InsaneJournal

“TEAR HIM IN HALF.”

“No, you can’t tear someone in half for singing at you,” Ikol told his faithful hel-hound.

“ROAST ALIVE.” Thori muttered, which somehow still carried enough volume to be audibly all capital letters.

“Really, most other creatures and beings take the compliment of being called ‘cute’ in stride. You’re overreacting. You can be both cute and horrifying, I promise you.” Ikol thrust his hands into his pockets and gave the canine a side glance. He wasn’t really walking along as much as stomping tufts of grass as if they offended him. A small flower was charred for good measure. “Look, if it will cheer you any, we’ll find one of your over-enthused golden friends--”

“NOT CUTE.”

“--and they can assure you in their own way that you’re a wretch if it placates,” Ikol finished with a sigh.

Thori snorted a smokey huff at a passing butterfly, which teetered in its flight but flew far enough away to evade much worse. Dramatics. Always.

Still, Derleth’s general affinity for perfect timing seemed to have caught on that placing one such over-enthused golden retriever in the path of a trickster and his dog would make narrative sense. It was Lucky who had come bounding from campus, possibly on his way to somewhere else, but tracking over to familiar scents instead. His greeting was to Thori first, as was the custom, and then Ikol felt the wet tongue of greeting at the back of his hand. It was a sloppy kiss given in the moment that Ikol was surveying the path that Lucky had come from. Surely Kate would be somewhere nearby…

“LUCKY HAS COME TO HELP REND FLESH.”

“Ah, no. Likely not, Thori.” But Ikol couldn’t fault the hel-hound for his hopeful nature. The trickster stooped and gave the golden retriever a scritch behind the ears. Something seemed off. “Lucky, where is Ka--”

Before Ikol could even finish, Lucky bolted. It left him and Thori both to decide inside the breadth of a second to get to their feet and follow. Away from campus. Towards town. Fast.

---

Someone had come up behind her and put a bag over her head. It brought up memories that seemed so long buried that Kate barely had time to register what was going on. Julia had gotten her hands untied, and they'd all managed to escape relatively unharmed. The idiots — lumberjacks? Seriously? — did a song about how upset they were for being rejected. What the hell kind of world was this?

Kate overheard one person muttering about how they weren't getting any younger, and they'd be lucky to get picked for a wife considering they were Outsiders. One guy actually had the balls to tell her that she should be flattered for the attention. That had stopped her in her tracks. She turned to look at him, asking him to repeat himself.

"I didn't see anyone lined up to marry you," he told her with a huff. His collar was so tight, she could see the artery in his neck throbbing. He was lucky that a third of them weren't vampires anymore.

"What do you mean?" she asked, sticking her finger in her mouth. Her voice was a little higher than normal. She was not going to let this guy get out of here without a black eye.

"Those are just about the only boys in town your age. Now you'll end up an old spinster without anyone to take care of you. What'll you do then? Be a burden to your parents?"

Kate started laughing. Yeah, okay. Her parents. The small-time criminal and the vampire who abandoned her daughter for Madame Masque. "Oh, I don't have parents." she told him in a matter-of-fact tone, hoping he would buzz off. "I've been on my own for years."

This seemed to horrify him to the point that his face turned purple. He sputtered for a few moments before, assuming that Kate must be some sort of harlot. That was the only way a woman — alone — could take care of herself around these parts, it seemed. "Then it's a good thing them boys didn't get stuck with the likes of you!"

Kate grabbed the guy's shirt, pulled her arm back, ready to send it flying when she heard Lucky's worried bark behind her. She didn't let the guy go, and she didn't lower her arm just yet. Her head jerked down to the golden who ran over to her, then she noted the plume of smoke and, then of course, the Loki that followed.

---

Even for an in-shape Frost Giant, a breakneck run at full clip meant that the moment he stopped, he had to take a few seconds to catch his breath. And a few more to catch up to what seemed to be going on. He met Kate’s eyes, then he leaned a bit to make brief eye contact with the man who was about to incur some Bishop Wrath.

Thori, on the other hand, was less observant and more instinct. He raced forward, growling, ready to pounce. It was Ikol’s quick reflexes that snagged him mid-air. Thori yelped and a quick jet of flame crackled out from his mouth.

“Easy, Thori. Let Kate do her thing.” He peered at Kate, brows raised. “I presume you were going to? Please, don’t let me steal your moment.” There was a short hand gesture (given by the arm not wrestling a hel-hound into submission), as if to say ‘as you were.’

---

Lucky ran at Kate, and it was only because of him that this dude didn't get a knuckle sandwich. She released him to catch her dog before he jumped at her or jumped at the guy. Either way, she wasn't risking Lucky to some random townsperson. Maybe she shouldn't have risked herself either, but he was smart enough to run as soon as she let him go. Probably because of their violent tendencies.

"Lucky, what's going on!" He ran circles around her until she crouched down to get a better look at him. "What happened? Is he okay?"

---

Thori was squirming so badly that Ikol had to shift both arms to stilling him. Hel literally hath no fury like a dog that would rather chase down a lumberjack, apparently. Thori snapped his head to one side and hit Ikol’s jaw with a solid thwack. It was the solid sort of sound that came with teeth rattling. There was a grimace, but Ikol held tight. Thori needed to calm down before he was put down.

“Well, he was meandering alone, and I merely asked where you were. Honestly, can’t tell the difference between him rushing to an emergency and him being over-eager to answer my question.” In pure protest, Thori decided to flip around himself Ikol’s grip and face his master directly. Snout frothing with sooty smoke clouds, eyes staring, head blocking Ikol’s view of everything. “Don’t mind the furred nightmare. He’s upset about being called ‘cute.’”

Ikol tried to lean to see around the scruffy face of his peevish canine. Thori leaned, as well. “Do I ask about the lumberjack?”

---

Lucky acted as though Kate needed him, and if she was being honest, she did. One night, years ago, she had been assaulted by a man in Central Park. He'd grabbed her from behind and unspeakable things to a teenaged Kate Bishop. She'd only spoken about it to two people: her therapist and Jessica Jones. It's the reason she knew how to handle all the weapons and fight people the way she did. She never wanted to be that girl again.

And somehow she'd ended up here anyway.

At least her and the others had been able to get out of it. That was some consolation to the young Katie inside her, the one who was trying not to panic.

"Some of his friends decided they wanted wives." Kate glared in the direction the cart with the lumberjacks who'd tried to abduct them had gone. "Apparently, courting them is not the way they do it here. They like to put a bag over a woman's head, toss her in a cart, and try to make off with her. Too bad they picked me, and three women with magical powers."

---

At that answer, Ikol turned -- which was more of a pivot at the hip and an attempt to sight the still-retreating man. He looked back to Kate, or whatever was visible of Kate through Thori’s wiry fur. She seemed physically fine, but she also didn’t get to land that final punch before she’d been interrupted. That was to the man’s benefit more than her own.

“Not that I meant to interfere in whatever just desserts were handed out or evaded, but I can let Thori down and he would happily drag that man back here in one piece or… more than one.”

Kate was a hard one to read. He’d met her when she thought of him as a nuisance of a child. Then, things shifted when he had come into being a young adult, even if that was purely by force of magic. They did a song and dance between friendly and antagonistic. He wasn’t always certain what the next round would be: extending a hand to help, or putting up an arm to block.

“By the way, don’t roll your eyes at this question, but: are you alright?” Ikol asked. He was met with Thori yawning directly into his nose. Dog breath. Great.

---

"Nah, this one just said some garbage that was going to get him punched in the face." She glanced around at the other townspeople who were eyeballing her curiously. Some of them looked sad for her, like she'd lost The Bachelor or something. Some of them were narrow-eyed and wondered what was wrong with her. None of them seemed to really think the men were in the wrong, it seemed. "The real ones are long gone. Decided to get out before anyone decided to stop them."

Kate was hard to read, and that was — generally — how she liked it. It's why she wore those shades all the time, why she spent so much of her talk on sarcasm. People assumed she was a spoiled brat (and there were times when she could be, but not in the way you'd think) because of who her father was and how she'd grown up, but she'd never had much in common with her father or her older sister who spent so much on a wedding dress that Kate couldn't help but comment the money could have helped hunger in a starving country.

She pulled herself to her feet, quietly commanding Lucky to sit. She thought about his question. She'd be fine for a few hours, long enough to deal with this conversation and make it back to the dorms before the adrenaline wore off and the reality of the situation reared its ugly head. So she was honest. "I'm alright. For now. Maybe not later, but I am for now."

Why was it the one person she felt the closest to was someone who had betrayed their team to get his own damn powers back? And now he wasn't even using them because he was trying to be better. Or so he said. It was hard to trust someone who had used your team the way Ikol had.

Then she remembered: "Aw man, I'd gotten some treats for Lucky at the butcher shop and dropped them. They're probably all gone by now."

---

Kate’s assessment earned a shrug. It was her call. Fair play if she was fine with letting the man go. If nothing else, Ikol saw no problem in respecting her wishes. And since the man was out of both earshot and sight, Thori had relented on his fighting and had succumbed to being a furred sandbag. Ikol obliged to put him down, only for the hel-hound to saunter over to Lucky and take a seat. Some dog part of his dog brain must have suggested that taking lead from Lucky was the right choice.

“If you’re alright for now, then maybe… perhaps getting out of here might be a good idea.” He turned to spot several lookie-loos, clearly townsfolk that were waiting for their next musical cue. If they started to sing about whatever mundane topic came next, he had to assume that Kate wouldn’t receive it so readily. Truthfully, he wasn’t much for forced showtunes, either. “They’re listening, and…”

TOWNSWOMAN: “What did he say?”
TOWNSMAN: “Asked if she’s okay.”

“No,” Ikol cut in, trying to shatter the rhyming scheme. The sounds of an orchestra swelled from nowhere and everywhere. He closed his eyes and raised a finger. “No, no. Don’t you all have something else to be doing?”

TOWNSWOMAN: “He really should be pursuing…”
TOWNSMAN: “A better way of--”

“DON’T.”

TOWNSMAN: “Wooing.”

---

Kate had enough singing for one day. She was eager to get back to the dorms where she could sit in her room and even if she sang, no one would be around to hear it. The townspeople were overly eager when it came to everyone else's lives. She missed New York; no one gave two craps about you as long as you weren't stomping on their ceiling or keeping them from getting on the subway.

TOWNSWOMAN: "What if she fought the lumberjack—"
TOWNSMAN: "--because she's into this tasty snack."

The townswoman looked sharply at the man, who quickly looked down. Nothing to see here from them. Kate gaped at them. Whatever her feelings (or NON FEELINGS) on Loki were, they were none of their concern. And also? Why would anyone think about wooing when someone just tried to kidnap them?

TOWNSMAN: "He really should be worried…"
TOWNSWOMAN: "The woman is a shrew-ing."

Kate's fist balled up at her side. Lucky didn't do anything, just kept sitting and watching everything with some sort of intensity she'd never seen in the door. Thori seemed to be along for the ride.

"I'm not a shrew!"

TOWNSPEOPLE: "That's what they all say!"

---

It was only a flitting second, but Ikol did let his ego take one small victory lap. Short, sweet. Vanity was always a part of his personality, and he tended to pocket the compliments where they were given. Still, more people were starting to draw in, and that felt like some incentive to start moving. He reached towards Kate to gesture, rather than say anything that could be co-opted into the ongoing number, but…

TOWNSMAN: “But then! He offers his hand!”
TOWNSWOMAN: “At last! Courage! Taking his stand!”

The hand lowered, but trying to outwit and outpace this was becoming more aggravating than not. Ikol stepped towards Kate, and a crescendo began to build. The town itself wasn’t going to let even a trickster dodge its wiles. Ikol’s expression turned into a series of unimpressed and flat lines as his patience started to wane. This shouldn’t be happening. Not with Kate.

TOWNSMAN: “Oh, bliss! Maybe they’ll… kiss!”
THORI: “COCK MY LEG, AND TAKE PISS.”

The music dropped, but perhaps that was part of the script everyone else seemed to be reading. Eyes fell on Thori, who seemed beyond delighted to have put his mark on both the town and whatever was going on. He lowered his leg. He beamed.

---

Kate took that moment to grab Lucky's collar — his leash wasn't here — and pull him away from the middle of town. Loki was free to follow, if he wanted, but she wasn't going to sit around and wait for more of this weird, romanticized misogyny every time a man and a woman were in the same place together. The obsession with getting married was weird.

After the jarring bit with Thori, the music started again.

TOWNSWOMAN: "I remember Morena told me of a pair— "
ANOTHER TOWNSWOMAN: " — that were caught kissing behind a tree."
FIRST TOWNSWOMAN: "Maybe they're betrothed with flair — "
SECOND: "She should wear her ring with glee!"

TOWNSFOLK: "With gleeeeee!"

She didn't wait for Loki to follow, but took off as fast as her legs would carry her. The butcher's shop was forgotten, and maybe she'd send someone else out to pick it up who didn't mind the potential for singing. Maybe someone who wasn't worried about the townspeople finding them smooching somewhere.

"BYE! Have a great day! You bunch of weirdos!"

---

TOWNSWOMAN: “She may run, she may deny.
But she knows,
Oh, she knows...”

He didn’t move with the same speed as Kate, but Ikol had turned as well. The singing and the music began to quiet with distance.

TOWNSMAN: “She knows, as he does…
That’s just how...”

TOWNSFOLK: “Love goes!”

Fortunately, whatever the townsfolk meant to deposit, they’d gotten enough in before their subject matter decided to exit stage left. The crowd stayed back. They were still singing something, but the lyrics were lost on Ikol as he pressed on.

Ikol called to Thori, who realized his spotlight had come and passed. The hel-hound bounded to catch up, then trotted alongside him both less cranky and a little more bolstered now that accusations of cuteness were back of the mind.

“Come on, Thori. No one in that town is tethered to reality.”