Chapter Fifty-Two: Nothing of Value

Thor was hurt, but there was nothing to be said. Words were useless, actions were useless. Loki had made up his mind. So instead of pointlessly trying to fight, he gestured to the exit. Loki took Eve's hand and pulled her away from the scene with urgency. He still feared some double cross was in motion. Eve hopped into the passenger seat and grabbed up Sasha straight away. The pup was overjoyed and pawed at her, yearning for attention. Loki started the car and drove off.

"Where are we going?" Eve asked.

"You haven't decided?" Loki responded. Eve hesitated. "No matter. I need to rest. We can leave in the morning."

"And until then?" Eve wondered dreamily, her attention mostly on Sasha. She felt very little concern. She was in a daze, she felt free, like she was a careless teen running away with the local bad boy.

"I was thinking a library," Loki suggested, "do you know of any?"

"Sure," Eve agreed, "but why there?"

"I like them," Loki stated plainly. "The presence of literature soothes me." Eve couldn't argue, not that she would have, and directed him to a library she'd spent a lot of time at as a child and into her late teens, affectionately called The Hedge. She'd been calling it by its nickname for so long that she'd honestly forgotten its real one.

He parked the car up on the curb a few streets away (after asking if they were close) and they walked, slowly, with their elbows linked through the poorly lit streets. Eve held the tuckered Sasha like a baby, the pup's nose wet against the skin of her neck. Exhausted and slightly sluggish, they used each other for support and widely ignored the romantic aura they gave off. Eve didn't question why they were walking. Anything that would help them succeed in staying undetected was fine in her book. Each step was one closer to a very different life.

Suddenly, Eve stubbed the front of her shoe into a section of raised up sidewalk and stumbled. She caught herself jaggedly, squeezing Sasha tight as to not drop her, and laughed her embarrassment off. Loki's face was hard and almost annoyed. Then he cracked, laughing at the simple misstep along with her. He turned to the side and covered his mouth, trying to stifle the noise he was making. Eve stopped herself and stared. "You have an arrow in your back!" She observed, thinking madly on how she hadn't noticed it yet.

"Ah," Loki mused, seeming not to care. His entire body had a dull, humming, constant ache to it that he'd been ignoring. He'd honestly forgotten. "Oh well."

Eve scowled at him and pushed him so that his back was to her. "There's blood as well," she remarked snidely.

"We can clean it up when we get where we're going, let's not keep making a spectacle of ourselves out here. Gods forbid that we wake the dog," he remarked. Soon enough, they trudged up the library's steps, just as it was beginning to sprinkle rain, and he held her close to pop them inside. It was dark but not pitch black. The windows were enormous and their eyes had adjusted to nighttime's hues after all.

Loki hmmed thoughtfully. "What?" Eve wondered.

"It's quite small," he noted with his nose wrinkled.

"There are four more floors..." she defended The Hedge with zeal.

"That's all?" He frowned.

"So what?" She snapped.

Loki smirked. "Have I offended you?" The moonlight caught his eyes and they gleamed mischievously. She neglected to respond. "You should see the libraries on Asgard," he pressed.

"Let me guess," Eve droned, "they're bigger? Better? Shinier?"

"Yes," he answered simply.

"Sorry our hideout isn't glamorous enough for you," she sneered. "Follow me," she headed deeper into the building and touched on the women's restroom door.

"Certainly not," he objected and broke off toward the men's room.

"But-" Eve protested, ready to argue that the ladies' probably had a couch of sorts that would make things easier, but he'd already gone inside. She gingerly opened the door after him, her brain firing off signal after signal that it was the wrong place to be. He'd flicked the lights on when he'd entered.

Loki stood with his shirt unbuttoned and slid the sleeves off his arms. The garment refused to be removed and hung from the arrow's shaft. Eve found herself laughing again. She choked back her chuckles, as the overall disposition of the place seemed more serious, and got nearer to him. She set Sasha down on the tiled floor gently, but the dog looked uncomfortable as the coldness of the floor touched against her paws. She drew Loki's shirt back like a curtain and looked at the back of his shoulder. She had little to no experience with wound care but tried to recall what Darla had done when tending to her. It didn't help much, maybe a bit with after the arrow had been removed, but not at all with how to go about removing it. Her scrapes and bruises had been nowhere near this serious. "Is it very deep?" He inquired.

"Maybe," Eve shrugged, "who knows?" Loki turned his head to glare at her. "What? I'm not a doctor."

"Are we not in a place filled with literature?" He gestured to the door.

"Aren't you a warrior or something? Have you never had a wound like this before?" She accused. "I was hoping you could just talk me through it." Eve bunched up his shirt and slid it down the shaft of the arrow, plucking it over the end and ripping it further. She set the garment down on the floor for Sasha and she ran to it, curling up contently.

"Ordinarily, I can heal myself quickly. I'm not sure, now, since this mortal weapon was able to pierce my body in the first place. I may be even weaker than I'm aware of. I don't want to use magic if I don't have to."

"This seems like a pretty good reason to splurge..." Eve noted.

He laughed derisively. "You have no understanding of how these things work." Eve stared at him heatedly. "Well?" He prompted. "If the arrow bothers you so much, you'd better go find that book."

"Fine. Let's do it your way. Just leave it there. Better yet? Let's just slash off the part that's sticking out and the rest can stay in your body forever as a memory of this wonderful day."

Loki studied his fingernails. "You'd still have to go get something to slash it off with."

She groaned and stormed out the bathroom door. She first went to the head librarian's desk and found a flashlight in a drawer. She flicked it on and looked for a map. There was a color-coded and laminated reference to each of the floors, including the storage room in the basement. She located the section she needed-Health and Medicine-and walked briskly to the stairs. The place was different at night. Spooky. Still, the way she felt about it was unchanged. She scoured the cone of light along the shelves she knew so well, seeing them in a new way. She came here from time to time, though not as often as when she was a teenager. When she'd exhausted all her mom's usual haunts looking for her and she was waiting for the police to call, sometimes this place made her feel slightly better. Not better in any real way, surely, but she knew she wouldn't cry or scream while inside. Most times too distracted or angry to concentrate on a book, she'd lounge in a corner with something open in her lap and daydream about a life not so stressful.

She came upon the section and grimaced at the dull looking books upon it. After grabbing a few hefty ones and skimming their table of contents, nothing seemed applicable. She tossed the issues carelessly to the ground with heavy thuds as they went, dust springing off some of them. If she loved this place, she wouldn't treat it like this. But did she love it, truly? Before she started training in martial arts, her parents had brought her here to settle her down. It was treated like a fun outing, and of course she loved to read, but now that she really thought about it, it seemed like a cheap trick.

When she was younger, for as long as she or anyone who knew her could remember, she'd had issues controlling her temper. Her high school friends would lovingly describe her as "hotheaded" or "feisty" to avoid using words like "irrational" or "mean." She was that toddler screaming in the supermarket, she was that five year old getting dragged off the wood chips to go home early because she wouldn't behave. She wouldn't play nice. She couldn't stand to lose, she couldn't bear to share, and she refused to adapt. Then one summer when she was eight, she struck her mother. Not just a playful slap, but a full-force punch to the back of the head. After her two straight weeks of grounding, her father enrolled her in taekwondo. The fighting helped her channel her anger in many ways, but she kept on being a firecracker. The times when she couldn't swallow her pride ended up being the worst. In her senior year, she almost got kicked out of school. She was unceasingly hot in her chest. At any given moment she was holding a match to her own fuse.

In reality, this building was used as a way to diffuse her. So much so that she'd even done it to herself in adulthood. Now as she cast the books aside, she did so maliciously, upset at the floor, upset at the ceiling. Upset at the walls that contained her. At last she spotted a book with medieval weaponry on the front, a bow and arrow included. She tucked it into the crook of her arm and strode off, tipping a heap of novels off the shelves as she went. As she came around to the end of the long shelf, she heard urgent footsteps clamoring up the stairs. She panicked and ducked into an alcove, stooping behind an armchair. She clicked the flashlight off and waited with bated breath, wondering if there was a security guard she didn't know about, or if she'd tripped an alarm. She listened as the figure walked past her hiding place and on to the Health and Medicine section where she'd made her mess. Afterward, they doubled back and moved more slowly, searching.

Eve couldn't bear to think of enduring all that stress and turmoil just to be apprehended by a library night guard. She impulsively stood and whipped the book with all her might. It hit him square in the stomach and he caught it, holding it to his abdomen snugly. "Why?" He begged through a frown she couldn't see.

She switched the flashlight on again. "Loki, oh," she remarked in surprise, "Oh..." She repeated with more dismay. "What are you-"

"You were taking so long and then I heard an awful lot of noise," he explained, now examining the book she'd thrown at him. "Did you not realize it was me?"

"I thought maybe it was a guard or something, you were running so quickly..."

"A guard? Why would this place need a guard? There's nothing of value here," he scoffed.

"Shut up! I get it, this place is stupid." She brushed the carpet lint off her knees and moved to him. She attempted to snatch the book but he held it firmly.

"Do you have some attachment to this quaint building?" He wondered.

"I said shut up," she yanked at the book again to no avail.

"I merely asked a question-"

"The word quaint may not technically be an insult, but I know what you meant by it. Like oh, how cute, she thinks this place is really cool. Like I'm an infant. Like I have no reference level because I've never been to your castle! Well guess what? You can't ever go back there, anyway!" She had been shouting but didn't realize it until her last word reverberated off the walls. It felt good to be loud where it had never been permitted before.

Loki shoved the medieval wound care guide into her arms and motioned for her to lead the way back downstairs, looking perturbed. Clearly anything he said would only deepen her unpleasantness.

Eve was disappointed. She wanted him to engage her, argue with her, but he hadn't taken the bait. While not the wisest choice, he was the only one around. She needed to vent and let these emotions boil over before they swallowed her whole and turned to sadness. Sadness was far worse and lingered much longer. Instead of accepting defeat, she poked the bear again. She dropped the book on the floor at his feet and hissed, "You can carry it." Then she skipped down the stairs.

He retrieved the book only after she'd slipped out of sight. Out of curiosity, he peered back at where she'd been looking. When he saw the mess before, he'd felt panic in his chest. He'd thought there was some type of struggle, he'd thought the Avengers had found them and taken her back. Now that he knew nothing of the sort had happened, the small heaps of scattered literature were all the more perplexing. Not to mention her new attitude, and the fact that she launched a projectile at him. He recalled clutching the heavy, cornered thing to him when it struck him, too shocked by the unexpected action to actually block it, and he was furious. The heat only lasted for a fleeting moment, but during that time he strongly considered getting rid of her. The other times she'd been bold or rude, overstepping clear lines drawn in the sand, she'd immediately seen her own mistake and backed down. Now, however, he felt no remorse from her, no fear, and that bothered him. And wouldn't it be just tragic to go to such lengths to take her from the Avengers and then leave her body on their steps?

When he'd cooled down, he meandered to the stairs and trotted down them. Despite the girl's brashness and despite her antagonizing ways, there was one thing he'd been thinking about since they'd left her home. In fact, little else had come into his mind and whatever did was quickly overshadowed by it. The way she'd lied to the tiny, freckled girl. No faltering or hesitating, and not given long to invent a story. Unless she'd already thought of the possibility and had been planning for the speech. Either way, her delivery was most impressive. He was curious to see what else she could do in the vein of deceit. He thought maybe there was a side of her he had yet to discover. Or, even better, a side of her she had yet to discover.

He flung the men's bathroom door open to find she wasn't inside. The light was off so he flipped it on and saw Sasha and his shirt were missing from the corner as well. He hovered in the doorway and scanned the space for the flashlight's glow. Soon enough, she came ambling around a corner in the distance and walked briskly to him. Once in earshot, she said, "You were taking too long, so I went to get their first aid kit. We might need some things from it."

Loki was displeased. She appeared to have calmed down. "Fine," he noted and shifted his weight to turn around. Eve brushed past him and slipped into the women's room with such precision she was nearly gliding. He listened in disbelief as the door swung shut behind her with a loaded clap. After a pause, he pushed it open slowly to find her lounging on a stiff floral couch, Sasha comfortably snoozing at her side. He narrowed his eyes. She was ignoring him, her own eyes glued to the open book.

Eventually, her studious gaze locked onto him impatiently. "Well?" She challenged. "Sit down."

A/N:

So I'm trying to make my chapters a little longer now. I found Chapter 50 very satisfying. Plus, all of you that have read 100,000 words of mine definitely deserve it. The short chapters worked for the first part of the story, but with all the things that are going to happen, I think I'm going to need a bit more room to work with. I am beyond excited for this story's course and I'm so grateful to my followers and loyal readers.