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Darcy was on her third dose of NyQuil and still feeling like absolute shit. She could barely breathe, her head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton, and every time she tried to sleep she would break out into a coughing fit.
So instead she was huddled up on her couch with a thick blanket wrapped around her shoulders, sipping some kind of lemon tea that she wasn’t overly fond of but was supposed to help with colds. She had a movie playing in the background –some kind of 90s action flick—but was focusing more on the clock. In ten minutes she could take another dose of cold meds. At first she had ignored the warning on the side of the bottle, but she found that taking it too frequently just increased the cotton-y feeling in her brain.
At eight minutes to go she decided it was close enough to be fine and carefully poured out the recommended dose (plus a little extra) before wincing pre-emptively and chugging down the awful syrup. She coughed and made the required “eughhhh” face, shuddered, and then capped the bottle and curled back up in her little cocoon of warmth, looking back at the TV and trying to figure out what the fuck was going on.
Not long after that she dozed off into a drug-induced sleep, snoring softly with her head tilted back awkwardly against the arm of the couch. She was completely out of it when there was a very loud crack from just behind the couch. She jolted out of her slumber and looked around in confusion before her eyes settled behind her. She was expecting it to either be a hallucination or a poster falling down or something. Instead, she found Loki, in full ridiculous-helmet getup standing in the middle of her living room.
She looked back to her TV, closed her eyes and counted to five and then looked back at him. He was still there. Not a hallucination.
“What the fuck, bro?” She was vaguely aware in some part of her brain that having an evil dude like Loki in her living room warranted a bit more than a ‘what the fuck, bro?’ like, perhaps, a call to SHIELD. However, she couldn’t even focus on a fucking movie, nevermind remember where the hell she’d left her cell phone.
“I require your assistance.” He said briskly, looking distastefully at her coffee table covered in dirty dishes and used tissues.
She gave him her best ‘are you serious right now?’ expression, but given her state it came out as more of an ‘I am going to fall asleep in three seconds and you’re annoying me’ expression.
“My intrusion will be brief if you willingly assist me.”
“I’m… pretty sure I’m not supposed to do that.”
“I am asking nicely. I will not do so again. Either way, you will help me.”
She groaned and held her head, wishing the cotton-y feeling would go away and so would Loki so she could sleep the next twelve hours away in peace. “What do you want?” She finally asked, looking at him through the cracks in her fingers.
“I simply require some knowledge that I believe you to possess.”
“What?”
“On Earth, there is a communication network that allows instant communication to anywhere in the realm, and free access to the entirety of human knowledge, correct?”
She nodded drearily. “Kind of, sure, yeah, I guess.”
“If one wished to take control of this network, how would he go about doing that?” Loki was pacing back and forth on her small shag area rug, looking spectacularly out of place in his fancy armor.
“…You want to take over the internet?”
“Knowledge is power. Control of knowledge, therefore, is control of power.”
She wasn’t sure if that sentence didn’t make sense because she was sick, didn’t make sense because of the meds she’d just taken, or if it just plain didn’t make sense, but she didn’t bother to pay it much mind.
“Uh, right.” She decided that agreement is the best option. “I don’t think you could just like… take over the whole internet. But if you took over Google or something that everyone relies on to find things on the internet then I guess that would kind of be the same thing?”
“’Google’? Where would this be located?”
She shrugged. “Fucked if I know. Look it up in the phone book. Or Google it.” She let out a half-hearted laugh at her own joke.
Loki stared down at her, annoyed. “This is not a game, mortal. Can you assist me further in my quest or not?”
Darcy stared back half-heartedly and shook her head. “I… don’t think so.”
He let out a noise of annoyance and then nodded. “Very well. You shall not be spared when my time comes to rule this realm. You will live to regret your ignorance.”
And with that there was another crack and he was gone. Darcy remained staring at the spot where he had been standing for a good long while after he left, but her eyelids started to get heavy and she eventually gave in, flopping down onto the couch and drifting off, the credits of her movie playing in the background.
When she awoke a few hours later, she was sure it had just been a dream, because there was no way in hell that Loki had showed up in her living room to ask her advice on taking over the internet.
After that she didn’t give the dream a second thought, forgetting it as just a cold syrup induced fantasy until three weeks later when she turned on the news only to see a rather impressively sized elk decimating Google headquarters. After taking a minute to process this new information, she fumbled around for her cell phone as she realized that she really needed to call SHIELD.