Cruel Vengeance

[Classified Address], Washington, D.C.

June 2012

Darcy stared at the clock.

Three weeks, one day, and eighteen hours. That was how long it had been since she’d slept. And she didn’t feel a damn thing.

She still wasn’t used to it, but the increased productivity was immensely satisfying. Darcy was getting twice as much done as she used to, and she’d managed to juggle two separate but parallel responsibilities, one to the Avengers and one to the government. Acting Secretary of State, pending Senate approval once the newly minted President Floren declared the state of emergency resolved, by day, and by night the Avengers’ political manager-slash-PR-consultant-slash-general-strategist. She’d even set up a schedule to call Jane, since her best friend would never remember to talk to her unless Darcy made the effort. Jane and Helen had already dived into Tony’s new lab complex upstate. The last Darcy had heard, there were four hundred other physicists around the world coming to a conference in Boston specifically for some of Jane and Erik’s new findings.

She bit her lip, going back over the email. It was the latest in a long thread between her and Astur Mahad regarding all the various ways they were coordinating things so that Wakanda, the Avengers, and the United States would all emerge from the chaos with a mutually beneficial relationship. Darcy didn’t have a problem with the fact that her loyalties basically went Avengers (and, therefore, Wakanda, since they were now inextricably linked, with T’Challa an unofficial honorary member) first and her country second.

Secretary Lewis sounded pretty damn good, but Darcy thought there were other titles she might prefer.

“Darcy, love,” Loki called.

That being one of them.

Darcy shut her laptop decisively and jogged down the hall of their apartment. They’d only moved in a week ago, and she was already in love—it was minimalist, sleek, with windows everywhere and gorgeous views of the city and a hot tub on the balcony. She smirked. They’d already taken advantage of the hot tub. Numerous times.

But Loki was in their bed tonight, not out on the balcony, so she only cast the hot tub a glance full of memories and kept walking.

She pushed into their (!!!) bedroom and immediately began divesting herself of her clothes. Being the youngest Secretary of State in history was fantastic, because she had an undefeatable excuse to dress in expensive, stylish, professional, sexy clothes every day. Today it had been a high-waisted white body con skirt with a dark blue blouse tucked in, a very pretty gold-and-green necklace that she had found oh-so-mysteriously deposited on her dresser when she woke up to an empty bedroom, and black heels on the tall side of classy. Darcy had looked stunning and made sure to spend some time in front of paparazzi. But it was also a relief to kick the heels into a corner and climb into bed wearing only her panties and the necklace.

Loki was sprawled out beneath the sheets, smirking at her in the way that said to be very cautious about where she stepped. Darcy checked for magical and physical booby traps, as had become reflex since they started living here. In the gorgeous apartment that had somehow remained unbroken in the chaos of D.C. (She was pretty sure Loki had magicked it back to awesomeness, but didn’t bother to ask.)

“I’m not going to turn into a rabbit again if I climb into bed, am I?” she asked.

“As if I’d pull the same prank twice,” he scoffed.

She grinned and threw herself onto the mattress. “You might, since you know I’d expect you to not pull it twice.”

His smirk softened a bit. “You’re clever enough to anticipate such a move, which would make it much more difficult to accomplish.”

“It’s so exhausting living with the God of Mischief.” She scrambled under the sheets and felt around until she could trace her fingers down the back of his thigh, enjoying how his breath hitched slightly at her touch.

“You got itching powder on all my clothes,” he said. “The rabbit was appropriate payback.”

“I had to hop,” Darcy said indignantly.

He nodded, face completely serious, which was usually an excellent hint that he was being not serious at all. “It was very entertaining.”

She heaved a sigh.

“Wanda called me today,” he said, rolling something small and brightly colored around his nimble fingers. It was moving too quickly for her to figure out what exactly it was.

Darcy narrowed her eyes at him. Mind turning over all the angles. She sensed a serious conversation on the horizon. “Did she now.”

“Vision has determined that the mind stone’s gift rendered her immortal.”

Darcy lifted a hand and called her seidr, watching the purple play of it around her fingers. It felt different to her now. More… alive. “The power stone didn’t give me that.”

“It was a brief contact, for you,” Loki murmured, and flipped on his side so she couldn’t reach his leg anymore. She retaliated by shifting closer and letting her fingers splay across his wonderfully cut stomach. “Giving a Midgardian long life would require much more prolonged exposure.”

“Mmm.” Darcy tried not to get too distracted by the feel of Loki’s body under her hand.

His fingers caught at hers, and stilled them. “But it still gave you gifts,” he said.

Darcy met Loki’s eyes. And felt the other gift, the one she was still learning to use, tug at her.

When she made eye contact with people, she didn’t just see their irises. She saw what they wanted. All their desires, first shallow and then, if she concentrated, deeper. Going down until she could see things they sometimes didn’t even know they wanted themselves.

It was hard to master. She hadn’t talked to Wanda about it yet—or anyone but Loki—but Darcy wondered if seeing people’s fears felt like this.

She thought knowing desire was better, anyway. Any fool could terrorize someone with sharp things and spiked hammers, but to know what someone wanted on the basest level was to hold them in the palm of your hand.

“You’ve not tried it on me yet, have you?” he said quietly.

She shook her head. It was a violation of privacy, and they’d come to a mutual agreement to leave one another’s headspaces alone unless invited.

Not that Darcy wasn’t curious. She was. Intensely.  

“Look at me,” Loki said, turning to catch her eyes with his. The only light in their room was the city lights shining through the windows; it made his usually green eyes depthless and unfathomable.

She let herself look at Loki.

He was so much more complicated than all the humans she’d tried this on. Much of it fit him well; some of it surprised her; little of it made perfect sense, because people didn’t put their desires into words. Especially the more complicated things. The fundamental wants.

The surface was easy. Sex, and sleep. Both of those things she could read in his body language without weird ass powers gifted to her by an ancient magic rock.

But there was a common thread lacing all of it together. Two, really, intertwined and glowing, inseparable from most of the other things.

“Tell me what I want, love,” he breathed onto her skin.

Darcy let him pull her closer. “Me,” she told him what he already knew. “And a throne.”

She was close enough, now, to see her own wickedness reflected back at herself in his eyes, once she let the gift go. Once she tore herself away from it, really, because it was easier to slip into seeing desires than it was to just see two colorful sight organs when she looked at other people now. It was a constant effort to keep herself above the surface. She supposed she’d get used to that eventually, and the endless wakefulness.

“I’m a prince without a throne,” he said. “Heir to the thrones of two realms, neither of which will accept me.”

“Maybe not now,” Darcy said, mind churning as it had been for weeks. They hadn’t had this conversation yet; the time since Thanos’ second invasion had been an exhilarating disaster and she had no time to spare between babysitting the Avengers’ public image and managing the disaster relief and reorganization of the government. But— “If you go after it, I’m coming with you.”

“You are sure?” he said quietly. “That might not—might not be a journey you return from for a long time.”

“Are you kidding?” she said, thinking about it. “On the one hand, stay here on Earth, watch half my closest friends stay young and pretty while I sprout wrinkles, wondering where you are and when you’ll be able to come back, scrabbling for the top of a pile that used to seem huge but now is really just an anthill, versus come with my unfairly hot boyfriend and see other planets and sail the stars and shit? Is that even a question?”

“If you come with me you will not… the aging concern will remain the same.”

Darcy wasn’t sure how to put this. She’d been stewing over this conversation for ages—she wasn’t stupid, she’d known they’d have to have it at some point—and she still didn’t know how to say what she wanted to. So she just let the words stumble clumsily out, hating that Loki could make her into a person who was clumsy with her words. “Okay, so if immortality were offered to me, I’d take it in a heartbeat,” she said in a rush. “Just gonna throw that one out. No matter where it came from. As long as the strings attached weren’t too thick to cut. I’d take the offer.” She thought of staying on Earth, contenting herself with wrestling human political obstacles that seemed so boring now that she knew what was out there, and tasted bitter in her mouth. “And if you—if you know of a way to make me immortal, if you want me around that long—”

“If I want you around for that long? Darcy, you—” Loki cut himself off, and his voice took on an angry, biting edge when he continued. “You make me mad,” he said. “I cannot—the thought of watching you age while I do not is unbearable, I want you at my side when I conquer Asgard, I want to argue with you and trade insults and hold you at night for the rest of my long life—” She could hear how furious he was that he felt this for anyone, and smirked even as she was flattered that he was willing to open up like this. He so rarely did. And never would for anyone except her and perhaps a few others.

Her chest was filling with painful hope.

“I was going to offer,” Loki said, voice low, rasping, unsteady. “There is… a way to grant an immortal lifespan to a mortal. It would not give you the physical strength of a true Aesir but you would gain their endurance, their resistance to injury and disease.” He hesitated. “It binds the recipient to the giver as… not marriage, not as Midgardians think of it, but a bonded pair. For life. It’s not something to be offered or accepted lightly.”

“And you didn’t want to offer because you were afraid I’d say no,” she finished for him. She knew him well enough by now to predict that.

Loki’s eyes were closed. He was fighting himself. Even now he couldn’t bring himself to drop his mask completely. Darcy could only see it in the set of his lips and the tension around his eyes—see the years of rejections, of people shutting him down, of his supposed friends turning their backs, of his brother and father walking away. And then—

“I’m of Jotunheim,” Loki said, the words sounding forced. But genuine. She lifted a hand to his cheek and he unconsciously leaned into her touch without softening at all, but that was okay. She didn’t want softness. “You heard Thor’s stories—you know what that means, what I am—”

“You realize I saw you, right?” Darcy said. She could’ve offered him sweetness and support but it would’ve been fake and he would know, so she went for her own weird but genuine brand of assholery mixed with comfort. “Blue skin and red eyes and shit. You still looked like you, Loki.” She paused. “Not gonna lie, it was actually kinda hot.”

His eyes popped open at that, looking somewhere between shocked, hopeful, surprised, and intrigued. Darcy felt a slow spreading warmth ignite at the base of her stomach. “We were in a battle and you were noticing that?”

“Like you don’t pause to notice how stunning I am when I’m like, I don’t know, facing off with heads of state,” she said. “Or some shit.”

He inclined his head, a trace of a smirk appearing on his mouth. “I concede the point.”

“Lemme see,” Darcy said, poking him.

“See… my Jotun form?”

“Yessss,” Darcy said, drawing out the word. “You were all like bloody and tired last time—”

“Darcy—”

“Oh come on, I’m not gonna run away.” She paused. “Okay, wait, I’m supposed to be supportive here. If you really don’t want to do it then don’t feel pressured. But also I’m very curious and I promise not to scream. Even a little bit. Read my mind.”

“I don’t need to do that,” he said quietly.

“But it’d help you, yeah?” Darcy knew all about the little quiet voice in the corner of your head always whispering not good enough. Hers hadn’t even been silenced when Steve called to ask in a disturbingly bland voice why someone had called Avengers Tower looking for Darcy Lewis in connection to the death of her father, Ralph Lewis, who had apparently gone insane and spent several months barricaded in a cabin repeatedly cutting himself open “to get the bugs out” before a couple of hunters dragged him to the cops, where he hanged himself in his cell. It had helped. But the little voice was still there. And hers hadn’t been ingrained over the course of centuries. Loki—she knew it would help him to read her mind and know with absolute certainty that she was hiding none of what she felt about the Frost Giant version of him.

It scared the living shit out of her to offer that kind of vulnerability to anyone but she’d trust him with it.

“…it would,” Loki admitted.

“Go on, Lokecicle.”

He frowned at her.

“Icicle, Loki, Lokecicle. No? Too soon?”

“Too pathetic,” he said.

Darcy cackled. “Oh, that one’s sticking. Remind me to text Tony about it in the morning.”

Loki moved, and in a flash Darcy had been turned on her back with him lined up above her, looming in the dark. The weight of him, the sight of his face inches from hers in the dark, elbows propped on either side of her head and hands pinning her wrists to the mattress, made the heat at her core go from embers into a fire.

“I’ll do no such thing,” he sneered.

“It’s okay, I’ll remember,” she snarked right back, matching his grin.

She felt his magic flare a second before it connected his mind to hers.

Are you ready? he asked. This close, physically and mentally, he couldn’t quite hide his anticipation.

“I was born ready, bitch.”

Loki’s eyes half-closed, and Darcy saw the instant his irises changed from green to red.

His skin temperature, always deliciously cool, dropped to noticeably chilly. Blue seeped sluggishly across his body. The raised lines, what Jane called epidermal traceries and Thor had described with a distinct tone of disgust as barbaric markings in one recording of a conversation from right before the New Mexico disaster, followed promptly after. Darcy watched them spread down his abdomen and didn’t even try to stop herself from appreciating how excellently they accented his muscles.

“You’re actually hotter than I remember, like this,” she said, because she had to say something and it might as well be the first thing that came to mind.

Loki’s eyes reopened all the way. “This may be the first time anyone has ever described a frost giant as ‘hot’.”

“Stick with me and it won’t be the last,” she said, loving the coolness of his skin against hers and imagining lips that same temperature tracing over her own, then down. Wondered if he’d feel cool inside her. She didn’t even try to pretend she wasn’t turned on.

Loki withdrew from her mind slowly.

“So you know I was being honest,” Darcy said, a little breathless. “Can we—”

Loki’s lips closed hungrily over hers and it was just as good as she’d imagined.

Loki

He stared at himself in the mirror.

Red eyes. Blue skin. Same dark hair as he’d always had. Too tall to be a mortal, taller even than the Aesir average, but too small to be a true Jotnar. A runt. A freak. A monster.

But Darcy had looked at this body and not been afraid. Had kissed him, had bedded him with both eyes open. He could barely bring himself to believe it and he’d been reading her mind when he shifted his form. She’d known Loki would need that assurance, and offered to let him see for himself.

He was—not humbled, precisely, by her trust, because humility was a trait he simply wasn’t made for, but if nothing else determined not to abuse it.

Loki remembered the horror he’d once felt at learning his true heritage. Remembered wondering if the darkness and the chaos and the destruction he’d always felt in himself was rooted in being a monster out of bedtime story, if Odin had never been able to truly love him because the Allfather had seen the evil in his adopted son.

He still couldn’t meet his eyes in the mirror without flinching the tiniest bit. But as Darcy opened the bathroom door, blinking sleep out of her eyes, and tugged him back toward the bed, Loki decided that eventually—eventually he could learn.

“I will return to Asgard,” he told the darkened room, promised the world and the woman at his side. “And take the throne that should rightfully be mine.”

“We,” Darcy said blearily, with the sass he so loved. She flipped over and was awake enough to poke him in the ribcage. “And I think I know some friends who’ll come and help.”

Even half asleep, her smile was wicked.

Loki closed his eyes and savored the savage joy that overtook him. The fierce contentment that came from knowing he had a family, no matter how strange and dysfunctional and riddled with issues it was, to rely on.

The Realms cannot fathom the chaos to come.