A/N: Well, I graduated…
Last chapter's Easter Egg was the line "I'm the Fort Knox of secrets" from the show Smallville.
Reflex
"Jeez it is nice living with a tall person," Darcy sighed contentedly as Loki noticed her reaching up on tip-toe to get a clean dish into an upper cabinet and wordlessly came up behind her to help.
"Has it occurred to you to purchase a footstool?" he asked. "You've lived here for how long, now, and half your storage is out of your reach?"
"Hey, it's not half—it's like three cabinets," she pouted.
"And the tops of all the closets," he added. "And changing lightbulbs. And hanging posters."
"Okay, okay, I get it," she grumbled, sticking her tongue out. "I get a chair when I need to."
"Yes, I've seen you and your antics atop a rolling office chair," he responded, remembering the contortions she'd gone through attempting to get at something in the top of her closet. "Again—footstool, Darcy. Doesn't swivel, doesn't roll out from under you…"
"Meh, I like to live dangerously," she laughed. "Anyway, now you're here to do all the tall-people stuff. Here—this one goes over there," she added, handing him the newly cleaned waffle iron, which she stored nearly inaccessibly on top of the free-standing pantry. Loki took the appliance, coiled the cord around it, and set it in its usual space.
"Who else have you had living here?" he asked. He knew there'd been a male roommate for a while—thanks to overhearing the end of her relationship with Jeff—but he wasn't even sure how long she'd lived here.
"When I first moved in four years ago, I was subleasing for a friend," she responded. "I moved here after I got expelled. I love my brothers, but I kinda' didn't want to stay in Chicago. Wanted to build up a good reputation and get some savings together before trying the school thing again. So, anyway, my friend Lori took an out-of-state internship for six months, and I needed a place to stay on short notice, so I moved into her room—your room, now. Keenan had what's now my room.
Then Lori took a job for the company she interned with, and didn't come back, so I signed a real lease after the sublet term was up. Keenan lived here until he graduated a year later. Then I was alone for the summer, which was expensive, and kinda' freaked me out to be honest, so I moved all my stuff into what's now my room—I wanted to be able to see if anyone was at the door without actually going to the door and making noise to let someone know I was here, y'know?" Loki nodded thoughtfully.
"Then for a year after that, I had this girl Jazmyn living here—and her boyfriend practically lived with her, in that tiny room, and ate all my food," she grumbled. "But he never officially moved in or took out the trash or did dishes or anything, so that was annoying. And man did he snore! And they weren't quiet, either, lemmie tell ya."
"Well, Thor practically thunders in his sleep," Loki chuckled, "so I understand where you're coming from on at least one of those issues."
"Yeah," Darcy giggled, "Jane's been complaining about how she needs earplugs at night. Anyway, once she finally moved out, Beth—you know her, with the tattoos…"
"I know who Beth is," he snorted in mock offense. "I think everyone in the state knows who she is—she's hard to miss." Darcy snapped a towel at him.
"Whatever—she subleased from me, while I took an out of state internship, and then she found a studio when I came back, and then you moved in."
"So, definitely nobody who can reach high shelves," he summed up.
"Nope," she responded, popping the "p" sound definitively.
"And you still don't own a footstool?"
"Nope."
Loki sighed, rolling his eyes as he slung his thoroughly sodden towel over the top of a cabinet door.
It had been a weird week. After his conversation with Rowena, he'd resolved to take some time to just do what felt right—let his reflexes do his thinking for him without worrying about the outcome. It seemed the most reliable way of determining what he wanted, considering (as he'd come to realize recently) that he'd spent his whole life with the idea of what a successful future looked like chosen for him, by Odin, by Asgardian culture… He had assumed that he had a destiny, and so had hardly considered who he was, and what he wanted from life.
It had all come exploding out of him during those fateful confrontations with Laufey, Odin and Thor—did he want to be a king? A destroyer? Thor's equal? Thor's brother? Odin's favorite? Odin's successor? He didn't know.
So, there he was, banished and powerless, having lost everything, trying to start new and figure out what he wanted, who he was, and what he ought to do next. It was a little terrifying, because simply letting go and acting openly on his every impulse wasn't something he'd often dared to do. But here on earth, that was actually quite normal. Oddly enough, his life here was like a safety net.
"How many brothers do you have?" he asked suddenly, turning to Darcy, who was filling up their water bottles from the pitcher in the fridge. He'd always avoided bringing up family—sore subject as it was for him—but he was feeling brave.
"By blood, none," she responded immediately, capping the bottles and sticking them in the refrigerator door before handing him the filter pitcher to be refilled. "The people I refer to as my family are a group of students from UIC—we actually applied for fraternity status once, but we didn't get approved." She snickered and nodded her head slightly from side to side, as if to say that thinking back on it, she could see the administrators' point.
"They're mostly guys, so I say 'brothers.' We weren't born together, but we're family all the same."
Loki was reminded powerfully of their first meeting—their very first conversation. She'd said that clearly they had very different definitions of family. That made a little more sense, now that he realized the way she herself defined it.
"My parents were kinda' sucky at the whole 'parenting' thing," she sighed. "I spent a lot of time with the guys—from teenage on. We were kinda' like a fraternity—most of us were UIC students at one time or another, people moved in and out when they needed to, but we're always family, wherever we go. And that house will always be 'home.'" She paused for a minute, smiling fondly.
"I moved in when I was sixteen," she added, taking the full pitcher from Loki and sticking it back in the fridge.
"But humans don't fully mature until they're… is it eighteen or twenty-one? I can never remember," Loki asked. Both ages seemed startlingly young, from his perspective.
"More like twenty-five or thirty," she laughed. "You're a legal adult when you're eighteen, you can buy booze when you're twenty-one, you have that right. But our developmental period is actually longer than that. But yeah, I was still a minor when I moved out, if that's what you're getting at."
"And your 'sucky parents' didn't look for you?"
"My mom left my dad when I was little—she lost custody because of her history in rehab. Failing rehab, I mean. Anyway, my dad had his own… issues. When I was sixteen, he got arrested."
"I'm so sorry," Loki murmured sympathetically.
"I'm not," she said flatly. Something about her face—the sudden aggression in her eyes and the set of her jaw—made him think the subject was closed. But then, in a low voice, she continued.
"'Battered persons' is the technical term for a situation where someone is being physically abused in the home, and has a reasonable fear for their life," she explained. "The idea is that people still have the right to defend themselves—violently if necessary. The first time I realized how important good lawyers were was when there was nothing but a public defender between it being me or him who ended up in jail."
Loki was silent, stunned. Of all the people he'd met, goofy, generally contented Darcy Lewis was the last person he'd expected to have had an abusive childhood. He wasn't sure how long he was quiet, but suddenly she was smirking up at him, the pain from her face gone except for a ghost of it in her eyes.
"You're not the only one in this house with daddy issues, Mischief Managed," she murmured, then slipped out past him into the living room.
"We're going out tonight—I promised Beth and Ted," she called over her shoulder. "Don't get too engrossed in your book—I will drag you away this time." Loki smirked, remembering twice now that she'd apparently tried to get him to go drinking with her and some friends and he he'd realized belatedly that after trying and failing to distract him from Dostoyevsky, she'd simply left without him.
"No promises," he called back, thinking of the large bag he'd brought home from work last night, which was still sitting on his desk because he'd have to reorganize his shelves just to have room for all the new stuff.
-0-
"And you're sure he hasn't noticed anything?"
"Positive," Sitwell muttered casually into his phone as he sat in a reasonably crowded restaurant in the middle of the day, invisible among the other suit-and-tie-clad men and women getting their lunches before continuing their work on Capitol Hill.
"This is the god of lies and trickery we're talking about. I don't like him so close to us, now that he's already had a run-in with rogue agents."
"I don't think anyone does," Sitwell agreed, taking a sip of his coffee. "But if Romanov and Fury and Carter herself didn't notice, I doubt an outsider would."
"Just to be safe, I want to reassign our people—keep it casual, make it look routine, but get everyone out of Larimer by the end of the month. He already has reason to mistrust SHIELD—let's not give him anything to look too closely at."
"Everyone… everyone?" Sitwell checked, mentally running through a roster of people he was going to have to move.
"Well, everyone except…"
"Right," Sitwell responded, metaphorically checking one name off the list. "Consider it done."
"I knew I could count on you, Jaz."
"Just doing my civic duty," Sitwell murmured.
"Hail HYDRA."
"For the greater good," Sitwell responded in kind, using the more modern, less noticeable vernacular for his public setting. With a click, the other line disconnected, and Jasper Sitwell set down his phone and rubbed his hand tiredly over his head. HYDRA would never have allowed such an unforgivable breach in discipline as agents Jackson, Kowalski and Bales had committed a few months ago, and thanks to SHIELD's lax internal security as of late, Fury was running to catch up. That meant more thorough background checks, more random inspections, more chances that HYDRA would be exposed before its time.
Personally, Sitwell blamed agent Barton. His little habit of bringing home strays had seemed like a cute, heroic sort of thing to do at first, but he'd opened the door on including freaks like Bruce Banner or renegades like Skye-why-wasn't-her-last-name-ever-recorded-on-her-training-paperwork. Hell, it opened the door on resourcing Loki. And now that the policy mess had finally created a hazard, the cleanup was threatening to turn up significantly more than anyone outside of HYDRA expected. He waved the waiter over and asked for the check as he stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth.
No matter who he was supposed to be affiliated with, Norse gods meant a ton of unwelcome overtime.
-0-
"The cheesy effects, though…"
"It's not about the effects," Beth ranted, gesticulating wildly with her half-full Solo cup. "They were fine for their era—they got the point across! It's the story!"
"Story!?" A man Loki did not know groaned incredulously, adjusting his glasses as they slid down his sweat-slicked nose. "Sentient puffballs, brain-thievery, saving the day by reciting the declaration of independence?! And don't forget the time they put a party hat on a dog and called it an alien."
"Oh… bullshit minutiae!" Beth looked ready to toss the rest of her drink on the offending geek. Loki was leaning against the buffet counter in Ted's kitchen, having recently escaped—er, gracefully bowed out of—a heated debate among what felt like half of Ted's party guests about the most superior pizza joint in Colorado. Now, sensing a certain level of drunken fumbling from the argument to his left, he slid a foot or so to the side, to be out of the way of the inevitable splashing.
"'Do, or do not; there is no try,'" her interlocutor quoted. "I mean, doesn't get much deeper than that!"
"'You may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting,'" Beth shot back immediately.
"'So this is how liberty dies—to thunderous applause,'" he replied with relish, flinging his arms wide. A splash of beer missed Loki by a few inches, and he began to really regret letting Darcy drag him to this thing.
"'Everybody's human,'" another unfamiliar voice said, and a roughish brunette man in a long gray coat with a fantastic dimple on his chin and the beginnings of laugh-lines around his eyes joined the conversation with almost a swoop. "'Everybody,'" he added quietly, with a twinkle in his eye, imitating the original actor's face and tone impressively.
"Oh, shut up—heathen," the bespectacled man spat, while Beth applauded gently against her cup, then remembered she still had alcohol left and proceeded to drink it, then shuffle off for a refill. The intruder shrugged good-naturedly, grabbing a slice of pizza off the take-out-loaded table and biting into it.
"Guess not everybody appreciates the classics," he commented with his mouth full to no one in particular.
"I think it's more that not everybody agrees on what exactly constitutes a classic," Loki allowed with a chuckle.
"Eh," the new man shrugged, leaning against the counter next to Loki. "They're both good, really."
"Personally, I prefer to avoid stories about family drama," Loki murmured. "But I can get behind a good old-fashioned adventure, 'vintage' effects notwithstanding," he added, looking at his companion. The man grinned, nodding his understanding. Then he held out a hand.
"I'm Jack," he introduced himself cordially.
"Luke," Loki responded. Jack laughed as they shook hands.
"And that's not ironic or anything," he observed lightly. Loki snickered a little as well. He had secretly wondered if Darcy hadn't actually gotten the name from the movies—daddy issues leading to intergalactic violence and all of that. One of the many reasons he'd had trouble getting into the series.
"So," Jack said, finally letting go of his hand—a shame really; his rough skin had been warm and surprisingly comfortable. "You don't seem like this is your kind of crowd." He gestured around the house with his pointer finger, then took another bite of his pizza.
"Well, I'm relatively new around here," Loki responded. "I didn't get out much back home, so the party scene is a… bit of an adventure, you could say." He smiled widely. "My friend ah, invited me. Nearly at knifepoint." He winked to show that he was joking, although he could tell by Jack's expression that he'd gathered as much.
"How very considerate of her," he said with a smirk. "I got reeled in by the grapevine—my coworker's brother's friend's sister; something like that."
"How admirably inclusive," Loki murmured, purposely dropping his voice into what Darcy had called "sonic pheromones." He watched Jack swallow. Then the slightly shorter man looked thoughtfully at him, pursing his lips.
"Well, since we've both done our social duty by now," he started, glancing at the clock. They'd been at the party for over an hour—that was plenty. "How about you let me buy you a better drink somewhere?"
"I thought you'd never ask," Loki responded, voice as smooth as hundred-year-old whiskey—and just as intoxicating, he knew.
A/N: This chapter's Easter Egg is from Doctor Who/Torchwood.
Also, mention is made (as you've noticed in previous chapters, I'm sure) of the Agents of Shield characters. Basically some of the events of the show are still going on in the background, but the team lives on the base in Larimer, CO, and just flies the Bus some of the time. Obviously it's also AU in that Phil is aware of how he was brought back, etc, but they met Skye and all that. If you don't watch AoS, fear not, they're just agents and doctors and stuff like you'd expect from SHIELD. Except for Skye, who is an accomplished and mysterious hacker—Phil's turn to bring in a stray.