Chapter 6
Loki wakes in the middle of the night with his headache raging worse than ever. It has coalesced into two sharp, fiery points just behind his eyes, throbbing so fiercely that he can barely lift his head up. Once he has awoken the pain will not allow him to fall back to sleep, so he resignedly clambers out of his very comfortable bed, stumbling a little as his feet make contact with the floor, and then haltingly makes his way to his kitchen.
Sleipnir is noisily asleep in his own bedroom, throaty snores rattling the walls, and Loki resolves not to wake him. There is no use in sharing his own misery. There is only one thing that can assuage his discomfort, and that is salted caramel ice cream, though for the life of him he cannot remember if there is any left in the freezer.
Five minutes later he discovered that the only ice cream in the freezer is mint chocolate chip, which is simply unacceptable. On top of that the kitchen itself is in a certain state of disarray, for which he can blame his and Sleipnir's attempts to put Bruce's baking lessons into practice. Loki is now of the mind that they should only bake while supervised, and even then the supervision should be carefully controlled for fear of harming innocent bystanders. It is not admitting defeat, it is only taking reasonable precautions.
Faced with a damaged kitchen and nothing edible inside it, Loki has only one practical option left to him, and that is to teleport to Stark Tower's guest kitchen, which he does.
If he is very quiet then he will be in and out of here before any of the Avengers are even awake to notice his presence. The clock on the wall shows the time as being three fifty-eight a.m. To his knowledge none of the Avengers are in the habit of waking before, at the earliest, five thirty. Loki is not a stalker, he just happens to notice these things. Also he certainly does not keep a meticulous calendar of all of the Avengers' movements so that he may 'accidentally' run into Bruce at the most opportune moments. Of course not. That would be absurdly stalkerish, bordering on supervillainous.
Well, Loki never did claim to have given up all of his supervillain ways.
There are no less than five cartons of salted caramel ice cream in Stark's guest kitchen. Loki cannot help but be suspicious: he has made no secret of the fact that this (divine, beauteous, brain-meltingly wonderful) flavour is his favourite. Perhaps Stark has left the ice cream as a trap, and has doctored it somehow?
Or perhaps it is Bruce who left it here, knowing that Loki would appreciate it. The thought sends a warm glow through his chest.
Cutlery is sparse in the guest kitchen, mostly because Barton has a habit of stealing it and using it for impromptu projectiles. (Many of these projectiles end up directed towards Loki. Loki chooses to see this as a sign of Barton's misplaced affection.) Still, he eventually discovers a strange implement that he deems acceptable; it is something like a spoon, but with jagged edges like a fork, and he has never seen anything of its like before.
The guest kitchen neighbours the guest living room, which the Avengers (plus Loki and occasionally Sleipnir) sometimes use for movie nights. So far Loki has been introduced to the delights of the Marx brothers, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and a TV series called Stargate SG-1, during which he often has to hit pause in order to scream at the television over various scientific, historical, mythical and/or magical inaccuracies. There is a particular sofa which is his favourite. It's a rather extraordinarily putrid shade of pale green, and the seat is soft and careworn and impossibly comfortable. Thor likes to tease him by calling it the Lokithrone, but Loki is inclined to take him seriously. If Loki were ever to ascend to kingship again - although he has absolutely no wish to do so - his throne would be this sofa and no other. It would certainly be more comfortable than Hliðskjálf.
He settles into the Lokithrone now, cradling two cartons of ice cream and his bizarre utensil, which he is becoming rather fond of. He makes his way through a whole carton before the headache begins to abate even slightly. These headaches are starting to worry him, though he has not told anyone about them yet. They have been becoming more and more common of late, and more and more painful.
Loki is so distracted by the incongruity of the pain of his headache and the deliciousness of the ice cream that he fails to notice that he is no longer alone until it is too late.
Barton pops up from behind the sofa with all of the speed of a striking viper. Loki clutches his heart in shock, and in doing so compresses the remaining ice cream carton in such a way that ice cream comes bleeding out of the edges to leak down his (bare, blue) chest. He lets out an unhappy squeak - first at the surprise, and second at the shame of wasted ice cream.
"What are you doing?" demands Barton. His gaze is deeply suspicious, eyebrows narrowed down to a fine point.
"I was enjoying my ice cream," snaps Loki bad-temperedly, and then adds, rather pointedly, "before you came along, anyway."
Barton looks rather nonplussed. "I live here," he says plaintively, and then gathers himself together and says, "I live here, not you, so I can be in the living room whenever I like. What are you doing here at four in the morning, eating ice cream with a... with a spork...?" He trails off as he notices Loki's quaint utensil, and his eyes bug out a little. He seems to lose his train of thought.
"I have a headache," admits Loki, curling around his ice cream. Some of it leaks down his chest a little, and Barton can't seem to tear his eyes away from the dripping ice cream. Loki, being a Jotun, has fairly little body heat, but the ice cream was already melting from being out of the freezer, and from coming into contact with the warm air of the living room.
"Oh," says Barton. He looks as if he would like to muster up some more pithy comment, but cannot quite think of anything to say.
"The ice cream helps," says Loki. "It is an excellent foodstuff. I would like to arrange to trade some of it to Jotunheim, as I believe my fellow Jotnar would greatly benefit from its presence in their lives."
"Oh," says Barton again. "Trade... for what?"
Loki shrugs. "We have many mineral deposits on our planet that we have no use for," he says. "We build with ice, you see, and shored up with magic it is sturdier even than diamond."
"You want to trade ice cream for diamonds," says Barton, rather weakly.
Loki peers at him. "Would that not be considered acceptable?" he asks worriedly. "We also have some seams of vibranium, and other rare metals, and gems that I believe you Midgardians consider to be valuable."
"No, that sounds... perfectly acceptable," says Barton faintly. He swallows. "You know what, you can - uh... If you would just..." He flaps his hands, but Loki cannot gather his meaning. Barton sags. "Just... enjoy your ice cream," he says finally, and wanders somewhat dismally out of the room.
Loki sits in silence for a few moments, and then dips an experimental finger into the slowly melting ice cream on his chest. He sticks his finger into his mouth and then hums contentedly.
He eats another carton and a half before the first streaks of light start to spread across the sky, at which point, exhausted and sore, he falls asleep.
Four hours later, that's where Bruce finds him: sprawled over the Lokithrone Sofa, snoring fit to wake the dead, covered in melted and congealing ice cream, and with a slight trail of drool emerging from the corner of his mouth.
Bruce puts a blanket over him and then leaves as quietly as he had entered.