Author's note: Apologies for how delayed this chapter ended up being. I've been super busy with school, so I'm going to aim for shorter chapters and more frequent updates.

Chapter 11

When they came back from Winter Break, Thor was in a very good mood. For the first couple of days, Steve was willing to pass it off as leftover excitement from seeing his family for the holidays. But then their professors started to pile on the homework and Thor's mood didn't falter. He spent more time on his phone than usual, but when Steve finally worked up the courage to check it, all he found were a few texts from Thor's brother Loki.

Really, this would all have been fine if Thor hadn't acquired the habit of humming.

"Thor," Steve finally said.

"Yes?"

Steve turned around in his desk chair and looked at his roommate. "I know it's only the second week of classes, but I need to do well on this project. Can you please tone it down a little?" Thor stared at him in confusion. "You're humming," Steve explained.

Thor grinned. "Sorry. Just tell me if I do it again, okay?"

"Sure," said Steve.

Fifteen minutes later, Steve gave up and went to the library.

"There has to be a girl," said Clint. "There has to be. How could we have missed her? Who is she?"

The five of them were sitting in the common room for Thor and Steve's dorm. Thor had class, so he wouldn't show up unexpectedly, and they had driven everyone else out of the room. No one needed to ask what the unofficial meeting was about.

Natasha shrugged. "Hardly any of us have classes with him this semester. We really wouldn't know."

"We could just ask him," Bruce pointed out.

Steve's mouth tightened. "I already did."

"And?"

Steve shook his head. Everyone sighed.

"We have to do something," Clint said after several moments of silence. "No one can be that happy all the time. People in love make me sick."

"Like you're one to talk," Steve and Tony chorused. Natasha smirked.

Bruce pushed his glasses up higher on his nose. "You know . . . it's been awhile since I've pranked anyone."

Everyone looked at him. Bruce grinned. "I am rubbing off on you," Tony exclaimed.

Clint was already looking excited. "I used to play pranks all the time when I was in middle school. If any of you have some spare shaving cream—"

"No," said Tony. A light was slowly rising in his eyes. "This isn't a job for us. Steve, get Thor's phone."

Loki was pulling on his jacket with one hand and grabbing his pencil case with the other when his phone started to vibrate on his desk. He swore under his breath, tugged his jacket on the rest of the way, and picked up his phone. It was Thor. "Thor, I swear to god, I have an exam in fifteen minutes. This has better be important." He grabbed his key, left his room, and tucked the phone under his ear while he locked the door behind him.

"This is Tony Stark. We, uh, met when you visited your brother awhile ago."

Loki stilled. Then he recovered, shoved his key in his pocket, and picked up his phone properly. "Yes, I remember you. What is it?" He began to walk quickly down the hall.

Someone else cleared their throat. "We were wondering if you could help us with something." It was Steve. So he was on speakerphone.

"What kind of thing?" Loki asked as he pushed open the door out of his dorm.

"A Thor kind of thing," said Clint.

"He's been too cheerful lately." That was Tony again. "He hasn't told you if he has a new girlfriend, by any chance?"

Loki licked his lips. "No."

"Ah."

Loki glanced at his watch and quickened his pace; his exam was in a lot less than fifteen minutes. "May I ask why you're calling, again?"

"We want suggestions for how to prank Thor." It was a woman's voice, and she sounded smug: Natasha.

"We wanted to do something small, but enough to take him down a notch," said Clint.

"None of us have done much of that stuff lately."

There was a lot of coughing that sounded a little like, "Or in the past decade."

Loki rolled eyes. "What would make you think I have any ideas?"

"You're his brother."

I'm not his brother, Loki thought silently, but he let it slide. "A prank, you said?" He was nearly at the chemistry building and he spotted several of his classmates ahead of him. "One of you text me your number. I'll call you back when I'm done with my exam." Before anyone could respond, Loki hung up and tucked his phone in his back pocket.

Loki felt as though he were in a trance as he took his Gen Chem test. He flew through the exam even faster than usual, and he had barely stepped outside of the building before he took out his silenced phone. He had a text from someone named Bruce Banner. He called the number and held his phone to his ear.

"Hello?" said someone.

"This is Loki. I have an idea."

Thor walked down the hall, humming to himself. As he approached his door, he could hear voices: Tony, Steve, Natasha, Clint, and Bruce. They grew quiet when Thor opened the door.

"Hey," said Thor.

"Hello," they chorused back. They were mostly sitting on Steve's bed, though a few of them were sitting against the wall. There was silence as Thor dumped his backpack on the floor. Then they returned to what they had been talking about, and Thor tuned them out. He went over to his desk—and stopped.

There was a two-liter bottle of diet Coke on his desk. Had there been a party in his and Steve's room that he wasn't aware of? It seemed unlikely. Thor stepped closer and examined it. The bottle had been placed so close to the center of his desk it might have been positioned with the aid of a ruler. The seal on the lid was unbroken. As far as he could tell, there was nothing wrong with it.

Curious, he picked up the bottle and unscrewed the lid. He pulled away the lid and heard the plop of the Mentos too late. He stood there, stunned, as he was sprayed in the face with foaming soda. There was a moment of total silence, and then everyone else in the room broke out laughing.

As the foam fizzled out, Thor wiped his face with his hand and grinned. Then he sat down on his bed and laughed so hard his shoulders shook. The others grew silent. The soda dripped from his hair and sank into the carpet without anyone moving.

"Are you okay?" asked Steve.

Thor shook his head, still laughing. "I'm fine," he managed to say. He wiped his eyes and calmed down enough to speak. "You know," he said, still smiling, "I can remember when I was—oh, ten years old, maybe. I walked up to my room and there was this brand new tennis ball just sitting in the exact center of the doorway. I didn't own a new tennis ball, and I didn't know what to think. I picked it up, and of course Loki had attached some fishing line to it, and the next thing I knew, a bucket of water had just been dumped on my head." Thor grinned.

"I was really angry. I said to him, 'Why did you put it in the exact center of my doorway? It was way too obvious.' He smiled at me and said, 'That's why you fell for it. If I had put it a little to the left, you wouldn't have touched it.' Loki made sure I knew I had no one but myself to blame." He chuckled and looked up at his friends. "If I didn't know better—" His smile faded and his eyes darted over to Tony. Tony shook his head almost imperceptibly: No.

"It was me, actually," Bruce said. He smiled. "I suggested we call Loki. Do you see how we used the magnet to keep the Mentos inside the lid? That was his idea."

Thor looked at the cap in his hand. There was indeed a magnet glued to one side of the lid. He picked up the almost empty body of the bottle and eyed it. There was a screw hanging from a string that was glued to the bottle.

"The screw kept the Mentos from falling inside until you pulled away the lid," Steve explained.

"How did you do all this with the cap still sealed?" Thor asked just as he noticed the sealed hole in the center of the bottom of the bottle.

"It was a little challenging," Tony admitted.

"Clint and I did that part," Natasha said smugly.

Thor chuckled at the ridiculousness of it all. He raised an eyebrow at his friends. "I'm not complaining, but you called Loki to pull a prank on me . . . why?"

Tony shrugged. "You've been driving Steve crazy with your humming."

Thor gave Steve a wounded look. "I thought I told you to tell me."

Steve smiled. "To be honest, I think Bruce just wanted an excuse."

Bruce made a startled noise and everyone laughed.

Clint had, of course, taken a video of the whole thing, and he texted Loki the link. Loki was watching it on his laptop, grinning despite himself, when Sif knocked once on his door and opened it. "Hey, are you ready to study for Greek?"

Loki hurriedly paused the video, but Sif had already caught sight of Thor, his shirt plastered to every well-defined muscle in his torso thanks to the Diet Coke, and Loki already knew what she was going to say before she did. "Loki!"

"Sif, this is perfectly innocent, I swear," he said, barely restraining himself from minimizing the window despite what he had just said. "I helped some of Thor's friends play a prank on him! See?" He pointed at the title of the video: Mentos and ... you know how it goes. "Prank!"

Sif dumped her backpack on his bed and came over, her eyes glued to the screen. "Who's Thor?"

Loki froze. Thankfully, Sif was too busy checking out his brother (not his brother, thank you very much), to notice. "A friend from home," Loki said, and the words slid off his tongue so easily, they might have been true.

They are true, he reminded himself.

"How come you've never mentioned him?" Sif asked. She suddenly peeled her eyes away from the screen and turned to him. "Wait. Where does he go to school?"

"Oklahoma State."

Sif nearly shrieked. The sound she did make was enough to make Loki wince. "I knew it! You did fly to that game with OSU for a guy!" She sat down on the foot of his bed. "Come on, spill it. How long have you had a crush on him?"

To his mortification, Loki felt himself blushing. "I—I don't have a crush on him." He wanted to groan. What are you, thirteen?

Sif was smiling knowingly. "Okay then. How many of those texts that you've been smiling at were from him?"

Loki's blush deepened. "Look, Sif, I know you try to set people up with each other—"

"Loki." Loki stopped and met her eyes. "I'm sorry if I embarrassed you," she said seriously. "I just . . . want you to feel comfortable talking to me about stuff like this. If he's important enough to you that you poisoned some poor kid so you could carry water for the football team"—the corner of Loki's mouth turned up slightly—"then I want to know who he is. I don't want to pry. I just want to get to know you better, you know?"

"Okay," Loki said, but he felt too nervous to smile. He shrugged. "I've known Thor for . . . a really long time, so I guess I've never thought to call him a 'crush.'" He licked his lips.

"But you like him?"

Loki looked down at his hands. "Like him, or just want to bang him?" he tried to joke, but it came out sounding pitiful even to him. Sif waited. "Okay," he said, looking up at her. "I . . . like him. And don't even say I should just tell him," he said when she opened her mouth. "There is no way it would ever work."

"You're sure?"

"So sure, you have no idea." He waited for the protest, the "But maybe he's not straight!", but it didn't come. Sif folded her hands in her lap and waited. So Loki told her about how they had known each other since they were little, about Jane, about everything.

It wasn't lying if he forgot to mention the most important thing.