"You've got a car."

It's a statement rather than a question. His accent is not like yours. He sounds incredibly, overstatedly British. Downton Abbey British. Except you didn't think the Brits were that into leather and kidnapping. Maybe you were wrong. Maybe London's a hotbed of fast gods and cheap kinks.

Your mind's wandering and not into helpful places. He shakes you, like a terrier shakes a rat. Your voice is a croak.

" I took the subway."

He huffs out a breath and continues to drag you. Your body doesn't seem to be working properly, but that's hardly surprising, given that -

Falling. You're beyond terror.

There's too much to take in and because you know you're going to die, your mind's in a frenzy, trying to suck into itself the last seconds, squeeze every drop of experience out of them before the finality of the sidewalk. The open air feels cold and your eyes (tears?) watering blurs everything further into confusion.

Falling.

Turns out you were fairly high up. Not at the top, which in a weird way might have been better, but quite high all the same. Once inside the building, you'd quite lost track of location in the hum of the beat, the thronging, packed hallways and elevators and endless, elegant rooms. The music had drawn you in, pulled you to the centre and held you there in its sway, as always. You could have been anywhere - on the Moon, in Paris, in a basement. All that had mattered was to be there and to be part of the party.

Loki leaps into the void as calmly as if he's jumping rope in the park and the sudden solid reality of location hits you. Quite high up. Quite high up can mean views, vantage and status: but quite high up is always accompanied by its gleefully morbid partner, quite a long way down.

You may have screamed. You're quite likely to have done, and no-one would judge you for it. Loki doesn't make a sound. His arm has shifted down to snag you around the chest, and it's crushing, but that no longer matters because any moment now you're going to be dead.

Still, your body has other ideas, other more basic survival instincts. It screams. It clings and scrabbles. It doesn't want to die. At the last, as you can sense rather than see the ground rushing up to meet you, you turn your face into Loki's body and grip onto him as if he's the last thing that can save you. The hard edges of the leather press into your cheek and your fingers dig hard into his collar.

Your primal survival instincts, as it turns out, are good.

The impact is purely ridiculous, in a cartoon way. There's no previous experience in your life that can give it context. You've flown before, and experienced the g-force on takeoff and landing. You've fallen from the apex of a swing's parabola as a child. You've been taken down, last man standing, in a hail of acrylic at paintball. This is really nothing like any of them, but a little of all.

As the sidewalk lurches sickeningly close, Loki swings you again, bringing his legs under himself, bending, bracing. His knees smack up under your spine as you hit, his torso arching over yours. There's a sound that you only realise much later was the sidewalk cracking in several places, like it was peanut brittle. This scares you, once you work it out. You're stuck with someone who is tough enough to crack concrete and not crack his own bones doing it. His stupidly resilient Asgardian body has acted like a car's suspension and rollcage: you're bounced around, bruised, whiplashed and winded, but you're still alive.

Why?

Crazily, the first sound you can make sense of is a parked car's stereo system. It's playing a song by Muse and the familiar intro bars give you an odd sort of comfort. Then into the familiar refrain comes the wail of sirens, and from above the super-and-sub-sonic whine of the Iron Man suit. You feel Loki exhale and uncurl from his crouch around you. Around you, there are people: the streets are never empty.

"Fuck, man," says a deep voice, from behind you. "Some party." More voices, cutting in, making only snatches of sense.

"You OK?"

" - need an ambulance -"

" - all the way up there, isn't it a -"

" - recognise that guy -"

" - isn't that -"

" - shit, he was on the news -"

Loki's name hits the crowd like a stone dropped into a lake. The ripples spread out as he stands, dragging you with him, and he looks up at Tony Stark's graceful descent, bathing in the blues and twos as more cars approach.

Someone takes a photo. Then another. Someone videoing. The camera phones flash and flicker in Loki's eyes as he darts looks side to side, turning his green irises to reflective red, like a cat's eyes in the dark.

You swear to God that if you get out of this you'll never use your own phone to record stuff that happens in the street ever again. It's insane, an affront to your own fright and desperate situation. You're gripped with an abrupt, numb hatred of these people who seem to think your impending death is some kind of tourist attraction. Had you been less in shock and more your normal self, you'd have felt unbearably exposed.

The scream of Iron Man's boosters sounds from above, and the air around you suddenly suffuses with the spice-market smell you're already starting to associate with Loki, and there's a moment when the air seems to flicker, fog with cinnamon shades, before clearing again.

"Hey," says the original deep voice, which belongs to a guy wearing a baseball cap backwards and a designer shirt. "Holy -! Where'd they go?"

The growing crowd hums uncertainly. They draw back, murmuring, and Loki moves as they move, slipping into the growing gaps, unbelievably silent despite the boots. You're in pain and you yelp as he jolts you. His only response is to clamp his hand over your mouth and he keeps moving.

Behind you, Stark's boots hiss and there's a ker-thunk as he lands in the centre of the cracked sidewalk. Bumping along with Loki as he slides between cars in the rubbernecking jam building up, you only catch glimpses and you can't understand what's happening. It's like the moment just after the speaker fell: you feel strangely half-deaf, unreal. People are looking everywhere but at you and the focus of everyone is now on Iron Man and the cracks in the pavement.

And this is how you and Loki disappear, under a cloak of magic (another thing that belatedly dawns on you once you're feeling less concussed). He's determined, it seems, to go on the run, and you're going with him.

"You've got a car."

"I took the subway."

This doesn't stop the newspaper headlines, for days afterwards, being convinced that you took your car anyway. And by that time, you're both long gone.