mylyz: Role reversal day! The two princes decide to teach the women how to defend themselves with ordinary objects found in the lab - no tasers.
shorinai: The card was rejected? Uh-oh, money troubles. Maybe it's time for someone to explain to the boys that food isn't cheap and they eat a lot. While Loki's pulling his weight working with Jane, maybe Thor should find a way to help pay for all they've been consuming. (i.e. job-hunting!Thor)
Wherein Thor and Loki inadvertently start a gambling ring in Puento Antiguo. (Humor. PG.)
Fernanda feels like maybe she crossed an ethical line somewhere awhile back, though she's not quite sure where it was. Strangers in a small town require observation, and when there's free porn you can't be expected to look away…
But then there's… this.
On the other hand, the bar's profits haven't been this good in the last three years. A woman has to pay the bills.
And if the scientist, her intern, and the cabrones brothers didn't want an audience, they really shouldn't have made themselves so interesting in the first place — and then they shouldn't do what they do out in broad daylight.
Still. Ethical line.
Fern will think it over when she counts the till later tonight. "Final call," she shouts. "Speak now, or forever hold your peace!"
"¡Treinta y cinco!" Manuel pulls a five dollar bill out of his pocket and passes it to Fern. "¡No, no, seis!"
She makes a quick note of his bet. Manuel has a soft spot for Darcy, and it's costing him a lot of money today. But, hey, it's his cash. No business of Fern's how he blows it. "All right, that's it! Are they ready?"
"Looks like!" someone calls.
Fern's clientele look out the front window across the street, watching the four figures in the dusty yard between Jane Foster's trailer and her laboratory.
Darcy and Thor step close to each other. Darcy raises a six-inch blade. Thor, unarmed, smiles.
As Darcy takes the first swing, Fernanda clicks her stopwatch.
"Block with your forearms," says Loki, circling the fight with a critical eye. "You're not quick enough to dodge. Then slash back with your left— your other left, Darcy Lewis—"
"Shut up!" Darcy flinches away on instinct as Thor feigns a swing at her face. "That's not fair, Loki was distracting me!"
"It matters not. Asgardians fight with honor," says Thor, easily dodging her awkward lunge with the kitchen knife, "but very few other realms do."
Loki snorts. "The honorable Asgardian tale is a myth. Given an excuse any one of them will knock your mortal teeth from your head. Now, when his arms are raised like so, turn the dagger and strike for the liver—"
But Darcy can't do it. She's just not the stabbing type.
Then she's flat on her stomach, hacking grit out of her mouth.
Fern hits the watch. "Twenty-nine point five one," she calls. "Round up to thirty. Cherry Beth!"
Cherry Beth, hair to match her name, hoots as the handfuls of bills come her way. Eli, who had twenty-nine seconds, throws his fiver in disgust. Fern's going to have to toss him out if his manners don't improve.
"Are they going again?"
"I think they're taking a break!"
A chorus of boos.
"I don't see why I can't bring my taser with me," grumbles Darcy as Thor helps her to her feet. "It's not like the TSA's going to search my bags, right?"
Loki and Thor give her identical confused looks, and she sighs. Yeah, there's sense to this whole self-defense thing, even here on Earth, but that doesn't make it fun. This is why she bought a taser instead of taking a kickboxing class.
"Your weapon needs an electrical charge to function, does it not? I think you'll find plug outlets difficult to come by in Asgard."
"Yeah, yeah." She hates it when Loki's logical. Or maybe she's just bitter because he's the one who told her to use a knife instead of a crowbar, which would have been her next choice. She used that on a creep in a parking lot once. Worked really well.
Once Jane finds one of those wormholes, this whole realm-jumping thing is going to be a really awesome vacation. Even better than that time Darcy's high school art history class went to Rome for a week.
But she doesn't like the knife.
"I don't want to hurt you," she mutters to Thor as he brushes the sand off her back.
He grins at her. "You are a very quick learner, Darcy Lewis, but I have had many centuries of training under the greatest masters in the history of the Realm Eternal. It is not an insult to say you have no chance of striking me with your weapon."
"I could do it by accident," she insists. She knows he's telling the truth, but… it's not fair to him, but she's used to thinking of Thor as just a little bit helpless. This is a guy she had to teach about microwaves, for God's sake. She doesn't want to stab him in the gut.
"I give you my solemn oath that you won't. Look, I'll show you." Thor motions at Loki, who raises an eyebrow. "Come, brother. Take her knife."
Darcy frowns, but Loki just groans. "We're not starting this again, are we?"
"For demonstrative purposes only."
"You really expect to face me while I wield a blade — yourself weaponless — and come out unscathed. Your ego knows no bounds, Thor."
"If it helps, I would suggest no such thing were you not still lame in the arm."
"I beg your pardon? I am hardly lame."
"Then prove it." Thor winks at Darcy, who, already kind of fidgety from all her own fighting, doesn't like the sound of this at all. "With a dagger in his hand, Loki is one of the finest combatants in all the nine realms. Even without his magic, I imagine. When he cannot land a blow, will you be satisfied that I am safe from you, Darcy Lewis?"
Like it matters what Darcy says now. Loki's already taking off his suit jacket, a creepy kind of smile on his face. "You understand," he says, "that you've left me with little choice but to sever a tendon. Perhaps two."
"Imagine what you will, brother."
Oh, great.
She hands Loki the knife and retreats to where Jane's pacing with her cell phone. "Our pets are about to kill each other," she informs Jane.
Jane just waves her off.
Darcy hopes for her sake that the goodbye sex was really awesome.
"Holy shit."
"Holy shit."
"Holy shit."
"Double for entry on this round," Fern calls over the sudden din, pulling the phone close in case they need to dial 911 in a hurry. (Not that it would matter: Mickey's cruiser is parked out back, and the cop himself is by the window thumbing through his wallet.) "Time and winner. ¡Rápidamente!"
In twenty seconds over two hundred dollars are on the bar.
Darcy doesn't scare easily. Never has. Sure, sometimes she gets freaked out — like when they found Thor staggering around in the desert like a crazy drunk homeless person and she'd had no choice but to zap him — but overall she's pretty laid back. She likes to think so, anyway.
But this is a little different.
"Jane, you've got to make them stop," she says, watching as Loki spins and swipes again and again. Thor keeps blocking with his forearms the way Darcy was supposed to be doing, and he was right, it's pretty obvious that Loki's right arm is a little stiff. That's the only reason Thor's not been sliced to ribbons. "Loki will knock it off if you tell him to."
If Jane has the slightest idea of what's going on — that is, the hardcore knife fight going on twenty feet away — she doesn't acknowledge it. She just claps a hand over her exposed ear and keeps yelling something about delayed payments into her Android.
Typical. Darcy is so going to renegotiate the number of credits she gets for this internship. "Okay, guys, you've made your point," she shouts. "You're both big tough badasses, all right? You can put the rulers away now."
Thor takes a kick to the ribs that makes him reel back. Without a pause Loki flips the knife to his left hand, swinging for his brother's throat—
—Darcy screams—
—and Thor sweeps Loki's feet out from under him before the blade can do more than nick his jaw.
Loki hits the ground with a groan. Thor drops to his knees at the same moment, clutching his ribs and gasping for air.
"It's a tie!" Fern shouts as her patrons start arguing. She sweeps the money off the counter and into a drawer. "House wins!"
The bar fight that follows is, if anything, worse than the one outside.
"You are morons," Darcy seethes, standing over them both with her hands on her hips. "You freaked me out. Do you know how much I hate being freaked out? A whole, whole lot. You are jerks."
Both the idiot brothers are still on the ground. "I drew blood," grunts Loki.
"I… would hardly… call that… blood," says Thor, wheezing.
"I'm getting the Mace," Darcy declares. She has to declare it loudly, though, because there's some kind of commotion going on in the bar across the street. Sound really carries in this town. "Maybe a face full of pepper spray will teach you both. Idiots!"
She hates being freaked out.
As she goes to open the door of the lab, though, something goes wrong. The lights flicker off. The screens of the computers go blank. The hum of Jane's equipment — funny, Darcy'd never really noticed a hum before — disappears. "Hey, what the hell just happened?"
And Jane finally lowers her cell. She's pale as a ghost. "Our check bounced," she says. "Again. They've cut our power."
Darcy blinks. "It'll be kind of hard to track all that wormhole stuff without electricity."
"You think?"
A chair crashes through a window across the street.
"I won, brother," says Loki, still unable to get off the ground. "Concede it, and I will not sever your tendon as I promised."
Thor just rolls over and punches him in the ribs.