When Loki said he'd take Melody to his room to wait for him, she was expecting the room to be more similar to her own, a gorgeous room with outlandishly fancy furniture, things like chaise lounges, four-poster beds, and French windows opening onto a balcony or three.

But no, of course not. That wasn't nearly fancy enough for royalty to live in.

Loki basically had his own apartment here, with at least three separate rooms that she could see, all to himself. She bounced impatiently on an absurdly fluffy couch, eyes wide as she took in the full extent of what Loki had so casually referred to as his "room". The only room he'd made it clear she was actually supposed to be waiting in was a sort of sitting room, antlers and tapestries hung on the wall, a cheerfully crackling fireplace that burned blue, and somehow cold, a soft and fluffy rug beneath her feet with some sort of Celtic knot-type pattern woven into it.

Heck, she wouldn't be surprised if there was an indoor pool somewhere around here.

What a show-off.

She could hear him humming to himself behind one of the closed doors, some sad tune that wasn't carried very well, but sounded as if it was familiar to him.

The number one rule of etiquette when in someone else's room, Melody was well aware, is to not snoop in all of the person who lived there's stuff.

She knew, yes, but she'd never seen fire that burned cold, before. With the silent, guilty look of someone who knows they aren't supposed to be messing with this kind of stuff towards the closed door Loki was behind, she slipped off the couch and tiptoed closer to the fire.

She knew better than to touch it, obviously, but that doesn't mean she couldn't figure it out. There wasn't any sort of dial that looked like a thermostat to turn the heat up. It just radiated cold through the air, pullng heat towards itself like an air conditioner.

Well, no wonder. It's not like someone would want to turn on a fireplace in Asgard, especially in the middle of May.

She stared, mesmerized, and didn't even notice when the humming ceased, along with the click of a door opening behind her.

"Don't lean in too close, you'll set your hair alight."

Melody yelped, leapt to her feet, and gave Loki a smile that definitely did not betray any thoughts of Messing With His Stuff.

"It interests you?" He wore a small, somewhat hopeful smile on his face, eyes searching hers for some hint of approval. The thought briefly passed Melody's mind that Loki was implying that he had somehow invented cold fire, but that wasn't what immediately caught her interest.

"You cut your hair!" She said it in accusing fashion, like he'd committed some grave sin.

He had indeed cut it, back to the length it had been in the first Thor movies, slicked back and tucked behind his ears.

"Yes," he replied. "I do have something I'd like for us to speak of…"

"I didn't think you were going to cut it!" Melody was dismayed. She'd been looking forward to Long Hair to Flip Around and Potentially Braid. "Your head looks so small, now!"

This was apparently not the kind of insult Loki typically received, and he spluttered. He was so taken aback, he had no witticisms left to throw back at her, and the best he could muster was, "Your head's small."

"Nope," she cheerfully said, and shook her curls to show off the joys of long hair. "I've got big hair."

"Yes," Loki agreed, having slightly gotten his composure back. "And while it suits you very well, it isn't my style."

"But it is stylish!" Melody wasn't going to go down without a fight. "You look awesome in long hair! I know from the story, your hair's longer than Thor's at one point. It's great!"

"I can't imagine why," he sighed in a display of infinite patience. "It's tickly and gets in the way and it's a pain to take care of. That does actually bring me to the topic I'd wanted to discuss…"

"Oh, okay," she sighed, and settled back on the couch. "What do you want to talk about? Why your mom may or may not have adopted me?"

"Oh, did she?" He did not look surprised. "It's beginning to be a habit of hers."

"We should stage an intervention before she starts an orphanage."

"Melody." Loki dragged her back onto the subject, apparently not in the mood to make fun of his mom for her worrying adoption habit. "Focus? How were you so sure my story wouldn't end in prison because of your intervention?"

Bingo! The million dollar question!

The answer: she wasn't. She wasn't sure about anything. Three days she'd been able to put off telling anyone, talking about it, even acknowledging it's existence.

She'd been in the MCU for nearly a week, now, and she still had no idea why or how.

She wasn't supposed to be here, and maybe if anyone knew that, they'd kick her out. Did she want to be kicked out? Was there a different sort of afterlife to go to, if they did decide she wasn't fit for this universe? Maybe she'd be resurrected in her world? Or maybe she wasn't even dead. Maybe she was trapped in a coma, and this was a fever dream, and everyone was waiting for her to wake up and she might never, she didn't even know how, she didn't even know if she wanted to.

"I'm sorry," Loki blurted. Melody looked up to see him watching in horror, hands half-stretched out, unsure if comforting was a good idea or not. "I didn't mean to… I don't wish to upset you."

That's when Melody realized her cheeks were wet. She'd never cried without noticing, before. That was odd. "I'm not… upset." That was a lie, and he knew it. "Your mom told me to tell someone. About the stories. Would you… mind if I told you?"

"I can't deny I'm immensely curious," he admitted. "And that's what I was trying to do at the beginning of this conversation. But… I don't want you to be distraught. If it's not good to speak of, you can stop."

"Okay," she sniffled, and wiped her cheeks with her sleeve. "If you have questions, you can stop me."

"Okay," he echoed, and sat down on the opposite end of the couch.

Melody cleared her throat, and sank her fingers into the fluffiness of the couch beneath her. "Um…" How was she supposed to start with something like this? Where did she begin to hope to explain? "Back in my world…"

"Midgard?" Loki guessed.

"Sort of? I don't come from this…universe." Just saying it sounded bizarre, but also a relief in a way. "In my universe… Well… do you know what a movie is?"

"Of course I know what a movie is," he scoffed. "You act as if I haven't been on Midgard in the last seventy years."

"Well, I didn't know if you'd had time for media while conquering the world," Melody pointed out.

"You act as if that's the only time I've been on Midgard in the last seventy years," he amended. "Go on. Why bring up movies?"

"Because you're one." She looked up at him to watch his reaction. "In my world, that's what you are. All of you. Tony Stark and Thor and you and Captain America are just movies. And I've seen them all and I really really like them so I know everything about them. That's it."

Loki stared blankly, as if he didn't quite believe her. As he maintained eye contact long enough to know that she wasn't kidding, a seed of doubt flickered in his eyes. "Alright, then."

"You're taking this surprisingly well."

"Well, yes." He shrugged. "It's real to me, as real as any world has been. I might as well keep living it. What does confuse me, though –"

"How did I get in?" She guessed. "That's sorta my question, too. I think…" She trailed off, staring into the blue flames. "I think I'm dead."

"Hm," Loki decided. "Elaborate."

"Well… I think… the last thing I remember in my world is getting in a really bad car crash. And then I woke up with a headache in your car. And since then, I haven't really thought about it, but the radio was talking to me."

"The radio," he echoed, eyebrows lifting surprise. "As in, the wireless?"

"Wait, how long ago were you on Midgard, again?"

The innocent shrug was telling enough. "Around the same time Captain America was growing up. Why do you want to know?"

Melody shook her head. Really she didn't have the mental space for this. "I kinda don't."

"They put that on frequencies of wavelengths, yes?"

"I think so," she shrugged, "you're the one who was around when they were invented, you'd know."

"I'm certain," he snarked. "And it was talking to you? What did it say?"

"Just my name. I don't know who was saying it, though."

"Disturbing," he noticed. "I wonder…"

Melody watched him with wide eyes, hanging on to every word of theory from a person who understood temporal phenomena better than she could. There weren't any more words.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said, obviously lying. "It matters little, anyway."

"It matters lot!" Melody jumped to her feet. "I want to go home! But… not really, because maybe my family's dead, too? I don't… I don't want to know. I'd rather just wonder. I want to know if… If I could go home if I wanted to."

Loki had nothing to say to that. He watched her face for a small moment, then his gaze went down to his hands, and he squirmed awkwardly back against the couch. "I don't have answers, Melody. I don't think it'd be right to give you false hope."

"That's not fair!" Melody stamped her foot. Yes, it was immature, but she was desperate. "Any kind of hope is better than just not knowing anything!"

"I was just going to say that I wonder if the impact from the car crash broke the time and space continuum and sent you flying to a whole different reality," Loki finally admitted in a voice barely louder than a mutter, then looked back up at her with a reproachful look. "But you can't expect that to happen again if we put you in another crash."

"Yeah, that's not even false hope," Melody admitted. "That's just dangerous. But it would mean I'm not dead."

"True." Loki rubbed his lip thoughtfully. "That's good news, I hope."

"Duh," she answered, and sat back down. "I was afraid this was…"

"Hell?" The suggestion was morbidly cheerful, she couldn't hold back the snort.

"Some sort of afterlife, yeah." She shrugged. "What's special about me though? Why do I break reality? I've never heard of that happening, before."

"Extremely lucky, is my guess. It really was just a random theory. I was thinking aloud."

They shared a moment of shared bewilderment, and Melody was tempted to voice her concerns about her family. It wasn't a good idea, there was no way Loki would know whether they were okay, and it'd probably just put her in a puddle of tears within a minute.

"If it's a movie, then you don't know what'll happen for the whole rest of the film," Loki pointed out.

Melody furrowed her eyebrows. "No, I know what's coming next."

"No, you don't," he repeated. "Because I'm not in prison. And you said things were different even before then. What was different?"

Melody hesitated a second, unsure if it was okay to tell him. "Well… your mom. She left when Odin told her to in the movie. And she was there at the start of the trial, not the end. It's a little thing, I think."

"That's a little thing?!" Loki was laughing far too hard for Melody to not get just a little miffed. "Melody! You didn't keep me out of prison, in that case. If that's what was different, I wasn't going to be in prison anyway. When Mother feels up to accusing Odin of child abuse? No, there's little that stands in her way when she's that angry."

"Oh," Melody said, and sunk into the couch in disappointment. He had a point, but she'd thought she'd had a bigger role in Things Turning Out Better than she had.

"Then… this is an entirely different timeline."

"That's what I'm saying, yes," he agreed. "You have no idea what's going to happen next because the movie is obviously inaccurate."

"Or it might just be a different timeline," she suggested, very sure that she didn't want to give off the impression that the MCU could in any way be inaccurate in the first place. "The movies talk about those. We get to see a few."

"Ah, then this is just an iteration of the movie that you haven't seen," he hummed, "which would also mean that the universe you came from is also an iteration of the movie, just one in which the movie is a movie, and not reality."

Melody's jaw dropped. That meant she was canonical to the MCU. That's something she hadn't thought of, before. "Woah," she breathed.

Loki seemed rather amused that this came as such a shock. "If that's the case, how did the story go? What comes after me being in prison?"

"Well, there's the Dark Elves' invasion," she began, not expecting this to surprise Loki as much as it did. She'd forgotten that for her, these events were as commonplace and natural to her as breathing, but at this point, Loki was under the impression that all the Dark Elves were dead, killed by his grandfather. This was probably why he was wheezing in shock.

"What?!" He demanded the moment he had enough breath to.

"Yeah, they aren't dead," she explained, as gently as she could. What exactly did breaking something lightly look like? Melody wasn't sure. She'd never really understood that turn of phrase. "And they come back to steal the Aether from Jane Foster so they can turn the whole universe dark. Fun times."

Loki said not a word, but stood up, stomped over to the fireplace in total silence. The outrage was palpable, although what, exactly, he was outraged about was a little unclear. Was it because Melody was so casual about this, or because he didn't like the idea of the whole universe being dark?

Very quietly, very slowly, he turned around with a carefully blank look. "Melody. How did Jane bleeding Foster get her hands on the Reality Stone?"

"She poked it because it was a glowy thingy inside a rock and she is a scientist." Melody hoped this explanation was good enough.

"How did she find it?" He shook his hands in exasperation. "I don't even know where it is."

"The Convergence opened a portal right to it," she tried again. She so desperately wished she was good at explaining things or telling stories.

Loki smacked his hand to his head in dismay, so she probably still wasn't doing well. "The Convergence!" He exclaimed, and promptly began pacing in a circle. "Of course. I knew that was coming up."

Suddenly, he halted in his tracks and turned back to her. "But why exactly do the Dokkalves want the Nine to be dark?"

Melody shrugged. "Fun? Amusement? Maybe they're planning a glowstick party? Or they're extremely offended by people wearing sunglasses?"

"Well that's…"

"Pretty bad writing, I know," she sighed. "The number of fix-it fics for Thor: Dark World as compared to the rest of the MCU is honestly pathetic. Second only to Infinity War."

"I… don't know what that means," he admitted, but didn't seem to care. He'd moved from his orbit around the center of the room and entered an adjacent room, where Melody could see him trailing his finger along the spines of a huge bookshelf, and he returned after a minute or so with a stack of books as tall as a toddler under one arm, pen clamped between his teeth, and several sheeves of paper in the other hand. He dropped the books on the floor next to the couch, and didn't even look up as he opened one and began to flip through it.

"For your information, this will be what Thor refers to as 'the boring part'. If you stick around, I'm going to ignore you until I've found what I'm looking for." Thankfully, he did spit out the pen to say this.

"What are you looking for?"

"A motive," he replied. "Why the Dokkalves would want to do this in the first place. Beyond that, information on the Convergence to keep Jane Foster from poking her nosy scientist fingers where they don't belong, if possible. Information on the Dokkalves in general, historical battle strategy, weaknesses, that sort of thing. Now you really do either need to be quiet or leave."

Melody opened her mouth to point out that the invasion was not the only event of Thor: The Dark World, but Loki had already tuned her out and was muttering under his breath about biological photonegativity, or something. Whatever smart people read about.

There was another moment with nothing audible but flipping of paper and the scratch of pen on paper before Melody got bored enough to go find someone else to amuse her.

She had plenty of time to tell Loki the rest of the events of the movies, and for that matter, there were some events that wouldn't be useful to him, anyway. Telling him his mom might die in the invasion might just cause him to freak out and not do as well with whatever research needed to be done. Plus, telling him about his faking his death and claiming the throne would be sort of pointless. He had less incentive to do that in the first place, now.

Maybe she'd tell him later, after it was too late to send Odin to live in a retirement home. It was kind of funny, after all.

TheOnlyHuman