"So Odin put you in a tree."
He nods, black hair falling forward to frame his thin face.
"A tree. Yes."
It's loud enough in the bistro that no-one thinks this is an odd topic of conversation. Lunchtime, in the centre of your city: right on the tourist highway, with the local monuments mere steps away and their much-photographed glory reflected backwards in the curving glass windows you're sitting beside. The day's weather is sunshine and showers. People flock by on the street outside, half in rainslickers, half more optimistically in light jackets. Amongst this crowd, you and your friend have passed unnoticed, unremarked. It's a blessing of the city, but more importantly, it's one of his gifts.
You're on a table barely big enough for the menus and the condiments, right in the very corner by the window where your back is pressed against the art-nouveau mural on the wall. The table tilts heroically when you lean forward to rest your elbows on it: Loki leans down to push a couple of coasters underneath the warped table legs. His own chair backs onto the main restaurant, with room for him to push back and get room under the table for his long legs.
"So what was that like?"
The look of him almost speaks for itself. He's always been pallid, but now he looks ill. His cheekbones could now not just cut glass, they could shred diamond.
He considers, twiddling the laminated menu card between his long fingers.
"Unfulfilling," he settles on, eventually.
"I was going to suggest "cramped"."
He smiles. His teeth look too big in his thin face, and he dips his head into his hands briefly as if finally weary, knuckles pressing into his eyesockets. In some ways you're surprised he came. He doesn't visit you often. Usually you take a few days, take that hippy-fantastic super-neon trip to Asgard and take in the sights of a world beyond worlds. But, you suppose, he's probably had a bellyful of Asgardian sights right now, at least any of the ones that involve trees.
The waitress comes over and you make the order for both of you. She doesn't notice that one of her customers is wearing jeans and a sweater and the other has a knee-length, green-faced leather tunic and a curved golden torc at his throat. She even brushes the chased-leather gauntlets on his wrists as she sets out the napkins and flatware, but she doesn't see them. Although admittedly, you can't help feeling this waitress isn't the most perceptive type. You've been coming here for years as half of a happy couple, and now you've suddenly started coming here alone, without a partner, she doesn't recognise you. That hurts, but you squash the pain. Today you're not alone. And today's about your friend Loki.
"Did it hurt?" you ask.
He looks up and his green eyes narrow. You've been friends a fair while, but sometimes he still has the power to scare you, just a little.
"Yes." He draws out the S into a slow hiss of exhalation. In that sound you can hear the uncounted hours of him hissing in frustration and cramp, trapped between sapwood and heartwood, the bark before his face, the sound of the living tree in his ears. When Loki's uncomfortable, he can make anyone within the sound of his voice feel that discomfort. His voice has a whack of power like a strong man can punch. "A little."
You're used to it. It's a good thing, sometimes. When he's happy, he can make you happier. When he's playing games, you want to play along.
"My pride, mostly," he clarifies, and the moment passes. The pain lifts from his voice. "Odin's little joke. One cannot talk one's way out of a tree. Trees have no sense of reality to be twisted and corrupted. They're very - shall we say - set in their ways."
He frowns, very briefly, at the menu lying across his hands. "What exactly did you order?"
You smile your own secret smile. He notices. Of course he does. And because he is who he is, he's intrigued rather than anything else.
"My, my," he says, looking at last more like himself than he did when he arrived and you picked him up this morning. "Secrets."
You look innocently over his shoulder, pretending he didn't say anything. "I brought you here for a reason."
He gestures languidly, folding one leather-clad leg over the other.
"Surely not the murals?"
"No."
This is your favourite bistro. Oh, the main meals are indifferent. The starters and side dishes are tasty but unremarkable. And all but one of the desserts are purely mediocre.
All but one.
It arrives warm on a colourfully (and tastelessly) painted plate with a pattern of hummingbirds. It has swirls of chocolate sauce dabbled around it and a perfectly spherical glob of vanilla ice-cream slowly melting into a puddle on top of it. Loki's manner changes as it arrives, and you read in the subtle alteration of his body language and expression just how hungry it must get inside of trees when you're dallying at Odin's displeasure. Sensory deprivation in sap. Preserved in living amber, with no way to scream. He definitely deserves this. It's why you brought him. Chocolate always makes everything better, and they just don't seem to have decent chocolate in Asgard.
He picks up his spoon and eyes you over the top of it.
"What is this."
"It's a brownie."
Personally you feel this is the biggest understatement possible since anyone suggested Thor was "a little bit muscly" and Odin "a little bit one-eyed." This is not a brownie. This is the brownie. The brownie of all brownies.
Loki is looking at it as if it might up and bite him. And well he might. As far as you're concerned, this is a brownie of power, just as much as his voice has power. It sure as hell has power over you. You can almost see the smell reaching out in warm tendrils to grab him firmly by the attention. Gods or Midgardians - this brownie is the great leveller, if he will but try it.
As he seems reluctant, you casually reach out with your own spoon and slice through the very corner of the thing. It barely resists, a faint crumbling as the baked crust gives way to butter-soft centre. It doesn't stick to the spoon. It's that professionally made.
You see the renewed scent of the cut treat strike Loki like a slap in the face. His eyes flicker, just for a moment.
Carelessly, you pop the tiny spoonful in your mouth and eat it, not letting your expression change. Ice cream dribbles into the gap, and Loki watches it like a hawk.
"You, ah, eat it?" you say, as if to a particularly dense toddler, and gesture him at it. He savages you with a scornful look and attacks the brownie with his spoon.
You wait. You are not disappointed.
Loki extends his tongue slowly, licks the spoonful of brownie with the very tip initially as if he's a food taster checking for poison. There's a dangerous moment where the atmosphere around you both is suffused with suspicion. Every clattering knife, every whisper of conversation, every clink of glass - they hold an air of subterfuge and danger that wasn't there before.
And then he puts the whole lot in his mouth, and the suspicion melts right along with that wicked dessert. The bistro seems to recede into a happy fug of background as you smile in satisfaction. Because you nailed it, and with it, nailed the god of mischief to the wall with chocolate.
Loki's expression flattens out around the spoon. The pain of the recent tree prison sinks into peace. His eyes, which had widened very slightly at first, close very slowly and stay that way for a long, hung moment. Just when you're starting to think he's almost fallen asleep, a tiny sound escapes him. You feel that you might recognise it. But of course, gods of Asgard don't whimper, so you're far too polite to mention it. You just smile and continue to watch him.
He eats another spoonful, still careful and slow, and you enjoy it almost as much as he does. Almost, because you don't physically shiver when spoon enters mouth - you can see the internal tremor move up his arms, through the set of his shoulders and you can almost feel it when the tiny hairs rise on the back of his neck under the black mane. You slice a crumb for yourself and feel rather than see the flash of possessive disapproval that crosses his face.
The next bite gets bolted in unseemly haste, with him leaning forward over the plate, head down like an animal's. Total sensory deprivation must have given the brownie more power. Should you try to take another crumb you might get your hands bitten. But worth it, because he's glorious to watch, this creature, this alien, this god: even doing stupid stuff like turning a plate or licking a spoon -
Licking a spoon.
You really shouldn't be staring this much. But Loki is rolling his whole head into the motion, tilting his sharp chin up like a cat washing a front paw, making an entire meal out of the smears of soft brownie still remaining on the spoon. His eyes are still closed. The arch of his neck as he turns the spoon to get every bit off the underside is ludicrously, painfully hypnotic.
He claims another spoonful without even seeming to look and purrs wordless approbation in a low voice as he eats it. There's a punctuating ring of the plate as he makes sure he gets that ice-cream to go with it. He's awash in the sensation, and his mood is suffusing the table, you along with it. You start to feel a little lightheaded.
You remind yourself (trying to stop staring, trying to distract your attention) you've got a vegetarian friend who has become vegetarian to fit in with his girlfriend's wishes. He's said he still gets cravings. Sometimes he comes round to your apartment and stays while you make bacon sandwiches, even though you think it must be torture for him. He's said he likes to watch you eat them, with the smell of frying seeping into the walls. Hear the crunch, feel the tang of smoke and salt in the air.
He says it's the next best thing to being able to eat them himself.
Watching Loki eat the brownie isn't the next best thing.
It's better.
The bistro's already crowded, but it's starting to feel even smaller, more cramped, not big enough by half, and you shift in your seat. The air feels heated: Loki lifts his shoulders in pure abandoned joy and this time opens his eyes to catch your gaze as he puts the second-to-last bite of brownie into his mouth. His expression, slightly glassy with sensation, drunk on cake, is nevertheless full of mischief. His smile is a perfectly orchestrated curve of manipulative delight.
Damn him. He knows perfectly well you've been watching him and that you've been loving it. And it's perhaps a credit to his talents that it's only now you start to wonder who today's visit has actually been all about, after all. Who's been making whom feel better.
Loki captures the last scrap of brownie, flipping it delicately upright onto his spoon with a flick of his elegant finger, then extends his spoon to you across the tiny table. The sounds of the bistro fade into almost nothing, a background hum.
"Really locked in a tree? Or was that just an excuse?"
He slides the spoon between your lips.
"Loki - "
He sssshes, mildly. The brownie melts into your mouth and Loki locks eyes with you as it does so, withdrawing the spoon to lick it completely clean himself. Your expression as you watch him do this must be priceless, because he brings his lips together in an ooh of slightly-mocking happiness.
"A tree," he confirms. "Yes."
It's busy enough in the bistro that not even your closest table neighbours really pay any attention when he leans forward, slips a cool hand down the side of your face and kisses you, deliberately. The entire, overwhelmingly glorious physical sensation of eating the best brownie in Midgard after months of paucity inside a tree slams into your unprepared body and you gasp, shuddering.
He draws back, just the smallest bit, and whispers, gleefully: "Did it hurt?"
"Yes." You draw out the S in a smiling low hiss of satisfaction, and push the plate away from its now unwelcome place between you, keeping you apart. "A little."