A Gem in a Rare Trove of Treasure >> Loki Laufeyson X Reader

Title: A Gem in a Rare Trove of Treasure


Paring: Loki Laufeyson X Reader


Warnings: abandoned relationships, fluff, angst, contains stuff (is psychological betrayal taggable?), Director Fury is a BAMF.


 Spoilers: no! Based on Avengers (2012). 


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When most people say they have taken a lover, it sounds almost Bond-ish; like they had a day job, and a classy uptown life and had to splash out one day and find a person to warm their sheets by night and heart by day. But for you, the waitress who worked downtown by the train station in your little old town, when your friends suggested that's the label to put with you and the handsome stranger who won you over, they laughed.


You'd laughed too; the idea that you, the waitress who had only finished community college because a generous check to pay the lot, taking a lover? You, who wore sneakers with more holes and wear and tear than the second-hand apron you wore to work, who belted out pop music in the car when nobody was listening, taking a fancy-schmancy lover? But that moment passed quickly, because it was true. You had a ... bedfellow, as you'd heard an elderly couple call it once. He was tall, with raven locks that grew longer with every time he came. He was pale, quite porcelain, and spoke with a clear voice, a practised lilt.


He said his name was Loki, which you decided was a fake name. It was the most exotic of fake names you'd come across in your line of work, where cheques came under Hermione Niehaus or John Smith. Whoever he was, whatever he did for a living, he somehow thought to name himself after a Nordic God, and yet, he dressed like a biker, all leather.


He was kind, and warmed your heart and bed, yes, but he got you, really got you - he understood your need to understand what was honestly out there in the world, and talked of his home like it wasn't from here. He brought a book, once, which was older than you were, and leant it to you. He said it was literature translated from his language to yours, and said he hoped you would like it. In fact, that time was the last time you heard at all from Loki, the one man who wasn't after your body and time like all the others you had come across. He had lusted for your mind. Spoke poetry in everyday ways to woo, but he - he never came back.


Months passed, jobs came and went, and you spent the months slowly working your way through temporary gigs closer to the city of Washington, closer to where your roots were, to try to make something come of your silly, blink-and-miss, short human life. In your new work, an after-hours joint where people wore pretty shoes and drank toxic shots, the TV blared, the news waking them from their pretty party facades.


There was smoke, on the screen, heavy, thick, the type that chokes you once it enters your lungs. Through it, were the echos of screams, the pulse of police sirens, the hum of German voices, panicked, shrill. The words 'hostage situation contained' darted onscreen, the figures of several people on screen. The Iron Man, the star-spangled Captain America, and -


You screamed.


The tray you were holding fell, toppling down, down until it smashed upon the ground. Your boss gave a shout, but you didn't hear his words, not over what was happening in Stuttgart. Because behind the two men, the American hero, and the billionaire superhero, was the dark-haired man you had become one with on more than one occasion, sitting there, bound, eyes wild, mad like a madman.


"__________!" Your boss boomed, "Clean up the mess, and take five out back to breathe."








You took ten, your pay packet, and ran to the one place where you hoped would help you with who you were searching for. After time passed, your cousin Maria had grown distanced from you, but no matter what, in every obligatory Christmas card she sent, there was always her work phone, and scribbled under it 'if you see something, say something x'. You'd always assumed it was because she worked for Homeland Security, and that's why you never heard from her, but when you dialled, a computerised voice intoned. You've reached the message bank of Agent M. Hill of S. H. I. E. L. D. - just as it went to enunciate the next part of the message, the familiar voice of Maria answered.


"There's a man on the television who I know, Maria," you burst, the words blurted out at once. "On - on the news. Dark hair, pale skin. Stuttgart." your voice sounds as wobbly as you are upon your feet.


You almost hear her grin in her voice. "Good, good, you're good, ________ - I knew giving you my number would be useful one day!" she nearly whooped, if counting her joyous business-talk counted as excitement. A lead. "Where are you? I'll send Coulson to get you on his way to Germany."


Coulson came, and was as silent as ever, the typical man in a suit, wearing shades indoors like he was a top government agent, but as far as you knew, that was exactly what he and your cousin were. As you sat in the small plane - a quinjet, he called it - hurtling towards Germany to pick up the man you had fallen so deeply for, the man who you had thought was a man, who, per the briefing from Agent Coulson, was man in gender, alien in race. From Asgard, the land of the immortals, the Gods of the Norse. You decided to be quiet. Listen. Because as soon as you came to Germany, the man who you had shared secrets with would get an ass-whooping.


But, alas, he was in deep custody by the time you got there, held by a man with an eyepatch, and, oddly enough, your cousin herself. Maria Hill. Before she looked you in the eye, the man with the eyepatch – Director Fury, as Coulson had told you – looked you up and down, handed you a clip board and a pen, and harrumphed.


"She'll be the second to go in, after Agent Romanoff." Director Fury glanced away, focusing on the screen by the front of the atrium, where the man you thought you knew was pacing. He looked almost feline in there, almost more inhuman than you'd ever thought you'd see another being become. "I have a mask, and a voice changer, as to protect you, Miss ________, if you will agree to use them. On the board are instructions, things to do and do not do in a situation like we are under as of now."


Your eyes graze over the paper in your hands, and back to the S. H. I. E. L. D. agents before you. "With all due respect, sir," you hand back the clipboard, "I'm not quite sure you've had a situation like this one before."








The mask changes your features to be of a woman of ethnic appearance, wrinkled by the sands of time, the voice changer making you sound like someone who had just swallowed a beach, salt water and sand, and all the sandcastle toys too. Natasha Romanoff had exited, having found his play (something to do with the resident time-bomb, a very smart man you knew from the headlines of New York, Dr. Banner) and counting five minutes, you entered.


"I'll guess you're hired help," he commented on your appearance into the room in which he was confined in. You didn't look to him, ignoring Loki's words, the taunts. He was nothing like this when you were with him. His heart had sung poetry, and lain with you like a man without an idea of what time did to those who rose from the bed and went on with life. "What, are you deaf?" He jeered.


You shook your head. "Only to the man standing before me." you replied.


He seemed to like the riddles; from what you knew, the Loki before you was somewhat like the Loki before, who had made you fall in love with the idea of words being different to what they truly were, having side doors and passages through meanings from times before. 


"Another elder, lecturing me on my life." he dismissed. "You are all the same, here on earth. Saying you know me for what I am, because of my actions."


You shook your head, steeping your back to sit on a chair by the front of the glass. They had given you a shawl to cover yourself with, much like the ugly old wench who had cursed the prince in Disney's Beauty and The Beast. "But oh, I am deaf to your insults, trickster. I know you, I know your heart. What froze it?" you whisper. 


Loki frowns, silent. A beat passes between you, but before he can speak, you continue. 


"I read the words you shared with me, and took you in my home like a good stranger would," your voice crackled over the emotions, coming through strange with the voice modulator. "I felt your soul beside my own, and you come here, and spit on my feelings like they are nothing."


"Who are you?" He growls, fist raised to the glass. 


You shake your head, giving a rueful chuckle. "How could I think, a thousand year old god would remember my name?" you ask the cameras, the microphones planted in the walls, ask the man captured before you. You hear them protesting in the earpieces, telling you not to shed your disguise, but your heart bleeds for the man, and not with pity. Despite their interest, you shed the modulator, the shawl from your shoulders, the cybernetic mask from your face. "Loki, I loved you." you look at him with your own eyes.


He is silent.


Then, "________-"


"But the man I loved is dead," you interrupt, rising from the chair, turning your back to him. "He cared about life, never hurt a soul, at least, not with the raw fury, the intention I saw in Germany. You are dead to me, Loki, and if you come to my bed once more, expect more of your anatomy to be dead to me, in the literal sense." At this, you walk out, leaving him in there, alone to ponder. 








The melee fades, and New York is in tatters, and people are saying there was no such thing as aliens like it was just another episode of Doctor Who and not real life that you had almost nearly died from the Chitauri, at Loki's lead. But when the base is blown up, and you are huddled in a shock blanket in the depths of the Helicarrier, you see a change in Loki as the mask is slapped on, manacles upon his wrists through the video-com link.


"I need to see him," you shout out, only to be heard by your cousin, Maria. 


She gave you the look. It was the look that suggested you were crazy, or that maybe what you believed was wrong, and it was just some dramatic How I Met Your Mother crap that you were sprouting, but before you pleaded once more, she nodded. "They're in the centre of the city. I'll have an agent drop you down there before they take him away." she nods.


Before you know it, you're running across the field, through the barriers and hesitant police, because nobody in the history of the world messes with someone running toward the one they've been a lover to. You stop just short of them, watching the famous faces of Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Clint Barton -- with your own two eyes.


"Hell-o," Agent Natasha Romanoff grins, "You're _________, aren't you? Hill mentioned you were incoming." 


You glance to Loki, whose eyes are back from blue to green, who is watching you expectantly over the mask, through the gap his burly brother Thor shared. "Could I speak with him? We were...close at one time." 


The blonde Asgardian nods. "Yes. I have to him to Asgard for punishment very soon, so please, do not tarry." He urges, and releases the darker haired man from the mask across his mouth. 


He flexes his jaw, yawns, and almost at once, falls to his knees before you, like a priest worshipping their god, or pantheon. 


"I still love you," you tell him, voice soft like the breeze threading its fingers through your hair. "I think I know you were under the influence of something beyond my understanding, well, because you weren't you at all, and - please don't leave me." you utter, falling to your knees too.


Loki nods. "I will be punished for my crimes upon Asgardian soil for that here on Midgard." he tells you, voice solid. "But I shall return. This I vow, because you are a soul I will never find a likeness to, a gem in a rare trove of treasure." his words sway you like they always do. "I love you too, my _______."


And with that, he is gone. 

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