☪ Little Cakes, Day 1, early morning ⛿ On top of the Peaslee Theater
Ikol heads up to his spot on the Peaslee Theater, only to find
Kate already there.. They have a few lovely moments.
⚠
Not really much I can think of.
The first step out of Butler Hall was a transition from the darkness of an interior to a warm glow. It paused Loki in his tracks, at the very first inclination of something different than the usual drab gray light that emanated from the Void space and cast a sickly pallor on Derleth most of the waking hours. The light was rosy, almost, even against his cool coloring -- pale skin, greens, blacks.
He turned his focus up to find that the crafted vision of an Asgardian sky remained, although it was a morning color palette now with dusty pinks and oranges blending into the start of something blue. It was fine spellwork, he had to give himself credit for that. He just hadn’t expected it to endure. Or, rather, for Derleth to let it carry on beyond the last week they had been bound to the Void.
It put a small spring in his step. The outer boundary of his magic seemed further out than he’d thought it was. There was space to build some momentum up. He would have to contend with his personal ghost, but…
It lightened some of the load of concern.
It meant that small magical expenditures and low level spells were safe. Safe enough anyway. In a Loki’s life, nothing was strictly by the rules and without risk, but safe enough would do.
He opened a portal to the rooftop of the Peaslee Theater, and traversed to the other side. His focus fell on someone who had already made the ascent to the loft, and a grin soon followed.
“How long have you been up here?”
"Ummm…." Kate turned over her wrist, looked at it, and shrugged. "Half past a freckle?" Neither wrist had a watch, but she was in her purple costume, holes at the hips. The wrist she turned over was the only one with a sleeve, so even half past a freckle was a big ole lie. Maybe she was picking up things from Loki.
Or maybe she was just being a dork.
She'd woken up early by Kate Bishop standards, before the sun rose even. As soon as she'd seen that Loki's sky was still there, she headed out in the hopes that he might be up on the theater rooftop — memories in tact for both of them. When he wasn't, she decided to stick around. She watched the constellation he'd made for Lucky — who was not on the roof, sadly, but was chasing squirrels in the green — fade as the sun gained traction. It was really stunning to be honest. She sat up in her chair and turned toward him. "I watched the sun rise in the void. Your sun."
He walked over towards her, towards where a cluster of pillows, chairs, and some miscellaneous trinkets from other worlds had accumulated. And as Kate was adorned in her purples, he was wrapped up in his greens. Both them dressed for action, and instead gazing at an illusionary sky. He swung into a chair beside Kate, but not before hooking it and pulling it closer to her.
“You know, I set the charm to shift on a typical Midgardian cycle, but I didn’t expect Derleth to let it stay,” he told her, as he leaned his elbows on his knees and tucked his chin into his outstretched hands. “Maybe I should have let Thor rope me into helping him stage a party sooner.”
It wasn’t really that. Kate knew. Many chances had come and gone when he could have stepped in to assist. He momentarily recalled the moment Kate had fallen from the old Butler Hall’s roof, and he hadn’t been ready or fast enough. It was hard to shake that memory, but it anchored him in a way that he hadn’t expected. It started him in earnest trying to be better. Be more present. Be here.
He looked out across the Derleth campus, and even though there weren’t the typical long shadows of dawn’s light and one could be removed from the illusion to think too hard on it, it was a nice view. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll come up here earlier.”
Kate thought about the previous week. Even without memories, they'd sort of found themselves in each other's orbits. In retrospect, Kate was sure that he was using magic for all sorts of things: drying himself off in a rain, expanding what she was certain had originally been a tiny one bedroom apartment into something that could accommodate two futons in the living space without being cluttered, somehow affording coffee most mornings. Here, he was much more skittish with his use of magic. She got why. She'd had the unfortunate past of being caught up in it at one point.
"Maybe… we could just stay the night up here." Assuming Derleth didn't throw anything at them. She'd found herself overwhelmed by the sight, smell, and desire to eat that little cake, but she knew that she shouldn't. She'd hidden it away, along with the drink she desperately wanted to drink, in the chest at the end of her bed. She did not want Lucky to get into something meant for her. "You know, stay away from all those cakes and drinks."
Kate reached over and draped her hand on his. Nothing clingy, but the touch was nice after a week of not being herself, but enough of herself to not be too strange in her memories. There was a lot to unpack, just not right now.
“We could stay the night up here,” Loki murmured, more so because he was bearing down on his jaw where his chin was notched in his hands. “The bedrooms don’t offer much in the way of creature comforts, anyway. Suspicious food aside, of course you mean we should stay up here for an all-night marathon…”
He turned to look at Kate, a sideways glance. His smirk was a hint behind his hands -- or at least one now, since the second had come away to rest on a knee. “Of video games. Agreed. It was one of the first things I did when I manifested my apartment in the City. I pulled an all-nighter simply because I could. Between all the missions for the All-Mother was a night here or there in which I had a chance to figure out what now.”
As Kate’s hand came to rest atop his, he switched his attention to look down at it. “Or, I suppose, who now. You know how that goes, don’t you? Suddenly, you’re on your own in a big city. Maybe people know the name, but they don’t know the person. A quasi-blank slate.”
Yeah, that sounded all too familiar. She'd gone to Los Angeles, originally, as a break but dad hadn't liked that, and he'd cut off her credit cards: his one and only thing to lord over her. She may have been living off other people's charity for that moment, in a broken down RV on the beach, but she'd been free.
Even if her dad hadn't turned out to be on Madame Masque's payroll and was just a jerk to her, insisting she call his wife mom even though they went to high school together, it was still worth it to be free. There were times she thought she wasn't worthy of her old friends without the money to back the team up anymore, but it wasn't worth being under her now cloned and younger dad with gross superpower's control.
"Sometimes you don't even know yourself when it really comes down to it. Who are you without All-Mother messing with your story? Or your dad dangling the credit cards in front of your face?"
“That,” Loki agreed. He cast his sight long and reflected on the morning sky. “But then you end up in a place where no such All-Mother or credit-withholding father exist, and so wouldn’t this be the ideal situation to figure it out? Between the margins of all the weeks where we’re not ourselves, that is. What a nuisance that is.”
He lifted his free hand and visualized a cloud or two across the expanse that was starting to turn bluer by the second. Like a director seeing what the frame composition was missing.
“For a time I thought Derleth was merely a place where things fell between the cracks. If we assume that we might go home one day and this time is all forgotten at the threshold between worlds, then what incentive is there to try to finesse anything? Or to workshop something that was going on back home so that I could return with all the cards in my hand, ready to play?”
Sometimes Loki spoke in flowery language that Kate would have to sit and think about. It wasn't that she wasn't smart or that she didn't understand him, it's just that the questions were usually bigger than any smart ass answer she could think of. Dodge and weave was fine, but it seemed he was on the edge of a point, and Kate didn't want to disrupt it.
She sat quietly, thinking about Derleth. As much as she'd like to believe that this was more than a place where people (and things) fell through the cracks and landed here, there was so much chaos around each week that she couldn't think of what purpose there would be in such an experiment. Except to see how long it would be before the cracks weren't just things people fell through. They were the people. Everyone had a breaking point, after all.
"What do you think it is now?"
That was the question, wasn’t it? Loki’s mouth pulled into a pensive line.
“Well, if the research team cracks the boundaries of Derleth and we all get to amble into another world with some more freedom, then this is a stepping stone. And if we do that, then perhaps there comes a time when avenues back to where and when we came from may be within reach. But that frames everything right now in the context of what’s in our view. We’re too close to the wall to know if the picture is hung too low. Or too high.” He exhaled, having decided that clouds were what the sky needed. It was a passive, background decision.
“And regardless of if this is a stepping stone or not, it remains that I haven’t -- in all these weeks -- figured out how to shake one spook from tailing behind me. How do you let guilt go? I’ve tried to erase it. I wasn’t even myself for a week. And the moment I am… well, you know. You’ve read the comic. I doubt it would fall away if we did ultimately crawl out of here.”
Loki looked at Kate. He shook his head. “I don’t expect you to have any answers. I’m merely grousing. I feel a little grousy.”
"Maybe guilt shouldn't be let go or erased." If there was one thing about Kate, it was that she was sometimes too honest when it came to these kind of talks. Most of them were with Clint, because they bounced off him like a rubber ball, and he wasn't afraid to tell her the same in return. It used to be that way with the Young Avengers, but then Cassie died…
"Does letting it go mean that you forgot the lesson that came with the guilt?" She turned his hand over, threading her fingers through his. She wasn't trying to make him feel bad for doom him to a life of having a tiny version of himself haunt him for all of his days. "Or should it fall away instead? Like naturally as you learn and grow from the lesson. Forcing it to happen might only make it worse for you."
Few would get such an admission -- even a grousy admission because of a grousy mood. But Kate had seen him in a moment of weakness, tears streaming in the moment that he blurted out that his first act has been to be the weapon of murder that snuffed out an innocent life. His guilt had been enemy to himself and the rest of the Young Avengers. It felt pitiful to be caught in the cycle, unable to wrest himself free.
“If there’s a lesson to be learned, surely it’s not to do as the first Loki did.” He flexed his fingers between hers and thought of how partnership like this might have nice to have back home. But clever Loki did what a clever Loki always did: removed himself from play when he felt like he wasn’t in control.
“It is unfair. I think… I think that’s just it. My existence was predicated on another’s non-existence. Neither he nor I had the chance to choose. What I see is the piece of him that remains in my memory. I can’t scrub him out. He belongs there. But, how do I let him rest? How do…” Loki furrowed his brow. “I let myself rest?”
"I don't really have the answer for that. Learning to coexist might be hard. Could be the solution. Just letting him exist inside you, even if it makes you feel bad. Let him be the part of you that reminds you of what happens when you go too far? So that you don't?"
That was easy for Kate to say, she didn't have the literal embodiment of a murder committed haunting her. Most of her guilt never had anything to do with destroying worlds or any of the tricks that the previous Lokis had done to their families. She was, also, more angry when she felt guilty, rather than introspective too.
"It's not your fault you exist. That wasn't something you could help."
It was this that he loved about her. Kate, with all her readiness for a fight, but also her ability to see a simple solution. Maybe it was because she had fresh eyes on it, or maybe because she wasn’t so bogged down by planning.
He straightened up a little in his seat, and let her reply sink in. His expression slackened a little, enough to take the tension out of his brows. Dealing with the child Loki always felt like the winning condition had to be release from the specter. He never considered learning to embrace it and trying to live with it. He didn’t know what that looked like, but it was a new vantage point on an old problem.
“You might be more clever than I am,” he quietly replied. “I think I’ve just heard something I never considered before.”
"Oh, yeah, I'm totally more clever than Loki, the god of stories and chaos and tricks," Kate replied, with an expression that was all sarcasm and disbelief. Kate might be a smart cookie. She might also be overly curious and nosy, but she considered herself pretty average in the brains department. Strategy? Yes, she could do that. Cleverness? Sure, in her own way.
She propped her legs up on a giant pillow and leaned back to look at the sky. It was nice seeing it, without some random hellscape to go with it. Then she looked at him out of the corner of her eyes. "Wait, what did I said that you never considered?"
“You have your moments,” Loki returned, easing in some humor although his tone carried enough of a weight that suggested he meant what he said. “And I’ve been known to be stupid.”
In fact, his own cleverness often made him do stupid things because he assumed no one could out-fox him. In actuality, he’d been fooled before, and worse even still… duped by himself. What a curse, to have a title. God of anything implied you were the foremost authority, but that wasn’t wholly true. There were moments he just had to pretend it was for the reputation.
“You said to try to live with it. Even if it makes me feel bad. It’s… a different approach. Maybe worth something.” He glanced sideways and down at her from his upright position. “Surely better than what I’ve tried already.” He reached out his leg and nudged her foot.
"Oh yeah, you've been way stupid before. I have pictures of the stupidity, Tyrion Lannister." It wasn't something Kate liked to think about because so much of Loki's time with the Young Avengers, he looked like he was eleven. And now, well, he looked older than her, but was younger than her, and if she thought about it too much…
Kate wouldn't mind being the god of something. The God of Arrows would be cool. In the meantime, it was something to strive for. Her and Clint could compete over it. It would be fun. She wouldn't take it that seriously either.
"I mean, the worst that could happen is that it doesn't work, and we try a new strategy. Right?" She didn't really want to think of the true worst thing that could happen.
“I also have pictures of the stupidity. We had fun.” He raised his hand and pinched his pointer and thumb in front of him. “A little fun. Between the parts that weren’t fun. Not as much fun as now, but…”
Honestly, if Kate was thinking about how awkward it was to have met when he was still occupying a child’s body, then Loki was trying to avoid thinking on it too much. His timeline was incoherent, anyway. He was a single digit of years in age or in excess of thousands.
“Surely the least I could do is give your idea a try. I’m a younger sibling. If I know of nothing else, I know how to be persistent.” He shifted his hand that was held out and turned the palm upwards. A spray of green sparks, almost like miniature fireworks, cascaded from the center until he coiled his fingers closed.
“Not to make this all about me. What’s going on in the land of Kate this fine day one?”
Kate knew all about being the persistent younger sibling as well. Her sister had a wedding that cost almost as much as a Van Gogh painting would. Susan thought their mother's effort to save the world were idiotic when she could have been spending time with her family. Kate, on the other hand, idolized her mom and got her desire to go good from her. Kate loved Susan, but damn if she didn't get on her nerves, spending money on what Kate considered frivolous nonsense just to show off their (dad's) money.
Susan was definitely not Thor, and Kate was definitely not Loki in those terms. Besides, Susan had shut down all communication with Kate when she went into superheroing. It didn't help when Kate discovered that their dad was a supervillain or that their mother had been turned into a vampire — both of whom were working for Madame Masque. Was Susan in on it all? She also wondered if Susan thought it was gross that her dad was married to someone younger than Susan and tried to get her to call her mom too.
Too bad they were estranged or she could have asked her those questions.
"Well, I'm back to being me, but I kind of miss my little hole in the wall Private Investigation office on the West Coast now. It wasn't much, but it was mine, you know?"
Loki hummed an agreement. He didn’t specifically know Kate’s wish to operate a small business, but he knew of a space -- even a small one -- that one could call one’s own being a key part of finding identity.
“I would say you could start something here, but the worst mysteries around that aren’t about the greater Delerth problem… are probably who drank the last scotch. Which might be worth finding out, but all evidence might vanish in a week, if not the culprit. And also Derleth is governed mostly by everyone having nice manners, so the teeth on any consequence is…” Loki shrugged.
“What would help with that bit of homesickness? Anything I can do?” He asked.
Kate's idea to be a private investigator was spawned from Jessica Jones. Though Jessica was mostly out of the superhero scene these days, the idea had gained traction. You see, if you were a superhero, and you had a PI business, people might bring their weird problems to you. So you could do the superheroing while doing your job. It seemed like a win-win situation, the kind of thing where almost anything you did could be a tax write-off almost. (Not that Kate knew much about doing taxes. She had software for that. And super smart friends.)
"You can answer a question for me."
Loki tilted his head as he centered Kate back in his focus. It was a broad request, and agreeing to it meant he had to trust Kate.
Which he did.
“So I can. What’s the question?”
Kate gave him a sly smile. One that might have Loki wishing that he hadn't offered anything to her for the homesickness.
"It was you. Expanding the living room, revamping the bathroom. Using magic, in a world in which we didn't know each other the same way, to help me out. Wasn't it?"
She knew the answer. She just wanted to hear him say it.
That crinkled the edges of Loki’s mouth until he couldn’t help resignation to a smirk. While the previous week’s recollection remained with him, he knew it had been spent not aware of his true self. That wasn’t great. But at least it had afforded him a life with Kate in it, and their friendship intact.
“Who else would it have been?” He shrugged, a short you’ve-got-me type of shrug. “No tricks…”
"Just mischief," she answered with a wide grin.
In an instant, she popped forward from her lounging in the chair to hang off the side so that she could reach his shirt. She gave it a tug toward her, and when he indulged her, she planted a kiss on his mouth.