A/N: I don't want to do anything I'm supposed to be doing. I don't want to write the paper that was due 9 hours ago, I don't want to do the research for the project that I need done by next week, I don't want to move my lazy ass downstairs to watch TV… so instead, I write this! And isn't it great? :) :) :)
Thank you, MarieBloom14, for your review!
The Guardians of the Galaxy Easter Egg in the last chapter was Loki's version of Gamorrah's line, "Whatever nightmares lie before me are dreams compared to what's behind me."
Luke
"Hey!" Darcy greeted Loki enthusiastically as Barton led him into the room. This was the first time she'd seen him without a partition between them, and she waved him over to the couch where she sat, laptop in her lap, Agent Sitwell in the chair beside her, working on her new roomie's papers. Loki's hands were bound by a long chain that glowed faintly blue—it suppressed his magic, according to Thor and Jane. The big blond had used the Tesseract to return to Asgard early that morning, intending to pitch Darcy's idea to Odin. Loki, for his part, was not at all confident that it would actually happen—and wasn't entirely enthused about the plan, either. He had agreed to it when Darcy reminded him that his alternative was eternal boredom—or worse—but she could tell that his acerbic reactions to it were a case of preemptive sour grapes; he was trying his damndest not to get his hopes up.
He sat regally down on the sofa beside her, ignoring agent Sitwell's frightened gulp and apprehensive posture. Darcy shifted so that he could see the screen of her SHIELD-issued laptop.
"What do you want your name to be?" she asked, showing him the forms she'd been filling out. She'd listed his place of birth as Westminster, United Kingdom, his age as 25, had made a guess at his height and weight, and had actually already typed in a name—anticipating his next response.
"I don't care," he drawled, shaking his head. "You pick." But she watched his keen eyes taking in all the information on the forms, memorizing it. Yep—definitely trying not to get his hopes up.
"Okay, 'Luke Randle,' then," she said, indicating what she'd already typed in. "That way, if I screw up and call you 'Loki' it'll sound like a slip of the tongue, or an embarrassing nickname—not suspicious in the least. Now, I think mid-twenties is probably the youngest you can pass for, so your backstory will have to include why you didn't start school at eighteen. And take it from me—don't say you got expelled from anywhere, because that is a nightmare to deal with."
"How did you get expelled, exactly?" he asked, raising an eyebrow and looking at her. Close up, his eyes were even greener. "You're no fool, for all your madcap ways," he added. "You know when to stop, before you really get hurt. So how did it go so far that time?" She smiled sadly.
"Well," she admitted, "I'd always been a troublemaker, and had a few black marks on my record. Then… I guess you could say that I made a point that needed to be made," she continued vaguely. "By that point, some of the admin people were just looking for an excuse to get rid of me, so I made one late payment—and when I say 'late' I mean that processing time took longer than maybe it should have—and they kicked me out.
"So, let's say that you deferred school for a while because you wanted to travel," she suggested, forcing them back onto the topic at hand.
"Let's say that I went traveling, spent all my savings, and had to work in kitchens to feed myself until I could finally afford to go home," he amended. "The key to telling a good lie is to include an embarrassing detail. People being dishonest are more likely to try and make themselves look good, but in reality everyone messes up."
"Good to know," she commented with a small smile, typing that into a document marked "backstory."
"Please don't give her any ideas," Jane said from the doorway. Darcy snorted, and Loki shot her the most innocent look Darcy had ever seen on a grown man's face in her life. Oh yeah, Darcy thought privately. They were going to get along great.
-0-
Eleven hours and plenty of revising later, Luke Anthony Randle—middle name chosen to annoy Tony, last name chosen because it sounded like "random," and Darcy's thought process was "any random name,"—had a birthday in May, a previous address in London (and before that, Westminster) a school record from kindergarten through graduating high school, parents who'd died in a car crash when he was twelve, and a foster family with whom he was on somewhat frigid terms after his impromptu round-the-world backpacking trip. He'd also CLEP'd out of an—in Darcy's opinion—unfair number of classes, and had aced the AP tests for several others, giving him forty college credits to start with, and proving that he knew his way around math and science.
However, he refused to major in either, saying that humans had only just begun to grasp the most basic concept of how the universe worked, and he couldn't bring himself to dumb everything down. He opted to double-major in history and literature, since he was unfamiliar with both, for the most part, as far as Earth was concerned, but had enjoyed learning what little he knew of them. He had also—with great trepidation—allowed Barton to cut off all but a few inches of his long, thick hair. To Darcy's surprise, it was curly when it didn't have half a pound of gel holding it down.
"When Natasha gets back, we'll talk about color," Barton said simply as he put the scissors away and removed the sheet he'd covered Loki's clothes with. For his first excursion into the rest of the Triskelion, they'd given him a basic SHIELD-issued uniform: dark blue pants, a grey t-shirt with the SHIELD emblem on his upper right pec, and a dark blue jacket with the SHILED logo again, decorating the back. Loki felt the back of his head with his still-chained hand. His lips were tight, and he merely nodded at Barton to show comprehension. The agent left silently, and Loki blew out a long sigh.
"I would have preferred to leave that until after Thor returns," he muttered.
"Why?" Darcy responded, coming up behind him and brushing some stray hairs off the back of his jacket. It was the first time she'd touched him, she realized. He didn't feel like a magical-space-alien-god-whatever. He just felt like a dude—a dude with hair stuck to his clothes.
"Because if the tidings he brings are poor," Loki explained tightly, "then I would have wished to keep my hair. In my… in Asgardian culture," he amended, "long hair is a symbol of success and independence, while shorter hair is worn by commoners or those in servitude."
"So, you'd want to still look like a prince while in a jail cell," Darcy translated.
"I'd want to keep some of my dignity intact, yes," he snapped. Darcy nodded once, getting that.
"Well, whatever Thor says, it'll still grow back," she reminded him. "Hair does do that." He shrugged moodily.
"I suppose it's a silly thing to be concerned over, in the grand scheme of things," he murmured.
"Eh, you're a college student—or you will be soon," Darcy shrugged. "We all get weirdly obsessive over silly things." Loki scoffed a little, but said nothing.
"Oh, enough," Darcy grumbled, knowing what was going through his head. "It's not about what you're going to learn in classes. College is a place where you go to find yourself. You know, try new things, rub shoulders with people you never would have met back home, take a class in Japanese Drumming, make bad decisions about sex, drink too much, spend a week trying to beat Call of Duty, play poker in the elevator. It's not about sitting in class and taking notes. It's about finding who you are."
"Well," he responded heavily, "I've been who I am for over a thousand years. I sincerely doubt anything is going to change because I have a few drinks and take a drumming class."
"I wouldn't be so sure about that," Darcy said cryptically, handing him a little mirror from her purse so he could see Barton's work on his hair. He gazed at his reflection in shock. She wondered when the last time was that he'd worn it short. When he handed back the mirror, his face was unreadable.
"It's about that time," agent Sitwell announced, entering the room with Steve behind him. "Until Asgard gets rid of your magic, you're sleeping in the detention area." Loki nodded once, having anticipated that, and stood, brushing out the wrinkles in his borrowed pants. Then he paused, and turned to Darcy.
"Thank you," he said, sincerity ringing through his voice. "However this goes… thank you, Darcy," he finished, unable or unwilling to say more. She grinned.
"I'll be seeing you bright and early tomorrow for more boring paperwork and 'Midgard 101,'" she assured him, still more confident of the outcome. He smiled back—a small smile, but a smile all the same—and then departed with the agent and the Captain.
-0-
Bright and early ended up being nearly five in the evening, because two hours after Loki was returned to his cell, the sky lit up with a familiar burst of rainbow colors, and Thor and an unfamiliar woman landed in the Triskellion courtyard. The woman was Frigga of Asgard, who had come on behalf of the Asgardian government to suppress Loki's magic. Thor led her to the detention area and Barton let her into the cell, then both men left, giving her some time alone with her son. She cast some sort of a spell over the cameras and hidden microphones, so no one on the security team knew what happened for the hour or so that they were in there, but when she left, Loki was sleeping, with a head of curly dirty-blond hair, just like Frigga's own.
"Technically speaking," she explained to the assembled Avengers, agents and Darcy, "he still has magic, in the same way that a sleeping human body is still expending energy. It's keeping his skin and hair and eyes looking the way they do. It's no more than the energy you expend to keep your heart pumping," she assured them. "But if you ever learn to sense or otherwise detect magic, do not be surprised if you get a reading from him. The process has drained him, I'm afraid, and will need to be repeated periodically," she murmured, a shadow of pain passing across her face, "but he will wake restored by the end of tomorrow.
"Thank you," she added, turning to Darcy. "My sons both tell me you have been his advocate, lady Darcy. You have my eternal gratitude." Then she bowed low, making Darcy's cheeks burn. It was one thing when Thor kissed her hand and called her "lady;" he was just, well, just Thor. But this woman, she was a queen—she was on another level. And that made Darcy self-conscious.
"My pleasure," she responded honestly. "I mean, my dream job is making sure that only the bad guys get locked up and the good guys go free, y'know? So this is sort of right up my alley."
"I owe you a great debt," Frigga said, straightening up. "If you ever need anything, do not hesitate to call on me."
"You'll be the first to know, ma'am," Darcy assured her awkwardly. After that, Frigga had departed on the newly Tesseract-repaired Rainbow Bridge, leaving Thor to spend some time in his home-away from home.
"Although the All-Father was reluctant to embrace your scheme," Thor admitted privately to Darcy, "Heimdall had previously informed mother of all that transpired, and she convinced him to agree."
"I kinda' figured that," Darcy admitted with a nod. "But now that the ball's rolling, I just hope I can live up to everybody's expectations."
"You will do brilliantly," Thor assured her. "As you have noticed, my brother likes you—and there are few he would deign to call friend. You are the very best person I can think of, to help him live."
Darcy smiled hopefully, then punched Thor affectionately on the arm.
"C'mon," she said, standing up. "Stark said he brought some video games—let's teach you to play Super Mario while we wait for Sleeping Beauty to wake up."
A/N: Hope you liked it! Review and tell me I'm awesome! What are you most looking forward to seeing either Loki or Darcy have to deal with?
This chapter's Egg is Tom Hiddleston related—and much harder to find. Can you spot it?
Chapter 5: Road-trip
"Twenty bucks says she's dead by the end of the week," Natasha muttered morbidly.
"You're on," Clint responded with a shrug. "I'll take myself out for a couple cold ones."
"You're making bets on whether or not she survives?" Steve demanded incredulously.
"Hundred bucks says he bolts by the end of the month," Tony added, holding up a crisp Benjamin and waving it in front of everyone.
"Done," Banner laughed.
"And this all isn't in poor taste or anything," Steve grumbled.