Chapter Two: I Want to Rain on Their Parade

When her eyes fluttered open the next morning, the first thing that Phoenix noticed was the wonderfully cool body laying next to hers, breathing softly. She sighed happily as she stretched, feeling Loki's arm tightened around her waist as she moved.

The next thing that she noticed was Socks when he jumped on the bed and batted a paw at her nose. Her eyes flickered over to the clock, and she realized that she had slept later than normal. Socks was likely quite the hungry cat right now. "You are a nuisance," she grumbled to Socks with a grin, trying to move to get out of bed. However, Loki's arm tightened around her again, not ready to let her go just yet.

"Looks like you lose, cat," she told Socks, rolling away from him, meeting a pair of piercing green eyes. "How long have you been awake?"

"Long enough to watch him vie for your attention," Loki said with a grin. "How long have you had him?"

"About a week and a half," she admitted. "Socks came from attempt number two to work that spell to get you."

"You got him instead of me?" She could hear in Loki's voice that he was trying not to laugh at her.

"Better than the first attempt. That just blew a hole in my roof," she told him. "It's not fun to patch a roof on your own." She had no way to explain the perfectly shaped hole in her roof, so she didn't bother with a contractor.

She leaned her head back, looking up at the wall behind her toward the mounted horns she had. "Those came from attempt fifteen," she said, pointing up at them.

He looked up, arching an eyebrow. "A bilchsteim? And your home is still standing?"

"Barely," she said with a snort. "I really only got mad when it scared Socks." She looked over at the impatient looking cat. "Him. His name is Socks." Not a creative name, but the cat didn't seem to hate it. It was as good a name as any.

He chuckled. "Protecting the honor of your cat. Interesting..."

"If I had to protect the cat's 'honor' I'd have castrated that thing first," she remarked with a laugh of her own, finally disentangling herself from him enough to sit up. She was starting to remember how sweaty she had been the night before, which was now making her itch and crave a shower. "I was going to take a shower, but you're welcome to it first if you'd like." She looked toward the door in her bedroom that led to the adjoining bathroom.

He nodded, rolling over and pushing himself out of the bed. It was then that she could take a good, non-frenzied look at his body, and she noticed the marks all over his back, some faded, but some still looking rather fresh lash marks. She narrowed her eyes, making a mental note to ask about them, but wanting to let him have his shower first. She didn't like people hurting what was hers, but she supposed that could be just part of the upcoming fun.

She had no intention of hiding away here with Loki for the rest of existence. She doubted he would be content with such an existence, either. She personally planned to rain down torment on all of those Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D. along with it. Of course, she'd have to get back to America really to do anything, and while she still didn't trust herself to do any sort of teleportation spell (she wouldn't want to wind up on a different world by accident...or at the bottom of the ocean), at least she shouldn't have to travel by foot now.

She got out of bed and slid on a robe, moving Socks off her bed and heading into the kitchen so that she could feed the big ball of fur. "I swear you must eat more than a normal cat," she muttered as she poured the food into his bowl. "Nothing that small should eat so much." After he was fed and seemingly happy, she headed back to the bedroom.

She came in just as Loki was coming out of the bathroom, towel wrapped loosely around his waist. "Feel any better?" she asked. The grime that had been on him from his captivity was gone.

"I've felt better since I've arrived here," he said. "Where is here, by the way?"

"Argentina, South America," she told him, walking over and looking up at him. "I figured I should get as far away as I could without needing to travel by plane."

"You walked all the way here?" he asked, sounding amazed.

"Not all the way," she said, shaking her head. "Walked, hitchhiked, stole a few cars and drove them until they ran out of gas," she listed, turning to look out her window at the mountainous area. If she didn't have so much rage burning in her, this might be a good place to stay. She couldn't rest, though. Not yet.

She had so many things to ask him, but couldn't stop the now most pertinent thing in her mind from popping out. "What did they do to your back?" she asked him.

Even though she wasn't looking at him at the moment, she could feel him tense. "Punishment," he said to her. "I'm royalty, so they couldn't put me to death, but that didn't mean that my crimes would go unpunished." She could sense the bitterness in that word. She actually had to bite back a shudder. She once again hated herself for not just grabbing him and going back in New York. He had been right when he said that her progress would have been slower, but there still had to of been some way for them to get away together and for him to not have to of suffered that sort of degradation.

She finally did look back at him, seeing the dark and faraway look on his face. "And they'll pay for what they did to you," she promised, reaching out for him and grazing her fingers over his arm, trying to reassure him. Now that she had him back, she was finding hard to keep her hands off him. "You'll be back in your rightful place soon enough."

"We'll be back in our rightful place," he corrected. He bent down, pressing a tantalizingly brief kiss to her lips. If it weren't for the fact that she desperately still needed a shower, she'd demand more.

Pulling away, she let her fingers drag across his skin as she headed into the bathroom. She wanted to scrub off the grim and leftover blood from the night before, dying to feel clean. She turned the shower head on, not needing much in the way of warm water as she stepped inside.

She let her mind wander as she washed. Getting Loki back was her only focus for so long that she hadn't really thought of the second step. She was driven nearly to the point of insanity in her efforts to regain him. Then again, she got results quicker than she expected, or possibly should have. She could only hope that Loki has some idea of what they should do as well. She knew that she wanted to go back and get revenge, but exactly what she wanted to do is a mystery.

When she's done, she stepped out of the shower, heading out into the bedroom. It's empty, although she could hear movement in the little home. After getting dressed (and looking around curiously for her clothes from last night and finding none), she walked into the kitchen to find Loki, now dressed in a simple green shirt and loose hanging black slacks, bent over and looking in her fridge. Socks was sitting on the counter and seemingly looking in the fridge with him, and it's just an odd enough sight that she laughed.

He turned around to look at her and smirked. "Wasn't aware that you were done," he said. She walked over, picking up Socks and setting him on the floor where he belonged, despite his yowling in protest.

"I can make something, if you'd like," she said, wiping her hands on her shorts and brushing past him, nudging him to the side with her hips and starting to pull things out of the fridge, intending on making them something warm and sweet and kind of decadent.

Phoenix isn't too much of a cook, but she knew how to make breakfast food taste good. Soon she's putting a plate of pancakes in front of him, and almost cracked up when he looked at them as if he didn't know what to do with them. "They're not an alien species, they're pancakes," she chided him. She pushed a bottle of syrup in front of him. "You pour the syrup on them and eat them. Now stop poking at them and eat up!"

As she turned to make her own, she can't really believe that's she's having pancakes in a kitchen with a Norse god. Despite everything, this was weird, even for her life. Weird and oddly domestic in a way that she's not entirely sure that she knew how to handle.

When she's done, she turned back around to find that he seems to have deemed them satisfactory, as he did what she told him, pouring the syrup on them and slowly digging into them, still managing to eat them with some sort of regality, even though most people would have been covered with syrup at this point.

"Glad to see that you like them," she commented as she sat down across from him. "I might have gotten upset if you didn't like my cooking."

She was teasing, and the smirk on his face as he ate showed that he knew that, but that didn't detract from the pleasure of seeing him eat her food just the same.

Eventually she finished eating her pancakes, although she ended up dribbling a little bit of the syrup on her own shirt. "How on earth do you stay so clean eating this stuff?" she asked him.

"Manners," he said, his voice deadpan even as a slight grin played on his lips.

"Yeah yeah, you're the regal god and I'm the barbarian animal," she agreed with a laugh, reaching over to grab his plate to toss in the sink. Before she can grab it, though, he took a hold of her wrist, yanking her over the table toward him and his lips met hers and there's that underlying taste of him underneath the sweetness of the food he just ate, and it's a taste that she just can't get enough of.

Even as they kiss, though, she heard him saying, "Can't get too carried away, now. We've got things to plan for."

"Says the man who started this," she said against his lips, pulling herself up on the table without breaking away from his lips so that she can get closer and just feel him against her. She slid over the table, knocking dishes out of the way, moving over and sliding down to sit in his lap, content just to keep kissing him for right now.

Even though she wants more, she knew that he was right. She settled for wrapping her arms around his neck, letting out a content purr as she rested her head on his shoulder. "So, what sort of plans did you have, Chief?" she asked him. "Anything I came up with involved burning things and that just seemed too simple."

"And far too quick," he replied, shutting her eyes as she felt his fingers running through her hair. "We'll need to bring full ruination down upon them. To kill too quickly would give them far too easy of a release." She can't resist smiling at that. She didn't want their pain to end too soon, either.