All Work and No Play - Loki x Female Reader

Six

If truth were to be told, which was a rarity for him, then Loki wouldn't have been able to say that he was surprised to find himself wandering up and down the aisles with her.

It was as though his body was on autopilot.

When they pulled up outside, he found a good spot to park and then climbed out as she did, both of them closing their respective doors at the same time.

She had looked at him over the car, raising an eyebrow in curiosity.

"What?" He asked. "Can my kind not shop as well?"

"Oh they can," she smiled, rounding the car to head to the set of automatic doors marked; Enter, "but usually it's only at a cheapo shop like this when you're truly desperate."

"Apparently you know all about us rich folk," Loki said with a chuckle, trailing behind her.

"I've lived in this district long enough to know that men like you don't shop here unless deathly necessary."

Loki shook his head but found himself smiling, others from varying realms had made such comments of status and wealth in the past but these were different, not filled with malice or ill intent with scathing looks.

This was purely playful teasing and it made his stomach flip in a pleasantly uncomfortable way.

Before they entered she had taken out a set of keys from her bag and flipped through a mass amount of keyrings until she found a rounded fob, which she promptly slid into the security slot on the trolley to unlock the chain and pull separate from the others waiting to be used.

As they walked inside, she pulled out a list and unfolded it while leaning against the handle of the trolley, her eyes trailing down it as she worried her bottom lip between her teeth.

"Okie dokie, let's get this done for another week."

Loki stepped up beside her, looking down at the list in her hand.

His eyebrow quirked as he noticed the amount of items on the paper and the budget she had to work with, what she would spend weekly was something that could tide him over for a month and that wasn't including other bills or surprise expenses, which were also written down in a separate column from the food items.

"That's seriously for a week?" He asked, looking down at her.

"Yep, the joy of living in a house of three, especially where the youngest brother doesn't quite understand that what's there is supposed to be shared and last us depending on budget."

"It still seems incredibly high for the amount you have to spend."

"And yet this is the cheapest shop around, the joys of shopping in a world that doesn't understand that putting up wages means nothing if you raise the price of everything else alongside it."

The words came out like a tired teacher who was fed up of repeating their lesson to deaf ears, fed up and resigned to the fact with an underlying of vitriol at knowing the issue but not being able to deal with it accordingly.

Coming from where he had and with the position he had, Loki hadn't had to deal with worrying over money and the stress that came with it.

Granted, there were other personal issues that money couldn't deal with but never did he had to worry about where his next meal would come from, even after Odin had moved the other realm business to Midgard.

He'd never stopped to take into consideration the position he and his brother were in, he spent too much time hyper focused on his work to take full stock of it.