#fakewife!reader + loki WHO

[whirlybirbs]

✶ ┈ PART ONE !

summary: the origins of the whole “let’s pretend to be married so the grandmaster doesn’t kill us while we try to get off this floating junk pile to stop your sister from destroying your home” bit. because it’s about time. pairing: fake!wife reader x loki, set in ragnarok. a/n: all the fake!wife reader and loki stuff? here’s 2k of their origin story.                                                  READ PART TWO HERE.

The first time you meet him, he’s tinkering with Erik Selvig’s self autonomy.

(Erik’s your boss -- a nice guy. You like him. Jane does, too. You’re running quantum decay samples for S.H.I.E.L.D. the day Loki crash lands on Earth. You’d thought you were having a bad enough day… and then the Tesseract went and spat out the resident super-villain who later opened the interdimensional front-door for the Chitauri and proceeded destroyed half of New York city. Talk about a bad day.)

The second time you meet him, you have Jane to thank.

She’s clutching the spectrometer with wide eyes and you realize in that moment, this is a lot like getting a text from an ex, except the text is the equivalent of crashing a party via falling through the roof. The Bifrost, a glittering quantum anomaly, allows for a fold in time and space. Cosmic kick-back ripples around an arrival, alerting the various quantum measuring devices in the office. The energy signature is familiar -- it’s Asgardian.

She’s pacing. You hate when Jane paces. It makes you anxious.

“I’ll go,” you offer up, “I’ll go, check out the anomaly, make sure everything’s alright --”

Jane blinks, running a hand through her hair as she chews her lip. She makes a pained sound -- the one of a woman torn between science and the unplanned visit of an ex boyfriend -- before nodding and shoving the hand-held spectrometer your way. She nods, speaking to try and convince herself:

“You’re right. No, totally. You should go. It wouldn’t be good if I saw him and --”

“Yeah, no, fuck that,” Darcy supplies, “He ditched you for space gems --”

“Infinity Stones.”

“Same shit, different name!” Darcy shrieks, “Listen, I love him but god, he needs to get his priorities in order, Jane --”

You nod, shrugging on your jacket and buttoning it. You tuck the device in your pocket after eyeing the projected address: 177a Bleecker Street.

“It’s just across town,” you chide, “I’ll hop over, check it out and call if it’s something horrible like, uh, I dunno? An alien invasion?”

“Oh goodie.”

Jane looks pale. “Tell him I say hi. Er… Maybe don’t. Don’t. I don’t wanna seem like --”

“I’ll feel it out,” you chirp, waving your hands in a gesture for her to calm down, “If he asks, I’ll tell him you’re great.”

“If he asks about me, tell him I’m still single!” Darcy cries as you close the door behind you.

Normal.

Today had been shaping up to be normal.

You’d left your normal apartment, took a normal train ride, got your normal coffee order from the normal place two blocks from the office. You arrived at your normal time, ready for a normal day at work.

And then, Thor and his brother decided to change the trajectory of your day and, subsequently, life.

Here you are, half past noon, being welcomed into the Sanctum Sanctorum by some neurosurgeon-turned-supreme-wizard to see your co-worker’s Old Norse God of an ex-boyfriend.

(You know Thor. You’ve met countless times now; the first time was at Jane’s birthday part two years ago. The night had ended in Jane calling you an Uber back to your own apartment, only after you’d gotten blackout on rum and cokes, and spent three whole hours trying to lift Thor’s hammer. Mew-mew, Darcy had called it. You woke up the next morning with a sore back.)

You’ve clearly interrupted something because aforementioned God of Thunder is on the floor, looking like he might throw up any second. You peer around the man who answered the door, squinting. “Uh...”

“Can I help you?”

“Doctor!” Thor cries with sheer excitement from his place at the bottom of the stairs. He stands slowly, staggering over and welcoming you into a crushing grip. He hugs you like he had at last year’s Christmas party. There’s no love lost. You laugh, clapping him on the back as he lifts you into the air, “It is wonderful to see you! Wizard man, this is my good friend --”

“Stephen Strange,” he juts out a yellow gloved hand out in greeting. You shake it, “You must be one of Jane Foster’s associates, then.”

Stephen Strange is an odd one. You can’t help but note the ever-so-faint fluttering of his cape. You realize there’s no wind. You opt not to say anything, just smooth down your scarf and shift from one heeled boot to the other as you exchange looks between the wizard and the God. You push your glasses up your nose as you introduce yourself.

“Just doing my usual quantum disturbance welfare checks,” you say as Thor places you down. You wave the hand-held measuring device in your hand, “Someone had to come and make sure it was Thor and not some eight-legged horse looking to stomp all over Times Square.”

Thor grins.

Stephen smirks.

“How is Jane?” Thor asks quietly, his hand gentle on your shoulder, “Well, I hope?”

“Oh, you know,” a soft shrug, giving him a so-so gesture as you wince, “Breakups suck.”

He gets this look on his face -- it’s a mixture of regret and longing and you know Jane’s decision for space has been as much as a blow to him as it was to her. Jane, selfless as always, knew he needed to focus on his current mission more than her. She’d never forgive herself if she kept pulling him from his search for the stones. Thor sighs, clearing his throat as he nods.

“I, uh, I agree,” he speaks softly, “Please, do tell her I wish her well in all her… science endeavors.”

“Of course,” you say with a smile, “Speaking of which… what’s with the drop-in?”

Stephen’s brows raise and he sighs. “He’s looking for his father.”

Your face twists into confusion. “Odin? What, is he, like, missing?”

Thor’s posture shifts then and he rolls his eyes. Annoyance floods the blonde’s shoulders and he shakes his head. His nostrils flare. “Loki dropped him here on Earth.”

You recoil. “Loki…? Isn’t he --”

“Dead? I thought so as well, but no, the snake has been masquerading as my father on Asgard for the last two years,” Thor supplies, “Speaking of which…”

Stephen jumps. “Oh, yeah, right.”

The second time you meet him, he lands at your feet with a loud groan and a bad attitude.

“I have been falling! For thirty minutes!”

You yelp, hand flying over your mouth at the sudden appearance of the man you’d watched on CNN wreak havoc on NYC. He hits the floor with a resounding thud! and looks… less imposing now, flat on the floor with wild black curls flying about. He’s swathed in a well-tailored black suit and you can’t help but think he’s the exact opposite of Thor. The God of Mischief pushes himself upwards, eyes wild with anger.

Thor hides a chuckle at his brother’s expense.

You blink with wide eyes between Strange and Thor, wondering why the hell no one seems to be as off-put as you are.

“Do you just…?” you make the same sort of gesture Stephen had just made to open the portal Loki had fallen out of with a confused look on your face, “Do that normally?”

A shrug.

He turns to Thor then, shaking hands and gesturing once more to sling open another portal.

“I trust you can handle it from here,” Stephen says to Thor, “Good luck.”

This portal, unlike the one Loki had fallen through, overlooks the ocean. You can smells the sea breeze and hear the whisper of tall grass waving in the wind. You feel a bit like you’ve opened a book in the middle of a chapter -- you’re not sure what the hell is going on and before you can ask, Loki is honing in on you like a predator his next meal. He’s standing before you, leering with an angry look that should have probably sent you for the hills.

Instead, you pull another face.

“What is this? A wretched little pest, here to help?”

“Brother --”

“Have we met?” Loki sneers, lip curling as he hisses, “Or do you simply bear resemblance to every other disgusting worm on this planet?”

You push your glasses up again. Suddenly, you’re away of the behavioral tango you’re locked in. It’s like a psychological game of chess. You decide to move your pawn.

“We have, actually,” you chirp with an uncanny amount of unamusement. Thor’s eye twitches behind you, “You tried to blow up my lab station…?  But, uh, I doubt you probably remember that, huh? Yeah, you were, uh, kinda busy terrorizing my boss and half the other staff on call… No, no, I get it. I’ve gotten a haircut since, so --”

“Doctor, please, ignore him --” Thor tries, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Oh, you’re one of Selvig’s wenches then.”

That doesn’t get the rise out of you that Loki had predicted. You frown, hands in your pockets. Your body language is guarded. Loki’s lip twitches.

“That’s an awfully misogynistic thing of you to say.”

There’s a glimpse of a recoil in his eyes at that. He takes a step forward, as if to challenge you -- to which Strange clears his throat. The game is stopped, if only for a moment, and Loki’s anger is redirected towards the wizard with a new-found malice.

“And you must be the second-rate sorcerer --”

You move, hand planted on the chest of the God of Lies as he shoves past you. He steps on your toes then, scuffing your shoes and you groan -- shoving him backwards with an annoyed cry. Thor makes a face, hands moving to try and pull you from the path of his brother.

“Hey, God of being-an-asshole, do you mind?”

“Move, bug, I have a pig to gut --”

“Alright, nope, bye-bye.”

Thor’s too late and you’re thrown through the portal. The ground is yanked out from underneath you like a tablecloth is yanked out from under a tea set. The flick of Strange’s wrists sends you careening into the grass on the other side of the portal. Loki lands, quite literally, on top of you a moment later, knocking the wind out of both of you. He groans, only to be cut off by your hands shoving him off as you try to roll as far away from the trickster as you can. Loki curses, annoyance boiling over --

And then Thor calls his name.

Today is not normal.

Before you can ask how the hell you’re going to get back to your New York office building, you’re painfully aware of the weight of the situation at hand. If someone told you you’d watch the two crown princes reconcile with their father that day, you would have laughed in their faces… Mostly since this is not reconciliation. Loki looks broken at the mention of his mother. Thor is in the midst of trying to work out the possibility of having a sister when Odin flutters to the wind in golden glimmers. There’s an electric threat in the wind.

In Odin’s absence, centuries of anger comes to a head.

You’re there, stepping between the brothers --

“This is your doing --”

“I had no hand in this --”

Hela arrives on the roll of thunder, and you realize quickly that this is all very much above your pay grade.

Normal.

Today had been shaping up to be normal.

And then, you were shoved out of the Bifrost by green gilded hands amidst fleeing the Goddess of Death’s claws -- the last thing you see is a twisted look of shock on Thor’s face as you’re sent careening through rainbow light. The Bifrost shatters around you like ice and you’re sent tumbling through the universe, the weight of the situations terribly apparent as you spin and spin and spin and spin and fall.

The second time you meet Loki, he throws you out of a glimmering quantum anomaly in an attempt to save himself.