The first night without Loki was pretty bad. The second night was worse. Darcy took to lumping her pillows into a man-shape and sleeping on what would be it's chest. It didn't help much. They were too soft, they didn't smell like him, and she couldn't hear his heart beating through them. But she could fool herself sometimes in the middle of the night, and so she kept doing it.

At work she and Jane went back to a sort of placid, quiet friendship. Everything that used to irritate Darcy before about Jane became pretty unimportant. She found it easy to overlook things because she was daydreaming about Loki. Even Tumblr lost some of it's appeal.

She cried for the first week, and then nothing. She just felt hollow. Like she was missing some really important Loki-shaped part of herself, and it became hard to do anything except obsess over the past and what she might have done differently, what she might have said to make him stay.

And why hadn't he asked her to come with him? That was the question she dwelt on the most. He had definitely cared about her- there was no way that he'd just faked liking her for so long. But he'd never said he loved her. Though, she'd never actually said that either, but she'd thought he'd known...

Had he not wanted her to come back with him? It had sounded like he'd implied that if she wanted to go to Boston she should come see him, but it was all so confusing- what did that even mean? Would it be like a vacation? Did he want her to move in with him if she went to Boston? Was he even being sincere or was it like when you graduated high-school and people would say, "We'll totally hang out this summer!" and then you never saw them again.

By the end of October Darcy knew she had to do something. She didn't want to wallow in self-pity anymore. Drinking held no appeal for her, but people went to bars to meet people, yeah? She didn't really want to meet anyone else, but it seemed like something that just needed to happen.

So she got all dressed up the first Friday of November and went to a bar. It was weird inside. Loud, crowded, full of people she didn't care about and didn't want to talk to. The scent of alcohol was overwhelming. It felt like a mistake almost immediately, but she stayed because she didn't want to just give up. I'll just stay for an hour, she promised herself. Then she could go home and watch funny movies and try to be cheerful.

She sat down on a stool by the bar, ordered a beer, and spent the next forty minutes pushing the straw she'd asked for around the edge of the mug pretending there was a whirlpool inside it and a piece of ice-cube was a ship sailing for new lands. She would have made up names and back-stories for the crew except that some guy pushed past her as she was checking the time and her phone, impossibly, landed in her mug of beer.

"Oh fuck!" she exclaimed quietly to herself. Loki's number was in there! "Fuck, fuck, fuck." She fished it out quickly and snagged a bunch of napkins from the dispenser on the counter. It was no good. Her phone wouldn't turn on. Her already low spirits sank even further. She had no connections left to Loki now.

"I am sorry," came a deep voice from behind her.

Darcy looked up, in no mood for making conversation. Ugh. It was the man who'd killed her phone. Murderer, she thought uncharitably. He's probably a terrible person. She shrugged her shoulders to let him off the hook, and turned her attention back to her phone. Maybe there was some way to save the memory card? She would take it to Radioshack or something, but she didn't hold out much hope.

"Excuse me," the voice again. Son of a bitch!, she thought. I do not want to have to talk to him.

"What?" she snapped as he sat down on the stool next to her.

He was a huge man. Really muscled. Almost freakishly so. And he had this weird shoulder-length wavy blond hair-thing going on. So not her type, even before Loki. She'd always gone for the more nerdy, slim guys. He looked like he was a huge wrestling fan.

"You are very beautiful," he said, his face apologetic and almost puppyish, "and I just wanted to say again that I am sorry about your phone. I wish to heaven that I had not been responsible for this."

"Yeah," Darcy said testily. "Don't worry about it. It's fine." And she tried to ignore him. But he kept talking! What the fuck! He was not good at taking hints.

"Can I get you something?" He asked. She made no response. It felt kind of mean, but then- he'd just killed her phone, and she didn't want to talk to him.

"It's loud in here. Do you want to go somewhere?" Yes she did. Home. But she still had fifteen minutes left in her hour. Really, it shouldn't be a big deal to just skip out earlier seeing as she was miserable- but the whole point had been that she should get out of the house. So she stayed.

"You seem like the quiet type," he kept going, unperturbed by her stony silence. Dude, she thought. I'm really not. "I like that. Silence becomes a woman."

"Excuse me?" Darcy could not just let that one go. "What the fuck did you just say?"

He just grinned. "Got you," he said. "I knew you talked."

Darcy shook her head, amused despite herself. She felt kind of bad now. He seemed like a nice guy. She felt compelled to explain herself to him. And why not? She was in a bar. This was what normal people did, yeah?

"Sorry," she said. "My boyfriend and I just broke up a few months ago. I guess I'm taking it pretty hard." She swirled the straw around her mug and sighed in exasperation with herself. "But it's been like sixty days! I should be over this, right?"

The man just studied her, his head cocked to the side. He seemed interested though, so she didn't make herself stop. All the things she'd been bottling up inside came tumbling out.

"I just miss him so much. Which is crazy, first of all, because we knew each other for three months! Three months. That's it! Well, maybe three and a half. But that's not a long time! We were probably still even in the honeymoon phase. But he was only here for the summer, and now he's back home and I'm still here and he didn't ask me to come back with him." She looked up at the man next to her. "Why didn't he ask me to come back?" Good god, her voice sounded bewildered and hurt even to her.

"I do not know," big guy said, staring intently at her.

She kind of got the feeling that he knew more about her than what she was saying. He had this almost knowing look in his eyes. But she shook the thought off. That was ridiculous; she was just imagining things. Remembering vaguely how she was going to give ice-cube seamen back-stories, she admitted to herself that she had quite an active imagination. Which was probably why she was having such a hard time figuring out just what Loki'd meant when he said that. "If Boston ever sounded appealing..." Ugh. She wished she could just forget about it.

"Maybe you should call him. Ask him."

Darcy laughed shortly at that and held up her phone sadly. He looked slightly guilty. "No, don't worry about it. Really," Darcy said. "I'm probably just making something out of nothing." The more time went by without Loki, the more she doubted that she was remembering things correctly. He just couldn't have been as perfect as she remembered.

The big guy looked like he wanted to say something, but stopped himself. Darcy glanced at her watch. Yes! She could leave now.

"Well," she said, "It's been...weird, talking to you. But thanks. And sorry. And you're welcome. And I don't know what I'm doing now, so I'm just going to leave."

He nodded in acknowledgment and she walked out, feeling his eyes watch her as she left.

Thor sat at the bar and scrubbed a hand over his face. Well. That hadn't exactly gone as planned. He'd certainly met this Darcy person that Loki had been going on about, but she hadn't been what he'd expected. From what Loki said she was a vivacious, lively woman- but the girl he'd met was subdued and sad.

He felt really bad about her phone too. That had been an honest mistake. It really fucked things up, too, because he'd been trying to get her to call Loki. His stubborn brother refused to call her, yet if they just talked to each other, Thor felt sure they would come to some sort of closure. Loki wasn't doing so good back in Boston...

Thor sighed and downed his beer. Oh well. What was he even doing here? he wondered. Trying to help his estranged little brother, that's what. Fat lot of good he was doing, too. Since he was at a bar though- he walked over to the tiny little brunette that sat at a back table nursing a drink and pouring over some papers. She looked cute with her eyes squinting at something on those papers, all serious-like. Not his usual type, but something about meeting Darcy had him wanting something a bit farther from the young, giggling blondes he usually went for.

fyi I started writing a story for Thor and Jane that begins here.

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