Loki stumbled into class with as much subtlety as he could muster. He was, due to snow on the metro tracks and the city's pathetically under budgeted bus system, hideously late, and soaking wet, and he should have taken the Ninja.

He'd at least had the foresight to enter the lecture hall through the rear fire exit. It meant could deposit himself in the vacant back row with relative inconspicuousness.

It being the last day of term, the hall was fairly empty. Most of his peers had mooched off to Austria or Whistler or wherever while the flights were still cheap, figuring they had better things to do than cope with professors sloppily wrapping up courses they'd already achieved credits for. Several people turned to blink lazily at him as he snuck in, but for the most part they kept their eyes fixed glumly on the projector. Even Loki's chem professor seemed uninspired to carry on.

Loki figured it'd be a better use of his time to crack open his Notebook and start the evaluation for the prac he had to finish next period, to clear up his time over the holiday. His Chemistry classmates had initially found it a novelty that he would do Physics or programming work at the back of a class that seemed to waste most of its time covering and recovering chiral compounds, but this interest had worn off quickly. Thankfully.

The reason for Loki's having so much variance in his classes despite attending a British university was not so interesting anyways. He was simply on a Natural Sciences course with enough flexibility that it allowed him to study several separate sciences if he wanted, as well as a non-science subject in a minor stream.

Loki furrowed his brow and hid a yawn. This class was dull and he'd be glad to be rid of it. His professor was uninteresting. Chemistry was dull, and had been a mistake. He'd drop it at the end of the school year.

The coursework he was motoring away at was insipid too; everything he wrote down was more or less copied from his specification, or SparkNotes.

He trawled his way through the chem session and the resistivity practical after that, which he'd already done in 6th form college, ate quietly in the library and made sure he was early for his next, lit (blessed, blessed 19th century industrial literature) class, only to realize he'd left a satchel with half of his handwritten notes for the practical task lying around somewhere during the day.

Loki could have kicked himself. He needed those. And there wasn't enough time now to go searching for them before class started. So he'd have to waste the afternoon of his last day of school that year in the snow, trudging between departments and retracing his steps to find it. Of course.

Loki's afternoon class went much the same way as the morning ones, except now, were it possible, he was in an even dourer mood. He devoted his time to telling people to fuck off with as much effectiveness as possible using only his eyes. It was a honed trait. Not even the sight of eternally chipper Thor Odinson, when he ambled in sheepishly half an hour late, could brighten Loki's day. He had resolved to remain miserable.

Thor, although he probably didn't know it, was the closest thing Loki had to a friend in Midgard. That being said, their relationship hadn't extended past formalities in the hallways and Thor trying, once, to recruit Loki for some martial arts club he did after seeing Loki catch another student's tipped lunch tray without averting his gaze from a worksheet.

Angie was trying to encourage Loki to take this relationship to the next level – the big 'introduce yourself to him' – but Loki didn't know that it was worth it. In his experience, the closer you got to people, the more you realized that they were human, and flawed, and sometimes complete assholes, and then your idolized view of them crumbled. Far be it for Loki to know Thor as anything other than a winning goof with the body of a Greek god. He would content himself to sit behind Thor in class, eavesdrop on his conversations with those members of his closer friendship group who were in the same stream, and make eye contact with the back of his head for longer than was socially acceptable.

Their personalities probably didn't mesh well anyways.

Thor was deliberately tardy packing his things away after Dr Sitwell finished his lecture, and he could tell by the disproving look on Pepper and Natasha's faces that they knew exactly why. Steve glanced, confused, between the three of them, before raising his eyebrows in realization and giving a tired grin-slash-eye roll.

'You're ridiculous, Thor', he said, and then paused to try to find the right words. 'That guy-'

'He's an asshole.'

'Tash! Come on.' This was Pepper, glancing towards the back of the hall and waving at Natasha to lower her voice. Ever the interceder.

'What? He is. Thor, I don't know what your thing is with him. He's a rude prick. He's an Ice Queen. Do you have any idea how many of my girlfriends came to me crying during fresher's because of that guy?'

Thor was hoping that he could pout enough to inspire sympathy in Natasha, but she wasn't stupid and it wasn't working. No matter how pathetically he scuffed his shoes.

'No, listen, Thor, Tasha's right,' Pepper nodded. The traitoress. 'People like Loki… they…'

'They're born with a pretty face and they realize by the time they're potty trained that it means they'll never have to develop a personality to go with it. Or, alternatively, they don't realize that they do need to not be a total dick to everyone around them until it's too late. Or they never realize it at all.'

Thor gave up his bid for compassion and leaned back in his seat, arms folded. 'Natasha.'

'What do you see in him, Thor?' asked Pepper, now standing with the rest of them, clacking her nails on the desk. 'Why do you want to be his buddy so badly?'

Thor saw in Loki someone who was bright, and shy, and had put up barriers, and skipped class too frequently for it to be normal. But there was something else to him, too. He had an intrigue that Thor was shocked no one else noticed. Not to mention that he had the sort of face and body that Thor wouldn't mind having writhing underneath him. Not that he'd ever admit it out loud. Not that he was ashamed of it. Not- he- well, there it was. There was something about Loki that just overwhelmed Thor. Nobody he knew made him feel this much like an incapable child.

Thor pointedly ignored the others and gazed up to where Loki was clacking away at his laptop, cheek on palm. 'I'm gonna ask him.'

Natasha rolled her eyes, giving him a hopeless gesture before meandering off with Steve, who had already given up on the conversation and was chuckling to himself.

Pepper stayed. 'They invented eBay for a reason, you know', she pointed out, head cocked. Thor just flashed her that annoying grin that said he was going to do exactly what he wanted to do, which made Pepper scoff and slap him over the shoulder. 'Be that way, you ass,' she smirked, and then: 'See you at Tony's tonight.'

Thor listened to Pepper leave with the others, before scooping up his books and treading softly up the stairs.

Loki couldn't be bothered to go back to the library to consolidate his notes, seeing as it wouldn't take him over 20 minutes. It was peaceful enough where he was.

Or, it should be.

Five minutes after class had ended, and Loki was painfully aware that Thor's bunch was still chattering by the front entrance. What made it worse was that he couldn't pick up what they were saying, so he couldn't even judge them for it.

Ugh. People. Go away.

Sitwell was a joy to listen to, but some of the stuff he had to say was absolute rubbish. Everything was phallic according to him. Characters live in houses with chimneys? Chimneys look like dicks. Phallic imagery. Characters are human? Humans are long and sort of pointy. Phallic. It was ridiculously juvenile, and it irked him.

But what he really didn't get was what Sitwell had to say about interclass relationships in industrial cities. Even as the noise died down and Loki could engross himself properly in the material, it didn't make sense to him. Loki wasn't guileless or unaware; he just didn't understand where Sitwell was coming from with his points of view.

About 3 feet away from where he was sitting, somebody cleared their throat.

Loki, who had by now presumed himself to be totally alone, jumped straight out of his seat like a startled cat, only to land back in it on his ass, jaw hanging open in shock. Thor Odinson was standing directly in front of him, facial expression indicating that he was somewhere in between feeling concerned at the reaction and trying not to shit himself laughing.

Loki scoffed and tried to catch his breath, forcibly relaxing his shoulders and shutting his laptop lid. 'Thor! Ah. What is- I- you- can I…?' Nice, he thought. Perfect. He lamely gestured at Thor, surreptitiously starting to pack his things away at the same time. 'Can I help you?'

Thor twisted his lips in an obvious effort not to grin, before turning around slightly so he could indicate Loki's satchel, which hung over his, Thor's, shoulder. 'You left your books in the physics department earlier. The janitor had them.'

Loki's face blanked in surprise. 'What were you doing in Physics?'

'I…' Thor frowned as if he knew what he was about to say wouldn't be received well. 'Actually, I was looking for you.'

Loki's posture remained calculatedly neutral. Thor was right. This wasn't OK. It was creepy. Furthermore, Thor was, for all intents and purposes, practically looming over him. The apprehension in the pit of his stomach was beginning to coil into something significantly nastier. Loki was beginning to wonder whether he should have booked it to the library when he had the chance.

They were completely alone here. Loki was within Thor's physical reach. Why had Thor been looking for him in the SHIELD labs earlier? The Physics and English departments were just under 15 minutes away from each other on foot. Thor had known he would see Loki in a few hours anyways. Why did Thor have his things? Why had Thor deliberately remained after class to approach him when he was clearly occupied?

Thor seemed to have become aware of Loki's unease because he stopped and took a step back. 'Look, Loki. The reason I was looking for you… I wanted to…'

And then he paused, for far too long. Neither of them moved. Thor glanced around the room before returning his gaze to Loki. He was nervous, which was uncharacteristic of him. This was all wrong. Thor sighed, shrugged, and then took a breath. 'Can I ask you a question?'

No, no, no, no, no, Loki did not like where this was going. At all. He stood up, drawing himself up as much as he could next to Thor, who towered over him on a good day, and slung his rucksack across his shoulder. 'You could,' he remarked, nonchalantly. 'Or, alternatively, you could, you know, keep your nose out of other people's business, and know when to weirdly trail around strangers after class and when to fuck off.'

Loki took Thor's reaction to this – that was to say, Thor's utter shock - as an opportunity to twist himself smoothly through the gap between his classmate and the desk that ran across the entire row, following it to the end and walking smartly down the stairs. He made sure not to run until he was through the doorway and out of sight.

Loki darted down the corridor, blushing with adrenaline and embarrassment and close to tears.

He had no idea what he had just done, or why. All he knew was that he had to get out of there. He could hear Thor calling out to him, but that just spurred him on further. He practically tore out of the building, down a green and then across the empty street, now floodlit as the sun set. Already on one of the borders between campus and city, Loki took himself around the back of a local pub where the bins were kept, glancing behind himself only once, and crumpled against a wall.

He counted to 10 with his face in his hands, tried to stop shaking, and then swore once and told himself not to be so pathetic, and to get a move on. He lit a cigarette and smoked the whole thing. Then, he realized: it was snowing and he'd left his jacket back in the lecture theatre.

And his books. Thor had his books. Oh, God, what a mess. What an idiot he was.

Loki pinched the bridge of his nose and paced in a circle, glancing down at the ground in the hopes that it'd swallow him up, but to no avail.

Also, he was going to miss his bus. His shitty, humid, underheated, once-every-half-an-hour bus. Where, oh where was his beautiful little Ninja when he needed it? What was up with all this thrice-damned snow?

He could buy a new coat. He could get his coat from lost and found next term. There was no way on earth he was going to miss his bus to go and get his coat – and books - from Thor, who was probably still standing dumbstruck in the empty lecture theatre.

Fuck the books. He had electronic copies of almost everything at home. He probably had notes from the last prac he did. They were more or less identical.

He could forge the data. It's not like they were going to use it for anything important. He hadn't had any anomalies anyways. R is proportional to l. Big surprise. OK.

Everything was going to be OK. He'd just work around this. Coat, books, satchel. He wasn't forgetting anything else. He had his laptop. It would be fine. He would go home, and he would have a shower. Fine.

Waiting at the bus stop just a block away, Loki reflected that this day could probably not have been much worse if every supernatural force on Earth had linked efforts to make it so. He stood in the corner of the shelter with another cigarette between his lips, shivering, and stared at his phone, which had no new messages, until the bus came, 5 minutes late, right on queue.

Loki was the last on board, and as he stepped up to greet the conductor, shaking snow from his hair, something clicked in his mind and he froze in absolute horror.

This was it. This was the climax, the pinnacle, of his absolutely horrible fucking day. Loki couldn't get on the bus and he couldn't ride it home. Loki couldn't get on the bus because, since he knew he'd get free lunch from Ms Tarnaki in the forum, and because his rucksack was full, he'd left his wallet, with his money and his student's public transport pass in one of the card slots, in the outside pocket of the same satchel that had his prac notes in it, and was currently, probably, sitting on the shoulder of Thor Odinson.

Loki opened his mouth and closed it again, speechless for the second time that day. He took a deep breath.

Then he began to talk to the conductor. He didn't shout. He didn't whine. He just tried, very evenly, to get the woman to empathize with him. He started to explain himself. He would not say 'it's Christmas.' Even he wouldn't stoop so low. But either way, she wouldn't buy it. She was tough.

Loki was just about to resign himself to his fate when an arm reached over his shoulder to present the conductor with a pass. Obviously someone had come up behind him and then decided they'd waited enough. Hence Loki's surprise when, trying to wriggle his way off the bus and onto the pavement again, the conductor grinned condescendingly at him and took the card from whoever was behind him, handing it to Loki and waving him onboard. Loki made a puzzled face at the conductor and then a skeptical one at the pass.

Wait.

For a moment, it was if time itself had been drawn out, and Loki was damningly stuck in this moment. He became critically aware of every huff and shuffle, every impatient eye in the entire bus.

This was his. It was his pass. Which meant-

Loki felt sick to his stomach. Which meant that the person standing behind him was Thor.

He turned, face still comically incredulous, to face the blonde, who took the most apologetic inhalation of breath Loki had ever heard and handed him his coat and satchel.

Loki didn't move as Thor got off the bus. He was paralyzed with shame. Loki wasn't religious, but he was fairly sure that if God was real, when he died, he would go to hell. And in hell, Loki would have to relive this scene over and over again for the rest of eternity.

Thor, for his part, looked truly regretful, if a little amused, but as if he realized the situation was too serious to laugh at. He bowed his head softly and turned away, pausing once and briefly.

'Merry Christmas, Loki.'

And then the doors slid shut.

Loki walked to the end of the bus with a completely impassive expression. He sat down in the empty back row. He took out the file with his resistivity notes, cracked it open in the middle, and buried his face in it.

He didn't move until he reached his stop.