Tunnel in the Woods
Person: classics_lover
Prompt: fic (either gen!friendship or pure smutty smutty smut) with the two of them exploring together, maybe a place neither one has visited or somewhere that one knows inside out and is showing the other all the cool places to hang out. Or else some cool badass!Darcy being all intelligent and snarky and winning Loki over to the idea that the Lady Darcy is as awesome as we know she is. Or whatever you're having yourself, I'm flexible.
( AU: Storybrooke universe. )
Summary: Loki is a writer and business man and ends up agreeing to go a place with Darcy Lewis, the intern to Jane Foster, which she feels that she needs to show him at all costs.
In the long walk of the woods, Loki Odinson could feel his temper rising at being outside like this. He was wearing a nice pair of slacks, with boots underneath, and a vest over his crisp white business shirt. He didn't know really why he had agreed to the woman in front of him, the one who was looking as if she was heading towards Fantasyland, instead of deeper into the woods so early in the morning. He had just been about finished with a morning tele-conference with his father and his business partners when the woman in front of him opened his patio door and walked herself right in, loudly at that, before finding him and waving at the people he was on the conference call with.
To say he hadn't seen Odin Borson, his father and CEO of the company, as perplexed as he had then didn't make him happy would be an understatement, as Loki couldn't help but take a screen shot of his adopted father's usually stoic face nearly slack-jawed at her appearance. If anything, Loki would think his father was more surprised at the idea that Loki even had a woman in his life as he had always been too driven in his father's inherited company to really appreciate having a someone in his life as a partner or to even appreciate having a secretary. He cringed inwardly at having fired the last seven within the last three months and his father's comments on his consistent firing.
"So...a CEO's son?" The woman looked over her shoulder at him, a raised eyebrow as she pushed a tree branch out of their path, intent on making sure his business outfit stayed free of any of the woodsy debris. Loki appraised her figure, despite the amount of cloth she was using to hide underneath. Her bright blue eyes seemed to brighten with each step she took. He moved his hand to her, taking the branch from her hold to his, a soft almost smile on his face at her sure steps and questions.
"Yes, Ms. Lewis. My adopted father is a CEO and Thor, the man who sent a football into Ms. Foster's face at terminal velocity, is the heir to the company." He sighed at the memory from two days before with his brother, Thor, a rather large and rambunctious man that was the polar opposite of him. Where Thor was sunshine and rainbows, Loki was the dark grey cloud and it had been an apt comparison as the two of them were as different as night to day.
The memory in particular dealt with how exactly he met Jane Foster and Darcy Lewis, both researchers, well, one was a researcher the other was an intern, at Storybrooke's local research center. They had both been eating at a picnic in the local park yards away from where Loki had stood with Thor trying to do a long-distance football pass. It was an attempt at brotherly bonding that had gone terribly wrong when Darcy had stood up, drawing Thor's attention just as he threw the football in his hand to Loki, who had tried to catch it when it whizzing through his hands, brushed the top of Darcy's bent over head and hit the plaid wearing brunette sitting down on the ground, right in the middle of her rather pretty face.
The inadvertent hospital trip had turned into a scene from the Love Boat, where Thor smiled easily and profusely to Jane with all of his manners, that seemed as if Thor hadn't ever been much of a rough housing beast when he was a child. Loki nearly gagged at the charm his brother was laying upon Jane Foster, not understanding how Jane's brown eyes and pretty face, despite her ill-gotten football injury, seemed more than just that. Darcy, who sat in the back seat with him, was trying her best to lighten the mood until they got to the hospital where her sarcasm and sass showed. Loki, who had helped picked up their picnic belongings, along Thor's and his own things, had left as soon as she was admitted, leaving a black mole-skin leather bound notebook behind that he noted later resembled his own. Loki spent a rather large portion of that trip watching Darcy and her many witty remarks fall upon deaf ears and ill humors. He had spent most of his life dreaming of her if it could be believable, but as with all things, when he and Thor left the hospital that evening, he thought her to be out of his life.
He doubted he and his brother would ever run into the two women again, but oh, he was very wrong.
"How does that work out for you? I imagine you would have more business sense. You dress business." She took a moment to lean over precariously, taking a sniff of something in the air around him before backing away with a large grin to her lips. In surprise, the business man was perplexed, leaning away from her for a moment before she turned her back to him to continue walking. "You even smell like you're made out of money. Literally, I bet that suit you're wearing would pay my student loans."
"My adopted father prefers Thor's honest, bumbling foolish approach to business. He says it is freshness in business that he has not seen in a long while." He grinned despite her statement. He doubted he smelled like money, though he did prefer dressing in a rather prim and proper style. His mother had marveled at his fastidious dress style since he was a boy, which garnered a sense of pride in him since he was young and had helped him to prefer dressing himself in such a fashion.
"And what about you?" He paused in their walking to look at Darcy Lewis with her wavy brown hair and bright blue eyes looking back at him. Her voice seemed to convey concern but Loki was wary of it and surprised at her words. Everyone cared little about his actual wellbeing compared to his not-adopted brother, something he had kept to himself for years, though the man knew his brother was not truly to blame for it. Thor was a golden retriever and he was a cat, who liked little about anyone really as they tended to prefer his brother over him.
"What about me?" He made sure to keep his tone measured and tried his best to not sound defensive about the subject. Darcy did not deserve his potential ire at being reminded that his brother was going to be heir to a company he barely knew how to run. In fact, for once in his strange life, Loki felt rather ambivalent with whether or not she knew the truth. He knew she was not the type of person to run her mouth off at the slightest hint of gossip, simply from the hospital visit where a gaggle of nurses had decided to ogle his brother and him. With bewilderment to himself, Loki felt as if he could trust her with the truth of his situation more so than even Thor, but he supposed it was because she seemed to recognize the fact that he was not alright with the way his life was being written.
"Are you okay with that? I mean, I'm the youngest out of four sisters, so I know all about getting the hand-me-downs and all of that, but what do you do then?" Loki blinked. At every turn, the woman in front of him was astonishing him with either her insight or thinking of him in such a manner that he was not truly used to. He could ask himself if it was really a surprise that he was suddenly brought out from Thor's shadow, by a woman no less that had met his brother. Then again, Darcy was a rather hard person to pin down so far that he had learned of her quite contrary nature.
"When Thor inherits, I will be his advisor, but while he and I wait for the company to come to us, I tend to write." He wanted to tell her what he wrote about exactly, though it was rare for anyone within his family's acquaintances to care enough to really ask about. He was prolific and his words were, according to a few newspapers, sinful to read to men and women. He tended to keep quiet about it though. Thor and his father had never picked up a book of his, but his mother collected each one, putting them on a special shelf near her bed.
"What do you write about? Hold this, really fast." He opened his mouth to reply that he wrote about her, a past her that dazzled him since he was a small child and her adventures that he remembered in glimpses, but the words were cut off when she held out a semi-heavy log that needed to be held back from a tree that looked as if it belonged in California amongst the great Sycamore forest with a hill in its backside. He hadn't even noticed that their pathway had taken them on a sloping path next to a large hill. He automatically took the long and heavy branch without realizing it for a few moments, watching her hands seem to search for something on a large ring of keys that were straight out of the books of the Victorian age with faded gold plating on iron and an aged bronzed skull on them. His eyes took in where she was putting the key, jiggling them with a turn before trying another.
"Why am I holding this?" He wondered why her hands were holding a set of keys before he spoke. They were in front of a large wall of foliage that now that he looked at it seemed as if it could have been built to protect something on its other side. The writer almost wanted to ask where she picked the keys up but he doubted she would answer truthfully about it
"There we go!" She stood up with a wide smile to her face, arms outstretched as what seemed to be part of a tree trunk that they had stopped at, in front of the wall of foliage opened up with one of the keys she held, however, it opened into a low crawl space of some sort that angled upward. He grunted at the opening. They would have to get dirty as the ground floor was damp. Did the tree open up into the large hill behind it? Why couldn't they have just circled around? "That's why."
"I will have you know that I do not just get on my hands and knees for just anyone, Miss Lewis." He peered at her, scrunching his face up in slight annoyance as she made no indication to go in front of him as any other woman would have. In fact, she seemed to be waiting for him to enter first. His frown only seemed to increase the wide grin upon her all too wide lips.
"Don't worry. At the end, when I've rescued you gallantly from the ever-teeming groupies, you'll beg me to keep you with me for forever and a day past that." Her palm hit his back lightly, patting him with a laugh that made his spine tingle. He remembered her laughter in his dreams, but there was really no compare to her real laughter and even the quirky smile she gave him in both of his worlds.
"I doubt that." Even though inconvenienced by the idea of getting down on his hands and knees to crawl uphill in a muddy and dark tunnel, his lips slipped upwards in a crooked smile, unable to help himself. Her touch on his back had been warm, despite the morning frosty air around them and the possible coldness of the tunnel that awaited him. Loki was certain she was trying to thaw out the starch coldness that his life mainly consisted of when it came down the facts.
"Hurry up, Frostylips." He was broken out of his musings upon how somewhat bleak his life was, despite the effervescent persistence of Thor constantly in Storybrooke with him. His green eyes stared at her words. Who came up with a name like that for someone? Truly? He inwardly frowned as he thought of the monikers that he had garnered with Thor at his side. Thinking it over to himself, Frostylips was not as bad some of the nicknames he had earned from his brother.
"Frostylips? Where did you come up with that?" Darcy laughed at the face he was making, a slightly twinge at the corner of his lips, trying its best not to turn down at her made up name for the man. She could tell he was trying his best to keep his smirk up around her, if anything so that she wouldn't feel awful. Loki was like some sort of curious cat, following her through these woods despite the fact that she had proved she was definitely not the most reliable nor righteous person in all of Storybrooke.
"Don't blame me for having awesome lips. Whoever your family was, they had great attributes to give your face, but you do have a bit of a disdaining attitude you know. Bit frosty, if you get my meaning, at least you were to me yesterday." He sighed, albeit almost dramatically, but Loki had mastered the art of theatrical performance and with her secretive smirk on her pink lips that she wasn't taking his sigh as anything truly serious. They both vividly remembered yesterday, something that he had kept away from Thor's nosiness.
"The sheriff was pulling you out of my house for breaking and entering." He could remember waking up from the sleeping pill he had imbibed, drowsy and uncertain about what was happening around his home. There had been the sound of a loud bang and the breaking of plaster that had woken him from his medicated slumber. Forgetting that he had most certainly fallen asleep in just a towel, that had fallen away from his hips to the floor when he stood up, Loki had wandered down the stairs to a sight, that he was sure could only be comical at the least and full of felonies and misdemeanors at the most, possibly an arrest too.
"Well, no one answered the door and it opened." Darcy pouted behind him, though both knew that was highly untrue. The door, which was old hand-crafted wood with designs of the Norse tree of Yggdrasil that had been crafted by his father with silver inlay along the wood and silver clasps for the hinges, was bolted, heavy to move, and had an electronic alarm on the inside of the house, to which he had been surprised that Darcy had been able to open it and he hadn't awoken to that.
"Is that why my door alarm was hacked?" He supposed, as he kept moving through the long upward tunnel, that she had quickly disabled his door alarm with her cell phone, which she kept in a place that made him blush, seeing the occasional times during their long walk where she pulled it out from her shirt underneath the over-sized dirt brown sweater she wore. He remembered that she had been showing Thor how to play Angry Birds to keep him from nearly smothering Jane in apologies.
"I was doing you a favor. That thing was really annoying." He sensed her tongue sticking out at him as she replied readily to his question. She seemed to have a ready response available for anything he might say, but then again he tended to as well. Her remark about his alarm was fairly spot on as well.
Thor had been able to get the alarm company to allow him to make a personal alarm that consisted of, "DEAR BROTHER YOU ARE BEING BROKEN INTO AND SHOULD CALL THE POLICE," to which Thor's loudest booming voice deafened any being within the vicinity. It had its uses when someone who was unaware of his alarm entered, scaring the bejeezus out of them. Though for Loki, when he had tried to replace it after the first two times he forgot to put his password in, the alarm company had believed it was Thor who was Loki and Thor wouldn't give them the confirmation to switch it out.
"Perhaps, but I will have you know that I had all reason to be disdainful of you at two in the morning, being woken by Sheriff Swan shooting a hole in my wall." He snorted at the rest of the memory of the early morning from yesterday. The sight that had greeted him was a knocked out Sheriff Emma Swan, convulsing with a bruise forming on her forehead from where her head had ended up hitting his wolf head banister that his grandfather had carved in the two story house for his grandmother, with the shocked and wide-eyed gaping brunette from behind him, wearing brown boots, tights, a leather 1940's airman jacket, and a mini-skirt.
The convulsing woman was at Darcy's feet with two prongs that connected to the black taser in Darcy's outstretched shaking hands, before she yelped as she looked up at the drowsy Loki Odinson in his glorious birthday suit, standing at the top of the stairs. She had grabbed the prongs almost immediately, stumbling away from Sheriff Swan before the writer on the top stair called out to her and pointed at Ms. Swan and then the couch in the room next to the stairs. Before he came down, to which a completely red-faced Darcy who had been staring at him the entire while of pulling the prongs out, stuttered about his nakedness. Red-faced, the younger Odinson had quickly left to grab a pair of pants.
"That was because I tasered her by accident." From both of their memories, when he had returned and they had placed the blonde inert woman on the couch, his words were sharp to Darcy Lewis, harsh in his regard for her breaking and entering and hurting the sheriff, to which she was o only doing her job. Despite Darcy's confrontational words, and his angered voice, they had decided to tell Ms. Swan, if she didn't truly remember what had happened due to the shock and the bruise on her forehead, that Ms. Swan had slipped and hit her head against his banister while investigating his open door and his neighbor's nosiness with her gun discharging by accident. There would be no mention of Darcy' late night visit, nor the fact that she had tasered the woman into a banister.
"What was so important that you had to break into my house?" Darcy had been relieved when Loki had let her go with a promise to repay him heartedly, though she went through his patio door instead of the front wooden door she had squeezed through earlier before all the commotion had happened with ever-serious Miss Swan. The sheriff had woken up on his couch with a stern Loki looking at her on his comfy loveseat. Thankfully, the blonde sheriff hadn't remembered what happened before she blacked out and had taken him up on a ride to the hospital.
"You grabbed the wrong book and I had work at four in the morning with Jane. Jane would have killed me because I lost her book." He turned to look over his shoulder at her in disbelief. From the little bit of light in the tunnel at the opening up ahead of head of him, he could see her bottom lip being bitten as she returned his wide light jade gaze. His mouth hung open for a few long moments.
"All of that was over a book?" The woman had a rosy hue to her cheeks as he stared at her, for a few moments longer. The disbelief tingeing his voice as she glanced away from his gaze upon her ashamed cheeks. Traitorous things. She nodded behind him before indignation took hold. Loki, in his thoughts, knew her now to be the craziest thing he had ever met and he had Thor Odinson, the blonde noble behemoth as a brother.
"Yeah...Hey! Don't look at me like that! You don't know how important that book is for Jane. She would have a complete mental breakdown. Do you want that on your conscience?" Loki only rolled his eyes in reply, before returning his view the opening at the end of the dark and muddy tunnel. He could only grumble at the idea of paying for Jane Foster's mental health care if indeed the so-called book he apparently had, that Darcy must have stolen away would cause such a thing. He almost didn't doubt it though. Jane, when he had a chance to examine her mannerisms on their trip to the hospital, was tightly wound into whatever it was that was in the black notebook he had picked up.
'Oh.' His mind supplied what book Darcy must have been talking about. He had picked up an identical black mole-skin leather notebook that was similar as the one that he had picked up a month earlier for his next novel he was writing when he had helped pack up the picnic and take it with them in Thor's car. Both leather bound books were similar on the outside, to his remembrance. There were no bookmarks and even though Loki was an accomplished intellectual, he felt rather like a large idiot for the mix-up.
"You owe me a new suit." The dark-haired man grumbled, unable to come up with anything that would not make him apologize otherwise.
"When you get out of this tunnel and out there, you'll be buying me dinner and hooker boots. "The brunette smirked behind him, moving a hand from the ground and patting his rear since she couldn't touch his back. He stiffened for a moment at the feel of her hand before it settled back in the damp ground behind him again. Blushing, despite his insistence to Thor the day before that there was nothing between the girl and him, Loki took a moment to imagine the short beauty behind him, standing tall in a set of leather clad boots that went to her knees, in a skirt of some sort before shaking his head to look back at her.
"Hooker boots?" Incredulity colored his tone with her.
"I got my eyes on a pretty set from Amazon. They're real nice stilettos, not that I have anywhere to wear them but they're pretty and would look awesome on me."Darcy nodded, laughing lightly at his scrunched up face. It was as if the idea of her in a pair of boots that would look ideal on a woman on the street corner of the night time escort persuasion was hideous with the way his face was tightened up. He stared at her for a moment longer, the blush on his cheeks increasing, saved thankfully by the darkness of the tunnel, hidden by the light he was facing.
"I doubt we will be ever at the point of having dinner and hooker boots." He knew he was lying to her at that moment. The inward drop of his stomach was different from the times he had lied to his adoptive father and Thor. He noted it was guilt at having lied. He frowned to himself, happier that Darcy's view was not of his lying visage.
"Don't scoff at me. I'm amazing, dude. Hooker boots are first base." It took a few moments for Darcy to reply and the writer knew it was because what he had said probably injured whatever chances he had with her, though her flippant attitude and flirting was perhaps her way of issuing a challenge to him that she would beat him at his own game and amaze him with more than just her unconventional ways of breaking and entering, and causing general mayhem. With a grunt, at the end of the tunnel where they were going, Loki took a breath and exited from the tunnel to gaze open mouthed at the area around him.
"Miss Lewis...This..." It was the place he had dreamed of since he was a small child and could remember his dreams. The benched log was the same, with a tiny bridge that was able to sit two over a small stream. The trees thinned out and the grass, though wild was not over grown. He could see exactly where she would sit, smiling and laughing at his stories. The stream even had the glinting moonstones in it from his dreams. In them, she would take the moonstones she could find and skip them down the stream. In some, she would sit on the wooden plank bridge singing a song for him with a low alto voice that trembled with his name. He was gaping. How did Darcy Lewis know about this place?
"It's amazing, isn't it?" Darcy was dusting off her mud-splattered jeans, frowning at the dirt before thoroughly dusting off her hair with a hand to make sure she wasn't too dirty. Loki swallowed, glancing back at her with wide jade eyes as if he had seen a ghost. The brunette tilted her head to the side, smiling up at him reassuringly.
"How do you know about this place?" His voice was soft, unsure as he moved forward to touch the large fallen over log that was a bench for the other girl. Her blue eyes were watching his long fingers trace the bark on the log as if mesmerized with the inconsistencies of the hard cover. She deliberately moved to the bridge over the stream, keeping her eyes on him before she spoke.
"I found it a bit ago, during one of Jane's many camping trips and was forced to go get lost. The keys were lying on the ground near it. Took them and heard the door calling me. I know silly right? When do doors call people? But it was there and it kept saying my name until I opened it, you know. It's my secret place. I've taken a few camping trips away from Jane to here. She sometimes gets on my nerves, but that's what being roomies do at times." He nodded numbly. It was technically impossible that a door would call to anyone. To anyone else, they might have labeled her crazy for such but Loki understood. He had tried to explain his dreams to his brother, but Thor only frowned as a child and told him to stop being silly and to throw the ball so they could play some more.
"So what do you write about, Elementary Brown?" His eyes blinked at her for a moment, noting the shift in their conversation. His footsteps took him over to her on the bridge, where she decided to plop down and look at the rocks in the stream, many of the white moon stones glittering from behind the larger ones. He leaned down over her for a moment.
"I write fantasy novels. This place...I write about this place the most. The Bifrost series and the SHIELD series are my most famous works." He sighed, steeling himself for the obligatory fan girl squeals he was used to when he told people what he wrote for a living until his brother took over the company from their father. He glanced down at Darcy, who bent her head backwards to look up into his eyes, blue meeting light green with a wide, awestruck look that he couldn't help but inwardly groan at.
"Wait a minute...Oh god! You're that guy!" Loki Odinson felt his body tense up at the mention of being recognized. He had hoped that she didn't come with the conclusion that he was nothing more than a trophy for her to grab. He already disliked the fact that Thor was favored more when it came to the business but he was annoyed at the idea that a woman he may like -for he was not certainly going to fall in love with her, at least he was going to try not to, maybe...- would only be with him because of his novels.
"That guy?" He sat beside her, feet over the edge of the bridge with his concerned eyes looking over at her. Darcy gaped for a few moments before answering.
"The sexy writing author! Loki Odinson! Oh god! That makes Thor, Thor Odinson and your dad must be the owner of Asgard Beauty Corp.!" 'Ah. There it was.' his mind readily supplied him as he felt the good part of the morning begin to slip away. Here he had been hoping, perhaps the tiniest bit, that Darcy Lewis was interested in him for more than his name.
"I see you read my works?" His query was met with a wide smirk, and mirthful blue eyes that made his pulse jump unexpectantly. The brunette leaned forward into his personal space for the second time that morning. Mischief exuded from her foxlike eyes before she opened that pink mouth of hers.
"No. I just thought you enjoy that reaction out of people. I thought it might feed your ego since I did have you on your knees in the mud with me to this amazing place. So dinner and hooker boots and then do I get all your novels for free or what?" She smiled as innocently as she could at him, waiting for him to respond to her teasing and ego-stroking. Loki stared for a few moments, processing her playful words before something truly unexpected happened that he almost couldn't believe himself truly capable of.
"You surprise me at every turn, Miss Lewis." He leaned against her, lips brushing tentatively for a few moments. Taser-toting Darcy Lewis stilled for only a second before her lips returned his chaste kiss, dancing against his with a fire that he didn't think possible. He reached up to the side of her cheeks, tips brushing her temple to pull her further into the warm, flickering kiss. Darcy's fingers reached to his other ones, intertwining vines of their skin together. The kiss lasted for many loud racing heartbeats. Lightning dancing between their lips before she broke away with wide blue eyes that resembled the morning sky that was awakening around their hillside cliff/glen.
"I hear I'm good at that." She took a moment to breathe, snark and sarcasm disappearing between her heated cheeks. Her wit coming moments later from its vacation as her forehead pressed lightly against Loki's cooler one. His black hair resting against his cheeks with dirt on it, as he took in her flushed and sensual face. Though it was a chaste kiss, Loki was celebrating to himself at being bolder than normal; taking something he hadn't thought to take from her.
"Now, about dinner...I will be meeting you at Granny's diner at 7 pm, sharp?" She nodded fervently, fingers holding onto his as if this was a lifeline she had just discovered. Loki noted her fingers were colder than his. He brought their hands together, not being disgusted at the uncleanliness for once, bringing the knuckles to his lips. He took his time, watching her swallow softly as he breathed over the knuckles of her hand with his warm breath, feeling the heat return to her digits slowly as he waited for her answer.
"7 pm sounds awesome. It's before my 8pm date with that hottie TV show and my Ben and Jerry's at home, but I'm willing to write you in for say...a night or more." Her replies made him laugh lightly, something he was beginning to enjoy little by little with each amount of dry wit given to him in return. Darcy could return as much wit as she was given. Their banter would certainly be an entertaining factor he quickly determined.
"I think you're being optimistic." He smiled at her, a wide smile that only made mirth dance in her eyes even more. He was proud of that feeling, a strong yearning in his heart to keep it there forevermore.
"It's a disease." Her laugh warmed him even more, as he kissed her knuckles gently with his soft lips. Her other hand came up to her face, trying her best to turn her head in giddiness away from his view, before turning her face back to him, a blue eye peeking out from her fingers.
"Let's first talk about hooker boots then we'll talk about penciling me in for more than your 7 pm."