Now with awesome cover art generously provided by "junosophia"...

Surreptitious Entry

Chapter One: Lying Low

Loki came to the door, glancing around to make sure no one else had entered the corridor; he was alone.

He slipped his hand behind the painted wooden "welcome" sign hanging on the door – letters in white springing from an explosion of pansies in shades of purple and pink and yellow – and found what he was looking for. A little pocket of some softer material, and inside it, a key.

Another glance, though he knew he hadn't heard anyone enter. Still alone.

He inserted the key in its slot, turned it, heard the click, turned the doorknob, stepped inside.

His body shimmered in green and gold until he looked himself again, in one of the comfortable leather and green cloth ensembles he'd commonly worn in Asgard, though absent any of the symbolic markings of the royal family.

The interior was relatively tidy – he'd seen worse – just a few books and papers atop the sparse furniture of the small living room, a cup of half-drunk tea on a low table in front of the sofa whose woven brown fabric had worn through in a few places. A desk that was as wide as the sofa stood against the other wall; Loki didn't know what it was made of, but it clearly wasn't made of the wood it appeared to be, since the "wood" was peeling off of it. A laptop sat closed on the otherwise bare surface of the desk, while pinned to the fabric-covered back of the desk, below a couple of shelves lined with more books, were numerous images of less-than-artistic quality, some of them familiar.

A relatively small flat-screen television and a DVD player sat on the top shelf of a waist-high scuffed bookcase painted pale blue.

He left the bag he'd been holding by the desk. There was no need to carry it around the apartment.

He ducked his head into the bathroom on the right. It was small, like everything else here, barely room to stand once the door was opened into it. Baskets hanging on the wall overflowed with cosmetics and nail polish and other things he had no interest in. He moved on.

At the back of the living room was a window, and on the left a kitchen that barely qualified for the name; Loki had spent enough time on Midgard by now to know what a typical American kitchen looked like. This one had a refrigerator sized for the smallest race of Nidavellir dwarves – if they had small appetites – and a stovetop with just two burners. Dishes were stacked in a rack on the countertop and a few pots and pans hung from under the one cabinet on the wall. The "kitchen" was more of an alcove than a separate room, and opened directly to the back of the living room, where a small round table with more of that peeling false wood was set up with two matching chairs and two others that matched neither the table nor each other.

How do they live like this? he wondered. But he'd also spent enough time on Midgard to know that plenty of people lived with far less, and many of them somehow managed to still be happy.

Across from the kitchen alcove a door opened to the bedroom, the only other room in the apartment. The door was open; he entered.

Two narrow beds sat on opposite sides of the room, one of a pale wood that didn't appear to be peeling, the other with a simple metal structure. Mismatched dressers framed a window above a small table and stool on a third wall, and on the fourth was a closet, long but shallow, he could see from the open door. He stepped further in. The pale wood bed had deep green covers – he smiled at that – and above the headboard were black-and-white checkered painted wooden letters spelling out "Emily." The other bed was not similarly labeled, but a stack of mail on top of its pink covers was all addressed to a Selina Rylon. A small stuffed bear clothed in pink and white lace sat next to this bed's pillow.

He turned back to the bed with the green covers. Emily's bed. The headboard was not a simple thin piece of wood, but had a shallow shelf built into it like a small covered bookcase. The shelf and the top ledge were covered in various items. Loki sat on the bed to look at them more closely. A clock with glowing red numbers – 10:48. A figurine of a dancer perched on the toes of one foot. A box of tissues. A book with a piece of paper sticking out of it, marking the place – The Psychology of Torture. Loki grimaced. Another book beneath that one – A History of Conspiracy.

Is this what young Midgardian women read at night? he wondered in genuine confusion. He would have expected a romance, something to transport the reader away from studies and work and tiny apartments to a world of passion and fantasy far better than the insecurities and pain and rejection of real relationships. He frowned, realizing he might possibly be projecting his own experience. After all, Thor seemed happy with his mortal, the Iron Man had actually settled down with someone despite the previous average length of his romantic relationships being somewhere around four hours from what he'd gathered, and one of the agents inside SHIELD who reported to him told him she'd heard rumors that the soldier was involved with someone and even the green beast had fallen in love with a teacher who somehow loved him back despite what lived underneath his skin. She knew the truth about him, this woman who taught six-year-olds. Loki had asked.

For him there was no one. Not a woman who loved him, not a friend who truly liked him. He had associates. Those who sometimes worked with him, or he with them, for some particular goal. He wouldn't trust any of them enough to turn his back on them. He had a "brother" who regarded him warily, and with whom there was a tacit agreement that neither would try to harm the other (capture, of course, was not the same as harm), and that was the extent of it. He had two "fathers" both long gone, both in their own way. He had a "mother" who…

Loki swallowed thickly and began absently scanning the objects Emily had collected on top of her headboard bookcase.

He was tired, and not just from the travel required to get him up here to New York City's Brooklyn. For several years now he'd been spreading chaos across as many realms as he could manage, moving on when the opposition grew serious or when he simply grew bored. Midgard was without a doubt his favorite place for a little of what he called fun and the humans called various other things. There was something endlessly entertaining in toying with these short-lived fragile mortals who thought themselves on par with a god. Provoking Thor also never grew tiresome – each time he returned to torment Midgard, Thor felt obliged to help stop him as he still considered this realm under his protection. He was an absentee protector, though, for Thor had been forced to finally take the throne once Loki's secret victory had grown so dull that he'd begun sabotaging it himself. It had been sheer ecstasy at first, the extent of his power the greatest elixir he'd ever known, but it soon began to lose its appeal, for what fun was a victory such as that when no one knew you'd won it? In just over a year suspicions had reached the tipping point and Loki had been found out. He'd feigned anger and various other reactions that seemed more appropriate than the relief he really felt when he was finally able to stand in his own taller, trimmer, younger body. When he no longer had to see Odin's face every time he passed by a mirror.

Loki looked down at the two pillows at the head of the bed, to his left, covered in linens of a golden tan color. He lifted the top pillow to his face. It was soft. It smelled of pomegranate. He put the pillow back, then bent over and tugged his boots off, flexing his feet and wiggling his toes before he even quite realized he'd done it. He was tired though. He'd traveled by bus and then train and then subway and then walked. It would feel so good to put his feet up for a while. He swung his legs up onto the bed and straightened out, letting his head rest on the pillow. He breathed in deeply, drawing in the pleasant pomegranate scent.

He'd been lying low in St. Augustine, Florida, for a few months now. He liked it there, more or less, this town with its picturesque beaches and quaint little fort, this town that considered itself "historic." In this country, if not precisely the rest of Midgard, he supposed it was, but Loki had been around five hundred years old already when it was founded. It was a new experience for him, really, the concept of "lying low," at least as a grown man. Formally he'd learned it from his "associates," though instinctively he'd understood it even in his younger years, any time he'd run afoul of Odin.

He was gaining this new experience because, while it was amusing to constantly force Thor to leave Asgard to come protect Midgard from his wicked little Frost Giant brother, Thor of course found it considerably less amusing, and had recently begun to find it even less so. Three months ago Thor had let him know it in terms so clear it came close to violating their "understanding." As it turned out, Jane was pregnant with their first child, and was not pleased with Thor's absences, and had been letting him know it in no less certain terms. The mighty Thor, never conquered by sword or fist, now conquered by a tiny mortal woman at least a foot shorter than him. A tiny mortal woman in whose womb grew the next heir to Asgard's throne.

It had infuriated him. And stung him with a thousand needles. And he'd mocked Thor for a solid hour to mask it.

But then he'd lain low.

It hadn't been so bad. Everyone needed a break. He'd just needed to find other things to occupy his time while Jane incubated Thor's perfect little offspring.

And find them he had.

A smile spread across his face, and a hand ran up in between the two pillows as he turned on his side. It was still early. There was time to rest. When someone came to the door of the apartment, he'd hear it, and wake.

/

Dear readers who've read other stuff I've written on here...this is a wee bit different. It's meant to follow TDW (an unspecified number of years later, not too many), but let's just say I didn't spend weeks agonizing over all that. I had a dream, a couple of images really, and wrote a bunch of words to give it life. And hopefully someone else will have some fun with it now besides just me. I guess it could go either in the Thor fandom or the Avengers fandom; I chose Avengers this time just to be different. This isn't really meant to be a totally canon-compliant Loki, really...I'll reiterate - it's from a dream! ;-) And it was fun to do something different.

Comments welcome - I always respond to reviews if the option is there to do so.