep.

Chapter Text

October rolled around, bringing with it crisp air, pumpkin spice, and, most importantly, Halloween.

Introducing Loki to the historic origins of the holiday hadn’t been too difficult as it turned out the Norsemen of old had celebrated something similar called Vetrnætr, a harvest festival held at roughly the same point in the year. And the Norse sometimes wore masks in other celebrations, so that, too, was explainable.

However, Loki was positively flummoxed by the modern interpretation of the holiday.

“You mean to say,” he started with a frown as he reclined on Alexandra’s sofa. “That the children of this realm spread out like locusts to devour sweets far and wide, and the adults simply grovel before them, lest they be subjected to a mild act of mischief?”

“Yeah,” she confirmed with a little laugh. “I mean, in America, anyway, not the whole planet. Oh, and adults also dress up sometimes, but that can be a bit more... skankified.”

The glass of whiskey in his hand—the spirit itself stolen from Tony by Alex after Loki had learned the concept of ‘daring’—paused in mid-air. “I beg your pardon?"

“I mean adults dress up to go to parties and bars, not trick-or-treating like the kids. And they dress far more suggestively than the little ones. Some of them, anyway.”

When Loki only continued to look horrified, she laughed again. “You’re not into this? It seems right up your alley.”

“It most certainly is not.”

“Come on! Shapeshifting, mischief, sex on display... How are you not into this?”

“Do you truly think so little of me?” he huffed as her amusement swelled. “Where is the finesse? The skill? The art?”

“Oh, of freaking course. You don’t like people horning in on your territory.”

Petulance oozed from his very bones. “They could at the very least attempt some spontaneity! Tell me, what is the point of mischief if it is agreed upon by all before it occurs? No, no. This holiday of yours is a disgrace.”

“Okay, but here’s an idea: what if Luke dressed up as Loki?”

That time, he rolled his eyes. “Really, Alexandra, I have come to expect better of you.”

She ignored him. “It’d be in pretty fucking poor taste considering you attacked this city like a few months ago, and you seriously might get punched in the face, but one," she held up a finger for illustration. “You would be playing by their rules but also secretly subverting them, because your costume would be your real self, and only a few people would know.” She held up another finger. “And two, and probably more importantly for your purposes, it would drive Tony nuts.”

Loki’s eyes sparkled as a faint smile tugged at his lips. “Now that, my dear, is far more like it.”

“So does that mean you’ll go to the Halloween parade?”

He heaved a dramatic sigh. “If I must.”

“Oh hush. You’re excited now, and you know it.”

Smirking for a moment, his smile suddenly faded, and when she looked at him with concern, he gave a slightly self-conscious shrug. “Merely considering the ramifications of such a costume.”

“Yeah,” she softly agreed. “Someone really could get violently upset.”

His face suddenly seemed paler, his expression tight and brittle. “They would have every right to,” he admitted in a low voice, the words dripping with unexpected self-loathing. “And I would deserve it.”

Alex paused. He had never spoken about the attack before, and she was shocked that it was happening so suddenly. “We all make choices we regret,” she replied after a moment of contemplation. “And most of us aren’t being tort- aren't under severe pressure when we make those choices.”

“Even so, the anger driving my actions was my own.”

“Your anger was misdirected at Earth, that’s for sure. But the anger came from a very understandable place initially.”

He gave her an anguished grimace. “You are far too lenient. I’m a monster. I attempted to enslave your realm. I killed your kind. I killed another you.”

“I know," she said with a tight swallow, her own obituary flashing in her mind for the first time in weeks, a burst of nausea returning with it. “I’m not sugar-coating things, Loki. You did horrible things. Your actions were despicable. But so was what Thanos did to you."

His back went ramrod straight, his entire being frozen in place. "Do not say his name.” The whisper was so low she hardly caught it.

“Okay,” she gently responded. “I won’t.”

They were both silent for several seconds.

“Perhaps another costume, then,” Loki finally murmured.

“Okay.”

“A pity,” he continued in a stronger voice. “I would have liked to have seen Anthony’s face.”

She smiled. “I mean, you still can. Project whatever image you want at him.”

That made Loki grin, wiping the earlier distress from his features. “Perhaps your night of supposed mischief will bear fruit after all.” He took a deep sip of his drink. “Though I do not have high hopes.”

“Wow,” she giggled. “Tone down that enthusiasm.”

He finished off the whiskey. “My enthusiasm might expand when you share with me what you intend to wear.”

She noted his empty glass and got up to fetch the bottle—Midleton Very Rare 2002 Irish Whiskey, which she had been horrified to discover after her theft ran in the $2000-range.

“Haven’t thought about it yet.”

Loki took the bottle upon her return and placed it on the side table closest to him as though he feared Alex would absorb alcohol just by looking at it. “How have you costumed in the past?”

“Depends on the year. Sometimes I go all out and other times I just slap on a black dress and call myself a witch.”

“Ah, but are you ‘skankified’?”

She let out a sharp laugh. “Your brain only has one setting, doesn’t it?”

His eyes raised from the glass he was pouring to look at her, his blue gaze dark, his black hair drifting over his cheeks, his pale skin so finely chiseled that he could be on display in the Louvre.

“With you, my dear,” he started in his rumbling baritone. “It is difficult to think of anything else.”

With a snort, she turned her focus to the television and its showing of the original Psycho. “Maybe I’ll go as Ed Gein,” she mused as she watched Marion Crane pull into the parking lot of the Bates Motel.

“Is that a reference of which I should be aware?”

“He was this crazy killer who was trying to make himself a lady suit out of human body parts. Like he had an entire belt made out of dead women’s nipples, and a corset that was basically just a skinned woman’s chest.”

Loki blanched. “Why in the Nine do you know such ghastly things?”

“You should be used to the insanity of my brain by now,” she said with a shrug. “And also, when you talk about the horrible things you’ve done, know that that is my standard for what a monster is. Ed Gein, and H.H. Holmes, and Josef Mengele, and all the other fucking psychopaths who torture and rape and murder purely for pleasure. You’re not even on the scale.”

He considered her words with a frown as they both lapsed into silence, while on screen Marion Crane prepared to take a shower.

Alex put the finishing touches on her makeup and slid on a champagne pull-through faux fur shawl, looking herself over in the mirror. She had convinced Loki to go for the 1920s look for Halloween—and as he had no concept of ‘couple’s costumes’ he would be blissfully unaware of any perceived connotations—and she had selected with her obscene, Tony-induced wealth an item from the Gucci Spring 2012 collection, a flapper-inspired, architectural black-and-gold fringe dress.

It took more than an hour and several online tutorials, but she had managed to bring her long mane of auburn hair into a fingerwave updo that instantly elevated her attire from dress to costume. A final brush of deep red lipstick and gold t-strap pumps completed the ensemble, and then she was out the door.

Loki must have heard her movement, for his own door opened a moment later, and he stepped into the hallway.

Oh, holy hell, yes.

He had gone the gangster route and...

Fuck.

Where to even start.

Her eyes rapidly took in the orgasm-inducing image presented before her, from the white penny collar shirt buttoned snug against his lickable throat, to the dark grey checkered suit that lengthened and broadened his already impressive form, to the light grey waistcoat giving his abdomen the embrace she longed to, to the long, lapelled black overcoat that seemed to wrap around him like a cape, to his slicked-back dark hair that only further enhanced the sharpness of his jawline.

She was pretty sure she didn’t stroke out for a moment, but when his twinkling blue eyes caught hers and that Cheshire Cat smile bloomed across his face, she couldn’t be entirely sure.

“As usual, Alexandra,” his velvety voice wrapped around her, his gaze roving over her completely ordinary form. “You are a delight to the eyes.”

“Uh huh," she breezed by the undeserved compliment. “I see you’ve been busy doing research on the internet.”

“Indeed. And what a peculiar place it is. Nearly every entry one makes invariably leads to libidinous material.”

Something about the knowledge that Loki had likely been scoping out porn was highly distracting, and all she could manage was, “Internet rule 34.”

He cocked his head at her as they walked toward the elevator. “I was not aware there were any rules in that virtual realm of vice.”

His overcoat brushed against her thigh and sent a little jolt through her system. “It’s like a scientific law, and it’s facetious. Means that if it exists, there’s porn of it.”

Loki hummed—another distraction—and hit the elevator button. “If it exists, such as a creature?”

“Such as anything. Even the idea of something means it exists. So like, mermaids aren’t real, but there’s definitely mermaid porn. Or, you know, elevators exist. Someone has surely made porn involving an elevator shaft.”

“I see.” As the doors dinged open and they stepped into the car, Loki raised an amused eyebrow at her. “You and I exist.”

A flush tightened her skin. “Keep that porno in your own mind, buddy.”

"You are not at all curious about how it might play out?”

“Nope.”

He flashed another wicked grin. “You are a pitiful liar, my dear.”

The city had been paralyzed by Superstorm Sandy only days earlier, and every neighborhood seemed positively itching to get into the Halloween spirit after days of torrential, flood-inducing rain. Alex had initially planned on taking Loki to the Village Halloween Parade, but as soon as that churning tropical storm had received its moniker and triggered her memory, she had both warned Tony to protect the city as much as possible and bidden farewell to any chance of a normal Halloween.

Instead, with occasional streets still darkened due to power outages and the subway not fully back to normal capacity, she opted to bring Loki back to the little green island that had become his favorite haunt: Bryant Park.

Midtown had gotten off fairly light from the ravages of the storm, and everyone in the area seemingly had the same instinct to congregate in front of the library.

In the dim light and among wind-stripped trees, New Yorkers descended into a kind of controlled madness, a pressure valve suddenly bursting after even more days of terror and destruction. Music pumped in from somewhere, a heavy bass, as battery-powered disco lights flicked over the faces of zombies and princesses and Star Wars characters, and they chatted and drank and raved and screamed and gave themselves over to a moment of unity after a long, pain-filled year.

Loki stayed close by Alexandra’s side as they meandered through the spontaneous dance parties and costume parades materializing over the park grounds. A flash of green caught Alex’s eye, and she couldn’t help but shriek with delight as a middle-aged blonde woman drifted past them clad in the latest of Hulk couture. She turned to Loki with glee, saw him puzzle-faced and baffled, and then burst into laughter.

Loki composed himself and cast her an annoyed look from his regal pose. “Perhaps the hue was correct, but she hardly accounted for the smell.”

Still giggling, she led him to the park café, which had turned into an outdoor pub for the evening. Loki snagged a table—or rather, he hovered near one with a silent, creepy air of menace until the current occupants grew too uncomfortable and vacated—while Alex went to the bar, the demigod still too flustered by the dual concepts of ‘running a tab’ and ‘paying’ to handle such matters on his own.

As she waited in line, another bright green Hulk—that time, costume donned by a kid that in no way was old enough for alcohol—pushed past her with two plastic beer cups in hand. Giggling to herself, she looked about for any other Avengers costumes.

A hand wrapped gently around her upper arm, and she turned to Loki with delight. “I-“

The word dropped off a cliff as she found herself facing Steve Rogers.

The Steve Rogers.

“Oh,” she stammered, heart racing, as his handsome face smiled down at her from beneath a NY Mets hat. “Hi.”

“Hi. Sorry, didn’t mean to…” He looked a little bashful as he released her arm and held up both his empty palms in supplication. “Alexandra, right?”

She hesitated, her eyes instinctively searching to find Loki through the crowd. “Um. Yeah.”

“I’m Steve.”

“I know.”

His face flushed in light embarrassment as he shook out another smile. “Yeah.” He glanced around the crowd, then met her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m… it’s Halloween,” she lamely offered in return as her gaze again darted toward Loki, still obscured by the queue behind her.

“Yeah, but…” He trailed off and leaned a little closer, offering her wafts of his aftershave along with his meaningful stare. “What are you doing here?”

For a moment, she froze in place, at an absolute loss for a response. Then, finally, “Tony took me in.”

“Weren’t you with Thor?”

Her eyes widened at his casual dropping of the name before she realized, given the holiday, nobody who overheard it would be suspicious. “I was but… I came back, and Tony gave me a place to stay.”

“Ah.” His expression relaxed, and once again he appeared bashful as his head gestured toward the wider scene. “Is it always like this?”

They inched forward toward the bar—she was hyperaware of Steve hovering beside her, hyperaware of Loki likely glaring in the distance—as she looked around, too, her eyes catching yet another Hulk cosplayer through the throngs of grinding bodies and drunken laughter. “No," she distractedly returned. "But I think people need a release.”

He made a commiserating sound as they took another step forward. “I guess it’s been tough on everyone.”

“Yeah, Sandy was awful. I tried to tell Tony-”

Steve cut her off with a frown. “I meant the attack.”

“Oh,” she softly murmured as her stomach clenched. “Right.”

There were several awkward moments of silence. “Hey, did it happen on your Earth?”

She frowned. “The attack?”

“Sandy.”

“Oh. Yeah. I told Tony when I remembered and I guess he did something to avoid the worst of it here, but even he can’t control Mother Nature.”

Steve smirked. “I’m sure he would disagree with that.”

“Undoubtedly,” she returned with her own smile.

They reached the bar in amicable silence, but when Steve heard her order two drinks, he blinked in surprise. “You that thirsty?” he probed in a laughing tease.

When she hesitated, heart suddenly racing, he responded with an uncomfortable tilt of his head. “Hey, sorry, I was just-”

“It’s fine,” she interrupted as she tried to slow down her speeding pulse. “I’m here with... a friend. From Tony’s building.”

“Ah.” He gave an embarrassed smile. They each paid, and as she scooped up Loki’s beer and her gin and tonic, Steve met her eyes. “Maybe I’ll see you around again sometime.”

She flushed a little at that. “Yeah, maybe.”

He didn’t look away for a few seconds, then smiled again before disappearing into the crowd.

Alex stood still for another moment, a drink in both hands, brain short-circuiting over the abbreviated interaction. When she finally collected herself, she returned to Loki, who was waiting for her with a narrowed gaze.

“What?” she defensively questioned as she placed their drinks on the table and tried to keep any whiff of her interaction with Steve off her face.

He took a beat, considering her in that knowing, annoying way that he had, before his expression wiped clean. “There was a rather scruffy fellow garbed in attire I can only assume was meant to replicate that of Thor’s.” He paused, sipped his beer, and gave a slight smile. “It was most unflattering.”

She grinned in return. “Sorry I missed that. Have you seen the other Hulks?”

“Yes,” he grumbled, face dropping slightly. “They appear to be multiplying at a rapid rate.”

From somewhere on the lawn, the opening bars of Thriller blared out. Then, spontaneously all around them, an impromptu flash mob of dancers began the choreographed moves, more joining in—or simply dancing their own way—the longer and the louder the song went on.

Loki’s eyes were wide when they met hers. “What in the Norns is happening? Have they become possessed?”

Alex just grinned in delight and sucked down her drink as the lawn came alive with movement. Thriller rolled into Superstition, and while the choreography died down, the dancing did not. They continued to crowd watch in silence, Alex stealing glances at Loki and swallowing down smiles as she saw him take in each new costume, or song, or performance with equal amounts of bewilderment and appreciation.

Every now and then, they would react to the same costume—usually one with an elaborate design that impressed even Loki, but occasionally one with a far more sexual edge that would lead to him teasing her about the wearer's 'hotness' level. One such costume was a... the best way to describe it was 300 meets Captain America, and it might have been her developing tipsiness, but she swore Loki noted her reaction to that costume far more carefully than he had the others.

When she noticed his beer was low, she jumped from her stool onto legs that slightly wobbled. “Another round?” she half questioned, half demanded in a yell to be heard over the swelling music, before hurrying back to the bar.

Thankfully, she hadn't run into Steve again, and she returned to Loki with another beer for him and another G&T for herself. While he accepted his own plastic cup with gratitude, he eyed her fresh drink with blatant skepticism. He murmured something to her, lost to the pounding bass.

“What?”

He gestured meaningfully at the cup she had at her lips. “Is that wise?”

“Oh come on,” she sulked back, flushing from both his words and the alcohol already streaming through her body. “I’m having fun!”

"As am I."

The words were said with an unspoken air of judgement, and she shot him a glare. "The drinks aren't even that strong."

He sighed but made no further comment, and Alex ignored him in favor of returning to crowd watching. A flash caught her eye and her heart stuttered before her brain recognized the shape, followed even more slowly by her brain processing the loud boos that were emerging from the same direction.

Loki heard the sound, too, and turned back to face the disturbance before she could stop him.

A dark-haired man moved through the taunting crowd.

Dressed as Loki.

They both mutely watched as the fellow revelers hurled abuse at the man, and he kept his head held high and his face impassive. Some people were laughing as they screamed at him, but others had far darker emotions on their faces. The cosplayer ignored it all as he got into the queue at the bar, his friends dressed as Chitauri falling into line behind him.

Alex’s sight darted to Loki. His eyes were widened in shock, his face unusually pale, as he watched New Yorkers take their anger with him out on the one dressed as him. He said nothing, his lips a tight line, his hand clenching his beer so tightly the plastic was warping and the beer inside was sloshing to the rim.

But after the costumed Loki’s initial appearance, the boos and taunts died down, and the scene lost its potentially violent edge. The real Loki began to relax in response, the sudden hunch of his shoulders evaporating. He looked at her with something of a question on his face.

She shrugged in return. “It’s Halloween.”

He blinked at that, then took a sip of beer, his grip eased. “Indeed.”

They continued to point out revelers, including the abundance of Hulk costumes which, after the tenth one, even Loki had to admit was starting to become funny. It was too loud to speak, so instead they shared their delight with smiles and gestures to the crowd as they each consumed their second drink.

An hour later, Loki stated that it was time to go home. Alex’s vision was beginning to grow a bit loopy, and while she didn’t exactly protest the declaration, she looked up at him from her slouched position with puppy-dog eyes.

He stoically returned the look. “You are quite intoxicated.”

“No,” she countered as she begrudgingly slid from the stool and immediately stumbled in her heels, Loki’s hand finding her waist with lightning speed to help keep her upright. “I had a gin and tonic... And a gin and tonic. Two! Two drinks. That’s like... That’s only two drinks!”

Loki half-laughed, half-huffed beside her. “Yes, my inebriated darling, and you know your delicate constitution cannot handle more than one.”

“That's such bullshit,” she moaned in a slur of syllables as they walked to the edge of the park. “This realm sucks.”

Loki pulled Alex close to his side as a group of five men dressed as characters from The Walking Dead drunkenly careened toward them. “It certainly has its drawbacks,” he concurred as his eyes stayed steady on the whooping, beer-spilling group until they had passed. “Though your current grievance is not particularly high up that list.”

“It’s high up for me,” she muttered as she slouched further into his embrace. He felt so comfy and warm and oh god all she wanted to do was sleep. “Get a taxi.”

“Why?”

“I wanna go home.”

“Yes, I am directing us there now.”

She groaned. “No more walking. Get a taxi.”

They paused at the corner of 5th and 42nd, and Loki watched the cars go by as Alex burrowed her nose into his overcoat.

“All of the taxis are engaged,” he reported after several seconds.

“Then do the whooshy thing.”

“Pardon?”

With a bit of effort, she righted herself and made a haphazard swirling motion with her finger. “The whooshy thing.”

He stared blankly at her. “What is the ‘whooshy’ thing?”

She burst out laughing. “Say ‘whooshy’ again.”

He sighed. “No.”

“Loki," she whined, her fingers clasped on the lapels of his suit jacket, her half-focused gaze staring pleadingly up at him. “Say it.”

He looked down at her with lips pursed in annoyance even as amusement remained in his eyes. “You are an absolute menace when drink-drowned.”

“I’m a goddamn delight,” she countered, and he laughed despite himself. She giggled for a moment, then rested her forehead on his chest. “I need to go to bed.”

“Indeed, you do, but I am afraid we must continue walking.”

“The thing, though,” she moaned against his shirt. “Whoosh, and we’re there. Can’t you just magic us home?”

“Is that what you meant? Teleportation?” She nodded against his chest, and he hesitated. “I do not think it wise.”

“Why?”

“It is a bit like stepping between dimensions, especially at so great a distance. Dimensions that could be inhabited by other beings.”

“Oh.” She struggled to process his meaning as she pulled back to look up at him. “But can’t you, like... green glitter us into oblivion?”

He gently brushed the hair from her face, and she couldn’t help but lean into the touch. “If it were only me, yes, it would be no problem at all. I could slip in and out without anyone ever noticing. Not so with you.”

“I’ll be quiet.”

“That is because you are likely to soon be comatose,” he retorted with a slight smile. “And it is your very being that would call attention, not your actions. You are not of this world, not of any world. There are those who would notice you despite any attempts at concealment I might make. And I would not risk that.”

She gave a heavy sigh. “This whole reality sucks.”

Loki gave a commiserating huff of air as he moved her once again to his side. “You will feel differently after a good night’s rest, my sotted little mortal,” he promised. “Come now, it’s only two more blocks.”

They made it home without issue, and soon Loki was carefully guiding Alex down the hallway of their floor.

As they passed Bruce’s room, his door suddenly cracked open as though he had been waiting for them. “Hey guys,” he said as he stuck his head into the corridor. “Everything go okay?”

“Brucey!” Alex drunkenly called as she broke away from Loki to greet the new addition. “You should’ve come. There were so many Hulks!”

Bruce watched her sway toward him, then glanced up at Loki with a frown. “Really?”

With a sigh, Loki came behind Alex to gently grasp her hips and hold her steady. “I am afraid dear Alexandra overindulged.”

Her head fell back against his chest, and she looked at him upside-down. “There was a Loki, too,” she giggled. “A little Loki lookalike.”

Bruce ignored her, still frowning at Loki. "And you let her?”

“Let?” Loki repeated with a surprised bark. “As if any god or man has dominion over this reckless creature.”

With gaze still upended, she shook her head at Loki. “Nope. I am no bird, and no net ensnares me.”

He met her look with an amused smile before quoting back, “Headstrong liberty is lashed with woe.”

She scrunched her nose up in distaste. “Mine was better.”

“Mine was more accurate.”

When she only continued to give a displeased look, Loki huffed a laugh. “And now it is time for bed.”

She sighed, collapsing further into his arms. “Yeah,” she agreed, her eyes falling closed. “Night, Bruce.”

As Loki started to direct Alex back down the hallway, Bruce took a hesitant step toward them. “Uh,” he stammered, clearly unsure of how to proceed.

Loki’s head whipped back to level the smaller man with a look of disbelief. “I am not joining her in bed, you deviant,” he spat with evident offense even as his arms tightened around Alex. “Is that what you think, that I aim to molest a paralytic woman in my care?”

“Well… You did try to start a war...”

Loki glowered as Alex’s eyelids sleepily bobbed up and down. “It's fine, Brucey,” she slurred. “Good instincts, love those instincts, but it’s fine. Loki’s fine.” She reached up and behind her to pat Loki’s shoulder before her hand tiredly slid down to his chest. “Sleep’s fine. Water and sleep.”

The two men seemed to resolve their standoff without speaking. Loki helped Alex into her apartment, and she dropped her shawl carelessly in her bee-line to the bedroom. She sat on the bed and collapsed toward the pillows with a muffled groan, struggling to kick off her shoes.

Loki watched from the doorway. “I will fetch you that water.”

Her face was buried in a pillow. “Thanks.”

A moment later he returned and handed her the glass to chug down what she could. As he helped her pull at the opposite side of the duvet, covering her like a burrito, he said with a smirk, “Thank you for a very illuminating evening, Alexandra. This will not be an All Hallow’s Eve that I soon forget.”

“Whatever,” she mumbled as she shifted into a comfortable position on her side, the dress’ fringe catching beneath her. “I had fun with you, and you better not be mean to me about this tomorrow.”

He delicately swiped the hair from her forehead and tucked it behind her ear, his thumb tracing over the lobe so faintly she hardly felt it. “I will not be mean,” he softly promised. “Goodnight, Alexandra.”

With that, he turned off the bedside lamp and left her room, quietly closing the door behind him.