Happy Birthday
When you woke up, Loki was still there, asleep on the pillow next to you, still dressed in his full leather suit, his cape trailing off the side of the bed. For a moment you were confused and had to piece together the pieces of the previous night’s endeavours, almost immediately wishing you hadn’t. Blocking out the painful memory of Cap’s expression, you instead settled for inspecting Loki’s face in the morning light.
His milky complexion looked like it had been mixed with honey in the warmth of early day, his skin smooth and youthful. It was easy to believe the man in front of you was always that peaceful and serene, his dark lashes fluttering on his high cheekbones. You had the strange desire to reach out and feel the contours of his face for yourself, if only to make sure it was real. His beauty was more akin to a fallen angel, and you wouldn’t have been surprised to see a pair of white wings on his back.
“What are you doing?” Your stomach dropped as you dragged your eyes away from his jaw up to his eyes, only to see them staring straight at you. Loki’s voice was gravelly in the morning, something you filed away for future reference as you attempted to make an excuse for your ogling.
“Well, I woke up to you sleeping next to me, I was a little confused.”
“You were staring at me like I’d fallen out of the sky and crash landed here.”
That’s exactly what I was thinking, you thought, but instead pushed yourself into an upright position. “You didn’t need to stay overnight.”
“I wasn’t going to, but you begged me to. Pleaded, practically.”
Did I? You couldn’t remember that specific moment. “Sorry. You can go now.”
“Give me a moment to wake up,” he grumbled. “I’m pretty sure that-”
He was cut off by a sharp knock on the door, and Nat’s voice coming through it. “Y/n?”
“Come in,” you said without thinking, despite Loki frantically waving his hands in front of you.
“Hey, I came in to talk to you, I know last night was a whole situation, but…” Nat trailed off as she entered, her eyes landing on Loki. “Uh, hi Loki.”
“Hello,” Loki said stiffly. “It’s really not what it looks like.”
“What does it look like?” You asked, confused, then put two and two together. “Oh, yeah, Loki is just here. He was being a good friend.”
“We’re not sleeping together,” Loki helpfully clarified.
Natasha mumbled something under her breath you didn’t catch. “I wanted to come in here to talk to you about Steve’s reaction yesterday. It was out of line. I just wanted you to know that irregardless of how ‘dark’ your powers might seem, if you’re using them to do good in the world, then I have no problem with you. Just give Steve and the others a little time to come around, I know they will.”
“I wish the others shared your perspective,” you said, raising your eyebrows as you readjusted your bathrobe.
“Bruce agrees with me.”
“So do I!” Thor strode into the room, full of energy as usual. “It was very unexpected, but it was good. Oh, hello brother.”
“So basically it’s just Cap and Tony who think I’m a menace and threat to the constitution of society. Great.” You rubbed your temples.
“They’re just old fashioned,” Nat assured you. “Once they get over themselves, you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks guys, I really appreciate your support,” you said, doing your best not to let your voice catch on the words. “You have no idea what it means to me that you’re…you know.”
“Yeah, yeah I do.” She smiled at you.
“I accepted Loki for who he is, Frost Giant ancestry and homicidal tendencies and all,” Thor boomed, ignoring the disgruntled sound Loki made behind you. “I can do the same for you, little murder girl.”
They filed out of your room to let you get dressed and you took a second to breathe and mull things over. Knowing that not all the Avengers were against your powers, and some were even on your side, was a relief. Maybe this time things could be different.
A week or so passed before Steve and Tony begun acting normally around you once again. You hadn’t been invited on any new missions, but you were fine with that. In fact, it gave you more time to work on your latest project.
A certain god was going to be celebrating his birthday soon, and you had to be sure you didn’t forget. Sure, Thor had looked at you weirdly when you’d asked when Loki’s birthday was, informing you that they didn’t really celebrate birthdays on Asgard (apparently they celebrated centuries instead of individual years), but nonetheless had told you it fell on December seventeenth. And so, you’d taken it upon yourself to make Loki a birthday cake.
You’d be lying if you said it wasn’t also an opportunity to solidify your culinary superiority over him for once and for all. The chocolate cake seemed to be the perfect way to do that, you reasoned with yourself early in the morning of the aforementioned birthday, bending over the circular cake to finish piping the white buttercream icing on. You were fairly certain Loki had never had sugary sweets of any kind, so the whole concept of a cake would be a bit of a hit or miss, but given that the Chipotle had been such a success, you were fairly certain the cake would meet its mark.
Grabbing the tube of green icing you’d prepared, you carefully scrawled ‘Happy Birthday Loki <3’ across the top in neat handwriting. It was quite a masterpiece, if you dared say so yourself. Carefully, you poked candles into the soft top, just enough to make a loose ring around the cake, lighting them with a spare lighter.
Once you were satisfied with your creation, you grabbed the wrapped package lying on the counter and placed the cake on top of it, balancing it as you went up the stairs to Loki’s room. You were confident he wouldn’t mind being woken up early if it meant he didn’t have to interact with the other Avengers.
“Happy birthday Loki,” you said softly as you pushed open his door. He must have heard you coming, because he was already awake, sitting up on his bed and watching you curiously as you placed the cake and present on the table.
“Why is that thing on fire?”
“It’s a cake,” you explained patiently. “Here on Earth, we bake them for people’s birthdays and we put candles on them, which the birthday boy – you – blow out and make a wish.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Loki drawled, but made his way over to the table nonetheless, leaning over the cake and blowing lightly. The candles flickered but didn’t go out.
“Come on, you have to try harder than that.”
“I feel like an imbecile.”
“Blow them out! Before the wax drips on the cake!”
Loki gave you an annoyed look before blowing significantly harder, succeeding in blowing the candles out.
“See! Fun, isn’t it?” You removed the candles, laying them on the edge of the cake board and wiping your hands on the back of your pants.
“Uh, no. What do we do now?”
“Well, now we get plates, which I forgot, and we cut up the cake and eat it.”
Loki waved his hand and a knife, two plates, and two forks appeared on the table. You gave him a look of thanks and began cutting the cake, a touch messily. He watched you, most interested, as you managed to extract a slice and pass it to him.
“First slice for the birthday boy!”
“Stop calling me that,” he said, frowning, as he dug his fork in and raised the first bite to his mouth. The second it hit his tongue he paused, looking at you questioningly before closing his mouth around the fork.
You laughed, watching his eyes widen before he dove back in for another morsel. “It’s great, isn’t it?”
“This is called cake?”
“Chocolate cake, specifically. With buttercream icing.”
“Forget the Chipotle, this is perhaps the best thing you earthens have invented.”
You cut yourself your own piece, pleased to find that the cake tasted just as good as you’d hoped it would. “Open your present.”
“What, this thing?” He grabbed the wrapped box. “You know, the last time I got a birthday present, it was my horns.”
“Interesting,” you hummed. “Somehow I doubt my present is as grandiose as a metal helmet.”
He tore through the wrapping paper, holding up the Calvin and Hobbes boxed collection you’d gotten him. “What are these?”
“Comic books. And good ones, at that.” You watched him slide one of the books out and flip through it. “Do you have comic books on Asgard?”
“No,” he said thoughtfully. “Are these the best ones?”
“In my opinion, sure. To be honest, I got them for you because you remind me of Calvin.” You pursed your lips to keep from laughing. It was quickly becoming your favourite form of comedy to compare Loki to various characters in various forms of media, especially ones he could easily dispute. Obviously he wasn’t a six year old boy with an imaginary tiger, but you weren’t kidding when you compared their two demeanours. They shared the same sort of sass.
“Are they named after the philosophers?”
You paused for a moment. Honestly, it had never crossed your mind. “They could be. I thought you needed something a little more lighthearted than ‘Anna Karenina’ and while Calvin and Hobbes is humorous by anyone’s standards, I think you’ll find it caters fairly well to you.”
“What’s my type of humour?”
“At risk of offending you, I’ll go with ‘high-brow’.” You watched him flip through the book with one hand while continuing to shovel cake into his mouth with the other.
“Did you make this cake?”
“I did,” you rocked back on your heels before taking the other seat at the table. “So I think it makes me the best cook in the room, honestly.”
“When’s your birthday? I have to surpass you.” Loki’s question made you pause as you found yourself at an unexpected crossroads. Did you lie? Or did you finally tell the truth?
“Y/n?” He waved his fork in front of your frozen face. You shook your head out, looking at him. Something was possessing you to tell the truth, as though you needed just one person to know. And, faced with no other viable options, that person was Loki.
“I don’t know,” you said quietly.
“How do you not know? I thought everyone on Earth knew their birthday. How old are you then?”
“I don’t know that either.” Your gaze dropped to the table and you felt a lump grow in your throat, against your better judgement. “All I know is that one day, I simply was.”
“What aren’t you telling me?” Loki sounded genuine, and you finally found the strength to look him in the eye.
“I’m not from Earth,” you managed. “I was created on Vormir.”
Whatever Loki had been expecting, it certainly wasn’t that. His mouth opened and closed several times, seemingly wrestling with a million questions. “I didn’t think anyone lived on Vormir. Other than the Vorms, but they’ve been extinct for thousands of years.”
“There was no other forms of life on that planet the entire time I was there. See, I was created by the soul stone as a way to manifest its creative and destructive aspects, I guess. I was the creation; my powers, the destruction. And so I lived alone at the centre of the universe in the darkness, in the cold, and in the silence. I didn’t even know that anyone else existed.” You let out a shaky breath. There was no going back now.
“The only way I stayed alive was through visiting the soul world. Somehow it sustained me, kept me alive without anything else. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like a world in between worlds, where all recently dead souls pass through on their way to wherever it is they go. I mostly use it for storage nowadays.”
“How long did you spend on Vormir?” Loki asked carefully, eyes watching you carefully.
“I don’t know. A millennium or so, I suppose. There was no way to measure the passage of time, only the honing of my skills as the centuries passed me by.” You could picture it clearly in your mind, despite all the time that had passed. You’d never felt so lonely as you had on Vormir, all alone without knowing if there was anything else out there in the universe. Even having lived the experience, you had no idea how you’d managed to survive.
“How did you get to Earth?” His voice was gentle, encouraging, and it prompted you to take another breath and keep going.
“I realized I could travel through the soul world. A spaceship landed once, when I was exploring the planet for the hundredth time, and beings got off it, searching for the soul stone. They were unable to attain it, like all those who search for it, yet it showed me that there were other worlds out there. So I studied the soul world, explored the boundaries of it, and I realized that all the souls passed through it, and that when they passed through, it opened up a portal of sorts for the briefest of flashes.
“If I could drop out of the soul world at that point, before the portal closed, I could land wherever the soul had originated from, and I quickly learned that it was best to find a point of mass death, where that rift would stay open longer, and I could drop through there. It took awhile, but when I found one, I landed here. Well, more specifically in France, on July first, nineteen sixteen.”
“The Battle of the Somme,” Loki said, dawning comprehension creeping across his features. “The bloodiest battle of World War One.”
“Someone’s been studying up on history.”
“I haven’t much else to do,” he quipped, before nodding at you to continue.
“I landed in No Man’s Land, no more than a ghost; bullets couldn’t harm me. I hadn’t figured out how to have a physical form yet, but right in front of me, all of a sudden, the universe I had known shattered. Their yells, their screams, their gunshots, to a girl who’d grown up in silence, it was like they had taken their world and-” you opened your hand, miming dropping something “-blown it to pieces. And all I could do was stand and watch while so many people, each with their own lives, their own dreams, their own fears, their own hopes, and each one of them with their own little world were killed. Sometimes when I close my eyes, it’s like I’m back there, watching the cosmos fall around me.” You realized you were shaking, and perhaps for the first time entertained the thought that you very well might have been traumatized by the war you’d seen all those years ago. After so many years of burying the past, you now realized that you’d been allowing yourself to be consumed by it, like a decaying porch one tries to hide with fresh paint. Eventually the wood had to crumble beneath your feet.
“I ran away from the battle to Scotland, somewhere in the North Isles, where I learned what it meant to be human; what it meant to leave the alien who had escaped from Vormir behind. And that’s where I found my voice. That’s where I chose my name.” Wistfully, you toyed with your fork, staring at your reflection in it. “A voice that’s said so much over nearly a hundred years, and yet it has never dared speak to this.”
You put the fork down and looked at Loki, taking in the sympathy in his expression, in the way his brow creased with worry. A small part of you wanted to stop, but you were far beyond that point.
“Eventually I made my way over to London and I primarily stayed there throughout the Second World War and up until five years ago, but it wasn’t quite the same as Scotland. At night, I used to sit outside and stare at the stars, because they were so different than the stars I had on Vormir, and this time I knew that there were others out there in that sky. I can never return to Vormir, and I know that, so I substituted that by searching for the galaxy it resides in.
“Somehow, it’s so comforting to just sit there and know that the mistakes I make will never reach the edge of the universe, and that to them up there, I’m nobody. But Scotland was a lifetime ago, and I no longer live in the echo of the words I uttered and the lives I led. It’s in the past now.”
“This whole time I’ve been calling you a mortal, but there’s a chance you might be older than me?” Loki asked incredulously after a moment of silence.
Unimpressed, you looked at him, letting out a little laugh of disbelief. “That’s what you got out of that?”
“Are you sure you’re not a god?”
“No! I was created by the soul stone!”
“How do you know that?” Loki challenged.
That made you pause. “I don’t know. I just do. I think I came into this universe with that knowledge. All I know is that it’s the truth and there’s no other explanation.”
“So the soul stone gave you your powers? Do you have it or something?”
“No, I can’t physically get the soul stone. It’s not possible, not for us anyways. But it’s like it’s in me, a part of me, because it essentially coded my DNA and bent the fabric of the universe to create me.”
“Yes but why. That’s what I don’t understand. What interest does a stone have in creating a being?” Loki helped himself to another slice of cake.
“You want my best guess?”
“Yes, actually, I do.”
“Well,” you popped your knuckles, “I think it wanted an attainable version of itself, one that could control life and death but with a sense of humanity attached.”
“But for the longest time you were just stuck on Vormir. Doesn’t that seem counterproductive?”
“I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know all about the circumstances of my existence, nor do I particularly seek to know them. Some things are best left unexplored.”
That answer didn’t seem to be good enough for Loki. “Come on, you’re not even curious?”
“Listen, it’s been hard. I didn’t have like, anyone, my entire life, and the first time Nick Fury came around, I thought that I could finally be a part of something more than just an urban legend around London. But then he got me into this mess where I almost wound up assassinating a politician and it brought the wrath of the United Nations down upon us and I had to disappear into the wind, and Fury did nothing to help me. Because he was afraid of me. And here you are asking why I don’t want to invite more trouble into my life, and I’ll tell you right now, Loki, it’s because I just want to live a normal, human life.”
“With power like yours, you could do anything, and yet you’re satisfied with being another cog in the machine?”
“Yes. And if you were in my shoes, you would be too.”
“Well, y/n,” Loki said, drumming his fingers on the table. “That was definitely interesting.”
“No one else has heard a word of it, so don’t go repeating it.”
“Your secret is safe with me,” he promised. “Even if I do not understand your motivations, I can respect them.”
“Thank you.” You stood, pushing your chair back in. “Now I must go meet with the others. They’re discussing our next mission.”
“I’ve been invited too,” Loki said, rising also. You frowned at him.
“To the meeting, or to the mission?”
“Only time will tell, I suppose.”
The two of you headed down to the meeting, greeted with a nod from Bruce as he put a disc on the table and tapped it, a holographic map springing up from it.
“Uh, that’s SHIELD headquarters,” Nat said, strolling into the room and throwing her leather jacket over the back of a chair. “It’s not our target, is it?”
“Bingo,” Tony said, walking into the room behind her, carrying a water bottle. “We have reason to suspect that some of the people working for SHIELD are actually double agents for HYDRA. And Fury has confirmed that there’s rumours of a flash drive with the locations of HYDRA bases on it inside the SHIELD facility. Our job is to steal it. Tomorrow.”
“How on earth are we supposed to A: find it and B: steal it?” Steve voiced the question you were all thinking. “I mean, we don’t have any frame of reference.”
You knelt in front of the hologram, zooming in a little closer. “It has to be somewhere accessible to all the moles, irregardless of their status within SHIELD so that rules out all classified areas.”
Nat leaned in behind you. “At the same time, they can’t risk others stumbling across it accidentally, so that rules out areas like bathrooms and break rooms where people are constantly moving through.”
“It’s probably disguised as something else or in something else, but it’s an inconspicuous object that no one would look out of place carrying. I would say a coffee cup, but if you leave that lying around there’s a chance someone would throw that out,” Loki added.
“A firearm would arouse less suspicion. Say you modified the clip to store a USB in it? That could work.” The suggestion came naturally to you, and you glanced back to see Nat smiling at you.
“We’ll start with that,” she said.
“How are we going to go about doing this?” Thor asked. “We are rather recognizable.”
“She’s not,” Tony said, pointing at you. “And neither is Reindeer Games if we change his look up a bit. He’s a shapeshifter, right? They’ll go undercover, the rest of us will go in casually to talk to Fury or whatever. Agent Romanoff can start with us and do some spying of her own.”
“This sounds like a horrid plan,” Loki said. “How do you know I won’t betray you all once we’re inside just for the hell of it?”
“You won’t gain anything by betraying us,” Bruce said timidly. “HYDRA is not your biggest fan.”
“We’re trying to be stealthy with this, so no killing people,” Steve said, looking directly at you.
“Why are you looking at her? I’m the one you should have qualms about,” Loki said loudly. “I’ll kill anyone who looks at me the wrong way. I’ll kill you.”
You cleared your throat, not wanting him to resort to fisticuffs again. “Loki.” He seemed to calm down, but his eyes were still shooting Cap daggers. ‘Not defending your honour’ your ass.
“If we’re finished threatening Cap,” Tony said, zooming in on the hologram, “we should probably go over the routes we’re going to take inside the building…”
Once the meeting was over, you wandered into the kitchen, surprised when Thor approached you.
“Y/n, I need an honest answer,” he said, taking away peanut butter you were about to dig a spoon into and setting it back in the pantry, presumably so he could properly talk to you. “Are you sleeping with my brother?”
“Uh, no, why?” You snatched the jar back, moving away from his grabbing hands. “We’re friends.”
“He seems very protective of you, and I was just wondering-”
“It’s not being protective, it’s just that Cap was being a bit of a prick and Loki called him out on it. I don’t see anything in that which would suggest we’re sleeping together.”
“I went into Loki’s room the other day and he wasn’t there, and then I go to your room and he was in there and you were in a bathrobe.”
“Is there a question in there somewhere?” You dug around in a drawer for a spoon. “Listen, we’re friends, so I suggest you stop making this weird somehow and talk to your brother if you feel this strongly about it.”
“Loki doesn’t have friends.”
“Well he has me, so you’re wrong.” You defiantly dug the spoon into the creamy peanut butter, taking out a massive glob and shoving it into your mouth. “Also, taking an interest in your brother’s sex life? That’s a little weird, bro.”
“No, no, that’s not what this is about,” Thor rushed to cover his tracks. “I’m just making sure you’re not getting yourself into something you’d later regret.”
“Well I’m not, so thanks for your concern, but I think it’s best if we pretend this little confab didn’t happen.”
“Yeah, probably for the best,” he agreed quickly.
Replacing the peanut butter, you strolled off to find Loki. It took you a few minutes, but you eventually found him in the gym, doing bicep waves with the weighted ropes. For a luxurious moment, he didn’t realize you were there and so you leaned against the wall, watching his arm muscles ripple.
“Enjoying the show?” Loki said once he became aware of your presence, dropping the ropes with an audible thud and walking over to you, swiping a water bottle from the mini-fridge along the way.
“You’re deceptive,” you commented, eyebrows raising at his tight grey t-shirt. “You’re lean but surprisingly muscular. Also, did you steal that from Cap?”
“No, why?”
“I wasn’t aware you’d become a whore.” You could practically see every muscle outlined through the shirt. It was completely not his style and he looked absurd, but yet you still couldn’t say it looked bad.
“Have you been eating straight peanut butter again, hellion?” He frowned at you in an almost scolding way.
“What can I say, I’m sybaritic. Also, you’re calling me a hellion now? Seems a touch hypocritical, doesn’t it?”
“I can’t exactly call you ‘mortal’ anymore, given that you’ve proven its inaccuracy.”
“I kinda enjoyed the demeaning nature of it, along with the irony,” you said, swiping his water from his hand and taking a sip while he glowered at you. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“You’re a special brand of annoying and immature, you know, for your age.”
“Birds of a feather flock together,” you chirped, grinning at him as you handed back the bottle.
“…until the cat comes, because that’s the whole saying,” Loki seemed to be unable to resist tacking on. “Seems fitting. We haven’t encountered our cat yet, but when we do…”
“The fallout will be cataclysmic. Got it.” You gave him a thumbs up. “By the way, your brother is poking around your personal affairs.”
Loki rolled his eyes. “What specific aspect is he on about this time?”
“Well, he asked me if we were sleeping together.” You stepped past him, laughing as you headed over to the dumbbell rack, selecting a random one and tossing it between your hands.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him we weren’t, and told him to keep his nose out of your business. I also mentioned it was weird that he had interest in that sort of thing.”
“That’s my brother. Always trying to be involved in my life without actually being involved in my life.” He caught the dumbbell in midair as it passed between your hands, placing it back on the rack. “You’re stressing me out with that.”
“So, what do you think about tomorrow’s assignment?” You asked Loki, following him out of the gym and back to his room.
“As in, am I feeling like betraying you?” He grabbed the hem of his sweaty shirt, pulling it up and over his head.
“I’m not really concerned about that, actually.” You admired his back muscles as he walked over to his laundry hamper to throw the shirt in, looking away the second he turned back around.
“You’d be the first.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of what disguise you would use. You’re a shapeshifter, so you kinda have a whole arsenal to pick from.”
“I could make myself look exactly like you,” he said, apparently having decided there was no need for him to put a shirt on, sitting down on his bed. You took up your usual post in the armchair.
“As entertaining as that would be, it might be a tad counterproductive.”
A flash of green travelled up his body, turning him into a mirror image of you. “Hi, my name’s y/n and I like to wear a dog mask and call it a hero suit.”
“Says the god who wears giant gold horns,” you said sarcastically as Loki changed back into himself.
“They represent my mastery of magic.”
“They represent your massive ego. And it’s a jackal’s snout, just so we’re clear.”
“Right. Jackals. And what, pray tell, does your jackal’s snout represent beyond fitting in nicely with the rest of your gimmick?”
“Gee, I’m not sure,” you snarked, preparing to count off on your fingers. “They represent tricksters, so really, you ought to be nicer to me about it, mystery, truth, intelligence, bravery.”
“Scavenging, loneliness, desolation, thieves, the works,” Loki said in a crude imitation of your voice. “Anything you didn’t get out of a book about dream interpretation?”
“Okay at least it’s somewhat reflective of my personal experience and not some stabby overcompensation to make up for various other shortcomings.” You folded your arms across your chest.
“And what shortcomings would those be?”
He’d backed you into a bit of a corner there, and you could tell by the way he laughed at your expression that he was rather pleased about it. However, you were able to make up an answer.
“Well for starters, those are horns fit for a king and you’re not one, so…” You shrugged.
“Not for lack of trying.”
“No, certainly not. Are you having a good birthday? Anything else you want to do?”
Loki looked surprised at the question and simultaneously unsurprised at the abrupt change of topic. “I didn’t actually expect to do anything on my birthday, so I can truthfully say it has surpassed all my expectations. As for things I want to do…” He gave you a look.
“Fine. We can go to Chipotle, just put a shirt on, birthday boy.”
“I told you to stop calling me that!”