"How do you feel now?" Loki asked, placing Beth's favorite teacup in front of her, along with the kettle to pour it herself when she was ready.

She pulled her robe closed tighter and shivered, even though it was 72 degrees Fahrenheit in the dining room. "I feel like... every bad thing at once. I'm exhausted and wound up. I'm hungry and thirsty, but I'm queasy too. Embarrassed, angry, hopeless... That's about it."

"Beth..."

She looked up.

"Remember when we talked about the missing children?"

"Yeah?"

"If all else fails and you can find no reason to go on, just remember that your body and mind can still be used as instruments for good. Useful is much better than dead or imprisoned." At least, he hoped so.

"I can't believe you still care about that idea."

"Of course I do. You said it was important to you."

"Alright, that's it." She cleared her throat and sat up straighter. "I'm about to ask you something, and don't spare my feelings when you answer. You can't make me feel much worse, anyway." Well, he could, but don't tell him that.

"... What?" Loki asked cautiously, getting the feeling he actually didn't want to hear this question.

Beth took a deep breath and let it out. "Do you love me?"

"..." That was worse than anything he was imagining. "Wh... What makes you ask?"

She takes another deep breath. "The way you never just look at me; you stare. How you say my name like you've known me forever. How you've adjusted your life around my sleeping and eating schedules. You always know how to put my unspeakable thoughts into words. You remember everything I say. You trust me with very sensitive information. You just gave your second speech today about how special I am. I've never caught you outright lie to me." She paused. "Oh, and you said you would kill yourself if I jumped off the bridge."

Loki was speechless. He took a breath for the first time in the past minute, his eyes fixed on hers with evident shock, though the rest of his face was emotionless. So she wasn't a mind-reader; he is just that transparent, and she is that observant.

Beth continued when she realized he was lost for words. "You go beyond just liking and caring about me. It's like... I'm important to your existence in a really big way. Which is nuts because I'm just a tiny blip in it."

"You are not a tiny blip!" Loki says, finally remembering how to talk. Beth suppressed a giggle at how it sounded in his accent. "Yes, I love you, Beth." His hands trembled imperceptibly, and it felt as if his heart was trying to break out of his body now before it was too late.

Beth did something she didn't think she was capable of anymore an hour ago: She smiled. "In what way?"

His brow furrowed. "'Way?'"

"As a friend, a sister, or...?" She couldn't bring herself to name anything else that came to mind. It would just be too pretentious.

Loki rolled his eyes. "Must humans categorize every aspect of every thing? My love comes in degrees, not 'types'. Every relationship is unique because people are, but love is... love."

Her smile grew even wider. Such a simple yet odd perspective. "You really are from another world. So to what degree do you love me?"

After a moment of hesitation, Loki sat in the chair next to her. The intensity in his eyes made Beth brace herself. Can't this man say anything simple and normal?

"There are walls I have built around myself that no one, not even my mother, has been allowed to cross. I want you to be the exception."

"I don't even know what you mean by that."

"No one does. But for example, I wouldn't sleep in the same bed with just anyone, and that's not only for the sake of decency. I have no idea if I talk in my sleep, and it mortifies me to imagine what I might say if I did."

What an unusual fear, she thought, but it made sense given what a severely private person he is... and how dark his mind has already proven it can go. "I've been wanting to do it for a while," she says.

"What? Share a bed with someone?"

"Not 'with someone'. With you. And not just in bed. I've wanted you holding me while we were on the couch, in the park, in the pool... basically whenever our bodies are close and idle, I find myself wanting to be pressed up against you." Her cheeks flushed slightly. "But you're a thousand-year-old supreme being, so I figured it would be 'beneath' you."

"'Beneath' me to hold you? After I've slaughtered people like you?" They are sitting so close that Beth can feel his breath on her face as he laughs with bitter surprise, and the feeling that sensation brought her somehow overshadowed the fact of what he just said.

"Yeah, well, unlike my sister, I generally try to focus on the best in the people I love."

Again with Kate. But wait... His eyebrows shot up. "I'm someone you love?"

She blushed deeply, feeling a way she may have felt dozens of times by now if life had been more fair to her. "Yes. I love you, Loki of Asgard."

"In what way?" he mimics her former question with the slightest smirk.

Beth's answer was a lot simpler than his was. She licked her lips, leaned over, and kissed him softly. His lips aligned over hers, pressing back gently, memorizing their texture. Goodness, he forgot how soft another pair of lips can be.

Five seconds later, she pulled away slowly and said, "I think I'm in love with you."

Loki smiled, and Beth couldn't help but think he looked so cute at that moment, like a little boy being chosen to sit on Santa's lap. He weaved his fingers through her hair and leaned in for a repeat of their first kiss, only a little harder. When they pulled away this time, he buried his face in the crook of her neck, leaving a tiny kiss there and letting out a breath of elation.

"Ohhh..." Beth shuddered when his breath hit her neck, fingers latching onto his shirt. "Kiss me there again," she whispered.

"I'll kiss you anywhere you'd like," he murmured into her skin, and then obliged her request.

Well, if just him kissing her neck feels this good... she can only imagine how it would feel on an actual sexual organ.

The second kiss there lingered longer than the first, then with the third came light suction. By the fourth, her body was flooded with heat, partly because her hands were underneath Loki's shirt now, mindlessly groping and caressing everything they could. He then pulled her robe down her shoulders, and traced his tongue from her neck to her collarbone, then leaving a short trail of kisses from there to her breast. He took her moans as approval to go further, pulling her top down a bit to uncover her nipple. He took a moment to appraise it before running his tongue over and around it, then sucking on it gently.

Beth didn't even hear herself moaning, or feel herself moving until she was already seated in his lap. She pulled on his hair and kissed him open-mouthed, his tongue immediately catching hers and trapping it in a chaotic dance.

Loki decided the dining room wasn't the place for this... at least not for their first time. He stood up and carried her to his bedroom, their lips still locked, her legs wrapping around his waist. Her nipple was still peaking out of her top. Halfway there, she breaks their kiss to say, "Don't trip or anything. If you fall on me, I'm dead."

"I won't. And we're already here," he says, extending one hand to open the door.

He placed her down gently on the center of the bed, but her legs remained around him. Her robe had already been discarded somewhere along the way. He quickly took his shirt off and threw it in some random direction, and went back to tenderly kissing and sucking on her breast, slowly pulling the straps of her tank top down.

Beth's mind was starting to catch up with her body. This wasn't right. Well it was, but... how did they get this far so suddenly? Less than two hours ago, they were sleeping. Less than an hour ago, she was dead inside. She trembled as his hand touched her thigh, and not with arousal this time. Is this a mistake? Shouldn't we talk about birth control? How well did I wash down there yesterday? What's Kate doing right now? Oh God, this isn't a good time...

Loki knew something was wrong. He could feel it. His passion wasn't being equally reciprocated anymore. He paused to take a good look at Beth's face through the haze of his lust, and realized she was far more scared than aroused, which wasn't in the plan at all. Not that they had a plan...

"Are you alright? Is this too much?"

"A little. I-I've never had sex before, if that's where this is going."

Loki's eyes widened. "You're a virgin?"

She nodded. "Yeah." Her eyes narrowed a bit. "You look shocked."

"You are 28 years old. For humans, that–"

"Stop. Rewind. I was thirteen years old. Knew a little bit about sex, then got kidnapped. Then spent eleven years captive; thank God Alice was never used for anything close to sex. Then I spent four years training, stalking and killing. Where, in my most delicate years of development, was there room for any healthy interest in the opposite sex? Or humanity in general?"

Halfway through her reiteration, Loki had politely rolled off of her and propped himself up on his elbow beside her. "You told me you had a boyfriend not long ago. A member of the Crowes."

"Dodgson? We never had sex!" That was the highest pitch he ever heard her voice reach. He believed her; even Loki couldn't fake such a strong visceral reaction automatically. "I may have implied that we would consummate our relationship once our mission succeeded, but we never did." She shrugged. "He went to prison."

"You don't seem very sad about it."

"I'm not. We shared a mutual grudge against my father, that's all. Swapping spit and whispering sweet nothings just gave him one more motive, and tricked him into making my problems personal to himself."

"So you know how to seduce men to achieve your goals... but you have no sexual experience?"

His questioning was beginning to annoy her. "I don't think it's that I 'know how'; more so that Dodgson was a complete idiot. He was cute, though, so some of my affection was genuine."

"All the people you killed, and you're still a virgin," he pondered out loud in plain astonishment.

Her eyes narrowed and shifted with bewilderment, like she was trying to solve a complicated math problem in her head. "I'm not a necrophile, Loki. Or a sexual sadist."

"But on the moral scale, one would think that before you worked your way up to murder..."

"Huh? Sex isn't wrong. And besides, I had multiple encounters with death and mutilation years before I saw my first pornography."

Loki shook his head and frowned, feeling sorry for her. "You were robbed."

"Of sex? Pfft! That's hardly considerable compared to everything else I was robbed of. Not being defined by my sexuality is actually a silver lining. It's sad watching people catch diseases, starve themselves, implant fake body parts, break hearts, lose their children, become social pariahs and even kill over something they do for less than seven hours a week tops."

Loki chuckled uncontrollably for a few seconds. She had a point, though he didn't think it was usually that simple, but he didn't want to get into those topics right now.

"Do you ever have desires of that nature?" he asks.

"Of course. My brain might be backwards, but my body still works pretty normally." Beth then tilted her head, brow slightly raised, as if to say, 'Anything else?'

Loki suddenly felt like he was being rude. "I'm sorry. I hope you don't feel objectified. It's that... though I have never given thought to your sexual history, I would have assumed it was average at best, since you never talk about it. But come to find that there is one part of you that has never been abused or corrupted. If we made love, you would be trusting me with the way you perceive sex for the rest of your life."

"I don't think it's that serious. I already trust you with so much more than my body. I just need you to know that... I don't know what I'm doing, and I need you to be extremely gentle."

"Of course. I would have been no less gentle if you had a hundred lovers before me."

Beth smiled widely, realizing that this meant Loki respected her no less prior to receiving this knowledge. That somehow made her feel safer about letting him be her first.

"Thank you," she says, and shyly plants a quick kiss on his lips.

"We don't even have to do it right now," he assures her. "I only brought us here so we can be comfortable. A soft, unrestrictive place to touch each other however we both like."

She sighed with relief and snuggled into him. "Thank goodness. I mean, I want to, but I don't want the first time to be spontaneous. And definitely not this soon after a meltdown. I want to be able to completely focus on enjoying ourselves."

He nodded. "This day has given us too much to process already. Let's slow down."

She let her head relax upon his chest, feeling like all the pressure of life has been lifted off her shoulders. "It seems like some higher power just knew we would fit together and forced us to meet."

"It does." But maybe those powers are just setting us up for our worst punishments to come.