Summary: Loki looks on as you slip into despair over a spilled mug of tea. But then he knows it’s not really about the tea, is it?
Warnings/Notes: Maybe this one is a little bit more autobiographical than my usual Lullabies? My husband broke one of my (many, many) mugs earlier this week and maybe I had to hide myself away and cry my face off because it was just the final straw. Things suck and it’s hard to see any real, actionable way that little people like us can do anything about it, but maybe Loki’s out there keeping an eye on us. Do what you can.
I’ve Got You
He hadn’t meant to do it.
In a way, surely, he wasn’t the one to do it at all. It was Thor. It was always Thor. If it wasn’t his loud excitement, it was his booming anger, or—perhaps most infuriating of all—his childish whininess. That whininess, and the pouting, were all that Loki could think of in the streets with his brother when Midgardian women swarmed them and begged to take pictures with the great and wonderous god. Would they fawn over him the way they did if they knew about the hundred-year strop Thor had thrown late in his adolescence? Surely not.
Summary: Loki’s been on the receiving end of a lot of nicknames in his time, but there’s something different about the things you call him.
Warnings/Notes: This is another little piece for my Loki’s Lullabies collection–plotless little fluff-bombs meant to (hopefully!) help you sleep, or at least feel alright. I know that I’ve done one like this for the pet names that Loki calls you (The Sweetest and Most Important Sound) but I just really wanted to write about Loki getting flustered over someone being kind and loving to him. I really hope you don’t mind all these “sequels” and callbacks to earlier stories but I promise that that’s not the new normal in these fics.
What They Call Him
“It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.”
— W.C. Fields
Over the course of his life, Loki had held a great many names and titles. The trickster. The god of lies. The mischief-maker. Odin’s lesser son. Laufeyson. The spoils of war. The tangled one, twisted and gnarled. They weren’t kind. Very few of them were, in fact. For centuries, he had known nothing but cool disdain and distaste from others.
But then, you. Seemingly out of nowhere, you stumbled into his life one day and refused to leave it again. You said his name simply, the way you said all of the others’. Loki knew that there was nothing out of the ordinary in the way you said his name, but he couldn’t get it out of his mind nonetheless. When you shaped your lips and teeth and tongue around the word that for years now had served to refer to him, he took a certain pleasure in that. Perhaps he sought out new ways to get you to say his name. Ways to pull your attention away from Stark or Rogers or anybody else who got to bask in your glow. He’d pull some sort of prank on you and then take off through the corridors, and you always shouted his name after him as you gave chase.
Summary: Loki reflects on the way you touch him, and whether he could be permitted to touch you.
Warnings/Notes: I straight-up hate that I cannot find gifs for these stories which include anyone with skin darker than lily-white. I’ve been trying to be a lot more careful about stuff like Loki’s fingers in your hair because I know a lot of girls with extremely curly hair wouldn’t allow something like that, but all the gifs that come up—even when I search “dark skin”—are gifs like this one. I swear to you that I do not consciously write my readers only ever as white. I myself am white, so I know that’s how I instinctively tend to code the readers, but I’m working on that.
Hold My Hand
The first time you grabbed his hand, Loki wasn’t sure how to respond. You weren’t in danger. No one was. You were sitting beside him on the sofa in the living room for one of Thor’s movie nights. No one else really ever sat beside him, so, admittedly, he was a little surprised when you joined him. You sat down almost like it was nothing, with only a shy, awkward smile to show him that you knew it could be more than that.
