Chapter one
The shattering of glass broke through the hazy shroud of sleep, obliterated the pristine silence, and rang out infinitely in the charged air of tension that followed. Loki kept his eyes shut, not flinching in the slightest at having been woken. He felt the glaring anger directed towards him with every particle of his being, but he only raised his eyebrows a small fraction and kept his vision dark. His hands remained folded over his abdomen, his fingers no tighter wound than before.
"Two years!" Miranda shouted, her voice the essence of devastation, raw and hoarse with tears. "Two years I've put up with your bullshit."
Loki waited, eyes still closed as he lay quietly on the couch. The ragged, angered breathing of Miranda filled his ears until another cup was thrown against the wall, shattering just as loudly as the one before it. This time, it held less of an impact on Loki as he was now awake and exposed to the sounds around him.
"Look at me, you asshole! Do you even care at all?" Miranda cried. "Loki, if you don't open your eyes right now, I will walk out that door and never come back!"
A long minute passed, and then the slamming of the front door echoed through the once again quiet house. Now Loki did open his eyes, breathing out a deep sigh and rolling softly off the couch onto his feet. He glanced over at the shattered cups then around the small room. Pictures of him and Miranda littered the walls. None of them really meant anything to him; no sentimental value was assigned to any particular photo or depiction of himself and Miranda.
He picked the closet one, a small silver-framed photograph of them in Honolulu, up off of the glass coffee table and ran a slender finger over the surface, wiping off a thin layer of dust. In the picture, Miranda was smiling, her full lips stretching over her teeth so far that it looked painful. Her arms were thrown around Loki, and she stood on the tips of her red-painted toes. Loki himself had a faint smile on his pale lips, just wide enough for it to not seem like he was having a terrible time. His green eyes conveyed nothing but sun-irritation, squinted in the bright glare that lit up his angular face.
He set the photo down gently, knowing he should feel something, but all he could muster was the ever-present feeling of boredom. Honestly, he was bored with everything, which wasn't Miranda's fault. It wasn't Miranda's fault that she was too slow-minded to captivate his attention for longer than a few seconds. It wasn't Miranda's fault that she was caught up in the same mundane things as the rest of the population. The same mundane things that drove Loki insane with boredom.
Sighing, Loki peeped out the window at the for-sale sign stuck in his perfectly tailored front lawn. Just a few more days and he'd been leaving this nightmare of a cookie-cutter house. He'd be going back to London after having been absent for two years. He had planned to leave Miranda behind anyways; the only bad thing about her being gone now was that he'd have to get rid of all this junk on his own.
He walked away from the window, the silence of the house wrapping around him like a blanket. Normally, Miranda's gossiping would fill the rooms and cloud his head with useless information that took him entire hours to delete from his memory. Making his way into the kitchen, he noticed a stack of un-opened letters on the table. He knew without checking that they were all from his brother, months' worth of failed attempts at correspondence. The rest had been thrown in the garbage long ago.
Grabbing a trash bag from under the sink, Loki set about to clearing the walls of the photos, happy to finally take them down.