A/N: File under: left field. This is not Trigun or Swath or even a canonically accepted pairing. WTF, inkydoo? I blame Tumblr GIFs.

Ask Me No Questions

Their first meeting had been quick. And strange. Darcy loved the big guy, but Thor struck her as kind of a well-intentioned idiot sometimes. He had popped in at the lab, unannounced, to tell Jane he had kept his promise. She was overjoyed and didn't much pay attention to the man Thor had brought with him.

Darcy noticed.

The guy had a Hannibal Lecter muzzle on and he had his hands cuffed together. That was weird, but the most disturbing part was the look in his eyes. She couldn't see his smile, but just judging by the wrinkles around his eyes, he had a big one plastered on his face.

The combination of the expression, the handcuffs, and the muzzle left her more annerved than she would like to admit, but then he saw her watching him and she froze. He looked her up and down and had no qualms about her knowing he was doing it. She wanted to say something, to turn and walk away, but she felt rooted to the spot.

A moment later, Thor turned and bid the two of them adieu. He kissed Jane and winked at Darcy, and a moment later, he and the other man were gone. She and Jane sighed at the exact same time, but for completely different reasons. Jane was smitten. Darcy was relieved.

A week later, Darcy realized she had a stalker.

She tried to tell herself she was being paranoid, that she had locked all the doors and windows to her apartment, that nobody could get in without her knowing, but things were weird. Somedays, the lock to her apartment would stick in a weird way when she tried to open the door. Some mornings she would wake up to find that her silverware had been rearranged. She always kept the forks on the left side, but sometimes the knives would be there instead. Sometimes things that she knew she left out would be put away. Sometimes things that she knew she had put away would be out again.

It was starting to drive her crazy. Literally.

After three weeks of bizarre occurrences, she started spending more time out in the field in the trailer with Jane. She felt safer with someone else around. The trailer was cramped, but it was better than being freaked out by herself and sleeping with a baseball bat. When she would go into town for supplies, though, she would sometimes see a dark haired man walking behind her. She wondered if he could possibly be the one who was messing with her shit all the time.

One day, while she was at the grocery store, she saw him there. She had had enough. She was in a public place and felt safe in confronting him. She walked right up to him and jabbed a finger into his chest, fully meaning to say something along the lines of, "Who the hell are you and why are you following me, asshole?"

However, when their eyes met, she realized she had already seen him. It was the man who was with Thor. He had "mischievous" written all over his face. She didn't even have to wonder who he was.

And thus began the serious mind-fuck that was Darcy's relationship with Loki.

She knew he was trouble. So why didn't she tell anybody that he could travel through dimensions, seemingly at will, without detection, even as he was supposed to be under lock and key in Asgard? There were several really bad reasons. The biggest was that she was a sucker for bad boys with dark and mysterious pasts, and this guy definitely fit the bill. He was also attractive and assertive as hell, a combination that made her weak in the knees. And he searched her out. Her. The intern. Nobody ever looks for the intern.

Things were hot and heavy for a few weeks. Then she realized dealing with Loki was like taking an unwanted vacation of indeterminable length to Opposite Land...except when it wasn't...and determining when he was lying and when he was truthful was practically a full-time job. It was exhausting. It was hurtful. He would say things to her to get a rise out of her, then act like nothing happened. He would ask her about herself, and once she started talking, feeling like they were connecting, he would disappear. He would literally fucking disappear. In the middle of a conversation. He wasn't nice. He wasn't sweet.

But he kept coming back to her.

She learned quickly that expecting anything from him was the fastest way to be ignored for days. He wasn't her anything: not a friend, not a boyfriend, not a lover, not anything. He came to her at his choosing. She had no right to ask anything of him because he didn't owe her anything.

She could tell him to leave and he would. He did make it clear, though, that if she did, he might never come back. Oh principle, of course. The man had standards to maintain, after all...

She sank into confusion, and then depression. People noticed she wasn't herself, but the weird thing about sarcasm was that she could say exactly what was going on in a deadpan snark and people would think she was joking. Even her closest friends didn't realize she wasn't trying to be clever. Now, she felt lonely when she was with him and lonelier when she was with her friends. It was like nobody even paid attention to what she was saying. At work, a sample conversation might go like this:

Coworker: "So, how was your weekend?"

Darcy: "You know how it is... Spent all of Saturday waiting for my magical non-boyfriend to show up out of thin air. Put the moves on him, and not five minutes after we're done, he disappears. Like, literally. POOF! I get that some guys aren't cuddlers, but this is ridiculous."

Coworker: "Oh Darcy, you come up with the weirdest stuff!"

She would sigh as they walked off laughing at her "joke." It was getting weirder and weirder dealing with this shit.

He popped in one day out of nowhere after she had gotten home from work. She had just eaten and was about to get ready to go to bed. The air in the apartment felt charged and then he was suddenly standing in front of her.

"Hey," she said, a smirk on her face. She usually put on a good front, and after all, she did like it when he was around...most of the time.

He turned his mournful eyes to her. Sometimes he looked so sad, and this was one of those times. He sat down next to her on the couch and put his arm around her shoulder, pulling her close so that he could press kisses along her neck.

She breathed out a quiet moan. "Getting right down to business, huh?" She waited for him to say something, but after a while she realized he wasn't in the mood to talk. She shrugged. "That's cool, I guess." Her tone of voice betrayed her emotions, though, and he stopped.

When he stopped, he sighed in a frustrated manner. "What would you like me to do instead?" he asked temperamentally.

It was her turn to sigh, but hers was one of fatigue. She stood up from the couch. "When you put it that way, I guess...nothing." She went into the kitchen area of the apartment and cleaned up a bit from dinner, pointedly ignoring him. When she looked back to the couch, she was surprised that he was still there.

"Nothing better to do, huh?" she asked conversationally.

He shrugged. "More like 'no one.'" He wasn't looking at her.

"God, you're such a dick sometimes."

"I can leave if you want."

"Do whatever the fuck you feel like."

Neither of them moved. Eventually he held his hand out to her and she took it. He pulled her back onto the couch so that she was sitting next to him again. She leaned against his shoulder and breathed in his scent. She sighed.

"You know," she started, "you don't have to rub it in that I'm not special. I get that. Females make up over half the population on earth and liberal arts majors are a dime a dozen."

"Is that so?" he mused. He drew circles on her arms with his fingertips.

"Yeah, it's so. And this planet has so many people on it that even if someone says, 'Hey Darcy, you're one in a million,' that still means there are 7,000 people just like me."

He hummed in what sounded like a thoughtful manner, but he could have just been waiting for her to shut up.

She sat up and looked at him. "Why do you come here?" she finally asked.

He looked at her, his gaze intense, but unreadable. "What do you want me to say?" he asked.

She looked down and chuckled humorlessly. He kept touching her skin gently, though, and he was there, after all. When he wasn't sitting in a holding cell, he was spending time with her, so that had to mean something, right?

"Nothing," she whispered as she finally leaned in and kissed him. He pulled her toward him as he sank back on the couch and neither of them said another word all night.

Author's note: Hello everyone. First off, I would like to assure you that I think the relationship presented in this fic is completely messed up, but I am drawn to this pairing for some reason, even if I can't make it a happy situation in my head.

There might be other one-shots for this pairing, but maybe not. Just had to get this out.