Chapter Text
As with every tragic morning since Odin first cursed him, Loki finds himself awakened by incipient, obnoxious snoring .
Of course, upon wakening fully, Loki is furious to realize the snores are his own. If not for the existing curse, which quite infuriatingly prevents him from using personal magic, Loki would cast another dozen curses on this—this prison of a body. It creaks and squeaks and groans with all the charm of a mangled tea kettle! It’s just as leaky, too.
In truth, it isn’t the age of his present form that irks Loki so. For a shapeshifter, gifted with the inherent ability to change gender, age, and shape at will, the true agony of the situation is confinement to a single, static body.
When Thor deemed Odin “an old man and a fool,” their monocular excuse for a patriarch had only expelled him from Asgard and stripped him of his powers. At the top of Loki’s To-Do-Once-Reinstated-In-All-My-Former-Glory List:
- Revenge.
(Well, after that.)
- Make a case for the unfair double-standards younger siblings are subjected to, before the formal tribunal of Asgard.
- More revenge, hopefully involving a good deal of grovelling from Odin…
The chamber door CRASHES open, rudely interrupting Loki’s internalized soliloquy. He certainly does not jump in surprise at the sudden noise. Nor does the motion cause his back muscles to cramp painfully.
“Good Morning!” Darcy Lewis, she of trailing knitted sleeves and glossy dark hair, flies past him with altogether too much pep for any Midgardian to possess at this early hour. Even if she is a sorceress. The cloying scent of her caffeinated vice of choice fills the chamber, like an odious natural perfume. Her hapless apprentice, Ian of London, follows, gently shutting the door behind him.
Darcy Lewis snaps her fingers, and Ian steps up obediently to remove her knit cap and scarf. Loki sneers a touch at Ian’s long-suffering obsequiousness, as he always does. The spineless whelp is constantly under Lewis’ well-manicured thumbs…
“No, it isn’t,” Loki snarls, stumping from his humble bed over to the pantry. Had Loki not had a vested interest in keeping Darcy Lewis alive to break his curse, he would’ve allowed both the sorceress and her apprentice to keep consuming the Midgardian ‘rah-men’ that barely passed for sustenance. He doesn’t care how often Darcy Lewis insists that the nutrient-bare threads of fiber kept her alive through the coming-of-age ordeal of College; as a former Prince of Asgard, Loki flatly refuses to settle for less than meager table scraps when dining.
Even if he has to do all the cooking himself.
Besides, Odin’s curse had one stipulation: magic done for the sake of others was perfectly allowed. Loki has always prided himself on the ability to locate and unscrupulously slither through a technicality.
Busying himself with skillet and spatula, Loki certainly misses the look exchanged between Darcy Lewis and her apprentice. Only when the sorceress comes up alongside him to proffer the egg carton does he deign to acknowledge her presence.
“Something wrong, Mister Witch?” Darcy Lewis asks, with far too much concern. It makes Loki’s wrinkled old skin crawl. “Aches and pains troubling you?”
“Not at all,” Loki grits out, rather ruining the effect when picking up the skillet, which causes his elbow to audibly pop .
Before he can so much as curse, Darcy Lewis runs a delicate hand down his arm. Immediately, the little agonies in his muscles and joints ease. Loki opens his mouth—to complain about the unnecessary use of magic, to question Darcy Lewis’ sudden ability to use healing spells when just last week he was preventing she and Ian from blowing themselves to bits on a Spell of Power, maybe even to thank her —
When she slaps him on the back hard enough to unbalance the skillet in his hand. He manages to save the bacon just in time.
“Can’t have our Master Chef suffering from stiff limbs!” Darcy Lewis says cheerily, before turning back to the work bench. Carelessly, she tosses over her shoulder, “Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with. It’s no trouble at all!”
If anyone were to ask, Loki’s face is only warm from leaning over the heat of the pan.
When he finally serves breakfast, scattering Ian and Darcy’s notes with a quick wind spell, he expects her to at least snap at him. He could do with a good fight, to get this old body’s blood up and moving.
“Thank you very much,” is all Darcy Lewis says, with maddening magnanimity. She smiles benignly at him, the gap between her teeth particularly noticeable, blue-green eyes sparkling behind glasses she doesn’t need, but wears anyways. Who ever heard of a sorceress who didn’t so much as cure her own blemishes, not to mention perfect her atrocious vision, the moment she was powerful enough?
(Ian thanks him too, tremulously, as if afraid Loki will bite. Loki wouldn’t deign to stoop so low.)
Loki just growls into his plate of scrambled eggs. The growl...continues.
Despite the deafness plaguing one ear, Loki is quite certain that the sound isn’t coming from him, no matter how dyspeptic he’s been of late. Instead, it’s coming from…
“Darcy Lewis,” he begins, slowly, “what are you keeping in your pocket?”
This time, it’s Ian who goes pink. Loki begins to wonder just where the two impudent scallions got off to while he was asleep.
“Oh, that,” Darcy says, blithely sawing away at her bacon. “Jane wanted a pet! And I thought we could do better than some shitty Midgardian fish that she’d inevitably kill, so I sent a missive off to Heimdall. Ian and I would’ve asked you to come, for your expertise, but we know you like to lie in on a Thursday—”
The growl is growing in volume.
“Darcy Lewis, I swear on my mother’s most beloved blade, if you’ve brought into this house what I think you’ve brought—”
Before Loki can finish his threat, Darcy’s coat pocket bursts into flame.
What follows is a great deal of shouting, outraged magics, and general mayhem. Of course, Loki only contributes in the form of rational, cool-headed rescuative spells. He certainly doesn’t throw out his back in attempting to keep Ian from stumbling over one of Darcy’s three escaped salamanders. It’s only when the trio of fire-breathing lizards have been captured in microwave-safe enchanted tupperware (Midgardian sorcerers do have some ingenuity, after all), that Loki recovers himself enough to realize that Darcy is laughing .
It isn’t...the horrible braying guffaw he’d expected from her uncouth, all too-expressive mouth.
Far from it.
Well, Loki supposes that he can admit it, at least to himself: babysitting wayward Midgardian sorceresses might be a cruel punishment for Odin to inflict upon him, but at least it isn’t boring.