xvi.
"Got it, got it, got it!" The cat peeked between its paws and the light zipped away. "Don't got it! Curses!"
Loki chuckled. He had—quite by accident—discovered the cat's peculiar and rather amusing quirk a short while ago when he had been testing out a laser pointer. The cat had gone insane and had been chasing the little red light around the room ever since.
"Ha! Mine! Noooo—!"
The cat stopped skittering and flattened itself against the floor, eyes the size of moons as it stared at the dot. Its hind legs rocked, eyes growing even wider, and then it pounced, closing the nearly five feet of distance between it and the laser.
It was so utterly focused, Loki wondered if it was possible for it to notice anything else. This gave Loki an idea.
Thor smiled approvingly at Loki as he walked past, playing with his cat.
…
Playing with his CAT?
Thor spun around midstride and stared as Loki and his cat vanished around a corner. He didn't know what was going on, but it most certainly was intended to be fatal for the cat.
Thor followed after them, but of course when he reached the corner Loki and the cat were gone.
Loki naturally didn't want Thor to spoil his plan—the other Asgardian had a tendency of doing that—so for a few moments he hid himself and the hysterically distracted cat, then continued on to his destination.
Loki would have thought the sound of running water would have alerted the cat, but strangely enough it didn't.
"Movingmovingmoving—still! Haha, stupid dot, you're still!"
The cat leaped, and then with a shocked yowl it went plummeting down a waterfall.
Loki laughed. This latest scheme had actually caught the cat by surprise, and who knew? Maybe that was the key to killing the aggravating animal.
Satisfied, Loki went back to his quarters. On his way there, Thor stopped him and worriedly asked after the cat's state of health. Loki grinned at him.
"I tricked it into jumping down a waterfall," he told the inquiring Aesir. Thor lost possession of all the blood in his face, and Loki went off cheerfully whistling.
The cat dragged itself in a few hours later, bedraggled and soaking wet. Loki sighed at the fact it was still alive, but at least it looked upset.
"Do you, Loki Laufeyson, have any idea how much cats hate water?" the cat demanded.
Loki smirked at it. "I do now."
The cat sloshed off to dry itself out in the sun. Loki found a batch of live eels in his sheets that night.
Thor teased him about his girly scream for weeks. The cat outright mocked.
xvii.
"Thor!" one of the Véurr burst into the hall. "The Casket of Ancient Winters is gone!"
Thor shot upright in alarm, spinning away from his father. "How can this be!" he exclaimed. "No Frost Giant has come here."
"Nevertheless, my lord, it is gone."
Thor sent Mjolnir in an arc around his wrist and used the hammer to fly off the edge of the balcony. He reached the end of the Rainbow Bridge just in time to see the Bifrost activate and meet Heimdall outside the observatory, frozen inside a cube of ice.
Thor sighed. "Loki again?"
Heimdall wasn't able to speak, but his eyes clearly said something along the lines of Well, who else would it be?
Meanwhile on Jotunheim, Loki was using a tool he shouldn't have ever gotten his hands on to carve a gigantic hole through the surface of the frozen world. The cat watched in boredom from its barred cage.
"So, what are you trying now, Loki?" it inquired. "Living burial in ice?" It somehow managed to cock an eyebrow, despite Loki's initial thought of it not having any. "I thought you Asgardians preferred pyres. Maybe it's a Frost Giant thing."
"Why would I give a mortal's shoe about what Frost Giant traditions are?" Loki grunted as he focused the Casket's energy further.
"Well, I'm sure I don't know. Why would you have a mortal's shoe?"
Loki stopped, blinking at the snow-swirled space in front of him. He shot a look over at the cat and irritably wondered why the small creature so often left him speechless.
"I wouldn't," he replied. "Therefore I wouldn't give one either."
"So you wouldn't give a mortal's shoe because you can't?"
Loki's face tightened. "No… even if I had a mortal's shoe, I wouldn't give it to learn Frost Giant traditions."
"Because the mortal's shoe to you is more valuable than information on the greatest threat that has ever come against Asgard."
"Precisely," Loki said. He stopped. "Wait, no, that's not what I meant. I meant… actually, I don't care! Don't even care." He went back to his task.
The cat shook snow off its pelt and smirked. "You were not prepared for a cat, Loki Laufeyson," it said. A chuckle echoed inside the Trickster's mind. "But then, no one ever is."
Loki glared at it. "A cat I was prepared for," he snapped. "A mind-speaking creation of Hela, not as much."
The cat snickered. "Ah, so you admit that you have been caught off guard."
Loki kicked the cage and the cat within down into the hole. He waited several minutes until the sound of its impact finally reached his ears, then utilized the Casket of Ancient Winters once more and refilled the depthed pit with ice again.
Loki placed his hands on his hips and nodded proudly at his accomplishment. "That will fix you," he stated.
"Don't be so sure about that, Frost Midget," a tiny mental voice drifted up.
Loki grinned and spun on his heel, just managed to catch himself before he ended up flat on his face against the Jotun ice, and made his way back to the Bifrost.
He collided with Thor as he came in, and in his loudly berating brother's hands he set the Casket. "There you go, I don't need it anymore," he said.
"Loki, what have you done?" Thor demanded, bearing an expression of deep concern.
The grin Loki directed upon his brother contained both triumph and relief. "I have eradicated the cat," he declared.
With that, Loki left Heimdall's observatory and happily endured solitary confinement in his quarters. Some weeks later, as he was relaxing out on the balcony, the faintest whisper of sound caused him to turn his head.
He reacted as a statue, staring in horror at the apparition before him: a sleek green cat, looking none the worse for wear.
"I said you oughtn't be so sure, Asgardian," the cat told Loki. "Thor dug me back out again."
"But I buried you in the deepest, most inaccessible, and distant of locations from the Bifrost!" Loki exclaimed.
"Well, he may have recruited the help of the local Frost Giants…" the cat looked at him suggestively.
Loki groaned and hid behind his hands as his fingers clenched onto his hair.
xviii.
"You know, I've got to paw it to you, you really do come up with some unique ideas," the cat commended Loki, much to Loki's chagrin. "I never know what unwinnable scheme you'll come up with next. Really, you should start up your own entertainment business."
Loki ground his teeth angrily and did not reply.
"What, you mean to say that you already have? That's not a surprise."
"How old are you, five?" Loki said scornfully.
"Three, actually."
Loki stared at it.
"What? You wanted to know."
Loki secured the last knot, giving it a far harder tug than was necessary. Harder, that is, for anything other than the cat.
"Well, this ought to be fun," the cat commented as it calmly regarded the tangle of knots that cocooned it.
Loki grinned at the cat. "You, miserable creature, are about to be trampled by bilchsteim."
"Am I? How interesting. Bilchsteim, those are the repulsive things that are huge and scaly and have antlers, right?" The cat turned its head. "I suppose that explains the herd of said creatures a few fields over."
"Yes, it does," Loki grinned heartlessly.
"Oh, wonderful. Truly, I can't wait to see how this turns out. You do have the best reactions when your plans fail, you know."
Loki scowled at the cat and stomped off to put his plan into action. First he took himself out of harm's way, scaling the height of a deep-rooted and wide oak. With where he had left the cat, there was no way it wouldn't be crushed by any number less than a dozen bilchsteim.
Loki reached into the folds of his coat, withdrawing a remote control. With a vicious grin, he flipped the cap off and pressed down on the green button.
A wall of explosives detonated right behind the herd of bilchsteim, frightening the massive beasts into a stampede. Even from where he was perched, Loki had to grip the sizable oak branch beneath him tightly to keep from falling off, for the bilchsteim shook the earth so terribly.
He watched as the bilchsteim thundered over the ground where he had left the cat, clenching his fist victoriously. The herd passed along for several minutes, until at last they had gone and their rumbling had traversed to a distance.
Loki peered down at where the cat had been placed, eyebrows lifting in an impressed expression as he saw how deeply pitted the ground had become. Where bilchsteim stampeded, rivers were created. There was no way in all the Nine Realms the cat could have survived that.
"Wow," the cat said, and with a frustrated growl Loki slammed his head into the tree branch. "I think I almost felt that one."
xix.
"I didn't know you even had mines on Asgard," the cat remarked, casually padding alongside the considerably tenser Loki.
"There hasn't been a need to send folk down here since before my days," he replied tightly. He glanced up at the cavernous ceiling above him, noticeably nervous.
"Uncomfortable, Loki?" the cat inquired, tip of its tail swaying. "Feeling a tad claustrophobic?"
"I have no phobias," Loki snapped.
"Oh, is that so? How impressive," the cat said sarcastically.
Loki reached over and grabbed it by the scruff of its neck, stomping along and growling in frustration when his boot went over its capacity into a puddle of water.
"How considerate of you to hold me above the water," the cat said. Loki promptly dunked it, and was rewarded with furied hissing and clawmarks up his front.
Loki frowned at the dripping cat that now crouched in front of him, hackles raised. "Did you really have to do that? This was a new wardrobe."
"I don't play with water," the cat growled.
"Oh aye, and I'll tell you what else you won't be playing with," Loki said, picking himself out of the water-filled hole and seizing the cat once again. "Cave-ins."
"Ooh, a cave-in now, is it?" the cat mused. "Gosh, it only seems like yesterday that you buried me miles within Jotunheim. Are you developing a pattern, Loki? Or do you just really like to dig?"
"I find greater pleasure in deceased felines," Loki replied. He decided he had gone a satisfying depth into the cave (and besides which, he really didn't want to go in further), and chained the cat in place.
The cat regarded the chains with some amusement. "Trying to keep me from coming out?"
"A creature starves to death eventually," Loki answered.
"Only about as soon as you would," the cat said, an amused sound to its voice.
Loki finished securing the beast and left the mine. A few moments later he triggered the cave-in, which turned out to be a little bigger than he expected. Okay, a lot bigger. Alright, so maybe he did nearly cause the Bifrost to fall off the edge of Asgard again…
Thor gave him an hours-long desperate scolding, and soon afterwards the cat was plucked from the wreckage, of course with nary a hair out of place, and placed back into Loki's hands.
"Miss me?" the cat asked in endearing tones.
Loki chucked it over his shoulder and went stalking off.
xx.
"I know! I know!" Loki exclaimed. He pointed at the cat. "I'll starve you!"
The cat slowly lifted its head, disturbed from its doze by Loki's outburst. "A fabulous idea," it said dryly. "Except for one thing: everyone feeds me around here. I filch off of Geri and Freki's meals quite frequently."
Loki scowled at it. "I don't believe you."
"'Starve' me and you'll find out." The cat laid its head back down and returned to its snoozing.
Loki shook his head irritably at the way the cat behaved so nonchalantly about the fact that he was determined to slay it. Anyone else would have been concerned, anyone. But no, not the cat. Nothing (aside from excessive amounts of water) ever seemed to disturb it.
For a second, Loki wondered if it really could die. Then he shook the thought from his head, determined that he would find the way to end the antagonizing creature, and strode out of his rooms to plot.
Notes: Credit for the first one, laser pointer down a waterfall, goes all to lethe-gray on deviantART. It was a brilliant idea and an absolute hoot to write.