Disclaimer: I own nothing but the OC.

Everything is unbeta'ed, so read at your own risk!

You'd think that the God of Mischief would be a more exciting person to follow around.

I'd been minding him for the past nine days, and he was blander than the American versions of Chinese food. I admit, I was honest-to-god frightened of him for the first three days after that scene in the conference room. However, his temper subsided into dormancy under a mask of polite calmness, and so my jumpy anxiety settled into a sort of wary watchfulness.

Fury had installed a wealth of super-secret-spy-surveillance-stuff in Loki's room, and what that meant was that I had a lot of information fed into my mobile phone, all the time. It basically made me feel like a Class A stalker, but hey. Work is work.

So when Loki so much as sat up in bed, the alarm on my phone would go off to wake me up so that I would be able to receive Thor and Loki at their doors in the mornings. Loki's room was directly opposite mine, while Thor's was a little further down the hall (but still not far away enough to keep the fact that Foster is a screamer a secret). I guess Thor assumed that I was their SHIELD liaison-handler person, which was much more diplomatic than the truth. The fact that I was specifically assigned to watch Loki like a summer blockbuster would be offensive to both Thor and Odin – Thor, because anyone suspecting his little brother of pulling shit would be insulting their brotherly bond, and Odin, because it meant that we didn't trust whatever mojo he pulled to keep Loki in line.

It's true. We didn't.

Loki, on the other hand, probably knew that I was his personal babysitter. He looked a lot smarter than his brother.

That was probably why he set up a very boring routine on his first day on Earth (wake up, lab, lab, lab, lab, back to room, one hour of TV, sleep) and stuck to it like clockwork, refusing to speak to anyone unless absolutely necessary. Even then, it was usually to Foster, Banner, or Stark, in a carefully neutral tone, with regard to some aspect of the science shit that they were messing around with.

From what I gathered, they were trying to work out patterns in energy spikes across the globe, breaking them down by type, level, and area. They hypothesised that whatever was sending them across wasn't quite strong enough to function properly, and so they had to rely on times like sunrise (like when the helicarrier was attacked) or sunset, where there was a sudden burst of solar energy to draw upon, to send themselves across the void and into this world. Even so, such manifestations only lasted a couple of minutes before they were pulled back into their own realm.

The two brothers were not often separated. Loki was pretty much confined to the lab, and since Foster practically lived in the lab, Thor was always in the lab.

Since the God of Thunder wasn't exactly Benjamin Franklin, he spent most of his time at a little area separate from the science-dudes that SHIELD had set up for the soldiers to congregate and discuss war stuff. He'd pace up and down, mapping fire demon sightings and energy spikes that could signal fire demon activity on a map spread out on the surface of a small conference table and muttering to himself about battle strategies. He also very patiently corrected me every time I referred to our adversaries as 'fire demons' or 'fire freaks' or other variations upon the same theme, like so:

"Eldjötnar."

"Fire-fries."

"Eldjötnar."

"Fiery-fire things."

"Eldjötnar."

"Smaug."

"Bless you, Lady Katharine."

And so I spent nine days flopping around in one of SHIELD's super fancy labs, listening to Stark grumble about how his labs were prettier and exchanging awkward comments in pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue with Thor and gossiping inappropriately with Darcy. Everybody took their meals in the lab, clustered around Thor's map table (the map was unceremoniously rolled up and tossed into a corner for the duration of each mealtime). Loki would wedge himself between his brother and Banner, who, ironically, was the politest in a roomful of people determined to be polite to him. At about midnight, Loki would stop work and just walk out of the lab, usually prompting Thor to tear himself away from whatever he was doing and throw himself down the hall after his brother. I'd say goodnight to everyone and troop after the Asgardians, seeing them to their doors before closing my own behind me, after ensuring that Loki was safely in his room.

After taking a very relaxing shower, I'd slip into my very frumpy but supremely comfortable batik pyjamas and make use of the blissful lull in my life to video-call my parents, who would have just finished lunch. Being able to talk to them every day was a luxury that I had missed. My family is very close knit, and I'd cried every single day for the first solid month I'd spent apart from them.

But, I had made the choice to put my duty to my nation above my desire to remain with my loved ones, maintain relationships, and pursue higher education. It had seemed like a very noble decision at the time. Doubtless, it's still noble on hindsight, but I can't help but feel like slapping myself for being an idiot of a nineteen-year-old chasing after glory.

The glamour of being an agent faded the second I had to hurt someone in the course of a mission. My goal from then on was to survive until I could get sent home. They say no guts, no glory, but there is nothing glorious about seeing a woman trying to hold her own intestines in and getting other people's blood in your eyes. It doesn't matter that they were trying to kill you first. I forced down so much vomit on my first few missions that I was convinced that my oesophagus was half eaten away by my stomach acid.

So, yeah. Not having to kill anyone was great. For a little while, I got to pretend that I was a stalker with a victim who made life super easy for me, which was great, because I love easy.

Too bad easy never lasts for long.

At about 4:20pm on the tenth day, Stark had some sort of genius-seizure, which involved a tribal war-whoop, a call for scotch, and unbearable smugness.

"They're going to appear around the pacific ring of fire," he explained, bringing the world map up on one of the super hi-tech screens littered around the lab and highlighting a series of volcanoes. "They've been trying to use wells of magma to anchor their projections, but so far, they haven't found a source that's both large and active enough to hold a portal. They've been popping up and around at some of the smaller volcanoes, but I think that's because they're still testing whatever it is they're using to send themselves through. The type of anchor they'll need will be difficult to control because large and active volcanoes are, you know, health hazards."

He paused and gestured at a couple of areas on the map, and pulled up the profiles of several hotspots. "They'll probably use any or all of these three spots as their portal anchor. We just need to figure out how to close it down permanently before they get a grip."

Loki shrugged. "The Eljötnar are a crude race. They may have crossed over once, twice, maybe thrice, but it is unlikely that they will ever pose any sort of threat to your people."

Excuse me?

I must have said that far louder than I'd intended, because Darcy, who'd been sitting beside me covertly scrolling through Tumblr, winced and angled herself away.

"They kind of fried the deck of our helicarrier, and Nat was like this close to getting barbequed. No threat my ass!"

Sneering, Loki leaned back in his seat. "But, no one was injured, weren't they?"

Because the universe loves proving anybody wrong, whether he's from this world or the next, all the alarms started wailing right at that moment.

All the combat personnel in the room began running for the exit (with the exception of Banner, who, awkwardly, didn't know quite what to do with himself for a second and managed to turn himself in a complete circle before fiddling with some switches that prompted blast shutters to slide across all the glass windows). Thor was last, having taken care to shove Foster under a table and order her to stay there.

I didn't even realise that Loki had disappeared until I got to where the breach was and saw that the lobby of SHIELD was blown wide open and flaming demons were joyfully torching everything they could see. I knew that he'd left the lab with us, but he wasn't anywhere in sight now.

I ducked under a fireball and inched closer to Nat. "Nat! I lost Loki!"

"Never mind him now! Deal with this!" She rolled behind a row of potted plants, slipping a magazine into one of her pistols.

My brain was working in overdrive as I threw myself behind a wall just as the space where I had been exploded into flames. It's sunset, so it's very doubtful that they're actually launching a full attack, given that they haven't made a serious effort to charge deeper into the building. They're going to be disappearing in a few minutes anyways. They have problems accessing worlds. We happen to be harbouring an accomplished world-walking sneak who is, currently, unsecured.

Fuck!

I turned tail and ran back through the way we'd come, not bothering to mind jump. Looking for hosts would only slow me down. If I were Loki and wanted to get the fuck out of here without magic in a very short period of time, where would I go?

I made it to the hangar at an all-out sprint, and I couldn't even collapse in relief once I'd gotten there.

Loki was already engaged in a skirmish with two fire demons, but he was a Loki that I'd never seen before.

He was blue. He still looked exactly the same, but he was blue.

There wasn't really time to ponder over his new skin, though, because one of the fire demons had grabbed his arm and he was screaming bloody murder. The other demon had burned a hole in the wall and they looked like they were just about ready to abscond with their prize pig in tow.

"Oi!" I flung a chair at the fire demon holding Loki. I did accidentally clip Loki in the head, and he stumbled away looking slightly dazed, but the point was that I managed to get the fire demon to let him go.

That's when I charged at them, hoping that Loki had enough sense to scramble the fuck out of the way. I didn't quite manage to dodge another burst of flames entirely, but the pain in my forearm came as if from a great distance away. When I was close enough to the two fire demons, I grabbed a SHIELD jeep idling nearby and threw it at them. I managed to knock one of them into a wall, where he slumped to the ground. The other one avoided the flying car and ignored me altogether in favour of going after Loki.

I was running purely on adrenaline right now, and I reckon that that was the only reason why I could focus enough to snatch the fire demon barrelling straight at the slightly disoriented blue jackass off the ground and hurl him out the hole which he had made.

That's when there was a bright flash from the corner of my eye, and I watched as the incapacitated fire demon convulsed and shot through the ceiling of the hangar, leaving a bed of twisted metal in his wake.

They're gone.

All I managed to do before the world went black was to raise my head to find Loki's face just inches away from mine, his expression as inscrutable as always, but with eyes as red as fresh blood.

A/N: I know that the whole Loki/OC interaction thing is going a little slowly, but I want it to be somewhat believable. There'll be more Lokate bonding in the next chapter, I promise!

Also, sunset is at 4:30pm in this chapter because it's around the start of December, as will be made clear in the next chapter.