Six months ago, when Jane announced that Loki would be moving in, Darcy decided that she had to hate him.

It wasn't just that she was the last to know, as usual. Jane had conferred with Erik about the idea at length before she came to Darcy. That part made sense, given that Erik had essentially been mind raped by Thor's prodigal brother.

It wasn't because Loki was, well, Loki, and E.V.I.L. That went without saying.

After Jane told her the news, Darcy wandered back to her room. The walls were still the bland original white, but she had her new bedroom set and desk. She flopped on the bed, on the pretty comforter with a bold red flower pattern. As she stared at the ceiling, at the place in the texture that looked like a dragon, she realized why she had to hate Loki.

This was her home. With Jane and Erik. Except now Erik was moving out, to be replaced by Thor and his dangerous brother who would probably kill them all in their sleep.

If she stayed, she'd still live there, but it wouldn't be home anymore. She hated Loki because he was taking her sense of home.

To be honest, Darcy knew she also should have hated Thor for being such a dope when it came to his lunatic brother, but it was damned hard to hate Thor. So she spent the two weeks before their arrival lobbing imaginary fire balls at a vague mental image of Loki. Beyond "black hair," "skinnier than Thor," and "nuts," her concept of Loki was amorphous, this in part because of SHIELD's efforts.

SHIELD and other powers-that-be realized early on that the two words, "alien invasion," had a tendency to send the entire populace into a panic, buying guns, ammo, canned goods and water and stocking up for a long siege. While this was a great boon for the makers of guns, ammo and other survivalist gear, the rest of the economy was bound to suffer. A country couldn't flourish when most of its citizenry were hunkered down in their homes, guns pointing skyward, refusing to go about their usual daily activities.

Then there were the Avengers themselves, particularly Cap, the Hulk and Thor. Ordinary human Tony Stark had already thrown a huge monkey wrench into the gears of the world's political power structure. Rumors that America's already formidable military industrial complex now included super soldiers and thunder gods threatened to breed the kind of global instability that even Iron Man couldn't contain.

So SHIELD and other secret parts of the government did their best to downplay the alien invasion aspect of the mess, as well as the Avengers' involvement, suppressing information, and minimizing the entire incident, hoping that the public's attention would wander off to the latest missing debutant, adulterous celebrity, or natural disaster.

For the most part, it was working, except for what some called the Loki Problem.

Loki wasn't a proper space alien, ugly and with a face like the back end of a toad. The many images of him from cameras and cell phones, uploaded to the Internet --erased by SHIELD and the government, then uploaded again --showed a handsome young man, resonant with smoldering sexuality. In no time, he had a cult-like following, most devoted to speculating about what drove the pretty man to such violence.

Darcy knew about this from the grumblings of SHIELD's agents, guards and even some of the Avengers. And if she wanted to, she could have accessed video and images off-limits to ordinary citizens. Not because she, a lowly science assistant, had the clearance, but because to Darcy, the word "no" was a challenge and not an absolute.

But she was too busy with her own life to spend free time watching the ultra-violent documentary of what was essentially the clan Odinson's family drama. The first time SHIELD had offered her a permanent, paying job as Jane's assistant, she'd turned them down, only to find that half her college credits had disappeared and her degree was in jeopardy. Only after several months, when she finally broke down and accepted the offer, did her BA in Political Science go through. Meanwhile Jane's research, now with funding and a real laboratory, took off and Darcy started doing more than being Jane's personal barista and errand girl. Helping the emotionally shattered Erik transition back to normal life was no small task either.

Beyond the initial images of the attack that were shown on television, Darcy had never seen Loki.

Thor and Loki arrived around noon, Saturday morning, at the end of January. They were early. SHIELD had said they'd be there around three. The daytime temperature had warmed up to 55-degrees, and Darcy was about to go jogging when the doorbell rang. She paused from putting on her shoes and went to the window, saw the black SUV and groaned.

Feeling belligerent, she sat on her bed and went back to her shoes, tucking lace loops carefully under each other like a child tying her shoes for the first time. Ignoring the murmur of voices at the door, she went to her closet to get a light jacket and her favorite wool hat. She zipped up the jacket, pushed the hat firmly down on her head, and put her iPod's earbuds in her ears like a soldier strapping on armor. With a deep breath, she pulled open the bedroom door and marched into the living room.

"Darcy!" Thor greeted her enthusiastically the instant he spotted her. His golden hair was longer and weariness shadowed his blue eyes, but he was as she remembered him. Magnificent, cheerful, charismatic. She wondered if he still liked Pop-Tarts. He wore something that she called Asgard-lite: breeches, boots, a red tunic with light armoring around the shoulders and neck, and a long-sleeved shirt with elaborate embroidery on the sleeves and collar. "It is so good to see you again!"

"Good to see you too, big guy," she replied, eyes moving to the man at his side. Unlike Thor, he still seemed to be outfitted for war, with elaborate layers of armor, possibly the same that he wore when leading the Chitauri. It was hard to tell though, since it was covered in crusty stains. Even at a distance, the slight slaughterhouse smell told her the stains were blood. Obviously, Thor's strong arms were the only thing keeping him upright.

Without the bloodied Asgard armor, or Thor by his side, he could have been any badly injured, dark-haired, young man. He looked like he'd been hit by a semi truck, caught under the wheels and dragged for several miles. He was porcelain pale, blue blood vessels stark against the few undamaged patches of skin. A dense network of slashes and gashes covered his face, a few starting to scab over, but most still raw. His right eye was almost swollen shut and the left a bloody ruin. She learned later that most of the bones in his hands had been broken. SHIELD's doctors wouldn't touch him (and he wouldn't have let them), but Thor had ask for and been given gauze, which he used to wrap his brother's hands, covering the ragged bone that jutted from skin. Consequently, Loki, ultimate big bad with a glorious purpose, now resembled the unhappy offspring of a vampire and a mummy.

Fierce malevolence, the only thing recognizably Loki about him, glared from his eye, but Darcy shrugged it off.

This was the man who had sent the Destroyer after Thor; Phil Coulson's killer; the monster that brought an alien army to Earth, intent on destroying everything she loved. But, staring at the skinny, shattered wraith before her, she felt no fear. Her four-year-old nephew could kick his ass. Her Taser would probably kill him. The righteous hatred that she had prepared simmered dully in her gut, but didn't catch fire as she expected.

Mostly she was afraid that Thor had brought him here to die, that in the morning, there'd be a big, bloody corpse in the house, cursing the home with major death karma. Dead things gave Darcy the creeps. Even things that were better off dead, like spiders, got ickier when the life left their body.

After Thor attempted to introduce her to Loki, with neither acknowledging the other, Darcy said, "And you brought him here...to die?"

"No," replied Thor, with an encouraging smile at his brother, "his wounds look far worse than they are." Loki responded with a look that was momentarily incredulous, then scathing. Obviously, Thor's rescue hadn't scored him any warm fuzzies from his vengeful brother.

Frankly, Mr. Big Bad had a point. "He looks like ground meat," observed Darcy. "Wrap him in plastic and Styrofoam and sell him for $2.99 a pound."

At this, Loki turned the full strength of his menacing gaze on her. Determined not to be cowed by this horrible stranger in her living room, she met his stare. For a millisecond, something shifted in his expression, loathing changing to cunning recognition. He broke eye contact, turning contemptuously away.

Thor and Jane began to talk about the brothers' living arrangements and Darcy studied Loki, wondering what the hell Jane had let into their house. Slumped against Thor, he stood several inches shorter than his brother, but she could tell there was more of him, and if straightened to his full height, he'd be as tall as Thor. Next to his muscular brother, he looked like he'd blow away in a stiff wind, but Darcy suspected that, without his injuries, if his face was as pretty as people said, he'd probably be her type.

Ugh.  She looked longingly at the door, muscles in her legs almost itching for a run. Thor and Jane were still talking; they might have been speaking to her, but her attention wandered back to Loki. Their eyes met and Darcy shuddered, seeing death in his eyes. Not hers; his. She'd seen that wide-eyed, glassy, startled expression years before when the vet put down the family dog.

Completely creeped out, she turned to Jane and said, "I'm going for a run."

"Now?"

Darcy arched her eyebrows at Jane. "Yeah, Mom, now."

Jane shot Thor an apologetic glance. "I asked if you could drive to town and buy some more bandages and first-aid supplies."

"Why? Our Muppets band-aids aren't good enough for the God of Mayhem? Would he prefer Hello Kitty?" She didn't know why she was being so childish. Seeing Jane's weary face, she felt the sudden urge to apologize.

At that moment, however, whatever dark determination had been keeping Loki upright must have failed, because he collapsed. Or what have, if not for Thor. He bent and gathered his brother into his arms with an ease that no mortal man could have managed. Loki was scrawny, but there was more than six feet of him, and he was dressed in armor. Thor's actions were so natural, Darcy knew she was watching a scene that had played out many times before and the thought made her ache inside. Glancing at Jane, she saw the same realization on her face.

Loki hung like broken doll in Thor's arms, eyes closed. Remembering the weird death look in his eyes, she asked "Is he alive?" and immediately reminded herself that she didn't give a crap.

Thor nodded. "Yes." He looked worried, though, dropping the false cheer. He and Loki had spent the past three weeks moving from one SHIELD facility to another. In that time, during his brief phone calls with Jane, Thor had expressed concern for his brother's condition. Not only were his wounds not healing at the accelerated rate of an immortal, they simply weren't healing at all. In the past, Thor explained, Loki had bounced back quickly from far worse than a few cuts and broken bones.

Darcy eyes panned over Loki, stopping at a slash on his throat. Something about the wound didn't make sense to her since it looked like an obvious attempt to kill him. Wasn't torture ultimately about keeping the victim very much alive?

Movement caught her eyes and she looked down, seeing a couple of spots of red on the tan carpet. Her eyes tracked upward to Loki's right arm that hung limp, a crimson stain on the bandages on his hands.

"Dude," she said, "Your brother's making a mess on the carpet." Then in typical impulsive Darcy style, she moved closer and with a grimace, latched a finger under the bracer on his lower arm and started to lift his arm. It was heavier than expected and she had to recruit more of her fingers for the job. With an "Ew," she draped his arm over his abdomen where he could bleed on himself.

It was the first time she'd touched him and the last for several months when he didn't snarl, "Don't touch me."

When his broken hand touched his body, he jerked in pain and she felt a twinge of guilt. Don't forget. This prick murdered Phil Coulson. Then she made the mistake of looking at his face.

His eyelids fluttered, and a sliver of green studied her without recognition or emotion. Nevertheless, it felt as though the floor shifted beneath her feet, and her vision swam with abrupt dizziness. A freakish wave of prescience washed over her as she suddenly knew he would be important to her, and not necessarily in a bad way. She shuddered, her sense of equilibrium obliterated: up was down, mice chased cats, politicians were honest, dirt tasted like chocolate and chocolate, like dirt. She shuffled backward, eyes still locked on his.

"Darcy, would you go? Please."

"To town?" she said, blankly, unable to turn away from Loki's face. Inside, self control battered at the icy hold of the weird connection between them. Distantly she heard Jane's voice. His eyes closed and she took another step back. She fumbled around in the dark of her confusion and found an ember of hate. Unfortunately, she still couldn't fire it up into more than adolescent angst.

"You don't bandage rotten meat," she said, sullenly, "You throw it out."

At this, even Jane, who also hated Loki, said, "Darcy!"

When she met Thor's eyes, she saw hurt and felt like a total shit. "He's a prince of Asgard," he said, "and...my brother."

"I'll go, okay?" She left the house muttering "Princess of Ass," and wishing she could just shut up.

The plan had been simple: Loki moved in; she hated him. Stupid, squishy emotions like pity weren't suppose to cancel her loathing party. (She had imaginary balloons and streamers imprinted with "Loki sucks.") She turned her car left onto Don Tenorio Road, taking the long route into town because no way was she hurrying for him.

Just before she reached the Richards's place, she slowed the car and pulled over in front of their front gate. The two pit bulls, Meteor and Rocket, rose, tails wagging and mouths open in panting canine grins. Neil Richards like to say that the only things between his belongings and a burglar were the dogs' ferocious looks--literally. Neither animal had a mean bone in its body.

I, on the other hand, am a total bitch.

She licked her lips, and wished she could go somewhere, drink herself silly and get stupid with a really cute boy. Except the nearest cute boy here in the middle-of-nowhere-and-nothing was that guy in accounting-Sean? --and the most she'd ever gotten from him was a distant smile. Plus the thought of spending the next morning with her face in the toilet, playing host to the mother of all hangovers, diminished the short term appeal of getting loaded now.

Meanwhile, the two dogs poked their muzzles through the metal gate, recognizing the person in the car as someone who snuck them treats. Rocket let out a frustrated high-pitched bark.

What the hell happened back there? Did Loki hit her with some kind of minion-making power? She snorted. If the best he could do for an army now was Darcy and her Taser, he deserved pity.

Meteor joined Rocket in a sad chorus of canine frustration and she smiled, feeling determination slowly washing away anger. She had made her choice. Yeah, she could be in New York now with Erik, but she had opted to stay and help Jane. And you're doing a kick-ass job, Darcy, acting like a pissy twelve-year-old.

With a silent promise to bring the dogs their treats tomorrow, she made a U-turn and headed for the short cut into town.

***

When Darcy got home, Jane was in the kitchen, staring into one of the cabinets. "None of our glasses match," she said, responding to Darcy's puzzled look.

"Neither does the silverware. Or the furniture." Darcy nodded at the red faux leather couch and plaid green easy chair in the living room. "So?"

"Thor...and Loki, they're princes."

"Homeless princes," responded Darcy, hanging her car keys on the peg by the door. "If they want pomp and circumstance, they should stay with the Queen of England, not us." Jane nodded, looking unconvinced.

"Where'd they go?" asked Darcy.

"Erik's room, I mean..." Jane met Darcy's eyes. "I guess it's Thor and Loki's room now, right?"

"We'll make them a little sign that says, 'Keep Out,'" said Darcy, not yet aware how appropriate that would be given Loki's temperament. She raised the white plastic bag full of bandages, tape, and whatever else at the pharmacy had looked useful for patching up failed supervillains. "I'll take this to Thor."

Stalling, she stopped by her room to leave her purse, and then steeling herself, knocked on the half open door across the hall. "Red Cross, we deliver."

The door open and Thor said, with a smile, "Darcy, come in."

Hesitant, she moved just a step into the room, eyes everywhere but on the man on the second bed. "Everything but a doctor." She handed him the bag. "About, uh, earlier...I'm sorry. My mouth doesn't come with a censor, or sometimes, a brain."

Thor's response was to give Darcy a big hug; Darcy's, to hug back, and squeeze in some PG-rated groping, because...Thor...yum.

Next, Darcy returned to the kitchen where Jane now stood before the open refrigerator. The fridge started beeping. The little alarm always went off if the door was open more than two minutes. With a sigh, Jane shut and reopened it.

Darcy stood beside her and helped her stare down the food. "What's the matter," she asked, "Our groceries don't match, either?"

"We have a half empty bottle of peanut butter, stale bread, three eggs, bacon, five beers," Jane open the vegetable drawer, "broccoli, a head of lettuce and one apple."

"Should broccoli be furry?" asked Darcy.

"No," whined Jane. "How are we supposed to feed them?"

"Beer and bacon are essential nutrients for growing superheroes and archenemies." At Jane's forced smile, she put her arm around her and hugged. "We can run down to Albuquerque tomorrow, maybe try that warehouse store."

"I don't think we have enough freezer space to buy in bulk."

"We'll get an extra freezer. There's space in the utility room." She tightened the hug. "Cute guy in accounting smiled at me yesterday. Maybe I can convince him to approve a freezer as an work expense."

"What have I done?" said Jane, mournfully.

"A very bad thing," said Darcy with a grin. "You will be punished." The fridge started beeping again, but she ignored it, instead opening the freezer. "With ice cream."

***

In retrospect, Darcy realized with a wry smile, Thor and Loki had made the house feel all the more like home. Though the four often ordered pizza or takeout from Izzy's, some of their meals were home cooked and the fridge stocked with un-furry food. With Thor's help, Jane and Darcy painted their rooms. With SHIELD's help, thanks to Sean's creative accounting, they got new living room furniture and a widescreen TV. Jane went on an online buying spree, finding inexpensive sets of glassware and silverware, so Asgard's wayward princes didn't have to suffer the indignity of mismatched place settings.

Loki healed and turned out to be as gorgeous as everyone claimed, although his personality would try the patience of a saint. Thor and Jane tiptoed around him as though he were an abused animal that could be tamed with kindness. Darcy, however, treated him like a misbehaving dog, using her snark like a rolled-up newspaper, metaphorically smacking him on the nose. Verbally bitch slapping Loki was so much fun, she forgot to hate him.

And somehow their antagonism evolved into a spiky friendship.

Darcy lay in bed on her side, studying Loki's rose. The Sunday morning sunlight, broken into bright yellow stripes by the blinds, cast the flower in contrasting planes of brilliant red and shadowed black. The rose filled her with a powerful longing and the achy worry that she'd done something really stupid.

Sitting up, she rubbed her hands over her face. "'...kiss me or get the hell out of my space before my girl parts explode'? Seriously?" She groaned. Yeah, he'd kissed her--and oh, wow, she could still feel that kiss all the way down to her toes--but judging by his expression afterward, smooching a mortal was an embarrassing mistake.

She got up and headed for the shower. The clock radio said 7:47, which was obscenely early for a Sunday morning, but it wasn't like she could sleep anyway, not with the memory of the kiss infecting her with fizzy energy. Plus, at this hour, there was no chance of a run-in with the owner of said fabulous lips. Left to his own devices, Loki stayed up until two or three and didn't get up until noon.

Forty minutes later, she stopped by the front door, and took the keys to Jane's SUV from the peg by the door and left the house. Inkblot was stretched out on the porch, sunning in the cool morning air, but the sun had already turned the SUV into an oven. She turned on the vehicle, rolled down the windows and with one last glance at the house, drove away.

The round trip to Albuquerque took six hours. Enough time maybe to figure out whether she'd completely fucked up her friendship with Loki. Then there was Sean, but he didn't have to know about Loki's kiss, did he?

Unlike quaint Puente Antiguo, most of Albuquerque look like any other western American city, a sprawling ocean of housing subdivisions, interrupted by seas of strip malls and fast food restaurants. Her route to Costco took her over the tree-lined Rio Grande River, which was the extent of the picturesque part of the journey.

In the store, she piled the shopping cart high with "essentials" like food, toilet paper and three cases of Thor's favorite craft beer. Outside, she loaded the frozen and cold stuff into a couple of big coolers so it would survive the long trip home. Her hip ached and she regretted not calling Sean and asking him to come along.

Sean. Loki. "Love triangle" was a generous definition for what was happening. Lopsided triangle, maybe. Sean was cute but if Darcy actually thought Loki was interested, she'd... I'd what?

Back on the highway, she set the vehicle's cruise control to 70 mph, and moved her thoughts to more productive tangents. Namely, did Peter Edwards and Mark King have anything to do with Andy and Max's death? If SHIELD took her theory seriously, they should have already done their own investigating. Big, tall-as-a-skyscraper, "if."

Either way, it wouldn't hurt to do some snooping, though the thought of another confrontation with the Duo of Drunk and Disorderly made her stomach hurt. If she wasn't careful, she ran the risk of turning into a too-stupid-to-live character in a horror movie, marching off on her own when everyone knows you never leave the group unless you want to be monster chow.

She didn't lie when she told Jane that she was afraid. Last night, she'd slept all right, but the two previous nights, she had awoken from a horrible nightmare. She couldn't remember the details, just the suffocating fear. When she got up and wandered into the dark living room, she wished Loki would be up as well, and dreaded that he would be. Had she found him there, she would have glommed so tightly onto him that no amount of snarls or threats to turn her into bug would have pealed her away.

***

She spotted Thor first as she slid the SUV into its spot before the house. He was standing by the metal storage shed, attention on the open door, late afternoon sun in his golden hair. He looked like a prince despite his faded jeans and gray, fitted T-shirt. Darcy got out and walked stiffly over to him.

"I wish I had this stuff back when I didn't have funding. It's amazing," Jane's voice said from inside the shed.

"Darcy, you are limping again," observed Thor as she approached.

Loki, who was crouched in shed, back to her, wearing black and green Asgard-lite, looked over his shoulder. "Your hip still troubles you?"

"I might have overdone it a little."

Jane's face appeared in the doorway. "Didn't Sean go with you?"

Loki turned quickly back to whatever he was doing and Darcy stammered, "He, uh, I, er, thought I could handle it on my own."

"This might work." Loki stood, long legs unfolding gracefully and making Darcy's mouth water, and handed Jane something that looked like a circuit board with antennae.

"Right. We just need another capacitor." Jane spun around and reached for a tall shelf. Standing on tiptoes, she pulled down a small cardboard box. "One of these will do."

Thor squinted in the sunlight, eyes moving from the SUV to the shed, probably calculating the distance. "The supplies must be moved into the house," he said pointedly to Loki. It was more than a hundred feet to the SUV and back into the house.

Loki nodded. "We're done here." Stopping before Darcy, he said, a little coolly, "Are you in pain? Do you need...help?"

You could help me out of my clothes; I'll help you out of yours and we'll...sigh. Taken back by his detached demeanor, she just shook her head. He nodded absently and followed Thor. Darcy didn't moved, watching as Jane snapped the padlock on the shed.

"Something's wrong with Loki," said Jane as they followed the men.

"You could write a book on what's wrong with Loki," replied Darcy.

"He hasn't snarled at Thor all day."

Ahead, Thor handed Loki two cases of beer, while he hefted the other and both coolers with ease and they headed for the house. At this, Darcy conceded Jane's point. "He's helping Thor. Isn't that one of the signs of the Apocalypse?"

Jane laughed. "Time to stock up on duct tape and canned goods. The end is nigh."

Loki and Jane, it turned out, were cobbling together the parts for her magic detector. Once the groceries were unloaded, they sat at the kitchen table, fiddling with the techo-bits borrowed from Tony Stark's big collection of crap. If either had lingering concerns about setting Darcy loose on Puente Antiguo to sniff out supernatural murderers, they'd forgotten them in the rush of geekish excitement to build a better magic detector.

Long car trips made Darcy sleepy and it was Jane and Thor's night to make dinner, so she went to her room and took a nap. Later, throughout dinner, Loki remained distant, polite and un-growly, but largely silent. Afterwards, she plunked down next to him on the couch. He was reading Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove.

"Loki Odinson's grand tour of American literature now turns to westerns," said Darcy, expecting the surname to generate a vicious reply.

His only response was a mild shrug and twitch of an eyebrow.

Well, shit.

She nudged him. "Can we talk? Out in the lair?"

He eyed her, expression wary. "All right." Putting down the book, he rose and offered her a hand. She took it since, even after a couple Tylenols, her hip hurt. Once she was up, he let go and made for the door. She followed, a hard ache in her stomach.

When he took his usual aisle seat two rows back, she pushed past him, past his long legs and sat at his side. She wasn't going to let him use the aisle as a buffer between them.

"I don't want things to get weird between us," she said.

"Weird?" He looked at her out of the corner of his eye.

"Yeah. Like now. You're all...polite."

His mouth twitched with a smile, the first all evening. "Would you rather I built another army and 'broke a city?""

"I'd rather you didn't have a stick so far up your butt it's about to poke out the top of your head."

"Your use of metaphor is always...colorful."

"This sucks," she continued. "I want us back. Snarky Darcy, snotty Loki. If this is about the kiss, don't worry about it. It was no big deal. I'm not naming our future kids or planning the wedding, or anything. It was just the wine talking."

"The wine?"

"Damned chatty wine." She mimed a yapping mouth with her hand. "Blah, blah, blah."

The lines of his face lengthened, and something moved across his face that was nearly vulnerability, and she wondered if she was taking the right approach. Just as quickly, he shrugged it off. "Very well," he said nonchalantly.

"We're friends, again?" To this, his dark eyebrows lifted high, confusion obvious on his face. "Oh, this is where you sneer that you don't befriend mortals, right?" she said.

He pressed his lips together and she swallowed hard, remembering what they felt like on hers. "It is a revolting idea," he said, careful enunciating each word, lip curled slightly, "But given the right motivation, I might suffer such an affiliation."

It was her turn to look wary. "Motivation?"

"Among the groceries, there was a carton of ice cream."

She shook her head. "Thor's probably already devoured it."

"Unlikely. I hid it."

"Under the frozen spinach?"

"Yes and aided by bit of spellwork."

"You learn well, grasshopper," she said, laughing and he laughed back. Her heart felt lighter than it had all day. She didn't know if she'd done the right thing, blowing off the kiss, but if it got them back to normal it was worth it. Because a big part of her definition of home now included this, the sometimes spiky, occasionally warm, friendship-affiliation-whatever, that was Loki and Darcy.