Darcy was no stranger to "oh, fuck" situations. Her best friend was a mad scientist, her boss was a genius billionaire, and she was the lighting sister of a literal god. Granted, that literal god's psycho adopted brother now held her captive in the genius billionaire's phallic tribute to his giant ego and looked about half a step away from skewering her like a tender slice of chicken on a kabob.
"You, uh… you wouldn't happen to have brought be here for a surprise party, would you?" Oh, great. Your mouth chooses now to start yapping? "Because it's not actually my birthday yet, dude."
Surprisingly ignoring her foot-in-mouth remark, Loki strode over to the large bay window and stared out. He was still, but that stillness was wrought with an undercurrent of crackling energy that left Darcy more on edge than when he was going all Mad God at the Stupid Science Gala. She wanted to stand, to hide as far across the room as possible, but she didn't want to draw his attention back toward her. The dude was a psycho space man. Even facing the opposite direction he could probably see still see her because of literal eyes on the back of his head or something.
She fidgeted in her seat, fighting the urge to run hard and run fast, because she might be scared, but not so much that it was enough to override common sense and self preservation instinct. She liked being alive, thank you very much.
"Do you not find yourself angry?"
Darcy nearly jumped out of her skin as Loki's voice broke through the quiet of the penthouse. She chanced a look over to find that while he still faced away from her, his vivid blue eyes were reflected back at her through the glass of the window pane, analyzing her.
"Angry?"
Those blue eyes narrowed, but instead of skewering her he explained, "You were a forced Cuckoo in the nest of another because you were abandoned as a child. Does that not make you angry?"
It took a moment before his exact meaning sunk in, but Darcy had always been good at reading between the lines. "Are you… are you asking if I'm upset about being adopted?" She took his silence as a confirmation. "How the hell do you even know that?"
Suddenly he was looming above her, his face seething as he leaned threateningly into her space. She shrunk back into the plush couch, flinching as he bit out his next words.
"You purposefully evade the question by focusing on the irrelevant details! Are. You. Not. Angry?!"
"No." She stated curtly, forcing herself to meet his eyes. "Why are you so angry?" Internally slapping herself for doing something as stupid as further provoking an angry god, she shut her mouth with a resounding click.. This is it. This is the moment my lack of filter kills me.
He flinched away, taken aback at her subtle accusation. The audacity of a human girl to speak back to him must have caught him off guard and Darcy had to hope that wasn't reason enough to him to consider snapping her neck.
His eyes narrowed a fraction more. "Do you truly not resent your false guardians?"
She huffed out a sardonic laugh. "Sure I do, but my adoptive parents aren't the false guardians. My biological mother was an irresponsible, constantly partying, drug addict. I left for school one day with her nursing a hangover at the kitchen table and came back to her dead from an overdose on the living room floor. I got bounced around in the system for years before these kind, amazing people took me in and raised me - and loved me - and those are my real parents. My biological mother? My absent father? They were the false guardians."
He seemed to digest what she revealed before asking, "and your absent father? Do you not hate him for abandoning you?"
"You can't be abandoned by someone who doesn't know you exist. Hell, my mother slept with so many people so often even she couldn't tell you who the guy was."
"And if I could?"
"If you could what?"
He scoffed. "You are being purposefully dense again."
"Oh, pardon the tiny human for focusing on not dying rather than the subtext of the conversation."
He laughed, almost like he didn't mean to. It was a harsh sound, but on a level of 1-to-blowing-up-cars-in-Germany it was relatively sane. This Loki seemed much more natural than the one with the creepy, insane blue eyes. Well, his eyes were still creepy and blue-
NO! Do not humanize a psycho alien because he has a nice laugh!
He relaxed, backing off from her space and sauntering around the room. He eyed the many technological knick knacks that Tony'd left strewn about, coming to a stop at the bar counter and fingering a manilla folder that sat on it.
"Are you not at all curious who your father is?"
"I know who my father is," Darcy argued.
"You purposely misinterpret my meaning, child, and I grow weary of it."
She shrugged, responding to his initial question rather than argue. "It doesn't matter to me."
He lifted the folder, turning it in his hand. "Doesn't it?"
In a flash of green, the folder disappeared only to reappear in her lap.
"Something that my brother oft forgets in lieu of his brutish tendencies is that I do so love to read."
The wind continued to rush through Tony Stark's ears as he stepped onto his penthouse landing pad, pieces of his suit retracting into the overarching gauntlets to be repaired with each step. He had eyes for nothing outside of Loki grinning up at him from the lower balcony. He followed as the mad god turned to enter the penthouse.
Tony's stance as he wandered toward the bar was casual, despite feeling anything but. Darcy was nowhere in sight and Loki was prowling around with a spear that was clearly trying to compensate for something.
Loki smirked, clearly aware of where his thoughts were. "Please tell me you're going to appeal to my humanity like that pitiful chit."
His jaw clenched at the obvious barb, but he remained otherwise aloof. "Uh… actually, I'm planning to threaten you."
"You should have left your armor on for that."
"Yeah, it's seen a bit of mileage." He shrugged. "You've got the blue stick of destiny. Would you like a drink?"
"Stalling won't change anything. We're both aware of the leverage I hold."
"So, no drink then? You sure? I'm having one."
Loki scoffed. "The Chitauri are coming, nothing will change that. What have I to fear?"
"The Avengers." There was a blank look of disinterest in Loki's eyes at Tony's bold statement, though he ignored it. "It's what we call ourselves, sort of like a team. 'Earth's Mightiest Heroes' type of thing."
He remained unimpressed. "Yes, I've met them."
"Yeah, takes us a while to get any traction, I'll give you that one." He smiled, taking a long pull from his tumbler of expensive scotch. "But let's do a head count here. Your brother, the demiGod, a super soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend, a man with breathtaking anger management issues, a couple of master assassins - and you, big fella, you've managed to piss off every single one of them."
"That was the plan"
"Not a great plan," Tony tutted at him, slipping on his suit bracelets behind the bar counter so that he could call Mark VII to him when it finished prepping. "When they come, and they will, they'll come for you."
"I have an army," Loki laughed, lounging by the wall of windows overlooking the city.
"We have a Hulk," Tony countered. He caught the glint in good ol' Green Goblin's eye before the next words slipped past his silver tongue.
"I have your daughter." A flash of emerald and there she was, standing next to the man Tony hated most in the entirety of Yssgadril and looking dazed in his grip. She blinked, processing her surroundings and staring at Tony wide-eyes once she realized he stood no less than twenty feet from her.
"You see, that's where you messed up," Tony growled. "There's no throne. There is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes, and maybe it's too much for us in the end, but I guarantee you that you won't be the one to make it to the end, because you were fucked the moment you touched her, and because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damn sure that we'll avenge it."
Loki laughed, the sound cruel and harsh. "You seem to think that I'll play fair in this scenario, just like Darcy here seems to think that my motives are at all less than my own. In the end, though, how can you hope to save the earth when you can't even save one girl?"
It happened in slow motion. Loki shifted, using the hand he held Darcy's arm to fling her backwards from where they stood and into the view of the cityscape below. The last thing Tony heard before he jolted forward was his name ripping like wind past his ears through Darcy's throat as the glass window shatter around her and she plummeted down the side of the tower.