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Pepper and Loki, still covered in pie and now laughing giddily, have finally made it to Pepper’s apartment door.
“Did you see the doorman’s face?” she asks through her laughter. She searches in her purse for her keys. “He must think we’re crazy!”
“His attempt to pretend that he noted nothing amiss was… quite entertaining,” he agrees.
She finally finds her keys and gets the door open.
“You probably shouldn’t have told him that we blew up a pie shop. I think he’s still trying to decide if you were joking, and if he needs to call the police.”
“Or The Avengers,” Loki suggests with an absolutely straight face, sending them both into fresh fits of laughter.
She ushers him inside and locks the door behind them.
“Well, I think they’re busy right now anyway… and probably will be for the rest of the night. You know Director Fury isn’t going to let any of them leave until they get the entire mess cleaned up.”
She leads him up the hallway to her bedroom.
“The director’s vocabulary is… very impressive,” he murmurs.
“Oh, and he was just getting started when we left,” she says. “I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the debriefing tomorrow!”
She flips on the bedroom light.
“Enough talk of them,” he murmurs, and moves closer. “I seem to recall that you mentioned an idea…”
“Yes, I did, didn’t I?”
“Am I going to like this idea?”
She smiles up at him. “Very much.” She takes his hand. “Come on.”
She leads him into the en suite bathroom and puts on the light.
His eyes fall upon the large garden tub.
“Ahhh,” he says, comprehending.
“Mmm, maybe later,” she says, following his gaze. “But right now…”
She unbuttons his suit jacket and pushes it off his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. She reaches up and loosens the knot of his tie, and then begins working on the buttons of his white shirt.
He’s watching with hooded emerald eyes as she undresses him, and then finally he reaches out, putting his hands on her shoulders so that he can push down the straps of her dress.
She gives him another smile, and then turns slightly. “Unzip me,” she whispers. “Please?”
He does so, and she turns back, using her arm to hold up the front of her dress. And then, holding his eye, she moves her arm away and lets it drop the floor.
He makes a noise that she can’t identify.
“Let me warm up the water,” she murmurs. She goes to the shower, opens the door, and starts it running.
As it runs, they slowly divest each other of the rest of their clothing.
“Come on,” she murmurs, and leads him to the steaming shower.
He hesitates.
“What?” She turns to look up at him. “What is it?”
“It is hot. It will scald me.”
She sighs. “Oh God, I’m an idiot.”
“You are not. You simply did not think. There is a difference.”
“Hang on, let me turn it down… how cold do you want it?”
“You could not stand it so cold. Wait. Just… give me a moment.”
He closes his eyes, and she feels his hand slowly growing warmer in hers.
“That’s amazing,” she says when he finally opens his eyes.
“And difficult to maintain.”
“Ah. So in other words, let’s make this quick.”
“Well… not too quick,” he says, and grins wickedly.
Much later, they lie together in the dark, the bed sheets and blanket tangled all around them.
“That was amazing,” she tells him, and sighs contentedly.
He chuckles low in his throat. “Yes. Yes it was.”
He’s quiet for so long that she thinks he’s fallen asleep, and then: “I am evil.”
“I don’t… you’re what now?”
“I am the God of Evil, in fact,” he continues. “God of Lies… I am a very busy person.”
She has absolutely no idea where this is going. “O… kay?”
He turns on his side to face her, and she can see the flash of his eyes in the dark as he speaks.
“How do you know that I am not manipulating you, using you to get to Stark and through him, to the rest of The Avengers? Perhaps that is my ultimate plan… perhaps I have been manipulating events all of this time… showing you Stark’s duplicity and being there for you in the aftermath, letting you feel sorry for me, the poor, ashamed outcast Jötun. How do you know?”
“I don’t…”
He takes a deep breath and turns onto his back. He is quiet for a long moment, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness.
“You should not get too close to me, Pepper Potts.”
And suddenly, she is angry.
“Well, it’s a little bit late for that, isn’t it, Loki? Because I’m pretty sure that the things we’ve been doing for the last… what?” – she glances at the clock on her nightstand – “four hours make us pretty damn close.”
She reaches over and turns on the nightstand light, and then sits up, pulling the bed sheets up to cover her bare chest.
“This isn’t some kind of game, and I’m not a toy that you can play with – ”
“Actually, you rather are, really. I have told you before, I have bedded countless mortals.”
This brings her up short. She is beginning to think that she might have made an absolutely enormous mistake… several of them, in fact.
She takes a deep breath.
“So this was… what? Tell me, Loki. Tell me what we’re doing here. I really want to know.”
“Do you really trust the God of Lies to tell you the truth?”
She sighs.
“No. I trust Loki, that funny, fun, smart guy who likes chocolate ice cream and red wine and doing crazy, random things like turning a fleet of laser-guided flying robot sharks into Starlight mints just because he can and who pretty much saved the entire city from a mad bomber earlier today. That is the guy I trust.”
“Yet we are one and the same.”
“Are you trying to push me away? Is that it?”
He’s staring up at her with wide, astonished emerald eyes.
“I – ”
“Yeah, so that’s the plan, right? Don’t let anyone get too close, don’t let anyone see the real Loki, the actual person under the royal titles and the lofty names from myth and legend and most importantly, that cold blue guy under the glamour, because then they might decide that you really are as loathsome and repulsive and unworthy as you think you are.”
“I don’t – ”
“You think you’re this inscrutable god and that no mere mortal could possibly figure you out, right? But the truth is, Loki, that you have more issues than National Geographic. And I can recognize that from a mile away because I’ve already been down that road with Tony Stark, King of The Unresolved Daddy Issues. It’s a bumpy road full of potholes and rusty nails, and the view is really, really shitty.”
There is a very long silence.
“I should probably leave now,” he says quietly.
“OK, sure, run away.” She shrugs. “Or you could stick around. Be real. Trust. And don’t push me away.”
“And you will trust me? The God of Evil, the God of Lies?”
She shrugs again. “Until you give me a reason not to, yes.”
“You may live to regret that.”
“Yeah, I may. And then I’ll be able to add that to my long list of regrets, right after ‘losing my virginity to that jackass Mickey Walters on prom night’ and ‘trusting Tony Stark’… among all the other really stupid things I’ve done.”
Loki sighs heavily. “You see more clearly than perhaps I would like, Pepper Potts.”
“Sometimes.”
“Please, would you put out the light?” he asks, and she does so.
He reaches for her, pulls her down close to him. It takes a while before she finally relaxes against him.
He’s so cold, but she finds that she really doesn’t mind.
After a bit, he begins to speak.
“I was the unwanted, abandoned offspring of one warrior king, stolen by another as a trophy, a pawn in an elaborate game. And then later, I was the child who always had his nose in a book and his head in the clouds, whose mind was always filled with strange new ideas and whose fingers were always stained with ink. My brother loved me in his own clumsy way and his friends tolerated me for his sake, but none of them ever really understood me, for it is true: I was far more intelligent and cunning than they. Odin despaired that he could have a son such as I, for though I could easily hold my own I was never really one for battle. I much preferred my books and my studies to weaponry.”
He takes a breath.
“I have heard that mortal children fear monsters, shades, the things in the dark, the unknown. Is this true?”
“Yeah. Kids can be… OK, this is really stupid,” Pepper says sheepishly. “But when I was a kid, I was terrified of the Wicked Witch of The West. You know, from The Wizard of Oz?”
“I know not of this wicked Witch, nor of her consort the fearsome wizard Oz,” he says, and she can hear the frown in his voice. His arm tightens around her. “But I am a sorcerer of some small renown and should she dare show her face here, never doubt that I shall be prepared to meet her.”
This little speech is so heartfelt and earnest that she simply cannot find it within herself to giggle.
“It’s OK, Loki, she’s not real. She’s from a movie… maybe we’ll rent it sometime. It’s just a story… as you’d say, ‘a tale for children’. But when I was a little girl… well, I used to have nightmares about her hiding in my bedroom closet.”
“Ah, I see.” She can hear the comprehension in his voice. “But you are lucky in one respect: Your Witch was but a story. The monsters of my childhood nightmares, from the stories that I grew up hearing at my parents’ knees, were very real indeed. They were the Jötnar.”
Realization dawns.
“And then when you grew up, you found out that you’re the monster of your own nightmares.”
“So you see.”
“Oh, Loki.” She snuggles closer to him. “I’m so sorry, my darling. I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
She feels him shrug. “It is in the past.”
“Yeah. But it hurts. Why would your parents do that? Why didn’t they tell you the truth instead of terrifying stories? Because you can’t tell me that that wasn’t deliberate! They wanted you to be afraid of them!”
“They thought I would never learn the truth. When Odin found me, he placed an enchantment upon me so that I would be entirely Asgardian. He never anticipated that I would go to Jötunheim – the place where my nightmares lived! – with Thor one day, and that one of the Jötnar would touch me and break the enchantment.”
She sighs. “That’s really messed up.”
“If I understand your vernacular correctly, then yes, it is incredibly so.”
Well, no wonder he’s such a mess, Pepper thinks but does not say. Instead: “You’re not a monster, Loki. A monster wouldn’t have saved the city from that bomber today. A monster would have been joining in with the fun.”
He sighs.
“You really do not know, do you? Very well. I first came here but you were not at home and I knew not where to begin to look. I wasn’t saving this city; I was saving you.”
The tears spring to her eyes and for a moment she can’t speak.
“I… I don’t really know what to say to that. Thank you. And thank you for saving New York. You were a hero today, even more so than any of The Avengers. You did what they couldn’t.”
“Or wouldn’t. Your Captain America cornered me earlier tonight and told me that he disapproves of my methods, as the United States does not torture people. Apparently you are more honorable than that.”
Steve has obviously never heard of waterboarding, she thinks. “Well, Steve has… ah, his ways. He’s from another era.”
“Yes.”
“So, are we OK here?”
“Well… I do have one last question to put to you.”
“Oh?” Her voice is wary.
He rolls onto his side and leans up on one elbow, and she can see his teeth in the dark as he grins.
“Have you any more of that chocolate ice cream?”
“I… think so, yeah. Why?”
“Ah… well, I have an idea…”
FINIS.