Chapter 16 - Kissing is Gross
What do you get when you kiss a guy?
You get enough germs to catch pneumonia
After you do, he'll never phone ya
I'll never fall in love again
Don't you know that I'll never fall in love again
- "I'll Never Fall in Love Again," Dionne Warwick
(ʃƪ˘ﻬ˘)xxx
Dr. Samson held his hands up in a placating gesture, or perhaps a gesture of surrender. "Excuse me, ma'am, have I done something—"
Karen stopped ten feet away from the bench they were sitting on and fired her weapon in Samson's face.
"Are you alright?" Karen asked. At first, Loki thought she had spoken to Doctor Samson, who had fallen off the park bench to roll around on the ground clawing at his own eyes, but then he realized that the question had been directed at him.
"I'm fine," said Loki. "But what have you done to my psychiatrist?"
"Psychiatrist?" Karen pointed the canister she had used to spray Doctor Samson down at the ground.
They both watched as the man poured the rest of Loki's tea over his face and screamed.
"I don't think that will help," Karen said as she stood frozen in place, as if she didn't know what to do.
"No, it didn't help, it definitely made it worse," Samson wheezed. He seemed to be having trouble breathing now, and his face had turned bright red.
"I'm so sorry! I saw Luke crying, and I thought—I mean, I've been worried since I came home the other day, and the chain had been pulled out of the door—"
"My face is starting to feel like it's on fire—OH GOD, HELP ME."
"What is it you sprayed him with? Is his face going to melt off like in that one movie with the archaeologist?" Karen didn't have a DVD player, or a computer server with movies on it like Tony had, but she did have some sort of older technology that played movies off cassettes containing magnetized tape. They had watched a few movies together that humans would probably qualify as "old," but in reality had only been filmed a few decades before.
"I don't think so. It was just pepper spray. I think it should wear off in thirty minutes to an hour."
"PLEASE DO SOMETHING."
"Um—there's not a lot we can do here. I think you can use milk of magnesia to neutralize it? Eventually it should wear off on its own." Karen turned to Loki. "Sorry, but how is it you already have a psychiatrist in New York? I thought you just got here a couple days ago?"
"I apologize for lying to you," Loki said, inclining his head towards her. "I did not, in fact, arrive the night we met. I had actually arrived a few days before that with my brother and mother. My mother recently separated from her husband, and we are staying with a few of my brother's friends. The night we met, I had had a little—hmm, 'freak out' I suppose you might say—and deemed it necessary to run away."
"So you just decided to go back without leaving me a note or anything? I worried about you, you know."
"Again, I apologize. I did not mean to leave without telling you, nor did I leave of my own volition. My brother's friends hired a private investigator to find me and bring me back. She is the one who broke the chain on your door." Loki knelt by Doctor Samson. He reached into the man's pocket and pulled out his wallet. He opened it, pulled out a few twenty-dollar bills and held them out to Karen. "Here, for the repairs."
"Um, that's okay—my super is supposed to fix it. I might be moving to a nicer apartment soon anyway. I had an interview with Union Allied Construction this morning, and I think it went well." Karen pointed to the scarf around Loki's neck. "Is that my scarf?"
"Ah, yes it is. In addition, I have another one of your scarves and one of your belts in my possession. The woman my brother's friends hired used them in my abduction. I can give you this back now if you wish, but I feel I should tell you that it has been inside my mouth—it has been washed, though."
Karen's eyebrows had gradually crept slowly up into her hairline. "No, no. Just keep it, it looks good on you."
"PLEASE, FOR THE LOVE OF—"
"Try not to touch your eyes," Karen told Doctor Samson. "You know, I should have realized how young you were when you acted like you didn't know what a VCR was. If I had, I wouldn't have just left you alone in my apartment."
"I'm an adult," Loki told her, but his offense was mostly feigned. At this point, he had become accustomed to humans treating him like a child, and he had done enough research on the Internet when he had it to realize that in relative terms, he might be a little younger than what modern Americans considered to be "of age." "Well, almost," he added, deciding that it would be less embarrassing to admit that he wasn't. Adults didn't run away from home.
"How old are you?" Karen asked.
"Seventeen," Loki told her. It was probably close enough, anyway.
Karen nodded. "Well, I'm glad you're okay. You are okay now, right?"
"Yes, everything is fine. I had assumed my brother's friends meant to send me away, but it turned out to be a misunderstanding."
Karen gave him a sympathetic look. She likely thought he was talking about boarding school, or, given that he was sitting in the park with his psychiatrist, some sort of mental institution.
"JUST TAKE ME BACK TO THE TOWER."
!( ･~･)r鹵~巛巛巛 (ﾟ0ﾟ;;)
Karen had called a taxi for them and had ridden with them back to Avenger's Tower. Loki had insisted on using the money he had taken from Doctor Samson's wallet to pay the driver, however.
"This is where you live?" asked Karen, her eyes going wide as she stared up at the giant phallic symbol that Tony Stark had built in honor of himself but had later rebranded.
"One of my brother's friends owns the building," said Loki.
"One of your brother's friends is Tony Stark?"
Loki didn't answer. He would allow the woman to draw her own conclusions. Perhaps he was underestimating Karen, but he didn't think it likely she would figure out whose brother he actually was. Even if the thought occurred to her, surely she would dismiss it as an impossibility.
The woman smiled up at him as she leaned out of the taxi. "Well, I hope everything turns out well for you, Luke. Maybe you can come see me where I work some time? I almost always work the evening shift on the weekend."
"I will try," Loki told her, "but I'm not actually allowed to wander the city on my own, so I'm not sure when I will be able to do so. I would suggest we exchange email addresses, but I am also currently prohibited from electronics usage." Admitting that he was essentially grounded was only a little humiliating.
"Thank you for taking care of him," said Doctor Samson, who seemed to have regained some of his ability to function. Perhaps the spray had already begun to wear off on its own. "Someone should have thought to contact you to let you know he was safe."
"Oh, it was no problem. I'm just glad he ended up with me and not someone else. Unfortunately, there are a lot of gangs in my neighborhood. I think at least one of them operates a sex trafficking ring."
Loki frowned at her. "What is a sex trafficking ring?"
Karen's eyebrows crept upwards again, and Loki got the feeling that Karen now not only thought him mentally unstable, but incredibly sheltered.
(･෴#) (･_-｡ ) ( ´△｀)
"What happened to your face?" asked Tony, as he sat down in the common room with his morning coffee.
"I got pepper sprayed by a crazy woman that thought I abducted Loki," said Doc. "The burning stopped a couple hours after it happened, but obviously, the redness hasn't gone away yet. What happened to your face?"
Tony fingered the bruise forming under his left eye. "Oh, this? I got punched in the face by a crazy Italian hottie that thought I abducted her nephew."
When Tony had walked into the room, it had barely registered that Loki had been there too, curled up in an almost fetal position in one of the chairs, but now he'd begun muttering to himself. "Hey, what's wrong with Loki now?" Tony hissed at Doc. "I mean, the kid always looks a little wrecked after you get through with him, but—"
"I don't think he got much sleep last night. I think he might be scared that he's going to be forced into prostitution now?"
"Why does he think he's going to be forced into prostitution? He can't think we're going to pimp him out or something!"
"No, no, he just found out about sex trafficking rings."
"Midgard is a horrible place, and I'm never leaving the tower again," Loki said into his knees, just loud enough for Tony to catch that time.
On the one hand, Tony was glad that the kid had realized that running around the city alone was dangerous, but he didn't actually want him to start having major anxiety over it. "Hey, New York really isn't that bad these days. As long as you stay the heck away from Hell's Kitchen, anyway."
"Can't you guys do anything about that?" asked Doc. "That's where Loki ended up the other night. We ran into the that woman he was staying with, Karen—you really should have sent her a message telling her that Loki was okay, by the way. Anyway, she was the one that brought up all the crime in her neighborhood."
Tony sighed. "We can't be everywhere. The Avengers prioritize global threats. There are some things that are more the police's jurisdiction, and besides, Hell's Kitchen has it's own defenders."
"I was thinking that Loki might feel safer if someone, maybe Natasha, taught him how to defend himself."
"Last I checked, Loki knew how to fight. He was raised to be a big scary warrior god like his brother, remember? He's got crazy reflexes too. He caught one of Clint's arrows one time."
"I doubt he could pull that off now. I think Loki relied a lot on magic. He's going to have to learn new ways to defend himself. That might help with his self-confidence, too."
Tony took one of the Dallas County parking citations that he had found stuck to his Iron Legion suits out of his pocket, balled it up, and called out to Loki. "Catch," he said.
Loki turned his head just in time for the paper ball to hit him between the eyes. Perhaps more worrying than his slow reaction, he didn't get angry at Tony for throwing something at his head. Instead, Loki's head tilted towards the carpet, where he stared at the thing that had hit him with unfocused eyes.
"Okay, I see what you mean," Tony said. "I'll talk to Nat about it. I'm not sure what she'll say, but she's worked with Pepper in the past."
( ･෴･)ﾉ⌒*(o_0)
"Okay," said Nat, her eyes flicking up at him over the top of her Guns & Ammo.
"Really?" said Tony. "Wait. This seems too easy—"
She shrugged as her eyes continued to scan the page in front of her. "I don't see the harm in teaching Loki self-defense."
"I thought you might object to teaching him how to fight, seeing as he did admit to wanting to rule the Earth."
The edge of her mouth quirked upward. "The way he is now, I could break his neck in one move and he'd never see it coming. That won't change if I teach him how to elbow a mugger in the face."
"Nat, please do not break Loki's neck. Frigga won't be happy about it if you kill her kid." He wasn't sure where Frigga was at this point. She could be halfway around the world for all he knew, but he was still pretty sure that was true. Besides, Tony was getting a little bit attached too, and Thor— "You know Point Break will electrocute you if you kill his sibling, right? Especially if he wasn't even doing anything to deserve it."
"I'm not planning on killing Loki. I just could. The same way I could kill you before you even knew it was happening." She looked up from her magazine and pinned him with the same kind of look a leopard might give a chubby gazelle with a twisted ankle.
"Right, I'll keep that in mind." Tony backed up a couple steps, as if that would keep him safe if she decided to murder him with her little finger. "You enjoying the Maserati I bought you, by the way?"
Natasha's eyes turned back to her magazine. She licked her finger and used it to turn the page. "I'm starting to think I should have gotten the convertible. Maybe in metallic red, with the pearl beige interior."
Tony was ninety-nine percent sure she was joking and not actually trying to extort him, but he might get her the convertible just to be sure.
`_ / _]_ ===3
/(o)_(o)\ ===3
"Okay Loki, if someone comes at you from the front, what are you going to do?" asked Natasha, as they stood together in the middle of the gym next to a training dummy that looked like it had seen better days. Its nose was a little crooked, as if it had been "broken" a few times, there was a gaping hole where it's left eye should have been, and someone had dressed it in one of the surplus Hawkeye t-shirts.
"Run," Loki answered despondently. Running was likely all her pathetic mortal body was capable of.
"If you can outrun an attacker, or hide, you should," agreed Natasha. "Avoiding a confrontation is usually going to be your best bet. But if you can't outrun them, what are you going to do?"
Loki shrugged. "Scream like a little girl?"
Natasha nodded. "Making as much noise as possible isn't a bad idea, actually. Sometimes that will scare an attacker off, because they don't want attention drawn to them. But if you have to fight, try to target sensitive areas. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do is try to kick them in the groin."
"In Asgard, such a move would be considered dishonorable," Loki grumbled.
"This isn't Asgard. And the point of self-defense is to do what you need to do to protect yourself, not to die honorably."
Loki had never actually had a problem with doing whatever she needed to do to survive, but she wasn't in a mood to admit that, after being forced from her room, where she had been pleasantly engaged in counting the threads in her bed linens, so that she could manually calculate their thread count.
"You can also try a heel palm strike," Natasha went on. "Aim for either the nose or the throat. You want to be directly in front of your attacker." She stood in front of the training dummy with her hips and feet shoulder width apart. "Flex the wrist of your dominant hand, then jab upward like this." She twisted as she jammed her hand upward. The dummy's head snapped backwards as it met her palm and began vibrating. "You try it now, okay? Keep your shoulders back and your chest up."
Loki slouched obstinately as she approached the training dummy. "What is the point of this? I am trapped in the body of a weak mortal female. Anyone could come along and do what they will to me, and I doubt any of this 'self-defense' will help unless my opponent is completely inept."
Natasha rolled her eyes. "I was born trapped in the body of a weak mortal female, but you know what? I've managed to do something with it. Besides, the attackers you're most likely to encounter are weak mortals too, at least while you're on Earth."
Natasha was wrong, of course. Eventually, Thanos would find Loki, and then—oh Norns. If she were lucky, the bastard would just kill her.
"Loki, I'm taking time away from my own training to work with you. I have better things to do than watch you sulk."
"Then go do them. I didn't ask for self-defense lessons. I am only here because Tony told JARVIS to play 'Blue' by Eiffel 65 on loop in every room I went to that was not the gym."
Natasha smirked at him. "Well, that was mean," she said, even though she clearly thought it was funny.
Loki made a rude gesture, took a few steps away, and plunked herself down on the practice mat. It had not been in the least bit funny. If she had currently possessed the upper body strength to do it, she would have chucked the smug 'genius' out one of his own windows again.
"Okay, I get it. You're frustrated because you can't do what you could before, and you're afraid you'll never get back to where you were. Believe it or not, I know what that's like."
"This isn't the same as being injured, if that's where you're going with this. All but the gravest injuries heal over time, while it is very possible that my current mortality is—well, not permanent, but as permanent as mortality gets."
"If you are stuck this way for the long term, that gives you all the more reason to figure out ways to work with what you have. Sitting on the couch eating cupcakes and feeling sorry for yourself won't help—actually, on second thought, the cupcakes might not be a bad idea. You're still dangerously underweight, you know that? Damn, now I want a cupcake. Come on, let's go."
"Wait, what? You want to go out and get cake, and you want me to come?" The thought of leaving the tower again still made Loki nervous. She had understood before that Midgardians were primitive, bloodthirsty barbarians that could not govern themselves, but she hadn't understood the extent of their depravity until recently. Apparently, just by walking the streets alone in Midgard as a woman, you were liable to be jumped, drug down a dark alley, and forced into sexual slavery.
"Cupcakes, Loki. It's a completely different food. And no, we're not going out, we're going to make our own. Ever done any baking before?"
"What do you think? I was raised a princess, not a kitchen maid."
"Ah, poor deprived princess." Natasha grabbed her by the bicep and hauled her upwards.
For lack of anything better to do (and because she did have a fondness for Midgardian sweets), she followed Natasha into the elevator, which they rode up to the floor where the common room and its adjoining kitchen were located. As soon as they arrived at their destination, Natasha began gathering various items—metal bowls and utensils, bags and tins of dry ingredients, butter, eggs, and milk from the cold storage, and a little bottle from a cabinet over the stove. Out of curiosity, she took this last item and unscrewed the top, bringing it up to her nose. A sweet, alcoholic smell filled her nostrils, which she found quite pleasant.
She would have taken a nip of it if Natasha hadn't caught her wrist. "Okay, first of all, you do not drink vanilla extract straight, got it? It's a flavoring. Also, please refrain from eating or drinking directly out of any communal food or beverage containers. You do know about germs, right? Bacteria or viruses that can make you sick?"
"Drinking out of shared food or drink containers will make me ill?"
"It's more that you might make everyone else sick."
"But I'm not sick."
"It doesn't matter. You can spread germs that cause disease around asymptomatically. There's always some kind of bacteria in your mouth and on your lips—well, all over your body, really. They aren't all bad. Some are actually beneficial."
Loki shuddered. "Mortal bodies are disgusting. I can't believe Thor lets that Jane woman put her mouth on him." Natasha's lips spread into a slow grin, and Loki felt herself blush as she realized what she had just said. "Get your mind out of the gutter, woman, I was talking about kissing."
Natasha leaned in closer to her, smirking. "So kissing is gross?"
"How is sticking your tongue directly in someone else's mouth not objectively more disgusting than drinking out of a shared container?"
Natasha shrugged. "You have a point, I guess. You actually can get sick from kissing too, and from other things. Do you know what an STD is, Loki?"
Loki arched an eyebrow at her. "Do I want to know what it is?"
"Maybe not, but since you're mortal now it's something you should know about. It stands for 'sexually transmitted disease.' They can be pretty nasty. I'd show you the PSA that Steve filmed for US public school sex education classes, but I don't want you to have nightmares worse than the ones you already have."
Loki shook her head. "That's it. Not that I had any plans to anyway, but I am never kissing a mortal, nor am I bedding any."
Natasha arched an eyebrow at him, the corner of her lips curled upwards once again. "Loki, have you ever 'bedded' anyone?"
"No." Loki didn't bother to lie; she refused to be ashamed just because she hadn't yet experienced the pleasures of the flesh. It wasn't as if she couldn't have. She'd had offers; she just hadn't found any of them particularly enticing.
"Have you even kissed anyone?" Natasha asked, arching an eyebrow at her.
"I suppose it depends on what counts."
"Obviously, family doesn't count."
"What about cousins? Almost everyone I knew in Asgard—" Most of the people she had grown up with in Asgardian warrior society, including Sif and Fandral, had been at least distantly related to Thor. But they weren't actually related to her at all, now that she thought of it. "Never mind," she said. (At least Loki hadn't kissed any of her own cousins, while Thor had probably slept with a few of his.)
"I meant that a peck on the cheek like you would give your mother doesn't count," said Natasha. "Other than that I would think it would be fairly straight forward. Either you've kissed someone or you haven't."
"But does it count as kissing someone if I did not want the person to kiss me, and I did not wish to kiss them back?"
Natasha sighed. "I'm kind of afraid to ask—"
"Don't ask, then." It wasn't any of the woman's business, anyway.
Natasha pointed to the sink. "Speaking of germs, you should always wash your hands before you cook or bake. Or before you eat, for that matter. Remember how I said that germs were all over your body?"
Loki went to the sink and scrubbed his hands thoroughly with water that was just shy of scalding and a copious amount of soap. When she was done, Natasha tossed her an apron and leaned over the sink to wash her own hands. "Preheat the oven to three-fifty for me, okay?"
Loki stared at what she was pretty sure was the oven. There were buttons with numbers on them, so she tried punching in three, five, zero. But the oven just made beeping noises at her. She tried hitting some of the other buttons, and frowned when she couldn't figure out just which sequence she was supposed to press them in to make the oven start.
"So, you figured out how to hack Jarvis in less than a week, but you can't figure out that you're supposed to press 'bake' and then enter the temperature?"
Loki jumped at the voice from behind her and turned around to scowl down at the shorter woman. "I learned how to manipulate JARVIS by watching Stark do it. I have yet to see anyone use the oven—this is the oven, right?"
At first it was only a repressed sort of giggle, and then Natasha burst out laughing, and grabbed Loki around the middle, burying her face in Loki's chest and using the bib of her apron to wipe tears from her eyes. "It isn't that funny," said Loki, which only made her laugh harder.
Natasha eventually let go of her, wiping the rest of the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. When she had gotten a hold of herself, she leaned past Loki and reached for the buttons on the oven. "Okay, look. This is how you do it. Press 'bake,' then press the numbers for the temperature."
"What are the other buttons for?" Loki asked.
Natasha shrugged. "I don't know. All I ever use is 'bake.'"
"And you're making fun of me for not being able to figure out how to use a device that is completely unfamiliar to me?"
"I'm not making fun of you. It was just funny—'this is the oven, right?'"
If there was one thing Loki couldn't stand, it was being mocked."You shouldn't have expected me to know!" she snapped, her frustration coming to a head.
"Whoa, whoa—calm down. I'm sorry I laughed, but you could have just asked me to show you how it worked. It's okay to ask questions, you know? Maybe you should sit down for a minute."
"I don't want to sit down."
"Then you don't have to, but really, you need tochill. You want a shot of vodka?"
Loki had never had vodka, but he knew that it was some sort of alcohol particular to Midgard. "You're offering me alcohol? I was under the impression that you all thought of me as a child."
Natasha shrugged. "In Russia, the legal drinking age is eighteen. You'd be somewhere around that, right?"
"Somewhere around that," Loki repeated. She wasn't sure it was a good idea, really. She had always tended to get a little silly after just one or two cups of Asgardian mead or ale, so she had generally avoided it if she could. Midgardian alcohol wouldn't normally be strong enough to have an effect on her, but she was mortal now. Oh well, if this turned out badly, she would have Natasha to blame it on.
╮ (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) ╭
Author's Note:
I decided to split this chapter into two so that I could expand on the whole "Natasha gets Loki drunk" portion of the story, thus bringing the chapter count up to 31. I might have to write an extra chapter now, because I'm not sure my OCD is going to allow me to have an uneven number of chapters.
I have "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" stuck in my head now. If you now have either that or "Blue" stuck in your head, you're welcome. Next chapter is titled "Cupcakes and Cocktails," and will hopefully have recipes, along with a disclaimer that you shouldn't try them unless you're of legal drinking age where you live.