☪ Day one, at the reset ⛿ In a broom closet in Carter Hall.
For some reason, I wanna make up a song called The Reset, but set to Duran Duran's The Reflex, and my brain is no cooperating. Imagine it's there and it's clever. However, the reset happens. Vampire Loki gets frisky. Natasha is
very confused.
⚠
Vampire talk.
The reset was always a jostle. The precise timing of 1:32 in the morning was especially inconvenient for vampires. It meant that they were awake when the change happened. Loki would have much preferred to have been asleep somewhere so he wouldn’t be snapped out of whatever he was doing. Then again, it could have been worse. He could have found himself in a much more precarious position at the time of the reset. He could have been caught by a hunter with a stake jabbed halfway through his heart. Or he could have been torn to shreds by the mauling jaws of a feral wolf. There were worse ways to find himself than huddled in a broom closet with Natasha—his Russian warrior daughter of the night—hiding from the hunter who’d chased them through the woods and back to campus.
If he were alive his heart would have been pounding. It would have raced right through his chest. But he wasn’t and thus his heart was still. As was his body. His breath. His blood. Everything but his mind.
A thin sliver of light from the corridor illuminated the cracks in the door. Loki didn’t need it to see Natasha’s face, beautiful and pale, framed by vibrant strands of red. His vision was keen enough in the dark. Not that he needed his eyes at all. He had her face memorized. Every curve of it. And every inch of her, too, for that matter. She was one of his favorites. His protector for decades. Or had they already reached their centennial anniversary? It was difficult for Loki to keep track. The years ran into each other like two seas meeting. Blurred waves of endless night.
He leaned in close to her face. He was still listening for any sign that their pursuer had caught scent of their hiding place, but he didn’t hear anything. Not a footstep. Not a creak. And if the previous week was any sign of how this one would go, then Loki was fairly certain they were safe from harm.
For now.
And so he took advantage of that rare moment of peace.
Loki tugged her towards him, hard and insistent, until their bodies were as close as they could be without removing fabric between them. Then he kissed her. It was a passionate kiss and a familiar one. Not a first time kiss. This was the kiss of someone who knew that mouth. Who’d kissed it before. Who felt confident and comfortable in the knowledge that the desire would be returned with equal fervor.
And it was the kiss of someone who’d clearly been intimate with the rest of her.
Natasha had been asleep at the reset. The days were hard on her newly born body; after all, it took a long time for children to become adults. They'd been shoved into these bodies and given no time to develop. There were memories of growing up in her head, of learning language and fighting and manipulation tactics, but her current body didn't always follow suit with what she wanted.
By the seventh week, she was getting stronger. She could feel some of that extra strength returning, but it came in tiny waves, and only when she really needed it. Then she had to spend her time recovering. She was used to being bruised and wounded and still having to press forward, but when there was downtime… You took the opportunity to sleep.
So when she snapped awake, she didn't quite understand what was happening. This wasn't her usual wake up: falling down a cliffside until she was jolted awake in her bed. She was already upright in a dark room. Her hands reached out to the sides of her, finding what felt like the handle of a broom. Her foot tapped the side of what she assumed was a bucket on wheels. Then she realized that she didn't need to reach out to find out where she was. She could see clearly in the complete darkness. That seemed strange and unusual.
Loki leaned in closer, listening for something. There was something off about his appearance, but Derleth liked to play games with them. They were shoved from body to body, and sometimes their bodies were taken over by other versions of themselves. What were they this week? He pulled her to him, and there was nothing chaste or innocent about it. Despite their clothing — whatever she was wearing was not typical — she could feel every inch of him pressing against her until she didn't know where her body ended and his began.
Then the kiss… It was so sudden that Natasha's gut instinct was to lean into it, go along with it. Were they playing some part in case someone crashed whatever hiding place they were in? A pair of lovers in a closet would get overlooked. Hadn't she done something similar with Steve years ago?
Something was off though. Something was different. This was a long burning passion, the kind that had learned every part of her, and she assumed the same in return. Later, she'd be ashamed that she'd let it go on for more than the initial kiss, but she'd let it go for more than a few moments. Her body felt alive for the first time in —
Her heart was not thudding in her chest, there was no rush of blood in her ears, and her tongue lapped over his longer than usual canines.
She broke away.
"Loki?"
Loki didn’t anticipate her sudden recoil from his touch. He was usually quite adept at guessing how people would respond to his attention. To his affection. This was, thankfully, not the normal response. This was an anomaly, even for Natasha. Then again, he supposed there was always a first for everything. But did she have to make so much noise while she pulled away? That wasn’t like her. Just because he couldn’t hear any footsteps outside of the closet door didn’t mean they were safe.
The hunters and the werewolves had the upper hand in Derleth, after all. There weren’t many places of refuge for vampires. None that a pair of keen eyes couldn’t find during the day anyway. They’d gone from being relatively high on the supernatural food chain to being rats—scurrying and scrambling about for a tight corner to cower in and hope that no one stumbled upon them during the day.
Loki furrowed his brows when Natasha said his name. What was that questioning stare for? He could tell she enjoyed his touch. As she always had in the past. He’d tasted the desire on her lips. Why did she pull away when they had so little time alone together? And why did she look so surprised?
“What? Did I do something wrong?” Loki asked, shaking his hair back over his shoulder. He knew he hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t done anything she’d ever complained about before. They were vampires. They’d shared much more erotic and exotic pleasures with each other than a mere kiss.
Perhaps he was thinking along the wrong lines. He turned his attention back to the door, voice dropping to a hushed whisper. “Did you hear something?”
Loki focused his thoughts, preternatural senses honing in on the slightest sound. But he heard nothing aside from the creaks of the old school building.
His face was paler than normal, much more like it had been early on in that first week after leaving the Matrix. His eyes, however, they were darker than usual — almost red in appearance. That was what unnerved her. She could get used to it, but it had taken her off guard for the moment. Her frown grew as she looked him over.
"Okay, so we're in another dimension. This one where we're — what are we this week?"
Natasha knew that Loki's attention had been unusual for her, and she'd bring that up soon. She just wanted to get her bearings before she asked him what that had been about. He was studying something outside the building, and she could swear he was listening for every tiny little sound somehow. Like Matt Murdock and his abilities, maybe.
Her nails were filed to neat points. The veins were easily seen beneath them, traveling through her fingers to her hands and up her arms. Almost as if her skin was so pale it was translucent. Her hair was pin straight and cut at the chin. At her hip, she had a weapon, a gun that was tucked into a neat holster.
"Are we in a broom closet?"
Loki tilted his head to the side and raised a brow. He didn’t attempt to hide his confusion. He didn’t feel like that was necessary. He and Natasha had known each other for years. They understood each other completely. Not even the tiniest of emotions went unnoticed. And that wasn’t just because they’d been together for what amounted to nearly—or was it more than that?—a century. They were bound in blood. Family for all eternity. And while Loki might have been purposefully elusive with his emotions towards others, his family, his inner circle, was always welcomed to know him inside and out.
Which was perhaps part of what made him different from some of his otherworldly counterparts. The Loki of this world was open with those he cared about. He kept a close, tight knit partnership with those who were important to him. And he wasn’t afraid of sharing his feelings and his weaknesses with them.
But why was he thinking about that now?
He pursed his lips, his thoughts wandering inward. He wasn’t the one thinking about that. Someone else was. Someone peeking into his memories from somewhere deep inside of him.
He wasn’t alone in his thoughts. He had a visitor.
Loki shook his head, consciously pushing that intruding entity to the back of his mind. Then he turned his focus back to Natasha. “Are you ill, darling?”
He placed the back of his hand to her forehead. His Natasha would have found that humorous. A little jest leftover from mortality. “Yes, we’re in a broom closet.”
Then the humor fell from his face, replaced with concern. “Are you injured? Did he hurt you? That didn’t happen last time…”
Resets were always hard in their own ways, but this one was different. There was some sort of internal clock that told her it was just after the reset. That this was not unusual, to find herself trapped somewhere — particularly with Loki — and hiding. She couldn't explain the feeling, just something in her blood. Blood that was not pumping through her veins. Blood that was still not rushing in her head. The absence of a heartbeat made everything around her feel and sound louder than usual. When the building's heater started, she could hear it almost as if she was right next to it.
Natasha didn't feel injured. She was sure she'd notice that. Decades of experience at being injured, noticing it, and walking it off. If the fall on Vormir hadn't killed her, extended NSAID use might have destroyed her guts.
"No. I don't think so." She paused, listening to the sounds outside. Her instinct was the breathe, a simple rising and falling of her chest, but apparently, it was not this body's. "Who was he?"
She had fangs; she could tell as her tongue moved over her teeth when speaking. Her speech tripped over them. They weren't long, like you'd see in the movies, but they were definitely different. Sharper. Pointed. Meant for blood. Confused, and not quite sure she believed it, she asked, "Are we — vampires now?"
“A hunter,” Loki replied, still partially distracted as he listened for any hint that someone was encroaching on their hiding spot. Still nothing. But he’d give it another minute or two before opening the door and checking the hallway. Just to be extra cautious. “Not a particularly good one, mind you, but his timing isn’t half bad. This is going to get incredibly tiresome very quickly if we reset like this every week. Not that I don’t enjoy the close quarters and the company.”
Loki’s smirk was accented by the shadows that cast across his face. Then he wink. He was tempted to lean in for another kiss, hoping it might jostle Natasha back from whatever had dazed her. But then she asked her next question and he knew.
He knew this wasn’t his Natasha.
Bloody hell. What next?
“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “You’re a vampire. I’m a vampire. Some others are vampires. But not everyone. Point in case, the man who was chasing us with the flaming torch and the wooden stake.”
But Natasha may not have been able to access that memory. Loki ran his tongue over his lower lip, tasting the remnants of their kiss. It was a pity. Then, while his thoughts drifted, a few foreign and unfamiliar memories wove their way through his mind. Memories of another Natasha as seen through another Loki’s eyes.
“Ah, I think I see now. You two aren’t…” Loki pursed his lips, searching for the most appropriate word. “…Well, that’s unfortunate.”
Okay, so there'd been that guy, Sam Winchester, who had been here for a while. He'd called himself a hunter, that he tracked down supernatural evil. Hunter made sense in that way, especially if they were vampires. She could understand that on a fundamental level. They were vampires in this world, wherever they had landed, and they were hunted because of it.
What she didn't understand is why Loki was behaving strangely. You two aren't…
"Who two, and what aren't we?"
She had a few suspicions, but she wanted confirmation. She also wanted to deafen the strange silence inside her. It toppled everything she'd known about herself and her body. It was even more challenging than the last seven weeks as a former meat battery for machines. At least then, there were certain things that were comforting about being human. The feeling of her heart in her chest being a big one.
The more time they spent in that confined space, the more certain Loki was that his Natasha wasn’t there anymore. He didn’t know if she was trapped deep inside her subconscious, like he felt the other Loki was in him, or if she was wherever this new Natasha’s corporeal self was. He probably should have played it more carefully. He knew the other Loki would have been more guarded and suspicious. That seeped through along with a few lingering thoughts. It made him a little dizzy, but he also had the sense that his invisible passenger was tired. No, more than that—incomparably weary. He felt confident it wouldn’t take him long to shake off his internal disconnect. But some feelings were impossible to ignore. Clearly this other Loki had very strong feelings for his Natasha. But there was also an odd sort of paranoia attached to those emotions. Loki didn’t understand why. Not yet.
But the truth of the matter was he didn’t know this person. So, he should have been more cautious with her.
But he wasn’t. Because vampire Loki’s priorities weren’t comparable to the God of Mischief.
He cracked the door open and peeked out into the corridor. He narrowed his eyes, adjusting them to the light. Empty. Still, he didn’t leave the closet. Not yet.
“You and the prince.” Loki paused. “King? God?” He frowned and shook his head as though trying to work out what he could glean from the memories he’d seen. Then he shrugged. “Whatever he is. I don’t think he even knows.”
He pushed the door open, flooding the closet with fluorescent light. “Ladies first.”
Natasha's paranoia hadn't slipped a bit. She could see him completely now. The ashen skin. The hair slightly different. The red eyes. It was something to focus on other than sounds she wasn't hearing. She didn't like the way this Loki talked about her Loki. Not her Loki, but the one from her dimension. It seemed this week was going to be far more complicated than the last seven which had a very clear objective.
"Right…" She stepped out, cautious as ever, hand toward the gun on her hip. "So this week, we're vampires — and you are someone else this week." She looked down at her tight latex and leather costume that somehow couldn't be comfortable for anything other than looking pretty, and yet she had the strange suspicion that she did a lot of fighting in this. "Or I'm someone else. Doesn't really matter. We're in this situation because of Derleth. Always Derleth."
She glanced around and realized: this was Carter Hall. She remembered because the other Clint — the one from a world where Laura and the kids didn't exist — lived there until it was destroyed. Then he disappeared not long after. Nearly everyone had died that week because of the White Violin.
She spun around to look at him. "What happened at this Derleth? Was there an experiment?"
“You’re someone else,” Loki corrected. Or confirmed. He wouldn’t defend it further. This was his world. His body. And the same went for his Natasha. Whoever this version of Natasha was inside the body of the woman who’d been his companion for years, she was the intruder. Not that Loki would fault her that. He could sense enough from his own scrambling mental passenger to know that this wasn’t intentional. It wasn’t planned. But he could also glean that it wasn’t entirely unexpected.
They’d been through similar situations before. Loki saw glimpses of unfamiliar places. A mechanical dystopian wasteland. A tall ship at sea. Horrifying flesh-eating creatures bursting through the aisles of a supermarket.
He instinctively clenched his eyes shut in order to focus and push those foreign memories to the back of his mind. Then he followed Natasha out into the corridor.
“Something happened a few weeks ago. No one knows exactly what yet. Or no one has had the opportunity to ask. Or confess. The people here…” Loki hesitated. They had community. Structure. Peace. He saw that in the other Loki’s thoughts. That was something this Derleth did not have. “Many of us are at war with each other. The reset hasn’t made it easy for us to establish safe grounds and hiding places. Vampires in particular. We’re vulnerable to the day and so our window of opportunity to protect ourselves is quite small compared to the others.”
Loki paused, taking his first good look at Natasha. She looked like his Natasha. She smelled like her. But the walk was different. She lacked that almost effervescent way Natasha moved. The way most vampires moved. With silent grace and poise. This Natasha walked like a mortal.
And she looked at him like he was the one who shouldn’t be there. Or, at least, that’s what he thought he saw.
“There have been rumors of an experiment, but I know nothing of it.”
From one war to another. It seemed that was all there was in almost every universe. Having the skills to fight, enjoying it - those were things that Natasha had in spades. Sometimes, though, she just wanted to lie low. Find a trailer in the middle of nowhere Switzerland and just watch movies and eat caviar out of the jar. Just for a little while.
Jumping into other people's wars was exhausting, especially after she thought she'd jumped out of a war for a purpose. Now here she was, trying to keep the people of Derleth together and she wasn't sure she was very good at it. It helped when there was structure, order, but there were so many people who were the Good Guys in their world who wanted to jump to action without thinking of the consequences that it was hard to juggle it.
Finding herself awake just after a reset wasn't encouraging either. Finding herself a vampire with a Loki who knew another version of her — one he was very familiar with — left a sour taste in her mouth. It seemed that so many of the other Natashas had people in their lives they trusted and relied on, that were intimate with those other versions of her in a way she never really experienced.
"I'm going to go out on a limb here. My people from my Derleth are likely out there, taken over the bodies of your friends and enemies the way I've done here." She turned to look at him. "It'll only be for a week though. We can get through a week without killing each other, I think. Depending on how many of us are my version of Derleth. We're not keen on killing one another. You should be safe. Relatively speaking."
“Will it?”
Instinct told him she was correct. That this bizarre encounter wouldn’t last longer than a week. But he could sense the lingering memories of the other man in his mind and knew that wasn’t entirely true. He saw flashes of a dystopian world. More than a week’s worth of experiences. Normally it was a week. But only if Derleth allowed it.
The other Loki tried to hide his panic, but as a vampire Loki had a lot of experience with secrets and facades. He knew the other version of himself was worried that one day it would be permanent. That one day they would be trapped wherever they were. And in whatever body they were in.
But this Loki didn’t have time to think about that right now. He had people he needed to look out for. Other fledglings he had to check in on. Family he needed to ensure were safe and protected, from both the dangers of their own world as well as these new ones from another.
He shrugged, pretending as though he wasn’t concerned. Brushing off her theory as though it were nothing. Or as though it were obvious and thereby nothing to worry about. His Natasha would have been able to see through his playacting. Maybe this one would be able to as well. Or maybe she’d simply think he was dismissive. It didn’t really matter. This wasn’t the woman he was bonded to.
“Well, please take care not to do too much damage to that body while you’re going out on your proverbial limbs. I’m quite fond of my Natalia. And if any ill will befalls her I will not be forgiving.” Loki smiled. The grin was more threatening than his words. “I suppose I ought to check in on some of my other children. So, if you have nothing further to discuss or if you do not wish to continue what we were doing a few moments ago…”
Natasha didn't really care for threats — whether or not they came with smiles or not — and the dry expression she gave him in return should have been all he needed for the first portion of his response. The second portion, well… she wasn't going to dignify at all. There were a few firsts in there that she could never get back (and part of her wanted to take him up on it).
"I'll make sure the body's in one piece. Limited scratches, so long as everyone here plays nice. I make no promises if someone tries to kill me though." That was all she said before she turned to make her way down the corridor. Her footsteps were silent, but her eyes were wide. She'd have to be on guard. If Loki wasn't himself, there was no telling who else might not be themselves either.
She paused for a moment. "Take care of my friend. You hurt him, and as you said: I won't be forgiving either."