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“Loki, why is it so cold in here?” Darcy asked as she walked into their apartment, shivering from the contrast of the hot air outside and the freezing air inside.
She rubbed her arms, trying to get rid of the goosebumps as she made her way over to the thermostat, which she saw was set to 65. She cursed softly and turned it up a little, but didn’t think much of it. It was August, which meant it was really hot outside and very uncomfortable for Loki with his frost giant physiology. He usually left the temperature at around 68, but he must have accidentally set it lower this morning.
Loki still hadn’t answered her, so she turned around, expecting him to be on the couch, reading, but he wasn’t there.
“Loki?” she called out, “Where are you?”
There was no answer. Darcy frowned, then shrugged and continued down the hall to their bedroom. He must be out on a mission with the Avengers.
She opened her bedroom door and stopped, shocked by the sight of Loki lying on the bed, his eyes closed, seemingly taking a nap in the middle of the day.
Darcy wasn’t buying it. Loki never took naps. She walked up to him and poked him in the chest.
“Loki. I know you aren’t really asleep, stop pretending,” she said.
No reaction. She knew he was a heavy sleeper, so she was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, but she also knew what a good actor he could be.
She looked at him suspiciously. It had been two weeks since the makeup incident, and at least a week since the Avengers had finally stopped teasing him about it. She knew he was probably going to try to get back at her, so she had been on pins and needles every day since then, waiting for him to do something…but so far, nothing. He had either decided to let it go, or he was just waiting for her to be lulled into complacency before he struck. Darcy would bet her paycheck for a year that it was the latter instead of the former.
Was that what this was about? She decided to do another test to see if he was really asleep.
“Okay….I guess I’m going to go take a shower now,” she said, starting to strip as she walked towards the bathroom. “I’m going to be naked…and wet…and in the shower alone.” She looked back at the bed to see if she had gotten a reaction out of Loki, but he hadn’t moved, and there was no obvious physical reaction, as there normally would be if he was awake.
He must really be asleep.
Darcy got into the shower and turned on the water, sighing with happiness as the warm water hit her back. She reached for her shampoo, then tensed.
COLD.COLD.COLD.
The water was suddenly freezing cold, and wouldn’t get warm, no matter how much she turned the dial towards Hot. She danced up and down, trying to get warm.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that in the same afternoon, the temperature in the apartment was set to freezing, and the water in the shower suddenly changed from hot to sub-arctic, and couldn’t be changed back.
Loki must have finally decided to set his plan for revenge in motion.
Fine. Darcy decided she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of letting him know she had noticed his prank, so she took the quickest shower ever, then stepped out into the bathroom to find that her towel, which had been on the rack a minute ago, was now gone.
She gritted her teeth and stalked into the bedroom, cold and wet. Loki was still lying there, pretending to be asleep. His cloak was lying across a chair in the corner of the bedroom; just to be contrary, Darcy grabbed it and used it to dry herself, throwing it on top of him once she was done.
He didn’t budge.
“Whatever,” she said.
She had homework to do, and didn’t have time to deal with Loki. She got dressed, left the bedroom, and sat down on the living room couch. She booted up her laptop and then, deciding the apartment was too quiet, grabbed her iPod off of the coffee table and put her headphones in.
She didn’t feel like picking a particular playlist, so she picked All Songs and clicked Shuffle from the Music menu.
Ice, Ice, Baby by Vanilla Ice began to play. Darcy frowned. She didn’t have that song on her iPod, she hated that song. She pressed Next.
Do You Want to Build a Snowman, from the Frozen soundtrack. Next. So Cold, by Ben Cocks…and so on, and so forth.
She hissed in frustration as she went back to the Music menu and looked at the list of songs on her iPod. Every song had been replaced with a song that had to do with ice, cold, winter, etc. She hadn’t known that many songs about those subjects even existed.
“Oh no, he didn’t,” she said.
Loki chose that moment to finally emerge from the bedroom, rubbing his eyes and giving her a sexy smile as he groggily said, “Sorry I was asleep when you came home. I had a really long day.”
He sat next to her and turned the TV on, then flipped the channels until he found the latest episode of Real Housewives of Atlanta (one of his favorites, presumably because the women in the show were as “cray cray” as he was).
She glared at him.
“Something wrong, darling?” he asked without looking at her.
Darcy took a deep breath and decided, once again, not to acknowledge his prank. He knew how much her iPod meant to her, and probably figured that changing every song on it would be the final straw that made her flip out on him.
“No, everything’s great,” she said as she stopped glaring at him and instead gave him a huge grin. She gestured to her iPod. “I was just listening to some music.”
“Oh,” Loki said, disinterested. He shrugged and went back to watching TV, but not before Darcy saw the smirk come and go on his face.
Darcy was sitting in the briefing room with the Avengers the next day when she started humming to herself. She abruptly stopped once she realized she was humming “Ice, Ice, Baby”.
“Dammit, Loki!” she said.
Everyone turned to look at her except for Loki, who sat there with an innocent expression on his face.
"Just you wait," she muttered under her breath as the Avengers lost interest and turned back to Directory Fury, "I am going to get you for this."
Loki smiled.
"Bring it on, little mortal," he muttered just as softly.
Darcy smiled back. It was so on.