The warfield strewn across the cafeteria table was a myriad of odds and ends. There was part of a sandwich with the internal components taken out (some missing entirely, some scattered), some bolts, a book that was not being read but was acting as a stabilizing weight for… the other half a sandwich, a hammer, something in an open plastic container that looked suspiciously dangerous to be set near anything edible, and a set of copper cables.
To peer up and over the collection of seemingly uncoordinated items, a set of raccoon ears would have been within view. Given Rocket’s stature (short) and his general coloring (gray), he was probably easy to miss on his own. He’d ducked his head, brow against the edge of the table and used the point of contact to brace his upper body rather than engaging things like core strength or, well, a spine. Sooner or later the position and pressure would make him shift, but for now he was scanning through the network on his device.
One hand reached up to the table top, feeling around for the half of a sandwich that wasn’t presently being compressed under a book. It was somewhere to the right of the bolts, so… where the flark did it go?
Loki slid into the chair on the other side of the table from Rocket. He’d seen the raccoon from across the room and looking to avoid conversation with a certain someone — no names to protect the innocent but suffice it to say there was definitely a laundry list of people Loki didn’t want to talk to at the moment — he decided that pretending to be in deep discussion with his new best friend. Alright, so that was an extreme way of putting it. Loki and Rocket weren’t friends. They were barely even casual acquaintances. But Rocket had impressed him by claiming to be friends with Thor and, while that in and of itself wasn’t hard to do (Thor wasn’t exactly a good judge of character nor was he difficult to amuse,) it had touched a certain nostalgic heartstring in Loki. Just a tiny vibration of homesickness. Maybe by courting the raccoon as an ally he could somehow maintain a distant connection with his brother.
Okay, yes, that was completely preposterous. And only half true. Rocket just happened to be in the right place at the right time. For Loki, that is. Which made Rocket a convenient excuse to avoid conversation with someone else.
Loki set an unopened can of cola, probably a leftover from the various Florida raids, on the table beside the hammer. A hammer? Loki made a face because that felt oddly symbolic. Then he reached across the table and picked up the half-eaten sandwich that Rocket was eyelessly searching for.
“Is this homemade or was it in one of those plastic wrappings at the back of the refrigerator?” Loki sniffed it, turned up his nose, and placed it back down on the table. Then he peered into the container full of, well he wasn’t sure what was in there. Nevermind. He glanced back over his shoulder in the direction of the door. Ah, shit. He turned his back, sitting sidelong in the chair to hide his face. “Psst! Rocket! Do me a favor and pretend like we’ve been deep in conversation for the last fifteen minutes.”
It wasn't a surprise to Rocket that a voice was coming from where there had been an empty seat seconds ago. He heard the approach, and some might assume he operated in his own little world, but a healthy (and sometimes moderately unhealthy) dose of paranoia kept him aware whenever someone was passing through his space. His hand stopped feeling around and he lifted his head to give Loki a squinted, mildly annoyed look.
To be fair, that was the usual set of his features, so it may not have been because of Loki at all.
"Nah, had it made yesterday by the other you. Probably shoulda left the bacon one, not the egg one for later…" There was a reflective glance at the remnants of the meal before he tipped it into the solution in the plastic container. No explanation was given for the decision.
But then the abruptness of Loki’s pivot made Rocket jerk his attention fully up. If stealth was the name of the game, Rocket was in clear violation as he stood up on the bench and took a look in the direction Loki was masking his face. "Why?" He smacked the Asgardian's shoulder. "What's happening? I don't see anything? Are you hiding?"
“By the other m—?” Loki paused for a moment. That sentence suddenly took on a much more confusing and complex meaning than anyone outside of a certain trio would ever know. Well, at least until somebody spilled the beans. That wouldn’t be Loki though. At least, not with literal beans. He’d already done that. But he had no reason to out Sylvie and her diabolical secret. A secret he was still grumbling about. Lokis, psh! Even Loki was sick of Lokis. His response? Just another irritated and overly dramatic eye roll.
An eye roll which was interrupted the moment Rocket had shot up to full attention. Rocket’s obviousness earned a look of sheer panicked horror from Loki who then immediately began waving a hand at his side to delineate an imaginary wall. A wall Rocket should not have been trying to peer over.
“Don’t look!” he hissed. Then he peeked over his shoulder as well to make sure neither of them had been caught by this particular individual that Loki was quick to avoid. Were they coming this way? Loki turned his attention back to Rocket and let out a very awkward and phony laugh. “Ha! Rocket! That was the most hilarious thing you’ve ever said! Ha ha! Tell me another joke like that one, you feisty rascal you!”
Because that was really a good way to get someone to ignore you.
“I don’t get --” There was a short-lived instinct telling Rocket to grab the hand waving in front of his nose and bite it, but he felt it spoke to his maturity that he didn’t. He settled back onto the balls of his feet from tippy toes, and gave the cafeteria another sweep. Whoever or whatever it was that had made Loki twitchy, Rocket had no idea. And that meant there was nothing to taunt. No fun.
By the time he focused back on Loki, he was met with the sort of full and intentional look that would make anyone lean back a few inches. Fortunately for Loki, Rocket rarely subscribed to the norm for reactions. He stepped up onto the table’s surface and walked across it (careful of his accoutrement as it was scattered around the wooden surface) before grabbing Loki’s face in his hands. No warning. There never was. You braced for being in Rocket’s presence, and then you hoped that he wasn’t in a destructive type of mood.
“Are you concussed?” Rocket leaned his head to the side to get a better look into the Asgardian’s eyes. “Everyone always says you can tell, but I kinda think everyone I know’s gotten cracked in the noggin already -- so it’s not like I know what normal looks like.”
Well, that was an unexpected reaction.
Loki blinked when Rocket grabbed him by the face and forced him to look directly into his weirdly human raccoon eyes. Were they having a moment? This felt like it should have been a moment. Not like a weird moment, but one of those slapstick friends-but-not-really-friends maybe cordial-casual-acquaintances kind of moments that might eventually lead to an actual accord of some kind. Not unlike when Loki banded together with the Revengers. Brother aside, that was also a moment. Fleeting, but, well, it was something. It had stuck, at least.
You know, for all of five minutes.
Loki quirked a brow. “What? No, I am most assuredly not concussed. I’m perfectly fine. Trust me. This is what normal looks like!”
Mhm. Normal. Riiiight.
Loki cleared his throat and continued with a hushed whisper. “I’m just trying to avoid someone.”
His pupils constricted the closer Rocket came to his face. Loki could smell the egg sandwich on his breath now and almost gagged. His face even turned a light shade of green. “Could you maybe breathe in another direction? Also the fur on your fingers—” Were they fingers or paws? “—tickles.”
“It don’t look all that normal,” Rocket retorted, but he let his hands drop from Loki’s face and then turned to peer into the open solution bath, which he nudged the side of with one foot. It didn’t really slosh, but it definitely glorped. Rocket scrunched up his nose and shoved it a few feet down the length of the long cafeteria table.
He meandered back, still walking the table’s surface and then crossed his arms as he regarded Loki. It was hard to start at someone like Thor and see the connecting line to Loki, which was exactly what Rocket had been trying to do since realizing this was Thor’s brother. It felt like there should’ve been something in common there, more than the blue eyes. But, really, who knew how families went? In Rocket’s experience so far, siblings rarely looked, sounded, smelled, or acted the same.
“Why’re ya avoiding someone?” Rocket asked. From his position standing on the table, he actually had the vantage point that allowed him to look down on Loki. Sometimes he was pretty intentional about how he approached people. “Stole something of theirs?”
Loki sat back when Rocket let him go and his gaze again drifted towards the dining hall entrance. It seemed that he’d managed to avoid whoever he’d been trying to hide from. At least, for the time being. Who he was trying to avoid didn’t actually matter. Loki had accumulated a list of people he was trying to keep his distance from this week. Well, relative distance, that is. Some people he was keeping at arm’s length like Fandral and Ikol and Strange. Strange mostly just because he was annoying, not because Loki had any reason to fear a confrontation with him. Others he was going at great lengths to keep completely out of view. Like Sylvie and Julia. Bucky, too, come to think of it. If Loki had to go through another droll and pedantic hero speech about how he had to ‘put in the gods damn work in order to see the results’ and hear that his ‘friends weren’t really his friends’ he would probably lose his mind.
And it really wasn’t a good idea for Loki to lose his cool while they were in the Void. At least he was composed enough to remind himself of that. They were essentially in a bubble, after all. There was no telling what might happen if he decided to let his feelings implode.
He glanced back at Rocket and raised a brow. Loki did not like looking up to anyone, least of all a raccoon. But he could forgive this minor transgression because he was the one to invade Rocket’s personal space.
What was all this junk anyway?
But then Rocket mentioned stealing something and—
“What? Steal something? No! Ha! What could I possibly need from any of these simpering peasants that I would resort to stealing? That’s preposterous.” Still, his thoughts drifted to Julia’s shade.
He popped open the can of cola he’d brought with him and took a sip. Then he made a disgusted face and spit it back up into the can. He turned it around to look at the name of the beverage. Dr. Pepper. “Guh, more like Dr. Disgusting...”
Loki pushed the can as far away from himself as possible. “I’ve merely had a few unpleasant run-ins with some of the locals as of late. Waiting for the temperature to cool before I attempt to regain favor with any of them. Assuming I decide to do that. Might cut them all off entirely. You know how it is.”
“I dunno, I think there’s plenty to steal,” Rocket mused under his breath. He was casting a survey of the room, which had pockets of conversation and people gathered. Undoubtedly someone had something useful, and even if they didn’t, there was an itch that required a scratch every so often. Thieving kept his mind primed, and it stopped the world -- or even Derleth, whatever Derleth truly was -- from being in total control of his life.
Everyone clung to some semblance of self realization and agency. It took all forms. If a raccoon from space was the one lifting items, then that space raccoon was actively deciding his fate. It made sense. It made perfect sense to a creature that had been created by scientists.
Rocket stared at the can that had been discarded. His mind spun with the possibility of grabbing it. How germy were Asgardian mouths? What a waste. He couldn’t have spit it out on the floor instead?
“Oh, yeah, sure. Cut ‘em off. I do that all the time.” He was still staring at the can. What a waste. “You piss them off ‘cause you didn’t apologize for bein’ you?”
“What?” Loki felt like he’d used that word more times in Rocket’s presence than he had in the last decade. It made for a humorous echo effect between the two of them that anyone passing by might overhear. ‘What?’ ‘What?’
But Rocket was more perceptive than Loki had initially given him credit for. And Loki eyed him suspiciously because of it. Why was it that the only people who really seemed to understand him as of late were his former enemy, a woman who’d betrayed another him in an alternate universe, and a talking raccoon? How had his life been distilled to these three unexpected variables?
He shook the thought away. That would require a keener mood to decipher. And Loki wasn’t in the right mindset to pick apart his subconscious.
“I never apologize for being me. This is who I am. It’s a centuries-long work in progress, but it’s as close to perfection as it’s going to get. Most people don’t like it, but most of the time I don’t care. It’s not my mission in life to please other people.” Loki leaned forward a bit to get a closer look at the semi-gelatinous sludge in the solution bath. “You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
As Loki eyed Rocket, Rocket eyed Loki. It wasn’t any real mastercraft of skill. Rocket merely came prepackaged with a suspicious-of-everyone-and-everything attitude, and if they were being skeptical of him, then he was doubly skeptical of them. Narrowed eyes met narrowed eyes. Rocket reached for the can of soda, found himself coming up short of arm length, and -- without breaking eye contact -- leaned the last bit of distance to grab the Dr. Pepper.
“‘Course I ain’t gonna eat this,” Rocket replied. He dumped the can into the solution, which frothed unpleasantly. “It’s a battery.” The statement was presented as if it were an obvious thing. Of course it was a battery. Keep up.
The set of cables that were strewn in the nest of items were picked up, and Rocket dunked the ends into the solution. Then, he fished through his pockets and produced an ammeter, which looked distinctly like it had been found around Derleth and may or may not actually work. He hummed as he watched the dial barely move upon contact with the cable.
“And you may tell yourself you ain’t about pleasin’ other people, but how’s that fit into you usin’ me to avoid someone else?” There was a sharp grin that played out on Rocket’s features, then he looked up. For a second it might have looked like he was framing the question as a gotcha, crowning it with a smirk, but then he held up the ammeter. “It works.”
Loki just made a weird look as Rocket tried to surreptitiously snatch the can of cola. A look that while not breaking from the stare with Rocket — listen, if this was a contest then Loki was determined to win — definitely confirmed that he’d caught a glimpse of that little paw going for the drink. A look that said, ‘Really? I don’t care about that so why are you acting so suspicious?’
Goodbye, Dr. Pepper.
Loki raised a confused brow at the frothing solution. Okay, now his interest was piqued. “Why are you building a battery out of old junk and bad beverages?”
He wasn’t even going to announce his surprise that this homemade battery seemed to be working. Was it absurd? Absolutely. But no more absurd than aliens devouring them for making noise or a stone monolith appearing out of nowhere and causing random nightmares. A raccoon with a penchant for eating day-old sandwiches and building batteries out of rubbish? Perfectly normal.
It really made Loki wish he could have seen Thor when he was around Rocket. Sounded like it could have given him a good laugh.
Loki opened his mouth to say he didn’t know what Rocket was talking about — truly he did not put together the racoon’s reasoning about pleasing people and using him as a cover — but Rocket interrupted before he could say anything. “And what good is that thing going to do for you? You going to use that to build some kind of wonky tech that’ll turn us all into potatoes next week?”
Rocket stopped. He stopped and lowered the ammeter, then he fixed Loki with an unimpressed look. There were at least ten seconds of silence following that, with Rocket looking borderline affronted that he’d been asked a ridiculous question, and then was further asked to entertain some even more ridiculous questions before he could even dignify the first.
“Battery to test ammeter. Ammeter to be used to test other stuff. Book…” There was a loose gesture at the book, which up until now had no obvious role. “To squish sandwich into a thickness that fits in my mouth without unhinging my jaw.”
Rocket scoffed. “Potatoes? Where do you come up with this stuff?” Because that was surely the most obtuse thing of the last ten minutes.
The battery to the ammeter to the book to the sandwich. And Loki’s suggestion that Derleth might turn them into starchy tubers was the most absurd aspect of their conversation thus far?
“Why not? My money is on potatoes or turnips. I’ve actually been anticipating this for quite some time now. Fresh vegetables, after all, are the one problematic constant in Derleth. At least, as far as I’ve noticed. No one has really taken a shine to the greenhouse or to any other form of gardening. And every time we end up somewhere that offers fresh fruit and vegetables, those are the items in highest demand because we have no viable system to prevent people from eating to excess during the static weeks.” And there were more than a few residents who seemed to indulge lavishly without thought to the rest of the Derleth community. No names, but Loki was keeping a mental list of them going. This was particularly an issue during the Void weeks when they had no real method of obtaining food. It bothered Loki because he foresaw a problem if Derleth were to just not go anywhere for more than two weeks in a row. They’d all be in nutritional trouble really fast.
None of the heroes felt it important to really address this issue, however, so Loki kept it to himself. His suggestions for improvement were always met with discontent and long winded mockery. Like the time he said they ought to consider forming a team of protectors. You know, in case something horrible happened. Like alien monsters showing up and tearing everyone limb from limb.
But if they all wanted to run out into the fray and die that was no skin off Loki’s teeth. Or his back. Or however the saying went.
“If I were in control of this place and I wanted to teach us a lesson, I would wait until the food supplies were low and then turn us into potatoes. Well, maybe not all of us. But some of us. An experiment in both patience and morality.” Loki shrugged. “Is jaw unhinging a normal thing for your species?”
Rocket was quiet, but it was less because he was thinking, and more because he hadn’t noticed that Loki had ended his short speech. There was something about vegetables, then gardening, and he was sure he’d been asked a question, but…
“Okay, I’m not gonna lie. I tuned you out.” It was, possibly, a mild look of apologetic shame that Rocket cast at the space beside Loki’s right ear. No one really set the bar on manners throughout his life, and he wasn’t great with knowing how to broach a true apology. And, so, he generally skipped them altogether.
“Hey, you got a wingspan there.” Rocket climbed down from the table top, then off the bench. He reached up for some of the loose components of his lunchtime project. “You grab the vat. Gotta find somewhere to dump it. That thing reeks.”
Cue Loki’s flat-faced, unamused stare. Both from Rocket’s confession that he’d stopped listening but also from the sudden demand that Loki help him carry his ridiculous cafeteria experiment. He wasn’t going to do it. Absolutely not! He wasn’t the raccoon’s house maid. He had nothing to do with this mess. Loki rolled his eyes in annoyance and was about to skeedaddle it out of there when—
Someone entered from the opposite side of the dining hall.
Ah, shit.
Now he had to help Rocket to avoid conversation with that person. Who, incidentally, was not the same person Loki was attempting to avoid earlier. This was someone else. Although the reasons for not wanting to run into either of them were similar. In the same class of reasons, at the very least.
He groaned. Then he carefully picked up the vat of gooey, globbing, slimy whatever that Rocket had concocted to create his battery. The odor wafted into his nostrils and Loki almost gagged. “Good Gods, I haven’t smelled anything this foul since…” But Loki didn’t even bother to finish that sentence. Some things didn’t need explanation. He followed along after Rocket, trying his best to keep the vat steady. Oops! A bit spilled on the floor. Did it just burn through the linoleum? “Hurry up and find some place to put this before I lose my breakfast.”
The sound of Rocket’s steps were something of a jingle as all the metal bits and pieces in all his pockets jostled. It almost gave him a soundtrack one might expect of a quirky woodland creature. Of course, were anyone to remark on it, he’d shoot them in the foot with a blaster.
His gaze tracked up to Loki, who was far enough away for Rocket to be outside the splash zone as they both walked.
“Aw, quit complainin’.” The front door of the building was unceremoniously punted open and then Rocket pointed at a bush. There was zero strategy about picking a place to dump the noxious gunk. “There ya go. Over there. And when you’re done with that...” A toothy grin was given. “I got some stuff I need you to grab from top shelves in one of the buildings.”