Hot, happy and very drunk, Loki wore the face of Odin still as he tried to remain upright, staggering a little in his walk towards his chambers. He dismissed the handmaidens with a wave of his hand, shed the glamour and stripped his tight leather robes from his body before falling face first onto his bed and giggling a bit.

He had a lot of things to say about the Allfather, but one of the more pleasant ones was that he could hold his drink a lot better than Loki could.

He struggled to pull a sheet up over him, dragged his head up in the general direction of the pillow and closed his eyes, partly in an attempt to fall asleep but mostly just to stop the room spinning. Loki always slept better after alcohol with a bedmate, he mused vaguely, it was a shame his was a realm away… he could do with someone to…

"Lejemand."

His eyes snapped open and he jerked awake, then spun over so he was propped up on his elbows. "Mouse?" he called out with his eyes narrowed.

"You said you were lonely, didn't you?" a thrillingly familiar voice whispered in his ear, and he felt her slender body press up against his back. Her lips were hot on the side of his neck- no cold piercing tonight, then- and he let out a soft moan. "I came to help."

"Let me see you," he demanded, and obediently the presence behind him vanished and Gwen appeared in front of him, lounging on the bed with a glittering smile. "You look…"

She was dressed in black satin, and her hair was long - it looked as though someone had drained the sky at dusk of its colour and braided it over her shoulder. Magnificently wrought Aesir jewellery clung to her neck and ears, and from what he could see in the gloom there was not a scar nor blemish on her body.

She looked Asgardian.

Her smile was all-white, no silver. She leaned back as he crawled forward and straddled her, the cloth of her dress so fine he could see her heart hammering beneath it. Fine and easily torn, he discovered, ripping it from her body and running his fingers over her flawless china skin, her stomach smooth and flawless. The beads of her necklace danced across her chest when he pulled her closer and her hips bucked against his as, finally, he kissed her.

But it felt wrong. She was like putty in his hands, and Gwen was only ever iron. He opened his eyes after the kiss to see that she was staring over his shoulder, her own gaze glassy. "Mouse?" Her mouth opened a little, and a trickle of blood carved its way down her chin. "Gwen!"

She shook like a ragdoll. Her body wasn't resisting because it was dead, or dying at least- he laid her down and saw the gaping red hole over where her heart should be, felt her blood on his own body. "No, no, no," he muttered, then leaped back in shock- she writhed up onto her back as a snake rose out of her, slick with gore, its tongue darting as it tasted the air and wound its way towards him-

He jerked awake with a yell, scrambled out of bed and tripped over the sheets, glancing over his shoulder to check it was empty before dragging himself to a drawer, yanking out the false base, pulling out a key, crossing to another drawer, unlocking it and grabbing one of the familiar purple crystals he had stored inside it months ago.

He had barely managed to stand upright by the time the world reassumed itself in the shape of Gwen's Midgardian bedroom. He smashed the lamp as he attempted to turn it on, gave up and reached out for the arm extended over the mattress, grabbing it and yanking her towards him as he knelt at the side of the bed and did his best not to throw up.

"Oi!" She had pulled a knife, but dropped it as she saw who it was. He frisked her, checking to make sure her only wounds were old ones and pulling apart the shirt she slept in to make sure there were no reptiles trying to climb out of her. "What the hell're you doing?"

His hands moved to her face, brushing against her septum ring. "Talk to me," he said urgently, "say something- say something you."

"But-"

"Now!"

"Jesus, fine!" She grabbed his wrists and dragged him down. "You ever heard of Cleopatra? Old Egyptian queen, she-"

That was Gwen enough for him; he clutched her to his chest and buried his face in her bony shoulder, relishing her familiar smell of city fumes and acrid sweetness mixed with that earthy Midgardian smell. "I love you," he mumbled. There was something else to her smell beneath all that, though: a warmth such as he had not felt since he was a child.

"I should expect so, but what happened?" she asked him, still sounding very sleepy as she stroked his hair in the exact same way Frigga used to. "You're drunk, ain't you? I can guess that much."

"Nothing," Loki said quickly. He released her. "Tell me about Cleopatra."

Gwen gave him a suspicious look with one eye as she rubbed the other with her hand to try and banish the tiredness from it. "Fine, but summat's definitely up with you. So she was the last queen of this millennia-old kingdom, right? And she had affairs with two of the most powerful men in the most powerful empire at the world at the time, Antony and Caesar. But what's cool is that she doesn't go back with them to Rome- the empire, that is- nah, she uses 'em as allies and makes sure that her sons inherit part of the Roman empire, and she doesn't… she never becomes theirs."

"Is this further reason for you not coming to Asgard with me, mouse?"

"Kinda. I mean- you can treat women as your trophy, or whatever, or you could actually view them as equals and let them have their own kingdoms, which means the pair of you effectively get two. So no, I'm never gonna be your queen, posh boy. Besides, can you imagine if we had to put up with each other all the time? We'd both be dead within the month."

"Cleopatra," Loki asked, tracing patterns on her bare thigh with his thumb, "did she have a happy ending?"

"God, no. They all died- Caesar got stabbed by a load of politicians, and Antony and Cleopatra both killed themselves. Wossisname wrote a play about it. Shakespeare." She looked at him. "Can I carry on talking?"

"Please do."

"I… it gets easier," she said, her tone more serious now. "Death. In films and books and stuff, people always say dealing with it never gets easier, but it does- even killing, too. And it's scary, because- I dunno how to word it…"

"You're scared that you will find yourself slipping," Loki finished for her, "each kill requires just slightly less reason than the last, and one day you'll wake up and there will be blood on your hands for no reason at all."

"It's been a bad week. I almost killed one of my Rats for being just as weak as I used to be, and it was... scary. I don't want to become this, this thing that doesn't feel anything."

"Would you rather the grief tore you apart like it has done before?" he asked her. "Like with Lucy, like with… with everything else?"

"No," she said, "of course not."

"You have to let it get easier, mouse, or the pain will drive you insane and the end result will be the same lack of conscience anyway. The numbness you feel, the walls you build inside yourself, you need them as armour to deal with the world, every time blood falls and it gets just a little more terrible. You need only learn when to shed the armour."

"You talk like you know from experience."

"I do. I reached the point where to kill was as easy as to breathe years ago, and I nearly burned your world to ash because of it. I wasn't there to stop my mother being slaughtered because of it… and yes, now I have what I always desired and more to boot, but I have more blood on my hands than was really required. Not to mention my family thinks I'm dead. Again."

"My heart bleeds," she teased him, and he flinched at the memory of the nightmare.

"Gwen," he said slowly, "you haven't had anything to do with snakes recently, have you?"

"Literally? No. Metaphorically and symbolically? Way too much. Feel like giving me some context?"

"It was a dream," he said, "just a dream." He took the lull in conversation to kiss her, far more gently than he did normally, savouring her thin, chapped lips.

"Hell of a dream, then. And I love you too, you weird drunk alien."

He laughed weakly. "Your rhetoric never ceases to amaze."

Her thumb brushed lightly against his temple; he wasn't used to anyone being so gentle with him, as though he was breakable, something that needed to be protected. He certainly had never expected to be treated in such a way by a mortal, but this was Gwen. She was the exception that proved the rule. His head had fallen downwards onto her shoulder again and her legs were resting lightly on either side of his waist - there was no ulterior motive here. The simple act of being held was enough.