Coffee Shops and Murderous Tendencies
Loki stared at the rows of packets behind the glass.
Presumably, they were to be heated—if their labels were to be believed, at any rate—though how anybody could stand to navigate a "baked panini" in that sweltering heat, he really couldn't fathom.
In this horrible line, he felt a sharp pang of sympathy for said sandwiches, as the impatient shuffling of the rather large woman at his rear was both pushing him forward into the irate man in front and causing the female's enthusiastically bespangled satchel to dig uncomfortably into his armpit.
It was also doing a brilliant job of wafting the noxious perfume which she insisted on spritzing beneath her arms every three minutes in his general direction.
He presumed that in small quantities, "Lilac Dream" may be considered a tastefully playful yet elegant scent—as promised by the bottle—"Ms Angelica Prisall", however, as she was announcing herself yet again to the unfortunate individual on the other end of her bright pink receiver, appeared to marinate happily in said fragrance with all the frequency and enthusiasm of a bilgesnipe in a swamp.
Loki grimaced. The weight of his agitated companion's generous bosom was bearing down on his upper back, and if he stepped any further forward, he would be-
In his indecision, a vigorous shove succeeded in unbalancing him, and his nose collided awkwardly with the back of the young man's head. Though it didn't hurt, the yellow curls tickled horrendously, and Loki barely had time to cover his face with a hastily conjured kerchief to keep from sneezing all over his new associate's enraged glare.
He had turned around during Loki's moment of distraction, and one hand had risen to rub irritably at the back of his skull—presumably the point of impact.
Quashing his temper with an impressive strength of will, and a beatific smile, Loki set his shoulders and dipped his head in a grossly saccharine parody of acquiescence.
"Terribly sorry." He simpered through gritted teeth, and the man scoffed, spinning back around without a word and smacking Loki in the hip with his laptop carrier in the process.
Loki's smile melted into a grimace.
Somewhere over his shoulder, a baby was fussing, and his buxom friend huffed directly into his ear. A small dog peered at him warily from a handbag, and Loki bared his teeth at it, gaining disappointingly little satisfaction from watching it cower and squeak.
One of the tables by the door—positioned conveniently just below the establishment's one and only cooling device—was occupied by a gaggle of teenage girls. They were glancing between Loki and their smartphones, giggling, elbowing one another in the side, and periodically waggling their eyebrows at the one in the corner, who's complexion had turned an interesting shade of magenta.
Torn between ignoring them and expending energy on eavesdropping, he barely noticed his irritable companion from half a minute prior making his order.
Before he could properly decide, the barista cleared her throat, and he startled slightly before turning to face the counter.
She looked... Bedraggled. The tight bun her hair had been wrestled into was drooping, and there were dark strands sticking to her brow and cheeks. Her eyeliner was smudged, and the peach-coloured stain on her collar suggested the paint had long ago melted from her face.
The expression she gave him suggested he'd better make his order quickly, at risk of life and limb.
He countered the look with a brilliant smile of his own. The kind with the twinkling edges and a trustworthy sheen.
It must've been working for him, despite his heat-flushed face, as the barista promptly reddened and smiled back. She had a nice smile, he noted, despite her rather droopy countenance, and his own grin began to hurt a little less as he ordered.
"One iced tea, if you would. Of the Passion Tango variety."
She continued to blink at him expectantly, until he remembered and politely requested she address it to Liesmith.
With a light chuckle and a flustered nod, she twirled to assemble it, and he just caught himself smirking unconsciously at the still-present smile on her face.
As he made his way to the disgruntled cluster of overheating humans waiting for their beverages and various roasted food items, he heard the door jangle violently behind him, half a second before it crashed back on its hinges.
Air distorting slightly around him, Loki whirled on instinct, but not before his ears could manage to pick up the sound of someone's running feet clattering inside—to a collective gasp from the crowd.
A few people in the line squealed, and the girls at the table by the door looked like they were in the midst of a conniption.
Loki frowned, attention piqued, and blinked in surprise when the flustered figure of his adversary came hurtling clumsily through the line, slammed a wad of ten dollar bills onto the counter and grinned sheepishly up at the gobsmacked worker.
"Nice hat, uhh..." He stopped for half a moment to squint at the name on the cashier's badge, "Rachel! Black coffee, please! Quick as you can, a friend of mine tells me he'll castrate me if I'm late to another debrief, and despite popular evidence to the contrary, I kinda value my ability to procreate, so make it snappy if ya would!" This sentence was expelled at lightning speed, with no noticeable pause for air in between, and punctuated with a wink to the poor manager, who had presumably emerged sometime partway through to investigate the fuss.
Realising he was staring, Loki turned quickly, scoffing under his breath and blinking away the urge to roll his eyes. Forty-five minutes he had waited in that Norns-forsaken line! Forty-five!
Anthony Stark sauntered back through the crowd to lean against a pillar, leg bouncing a mile a minute and graciously indulging the few customers who had shaken off the shock sufficiently to request photographs.
Loki was staring again.
Typically, when he saw the man, he was encased in his flamboyant suit of flying armour.
Not today.
Naturally.
Loki would be concerned for anyone ordering coffee in full battle regalia, after all.
Today, Stark was clad in an off-white vest top, covered in splotches of what looks suspiciously like oil of some variety, one ribbon sleeve drooping from his shoulder and revealing a slight tan line where it should have been positioned.
It was a good top, Loki thought, absently.
It showed off his arms quite nicely where they folded over the light in his chest.
It was also a tad too short, riding up over one hipbone and revealing a sliver of sun-darkened skin between the hem of the shirt and the elastic band of his underwear, just visible over his low-rise jeans.
The band said "Calvin Klein".
Not that Loki was looking.
"Mr. Liesmith!" The call from behind the counter had Loki startling embarrassingly for the second time that afternoon.
He reached for his drink, nodded his thanks to the barista, and promptly spilled it all over the counter when a pair of hands planted themselves firmly on his waist from behind.
With an indignant (undignified) yelp, he spun to find himself face-to-grinning-face with the very man he'd been observing mere seconds before.
Stark beamed up at him, tongue poking mischievously through a set of pearly whites, and calmly removed his hands from Loki's hips.
"If it isn't my favourite deity! How's it going, Lokes!"
It wasn't phrased as a question, and Loki's eye twitched irritably as the whole establishment fell silent.
He answered anyway.
"Stark. How lovely to see you." And, just because he felt like it, "I must admit, I'm relieved to see that you remove that armour occasionally."
The other man's eyebrows rose a fraction, before his smirk was widening, and Loki found himself mouthing along to the next words as they left his lips.
"'Relieved', huh. Care to elaborate on that?"
Had Loki been anybody else, the unsubtle come-on would have had Loki flushing like a schoolgirl.
He wasn't.
"Yes. I'd hate to find the rumours of your appalling personal hygiene to be true."
The mock-affronted look on Stark's face did nothing to hide his amusement, and he raised one hand to cover his chest.
"You wound me, Reindeer Games, you really do." Stark mourned, shaking his head and adopting a tragic expression.
All Loki could focus on was the perfect pout gracing his lips.
This time, he didn't even attempt to suppress the eye roll.
"I couldn't help overhearing the tragic news of your impending sterility." It was an unsubtle diversion, but it seemed to serve its job, as Stark's eyes widened dramatically.
"Shit!" The man looked genuinely nervous.
"Yeup, Fury's looking particularly murderous lately." Loki couldn't possibly fathom why that was, and he said so.
He and Stark had been flirting rather obnoxiously lately, throughout Loki's expeditions among the human race.
Stark snorted inelegantly. "At this point, I don't quite trust him not to follow through."
Loki didn't stifle his snicker.
He was about to make a witty retort, when a flash to his right made him jump and dodge on instinct. Nothing happened, however, and the air around him flickered slightly as his seidr relaxed.
The irritable man from the line was holding up a telephone, and blinking in terrified curiosity at Loki's reaction.
"Just the paparazzi, Lo-lo. They're drawn to the aura of our beautiful faces and sparkling personality.
He turned to blink at Stark in confusion, not in the least because of Stark's phrasing of "personality" but before he could ask, the man was gripping his wrist and tugging lightly.
Meeting the other's eyes in question, he was caught briefly by the mischief dancing in his gaze. He was grinning, the soft laugh lines around his eyes emphasizing the dark lashes, and for a second Loki could only stare.
Yes, Anthony Stark was attractive.
Loki knew this, had known this for a while, in fact, but as it turned out, matching the man's creative wit was one thing behind a mask in the heat of battle, and quite another face-to-face.
Face-to-face, he got to watch the way Stark's impish smirk formed dimples at the corners of his lips. The way his eyes seem to draw him in, bottomless pools of chocolate brown, inquisitive and sharp and strong, and Loki was—
Loki was waxing poetic.
A barely perceptible toss of his head was sufficient to bring his attention back to the room at large, but the glimmer of satisfaction in Stark's eye told him enough to know that his brief lapse in judgement hadn't gone wholly unnoticed—
"C'mon. Whaddya say we ditch this place, take a walk? Fury's bossy ass can wait a few more minutes." Yes, there was a clear glint of mirth there now. "He knows how much my balls are worth, he couldn't afford them if he cashed in his pension."
Loki nearly choked on thin air, and by the time he'd recovered his breath, they were outside. He tried to shoot the mortal a glare, but he was looking the other way, glancing about the street and dragging Loki behind him by the arm.
Yes, Loki could break away easily.
Hel, Loki could simply stand still, and that would be that, and yet...
And yet.
"If you are planning on putting some oh-so-clever scheme into action, dragging me off to Norns-know-where in an attempt to wipe me out, then I really am going to have to disappoint you." He stated flatly, raising an eyebrow at the back of the hero's head.
Stark turned to face him, eyebrow of his own raised in competition.
"If I was planning to bump you off, it wouldn't be conveniently out of the way so you could vanish my remains without alerting the press."
Loki snickered.
"A fair point, Stark," he drawled, just enough emphasis on the name to mock, "You should be slaughtering me where I stand, unarmed and defenceless against your heroic efforts to save the world from my dastardly grasp."
Stark raised him a second eyebrow and stared incredulously for a full ten seconds before turning once again with a huff of laughter. "Oh yeah. Defenceless as a kitten. Right." He paused for half a second and looked back over his shoulder to wink at Loki. "Lokitty. There's another name for the books."
Resisting the urge to snarl pettily with a frankly impressive force of will, Loki managed to contort his lips into something resembling a gracious smile. It contained a few too many teeth to properly constitute as "sweet", but a smile it was, nevertheless.
Stark looked mildly disturbed. His arm twitched slightly as if contemplating whether or not to cover Loki's mouth, but clearly deciding against it before Loki had to worry about whether or not he should be risking severing the human's fingers in a crowded street.
"Tell me, Reindeer Games."
The lip curled further, but Stark had already turned back to pushing his way through the artisanal market that appeared to have sprouted from the cobblestones while Loki was occupied with ordering tea.
He was certain those stalls hadn't been there when he'd used the street half an hour ago...
"Whaddya say about ruffling some mortal feathers tonight?"
Magic? He doubted it. Magic on Midgard was a rare occurrence, after all, and he would have felt it had it been prominent in the area. The stalls seemed perfectly ordinary.
They turned into a side alley, one of those little passageways barely wide enough to extend one's elbows in. The right wall was littered with torn posters, advertising everything from circuses to concerts long passed.
Stark halted abruptly, and Loki barely stopped in time to save himself another bump to the face.
At least his nose would have been safe this time, he mused to himself sourly in the privacy of his mind, Stark barely came up to his chin.
The smaller man leant back against the paper-mache-d wall, gripping Loki's wrist with such vigour that it was as if he meant to prevent the god from flying away.
As if the mortal could even hope to prevent Loki from doing whatever he damn well pleased.
Nevertheless, teleporting was complicated when one remained attached to something they didn't wish to take with them, and prising the human's hand away would likely break his fingers, and Loki didn't wish to go into exactly why that thought distressed him so.
Stark looked him in the eye and tugged gently on his wrist, the same gesture used previously to indicate Loki follow, and without much question, Loki did.
With the mortal's back to the wall, it wasn't too difficult to figure out where Loki was supposed to go, and so he leant in, cocking a hip into Stark's hand as an arm coiled about Loki's waist, and ducking his head so that his lips were inches away from Stark's own.
To his surprise and delight, the only signs of nerves the man gave was a very quiet gulp, and that warm chocolate gaze flickering briefly from Loki's eyes to his lips and back up again.
Then, the smirk was returning, slow and sinfully gleeful, and Loki found himself mimicking the expression with only the slightest suspicious tint.
Stark seemed to note the curious narrowing of his eyes, and his own smile widened. "I think you might've been distracted, when I was proposing my brilliant plot earlier?"
Pressing forward so that his chest pushed deliciously against Loki's own, he rose onto the tips of his toes so that his lips barely brushed the shell of Loki's ear.
"I said, how about upending some midgardian world views?"
His breath puffed hot against Loki's pulse point, and the god couldn't quite repress his shudder.
The human pulled back, nose brushing Loki's and lashes dusting his cheekbone as his eyes twinkled.
"And what did you have in mind, o noble hero?"
A narrowing of Stark's own eyes betrayed his mild irritation.
"Fancy being my date tonight at the charity gala Pepper's forcing me into?"
Loki blinked.
Stark elaborated.
"The sort of humans that generally attend these things tend to make me crave murder, and though that's out of the question," he paused to scowl slightly at Loki's intrigued expression, "Getting to watch the aristocracy clutch at their pearls and turn interesting shades of maroon is almost worth the restraint."
Loki's grin was wicked, and Stark looked minutely flustered in response, even as he matched the expression with devious precision.
"And what time would you expect me there, should I agree to the... unspoken terms?"
The human considered.
"Nine thirty, I should think. Wear something nice and fancy."
The response was very nearly cut short by Loki's mouth covering the mad inventor's, pressing just hard enough to make a point, but not quite enough to merit satisfaction.
Chasing his lips when he pulled away, Stark's eyes remained closed, right up until Loki teleported, a shower of green sparks tickling the mortal's nose.