Chapter 12
Being a cat made so much sense. Annoying the Avengers? Easy. Leaving the tower? No one knew. Falling asleep, a breeze. Loki would be the first to admit that most of that sleep was light, but that’s why cats were so awesome. They didn’t need deep sleep nearly as much.
Loki found it much easier to get sleep when he could be vaguely aware of his surroundings while he was sleeping—ready to get up, fight, or flee at a moment’s notice.
Occasionally, though, he did need a deeper form of sleep. For that type of sleep, he needed to be sure that he wouldn’t be bothered. This usually involved laying somewhere hidden beneath a dresser, bed, or chair in his room.
It worked well, especially when he got the luxury of having the Avenger’s Tower to himself. On those days, Loki found it easiest to fall asleep. Sure that no one would come looking for him, he would lay beneath his dresser, just close enough to the window to sit in the small patch of light it offered. To catch the warm rays of the sun in a way that wouldn’t blind him, he always kept the thin linen curtains closed to soften the light.
Today was supposed to be one of those days.
Instead, someone had walked into his room, and unwittingly slid open the curtains.
Being a cat, Loki literally hissed at the sudden blinding light.
What the heck?
What would anyone even be doing in his room?
No one’s even supposed to be here right now!
“Oh my—Jesus, sorry!” Steve’s familiar voice allowed him relax a little bit, though he still had no idea what he was doing in his room.
He had to be looking for something, his eyes flitting from one end of the room to the other and back again. He seemed annoyed.
did he realize the stone was gone?
No, he would’ve been much more than annoyed if that were the case.
Reluctantly, Loki slunk out from under the dresser. He shifted back to Aesir form while Steve had his back turned (the others seemed to find watching his shift unsettling, but seriously, it was just magic).
“What are you doing?”
“Where’s my phone?” Steve asked finally.
“Beg your pardon?”
“You took my phone.”
“No?”
“Well Jarvis told me--” he cut off abruptly, “Stark.”
“Ha!” Stark laughed, leaning on the doorway with a wide grin on his face. His cackling voice echoed down the hallway as he left, “Made you look. Should still be in there, though!”
Steve sighed, a slight smile on his face despite the annoyance, “Sorry. He shouldn’t be able to do that. It’s a breach of privacy.” He half-shouted the words.
A muffled sound from down the hall.
“He said: ‘Not if it’s his own house,’” Jarvis translated for him.
“It’s still not right,” Steve muttered as Loki started rummaging through his desk drawers.
Outside, it started to rain.
He really hoped Stark hadn’t given much thought to sneaking around his room. He’d have to start locking his drawers.
He had some expensive chocolate that he’d rather not go to waste, thank you very much. Oh, and about all of his personal belongings.
Thankfully, the phone had been easy to find, in the bottom drawer of Loki’s desk.
Steve had been about to leave, but the steady rain had worsened to a downpour. He glanced past Loki’s shoulder at the window, frowning.
It hadn’t yet become a thunderstorm, but the thought that it might still unsettled Loki.
Steve had been there for him last time, maybe he could . . .
“Stay?” Loki felt oddly calm asking.
Steve nodded, “I’ll go grab my sketchbook.”
While Steve got his sketchbook, Loki grabbed a blanket throw from the bed, wrapped it around himself, and sat down on the floor. He leant against the bed, facing away from the windows.
As soon as Steve returned, he closed the curtains and laid on the floor across from Loki, using his elbows to prop himself up to open a large, leather-bound book.
Loki watched curiously as Steve opened the book, flipped through a collection of drawings to a blank page, and began sweeping his pencil across it. He started in broad, wide strokes before switching to shorter, more precise marks.
With a jolt, Loki realized what he was drawing: a familiar-looking black cat, asleep, laying stretched across a shelf in a bookcase. Steve’s bookcase, from what Loki could tell.
“Is that . . . me?” He asked after Steve had finished.
“Yeah,” Steve smiled sheepishly, “Is that okay?”
“O-of course,” Loki hesitated, and gestured towards the sketchbook, “May I?”
“Sure,” Steve sat up beside him, closing the book and lending it over.
“I was going to look at the cat,” Loki commented, though he was already flipping through the pages slowly, gazing at the artworks that Steve had completed.
“You mean yourself?”
“Yeah,” Loki said, somewhere between a scowl and a smile.
He stopped on a masterfully drawn mountain lake scene, “Did you draw all of these?”
“More or less,” Steve answered, pointedly not looking at the drawing, “I’m not very good at it.”
“Unbelievable,” Loki grumbled, staring at the drawing some more, “Steve. You have a gift.”
“Oh really?” Steve’s voice took on a challenging tone, and he flipped forward in the book, to where an (admittedly horrendous) drawing of a person grinned crookedly, “How’s this?”
Loki laughed, “Just because you’re an artist doesn’t mean everything you make has to be perfect.”
The rain never did turn to a thunderstorm, but Steve was content to stay with Loki and talk, even after the rain had stopped.
The Avengers were called down to the ground floor after supper for a meeting.
Nick Fury had been waiting for them in the boardroom, a holographic screen already pulled up. He gestured to the image on the screen before they even had the time to sit down.
He didn't even bat an eye at Loki's presence, and for a moment, Steve marveled at how they had managed to convince Fury to let him stay on the team.
Or it could just be that Fury didn't want to argue with Loki's brother, the god of thunder.
“Seem familiar?” Fury prompted.
“Yeah, actually, I think I’ve seen that somewhere.” Steve peered at the projection for a moment, “Yeah, I remember that stone. I found it on a beach somewhere.”
“Did you take it?”
“Yeah, actually.”
“Why?”
Steve shrugged. “Thought it looked pretty.”
“Where is it?” Fury demanded.
“I, uh . . .”
If Fury was looking for it, was it—?
It dawned on him.
“The Mind Stone,” Fury confirmed.
”I don’t really know. I think it’s somewhere in my room, but—”
“—you lost one of the most powerful objects in the universe?” Fury growled, incredulous. Already, he was pushing past him, headed for the elevator towards Steve’s room.
“He can’t get that stone,” Tony protested, whisper-yelling to avoid being heard by the director, “SHIELD was the one who lost it in the first place!”
Loki stood to follow Fury, but Steve stopped him.
If Fury thought there was any hesitance to hand the mind stone over to SHIELD, he might send in agents to find it and take it by force.
“Rogers! I’ll be needing your key!” Nick called.
“I’ve got it.”
Steve closed the door behind him and jogged to catch up with the director before he got in the elevator.
He stood, silent, next to Fury as the elevator ascended, grasping for some sort of excuse, “To be fair, I didn’t know that it was the mind stone at the time.”
His embarrassment only increased tenfold when he unlocked the door to his room and opened it.
Of course, he hadn’t been expecting anyone to go rummaging through his room later that day, but it was a mess.
”Like a tornado had gone through,” as his mother would often say.
Steve made an effort to make his bed every morning, but even that had been periodically covered by a mountain of misplaced items.
Whatever he left around the common floor often ended up on his bed, put there by Tony’s cleaning robots, who of course didn’t know where Steve’s items specifically belonged, aside from inside Steve’s room.
Today, miscellaneous pens, pencils, markers, and sketchbooks were scattered across the bedsheet.
Fury disregarded that, already starting to rummage through his desk drawers.
Steve glanced at the nightstand, where he thought he had put the stone, but it wasn’t there.
He lost it.
Something he probably should be freaking out about, but really, he just felt relief.
Maybe it fell behind the nightstand.
He’d find it later.
To hopefully appear as if he was looking for the stone, Steve knelt on the floor and pulled out some boxes from under his bed and started sorting through them.
Most of what he kept in those boxes were keepsakes from the 1930s, mostly collected by the people of SHIELD after he woke up, so Steve already knew the stone wouldn’t be in them.
Was that the—?
“Oh my gosh,” Steve gasped, taking it out of the box.
“Did you find it?” Fury snapped.
“No,” Steve answered, holding up one of the trinkets, “I totally forgot about my wind-up cars!”
He really needed to go through all these boxes sometime.