Part Four: In Which a Bookcase is Built

When they finished their meal they disposed of their tray and dishes into one of the return carts before going downstairs to the warehouse. It didn't take long to find where the LIATORP bookcases were stored. Loki helped her load the two long boxes containing the parts onto one of the flatbed trolleys, then pushed it for her to the self checkout. This was another point of interest for him. Sigourney let him push most of the buttons on the touch screen as well as use the handheld barcode scanner. She was certain that he would have taken it apart bit by bit to understand how it worked if she'd let him. She managed to stave off his curiosity by buying them both frozen yogurt on the way out.

By all reasoning, Loki's hatchback shouldn't have been able to fit both boxes. Sigourney held his frozen yogurt and watched in astonishment as, somehow, he managed to get them both in and shut the trunk without a single problem. Loki brushed his palms together a few times and smiled.

"And you said it wouldn't close." He teased.

"It shouldn't have." She handed him back his cone, "I say magic is involved. Speaking of which, this has been bothering me all day. Are you technically still barefoot? Or are you actually wearing sneakers right now?"

He chuckled, "The shoes are an illusion. I'm barefoot."

"Huh." She thought for a moment, "But the clothes...?"

"Are real." He assured her, "Borrowed from the shop next to yours."

"So, stolen." She licked her frozen yogurt, "That figures. Did you get the suit from there too?"

Loki opened the passenger door for her and said, as she got in, "No, those garments are also an illusion, cast over these ones."

He shut her door gently and walked around the car. Sigourney tried to wrap her head around the fact that Loki had just spent a couple of hours walking around Ikea, like a regular human being, barefoot. He got into the car and brought the ignition to life. Sigourney did her seatbelt, readying herself for another bout of his manic driving.

"I have a question for you." He said as he backed out of the parking space, looking at her instead of over his shoulder, "Why did you say that you haven't any friends?"

"Because I don't?" She shrugged.

He finished off his frozen yogurt, driving with one hand, "What about the shop girl?"

"Lavender?" Sigourney was trying very hard not to think about how fast he was flying through the parking lot, "She's seventeen. And in high school. I mean, I do like her and everything. She's great. But it's not really as though we hangout on the weekends or spend anytime together outside of work."

Sigourney had, at Lavender's request, kept her up dated on the bookcase quest, however.

Loki considered her for an unsettlingly long time considering just how fast they were going, before turning his attention back to the road, "I see. I am sorry to hear that."

She shrugged again, "It's alright. I don't mind it so much."

"Well," He swerved around a white minivan, "now you have me."

Sigourney allowed that statement to sink in fully before laughing a little and saying, "I do, do I?"

"I am pleased to see my offer of friendship is amusing to you." He teased.

"It's just... unexpected." She told him.

Sigourney wanted to add that it wasn't a bad thing, but Loki ducked into oncoming traffic, dodging other vehicles left and right. She latched onto the hand bar hanging above her window, pressing herself into her seat. The only thing that came out of her mouth was 'Loki! Loki! Loki!' in a shriek as she stared, horrified, at the headlights coming towards her.

"Opps!" He laughed as he veered back into the proper lane, "There we go."

Sigourney shut her eyes and felt herself begin to breath again. Her heart hammered in her chest.

"I have to admit," Loki said cheerfully, "there are some differences between this craft and the ones I've piloted in the past."

The rest of the drive proved to be significantly less terrifying than that moment. They managed to reach the shop in one piece which surprised Sigourney greatly. Loki parked, half on the curb and half off, and jumped out of the car happily. Sigourney followed, legs threatening to give out at any second. He was already opening the trunk by the time she stepped out onto the sidewalk. She hurried to unlock the front door of the shop, frantically rummaging for her keys and cursing herself for not having a better system, as Loki slammed the trunk of the hatchback closed. He picked up the long flat boxes, one under each arm, and followed her inside.

"You can put those, ugh," She couldn't help but stare at him, "anywhere."

Loki set the boxes down in the middle of the open space at the front of the shop. Then he set his hands on his hips and examined them in much the same way he had the Ikea. With his insistence of helping, Sigourney and Loki set to taking all the remaining books off of the broken bookcase. He carried whole arm loads of encyclopedias as though they were flowers. Sigourney supposed it made sense that he would be impressively strong. It had just never really occurred to her before witnessing it first hand. Unlike his brother Thor, Loki didn't really look as though he could single handedly carry a bookcase outside. He was leanly built and very slender whereas Thor was put together like a lumberjack. Sigourney watched, amazed, as Loki's slim figure deposited the broken bookcase onto the curb.

After that, the two sat together in the middle of the floor, taking apart the boxes and hunched over the instructions, putting the new bookcase together. Loki was not particularly well versed in working as a team. He got in the way a great deal and was easily frustrated. Sigourney couldn't help but giggle into her hand, suppressing it as best she could, as she watched him sitting cross-legged on the floor. He swore under his breath and muttered to himself, a screwdriver in one hand, the instructions in the other. There was something oddly reassuring about Loki's struggle with the furniture.

It made him seem more human.

Frustrated as he was, Loki wasn't unpleasant to be around. On the contrary, as she looked back on their day together, Sigourney found that she rather enjoyed his company. He could be sweet when his dazzling charm was turned off and the way he clumsily navigated the extremely human parts of her existence was endearing. If he had been someone she'd met at school, if he were an ordinary person like she was, Sigourney felt that she might grow to like him a great deal indeed. She smiled at the thought and gently reminded herself of the insurmountable chasm that sat between them. And then she remembered how he'd implied, just that very morning, that he loved her.

"Can I ask you another question?" She said, voice soft.

"Of course." He didn't look up from where he was fastening screws into holes along part of the partially assembled bookcase.

"Before," She started slowly, not really sure how to ask, "when you were talking about love at first sight and everything. Did you mean it? Do you... love me?"

Loki dropped what he was doing and looked up, his gaze steady on her face, "I do. Very much."

"But why?" Sigourney shifted a little, suddenly uncomfortable, "You only just met me."

A smile spread across his face, but he said nothing.

"Loki." She pressed.

"I loved you the first moment I saw you." He told her, reaching to take her hand, "I know it's difficult for you to understand. It's difficult to explain. I don't... expect you to feel the same way.'

It looked almost painful for him to say it.

"Just know that I do. And always will. That's all we need say on the matter." He concluded gently and released her hand.

Sigourney's mind was a blank. She had wanted the information, but now that she had it she didn't know what to do with it. She swallowed hard and stared at Loki. He had turned back to working on the book case, his face pensive as he continued to silently fight with the screwdriver. He loved her. She could feel it when he told her it was so. Something in her chest had twanged. It was like a slack cord that extended out beyond her body was suddenly being pulled tight. She nearly moved with the motion of it. Sigourney shut off the part of her brain that was trying to tell her what that meant.

Loki changed the subject, saying, "Tell me more about yourself. About your life."

"I..." It took her a moment to collect herself enough to reply, "I guess there isn't much to tell. Not really. I grew up here, went to school here, traveled a little. Then I came back because I missed it here. I opened this place and, well, that's it really."

"Surely that's not all." He pressed, smiling kindly at her, "There must be something more. Details about your childhood perhaps? The colour of your bedroom growing up, for example."

She shrugged, "It gets... jumbled. I don't know how to explain it. I never have. Sometimes, if I think too hard about my childhood, it gets mixed up in my head. I can't really remember the order things happened in. Not in detail, at least. I know the big picture things. When I try to remember something, like that one time I fell off my bike and scraped up both my knees so bad I could hardly walk home, I can't remember how old I was. Just that it happened one summer before I started high school. I think I was still little, nine or ten maybe, but I remember the bike being blue. I didn't get a blue bike until I was fourteen. My first one was purple."

Sigourney wasn't certain why she was telling him all this. She never talked about her mixed up memories. Not any more, at least. Just as she had for her problem dream that never went away, she had sought out help. But nothing ever came from it. Apparently, she was fine. But it didn't feel that way.

Sigourney thought it best to stop before she got to the really confusing bits. The bits about playing in beautiful, sprawling, gardens that didn't exist. The bits about hiding under the oak table in an antique library, reading old books with delicate pages. At this point she had mostly convinced herself that those memories, the ones that were completely out of place and impossible, were just things she had dreamt as a very small child.

Loki listened to her clumsy explanation and smiled all the more, "Memories are a tricky thing. Thinking things happened one way only to later discover that they happened in another. Not knowing what is true and what is not. Being so sure of something only to discover it was a lie all along."

Sigourney only smiled and nodded, taking comfort in what he said. It sounded as though Loki had had his own experience with such matters. It was reassuring. They finished assembling the bookcase together, chatting about the parts of her life that she did remember clearly. She told him about how her grandmother had told her stories from the Norse mythos when she was a child, which made him smile broadly. She told him about other things too. Her parents, her schools, her interests when she was younger. He listened happily, asking questions or pressing for more details. The strange feeling in Sigourney's chest grew as they spoke until it seemed to matter very little that she and Loki hadn't met at school.

Then, when the bookcase was finished and in the place of the old one, they re-shelved all the books in comfortable silence. It was remarkable just how much Sigourney's opinion of Loki had changed since that morning. She couldn't help but watch him as he carefully set the books in place. The strange kind of compassion she felt was still lodged in her chest, but now she also felt rather warm towards him. She didn't know if it was because she had spent time with him or if it had something to do with the fact that he said he loved her. What she did know was that she felt as though she knew him. As though she had always known him.

If the adventures of the day had proved anything it was that Loki could be incredibly human. An odd thing to consider when one remembered that, technically, he was an alien Prince and a Norse Diety. Perhaps 'human' wasn't the right word. Perhaps 'person' was more fitting. Loki was, in fact, a person. And Sigourney rather liked him a lot.

She gently declined his offer of a ride home from the shop. Sigourney had had enough of Loki's driving for one day, not to mention the fact that she didn't want to think too hard about where he had gotten the car. Instead, they parted on the sidewalk out front the bookshop for the second time since their meeting. Sigourney thanked him for all his help and allowed herself to be talked into seeing him again the next day. It wasn't a hard sell.

As she lay in bed that night, Sigourney thought back over the events of the day once again. She was now, by his declaration, friends with Loki. Not the man who had laid waste to a city because he was mad at his brother, but the vibrant and friendly trickster who had stood out in the stories her grandmother had told her as a child. Sigourney wondered just how much of those stories were true. She also wondered what would happen to her if anyone found out she was spending time in his company. The words 'interplanetary war criminal' as well as 'aiding and abetting' lit up in her mind like a neon sign. Then came the image of herself in some prison that didn't technically exist, being asked questions she couldn't actually answer about the nature of her relationship with Loki by men in dark suits. Sigourney shut her eyes tight and ignored the question she was too afraid to think about. Who had beaten and bloodied Loki that morning?

Eventually her mind drifted into dreams. She was back in the antique library she only half remembered, under the oak table with a sizable book. Sigourney dragged her fingertips lightly across the glossy pages, watching the illustrations twist and curl before her eyes. She was hiding from something, she couldn't recall what exactly. Then her father's boot-clad feet appeared beside her and she remembered. He knocked on the top of the table before stooping to look at her. He sighed as he took in the sight of her, stretched out on her belly, reading. He looked strange, dressed in a dark blue tunic, his hair long and his lined face bearded.

"You said you would at least make an attempt today." He told her, more sympathetic than stern.

She shrugged at him.

"You did promise, you know." He raised his eyebrows at her, "You can't stay in this library forever."

"Mother does." Sigourney heard herself say.

"That's because it's my duty." Came her mother's diplomatic voice from somewhere beyond the table, "Listen to your Father. Go outside. Make friends."

"You did say you would at least try." Her father looked at her pointedly.

She sighed and pushed herself up onto her elbows. As she crawled out from under the table the dream changed and she was back in the gilded chamber. The old man slammed his scepter against the surface of the golden dais, the metallic sound ricocheting through the large room. Everything started spinning. The wall behind Sigourney opened up into a riot of colour and light. Her scream filled the chamber as the world dissolved into colour all around her once again. This time, though, something was different. The blinding colour broke apart until it formed countless points of light within a black expanse. They were stars. Sigourney was looking up at the night sky. Then, she awoke to the sound of birds singing outside her window.