circles
She knew what he was doing.
Kidnapping her had been a hell of a lot easier than SHIELD had promised her it would be, and when she got back, she was going to give them hell for it.
Of course, she’d been promising herself that for over a month now, and no one had come. She had to believe someone was coming, but it was hard to dismiss the idea that maybe they had forgotten about her. She wasn’t very important at all.
And it didn’t help that he was encouraging those thoughts. She knew what he was doing, and personally, she thought he was stupid for doing it. Because his attack on her psyche had two prongs. One, he would undermine her confidence in her friends. Two, he would try to convince her to rely on him. And why would she do that if he was constantly reminding her how unimportant she was? Two steps forward, two steps back.
But, Darcy had to admit to herself, she’d arranged a pretty sweet deal here. Somehow, and she wasn’t exactly sure how (copious Lilo and Stitch references?) she’d convinced her kidnapper that the only way she would rely on him, trust him, was if he reformed. Redeemed himself. Stopped being such a crazy bag of cats.
Loki actually started doing it.
Of course, he was faking it. She knew this. Darcy wasn’t about to trust the guy named “God of Lies.” He was softening her up so she would give him whatever it was that he was looking for.
Darcy still didn’t know what he was looking for from her. That was a problem. But, she figured, if she played along with the “reform” game, he might eventually get to the point where he asked her for the thing he really wanted. There were two tricky bits to this. One, she had to be convincing. She had to be just the right amount of reluctant, and move at just the right pace toward accepting, forgiveness, all that jazz. Two, she had to make sure he didn’t get what he was looking for while she wasn’t paying attention.
On the plus side, this had Loki acting like a nice guy most of the time, which was not only beneficial for her, but beneficial for the world in general. And it may be beneficial for Loki. Fake it ‘til you make it, right? Though, Darcy thought that might be being a little too optimistic.
Minus side, it was hard. It required a lot of acting and a lot of calculating without looking like you’re calculating. Normally, Darcy would pass on this job and point whoever asked her to do it toward the Black Widow. “You want Nat for this,” she would say. “Nat is perfect for this.”
Except Loki hadn’t kidnapped Nat. He’d kidnapped her. So Nat wasn’t available. Also, Loki would probably know what Nat was doing. He knew what she did for a living. It would be hard to convince him that Natasha Romanov could be forgiving.
She had to hope that he believed Darcy Lewis could be forgiving. Because if he was on to her, she was in deep shit.
***
He knew what she was doing.