Gwen sat back in her seat and surveyed her little Senate, convened in the well-insulated and officially abandoned warehouse. She had been watching the changes that had been made to the House of Lords back in the UK, watching and making notes on the old hereditary seats slowly being weeded out and replaced by people who were actually useful. And, in the underworld of New York, the same thing had been happening. She had found the most influential hitman, the dealer with the biggest patch, the old soldier who ran the New York mercenaries and so on, and given them a grant (with the threat that if the money was used for pleasure rather than business that they would be losing the money again, along with a couple of body parts) and a position of influence on this little council of important. Power and jurisdiction they now had, tied unbreakably to the responsibility of managing their respective fields just as Gwen wanted them to, and they were more loyal to her than they had been any old mob boss. And, meanwhile, the heads of the old crime families found they were having to work harder to keep their place on the table. And now she had her own little government, a dark and better-managed shadow of the one on the other side of the law.
Take Granny Moll, for example - the head of what Gwen chose to refer to as the "working women" and, at a push, the toms, although often while blushing. She had run a big brothel, not the biggest, although the one kindest to its girls and the best at paying it's taxes. Now there wasn't a hooker in Harlem (or, sacrificing the alliteration, the whole city) that wasn't looked over by her and the Agony Aunts - a clique of frumpy women who made for better security than the black suited agents of the President. STI rates had plummeted too, because nobody argued with the toms about contraception when there was an Agony Aunt waiting to smash their legs in with an umbrella should they say no.
Oh, they didn't like her very much. She heard the whispers better than they did. That Mouse had some nerve, coming over here and going from a nobody junkie to thinking like she owned the place. Sure, the mob had more business than ever, but nobody liked taking orders from a small woman with pink hair. But through hard work she had become respected, and it helped that those who were not capable of respect were shit scared of her. But they still complained about the taxes.
"I resent the notion," Bochelli said, from his new position on the "dregs" end of the council table. "My family makes a voluntary contribution, of course, but to compare us to the common man by -"
"Let's call a spade a spade, shall we, my good man?" Gwen said, to a small murmur of laughter. "You pay taxes, or one way or another you leave this city."
"One way or another?"
"I am known for my creativity," she replied. "Aren't I creative, Ben?"
"Veritable van Gogh, Mouse."
"Cheers. There's no room in the new mob for your pride, Don Bochelli. I know several up-and-comers in the five families whose egos aren't so big they need to book two seats on the plane."
He flushed red. "I'm not expendable, you know."
Gwen steepled her fingers. "Oh," she said, "really? Do tell me more."
She waited, tapping the heel of her shoe against the cement floor. Click, it went, click, click, click, click…
Click.
"I have contacts," Bochelli blurted out. "And – and if you kill me, there'll be a riot. People love me. They won't let you do this."
"How interesting. Anything else?"
Click. Click. Clickclickclick –
"Martoni would never do this! He would never have the nerve, the impudence, the – the – how dare you assume that I'm – that you're – would you stop with the god damn tapping, you sour-faced bitch!"
Someone gasped. It seemed louder than it in fact was, since everyone else had stopped breathing.
Gwen smiled at him, smiled so wide there was silver. She rested her foot flat on the floor and leant back in her chair, body language going from expectant to satisfied in a heartbeat. She had won. Everyone in the room knew it, even if they weren't quite sure how.
"Is something the matter?" she asked. "You seem a little on edge recently. I'm worried about you, Bochelli. We all are."
Quick on the uptake, the rest of the room nodded. You had to love backstabbers; they were the involuntary electors of emperors. It was the Ides of March all over again. Fear. That's all you needed. Fear, and the illusion of being in control.
"No," he replied, breathing heavily. "Of course there isn't."
"Stress is perfectly natural. We all love you, don't we? We all want the best for you. Perhaps you should take a break – Ben, organise a nice break for Mr Bochelli, somewhere nice and quiet. Isolated, I suppose you could say. Where nobody will bother him. Everyone will be so happy that you're putting yourself first. In fact, you could probably even take a nice, early retirement and they'd applaud you on a job well done. We can buy you a cottage in Kentucky, if you like. You can spend your dying days there. Wouldn't that be nice?"
Everyone was looking at him.
"What if… what if I don't want to take a break?"
"Oh, Mr Bochelli. I'm afraid what you want doesn't really come into the matter."
Bochelli's second leaned in and whispered something in his boss' ear. There followed half a minute of hushed and furious arguing, after which the man turned back to Gwen.
"I'll pay the taxes," he said. "A spade is a spade, as you say."
"So glad we could come to this arrangement peacefully," Gwen said, still with the same brilliant smile. "The cottage in Kentucky's always there if you want it."
An hour or so later, when the meeting had finished, Gwen ran her fingers over the knackered old desk chair that had held the arses of every mob baron for the last fifteen years and smirked.
"People've died in that chair," Ben told her with a grin as the last stragglers left the meeting, and she lifted her shoulder.
"Clearly, they weren't as smart as I am."
"I think it might have gone to your head a little bit."
"Nah," she said, "I was always this vain. Now I just got a reason for it. How're the books?"
He pulled a heavy ledger stuffed with paper towards him, since Gwen had put her foot down about digitalising it. "Sound and solid," he replied, "the amount of revenue we've redirected from profit to community is… stunning, actually. Dunno what we spent it all on before."
"Drugs and hookers, Ben. Drugs and hookers."
He nodded. "That sounds about right. How's Peaches?"
"She's good. Vicious little shit, but good. Nobody'll pick my pockets and get away with it."
"Doubt they could anyway, Pinky."
"Good answer," she laughed. "You know what's weird, though? I was paranoid that once I'd got this, I'd still want more. Like- like power would corrupt me, or summat. But it hasn't. Like, I've got what I want and I'm happy with it." She leaned back in the chair and looked up at the shadowy ceiling. "My life is pretty good right now, touch wood. I don't feel like I want anything else, y'know?"
"You're rambling, Mouse."
"Right, sorry." She yawned. "Gotta go interrogate a guy, now. Some dealer who's been selling dodgy shit to people who don't deserve it, and I wanna see where he's getting it from."
"Can't you get someone else to do that?"
"Nah, I want to. Nice to get my hands dirty every once in a while," she explained, "sometimes literally."
%
"Morning, miss," James said as she shuffled into the kitchen with bare feet and make-up smudged from rubbing her eyes.
"What? What time is it?"
"About half five, miss. I'm off to work in a minute."
She groaned. "I wonder what having a normal sleep schedule's like."
"It's got a lot to recommend to it, miss. There's enough hot water left for a shower, if you want it."
"Cheers."
"No problem. You've got blood on your face, see. I figured you might want to wash it off. I'll see you later." He pecked her on the cheek that wasn't covered in bodily fluid, grabbed his coat from the hook on the door and hurried off to the hotel. Gwen grinned as she limped into the bathroom; not once in that last sentence had he called her "miss".
She fed Peaches and stuck her in a hamster ball so she could run around for a bit (not being quite as trusted as Algernon yet), stripped off her clothes with difficulty due to her aching joints and showered sat down in the bath, letting the near-scalding water beat down on her skin until it turned red. She sung as she rubbed shampoo in her hair, enjoying the sound of her terrible voice reverbating off the bathroom walls.
When the hot water ran out, she swaddled herself in a fluffy robe thing that James had appropriated from the hotel, stuck her head in downstairs to check everything was in order and returned to her old kitchen to find Loki sat on the side, next to a rattling coffee machine with his head leaning back against the cupboard and his eyes closed.
"You look like shit," she said, "and since when did you know how to use Muggle technology?"
"It isn't exactly complex," he said, still with his eyes closed, "and thank you for your concern as to my wellbeing."
"You're welcome. What's bugging you?"
"We apprehended the coven," he told her, opening his eyes as the coffee finished brewing. "Their trial begins next week."
"That's good, right?" she asked, pulling out two mugs and skidding them across the counter towards him. "They're not, like, killing people anymore?"
He decanted the coffee and added a vein-clogging amount of sugar and milk to each. "Say there was a hypothetical child," he said, "a young girl, as a matter a fact. Say she had done hypothetically terrible things, but only because that was what her family instructed her to do."
"Hypothetically."
"Hypothetically," he agreed, downing half the mug in one and grimacing. "Gods, this is foul."
"You drink it for the caffeine, not the taste. Which I'm going to regret, considering I wanted to sleep today. Carry on telling me the hypothetical scenario."
"The penalty for these acts are death," he said, "so as to let the punishment fit the hypothetical crime. But the hypothetical child, she is…"
"Still a child," Gwen finished for him. "And no matter what she may have done, she's still got that look of innocence in her eye."
"The guards tell me she is terrified," Loki said, staring into the murky depths of his coffee, "and not just of them- of everything, including her supposed kin. And yet the people of Vanaheim, they cry for her blood. She was the cause of their own children's deaths."
"You're stuck between a diamond rock and a spike-covered hard place," Gwen said, "let me guess- you let her go free and there'll be a lynch mob anyway."
Loki nodded.
"It's not gonna be fun," she said softly, "but you're the king of them all. Kings have to make hard decisions, sometimes."
"I do not want a child's blood on my hands."
She smiled crookedly. "Look at you, with your conscience and your coffee. Proper domesticated, you are." She sat next to him, and nuzzled into his neck. "At least you're not slipping into psychopathy."
"Ah," he said, "a silver lining. How wonderful."
She elbowed him, and they sat in silence for a while. That was what Gwen liked best about their relationship- as much as she revelled in the arguments, the talking and the sex, it was the brief moments of stillness that set it apart from the rest of her life. "Loki?"
"Mouse?"
"I was just wondering," she said, "what you would've thought of me if you'd found me a couple years before you did. Back when I was still a dealer and a junkie myself."
"What brought that on?" he asked, finishing his now-cold drink with a single gulp.
"Met an old friend today. Well, not exactly a friend, but y'know. A guy. I cut his knees off, but I knew him from when I was doing the rounds. He'd sunk so low, enough that it made me sick to look at him, to think that I used to be something like that. I killed him just to get away from that feeling."
"Well," he said, "if I remember correctly, about that time was when I was hellbent on conquering your planet out of revenge for being shunned by my own family. I don't think either of us were much in a position for sentimental attachments."
"Fairs. We're lucky we met when we did. Plus, you obviously didn't fancy me when I was just a street rat, so you didn't look at me with sex-tinted spectacles until you got to know me as me. And I just didn't like you at first."
"Nor I you."
"Bullshit, everyone likes me. I'm a very likeable person."
"Don't forget humble," he said.
"Oh, I'm the most humble person you'll ever meet, me. Humbler than anyone."
"Except, of course, myself. It's my mild personality that led to Odin thinking I would be a terrible king."
She sniggered. "You're just too nice, you are. Bend over backwards to make everyone else happy, you never stick up for yourself."
"My only flaw."
"That, and you're terrible at sex. Very inexperienced."
"I know. I do, in fact, have a complex about it, as I'm sure you aware. It ties in with my shy and bashful nature."
"Loki?"
"Gwen?"
"You're a prick," she said, and he winked at her.
"What's the phrase you creatures use? Something about pots and kettles, if I remember correctly."
"Something like that." She rested her chin on his shoulder. "I'm sorry you have to do this shitty thing with the witch girl. Being king isn't as fun as it should be, huh?"
He slipped down off of the side. "Your puny Midgardian words do naught to comfort me," he teased her, and she rolled her eyes.
"Ah, go polish your duchesses or whatever it is you bourgeois bastards do nowadays. I'll still be here when you get back."
"I should hope so," he said as he pulled the crystal from his pocket, and she stuck her tongue out at him as he vanished.
A/N okay so a guest, GlindaGoddess, asked me a really good question in a review and since I can't answer because you're a guest, GlindaGoddess, I'll take it as a valid excuse to waffle in the notes. Basically, she asked where the plot was amongst all the banter. My answer: when I wrote this, I knew I wanted to try writing in a serial comic style; with arcs over set amounts of chapters but little events and things in each one. So you can divide this into arcs of separate plots: Lucy, the kid they lost, overthrowing Martoni etc, as well as smaller ones like when they go to Knowhere. The idea was that you can just go back and read your favourite short bits, like you do with comics, and it would work as like an ongoing thing you can dip in and out of, with underlying themes in it throughout (Gwen's thing with kids, rise of a new kingpin, Loki gradually becoming slightly less of a shit.) We're just now coming up into the final arc, since there's only a few chapters left. It sort of ties it all together, or at least I hope it does. Then, when Ragnarok comes out, I'll do a sequel as a separate story, which is just one plot rather than a series of loosely connected arcs. Also, I'm glad you like the banter.
Does that make sense? I hope it made sense. TLDR is that I wanted to make this ongoing and rather than thinking out a whole big thing I did a series of smaller things in a single story so it was easier to follow than clicking through the various documents. Also, I'm not a very good writer and I tend to meander a bit since planning is something I can never actually be bothered to do. But thanks for the love, all of you! Y'all are fab. Sorry for the long A/N, and how long it took to update. I love you.