With a frustrated sigh Hayes slammed the door behind him. His mood became even worse when he saw Loki in the corner of his room, chuckling, his arms crossed. "Oh... That face of yours is priceless."

"Fuck off," he grumbled.

When Loki kept staring mockingly at him, Hayes could no longer control himself, even though he knew he wouldn't be able to hurt the other with his human powers. He rushed to the other wall, clenched his fist and grabbed for Loki's shoulder.

His fingers grabbed into nothing, and with a bang his hand hit the wall. Pain shot through his fingers, and cursing he turned around when he heard Loki applaud. His bully was standing in front of the door, his shoulders straight while he was slowly clapping his hands. "Such an aggression." In his hands appeared a red clothe with which he started to wave. "Let's practice a little more and we can join a bullfight. Apparently it makes a good amount of money."

Hayes breathed in deeply, cursing himself because he had lost his self-control. That guy really was driving him crazy, and there was nothing Hayes could do to get away from him. No door would be able to stop him.

He flopped down on a chair and turned his head away from Loki, pretending he wasn't around anymore. The angry words Aella and he had spoken, kept echoing in his head. It was annoying that she ignored everything he said about Loki, calling it jealousy.

It wasn't. Sure, he wouldn't have minded to be in Loki's place, but he knew for quite some time she wasn't in love with him. He could look past that, after all, his feelings for her hadn't been that serious. From the start he'd found her pretty and mysterious, but he had particularly considered it as a challenge to win her heart, and after their date so many weird things had happened that he had barely thought about his feelings for her. It hurt his ego that she had developed feelings for that asshole instead of him, but it wasn't like she had stomped on his heart. But he did care about her, and yes, he was worried.

She had changed. As blunt as she had responded just a while back... He just didn't know where it was coming from. Was it because of Loki? He knew the god had crept into her head multiple times — and who knew what else those two had been doing the past days. At first he had been afraid that her mind would blend with that of that sociopath, and now, Hayes had the feeling it had really happened, and that Loki's depraved soul was seeping into hers.

Or was this actually her true nature? At first she neither had been very friendly; not for nothing had he called her an ice queen. Had she only been nice to him because she needed him? There was a pit in his stomach when he wondered if Loki really was the only one who was playing games with other people's minds. Maybe they were a better match than he always thought.

He turned his head aside, feeling relieved when he concluded that Loki had disappeared. Hayes was lucky for being talented in excluding himself from his surroundings; he didn't rule out that Loki had continued to mock him while Hayes hadn't even heard him. Sighing, he got up and started to pace the room.

How much longer would it take before they reached Alfheim? That had been the real reason he had wanted to join this trip. To discover a world other people only considered as a figment of imagination. The adventure, that was what he wanted to set his teeth in. The adventure he had wanted to be part of so badly that he had been willing to die for it.

Regret was something he could not afford.