Disclaimer: I do not own Thor, but I do own The Crone. Anybody want her?
As Loki raised his hand to knock on the dark wood door, he wondered if, perhaps, he was just caught in a very, very bad dream. Maybe he would wake up to see Sven's grin and hear little Rai-rai's squeals of laughter as Darcy baked cookies.
Ah. Lovely Darcy was horrid at baking.
Perhaps this was reality after all?
Loki was jerked from his brief daydream as the heavy door in front of him creaked open. He felt Thor stiffen behind him and unconsciously lowered his center of gravity himself.
He needn't have bothered.
The woman—if she can be called that—who opened the door wasn't Asgardian. Nor was she human. She was, perhaps, some odd mixture of Midgardian and Dwarf, with a lot of Very Old and Very Ugly thrown in. Loki had come to her abode only once before: when he was a teen and in search of bigger and brighter potions. He now realized that his memories had been overly kind to The Thing standing in front of him. He had somehow blocked out the grey tint of her skin, the stenches that wafted from the room behind her, and the strange green thing that seemed to be clinging to the bottom of her chin. Loki suppressed a shudder. Thor had stopped looking about two paragraphs ago.
"…Come in?" At least her voice wasn't… that bad. More like a horse whisper than anything else.
"Of course." Loki faked a smile as he stepped over the threshold, casting a glance back at Thor. Apparently his brother found the muddy foundation in the ally extraordinarily interesting. The blond man looked up for a brief moment, caught his brother's eye, and sheepishly followed him inside.
"What… brings… you here… son of-"
"The Yggdrasil potion," Loki cut her off before she could remind him once again of where he didn't belong, "I'm willing to give anything." Loki cast a slightly worried glance at his brother. Did he suspect anything? No, the blond man had taken to holding his breath as he tried to make out furniture in the dank room. Thor's face was starting to turn slightly red.
"…anything?" The crone's shadowed eyes turned to Asgard's Golden Boy.
"I believe that's what I said." Loki's snark had just about left the building. He wondered if what he was about to do would fall under the category of "forgivable." He was sort of thinking not.
Thor continued to stare at the corners of the black room, oblivious as to what was going on around him.
…
A/N: Review to see what happens? Lol, no, it's not that bad—Loki's not half as dark as he seems ;)