california 02 // loki's romanoff prelude

twelve // open road

It was late into the evening when she was messing about with the radio and he was reading on his bed when she asked him.

'Loki?'

'Hm?'

'Is it okay if we leave this place?'

He looked up from his book.

'Leave?'

'Yeah. We were gonna go to L.A, remember?'

'Oh.' His eyes flicked wistfully back to his book. 'Yes.'

'Does that mean yes, we can leave?'

He nodded. 'Tonight, then.'

'Tonight.'

He went back to his book. He was so easy to talk to, so unresisting, so ... kind. Or maybe he just wanted to get back into the story.

Night fell, and under the cover of darkness, it was a round man in a blue Ford Fiat.

It was too easy for them. They were out and away, heading south, in mere minutes, leaving the round man tied in his own scarves under the bench near the service station.

When they drove, Natasha turned the stereo all the way up. She wound down her window, so the car was filled with music and cool black night.

Asgard and Odin and Thor felt very far away. All that was real was the shining lights on the freeway and her, sitting beside him.

Her. He remembered her kissing him, and he wondered if she remembered any of it at all.

They drove all the way to Novato by the time Natasha got too tired to drive anymore. She was surprised when Loki volunteered to take over.

'I thought you'd never seen a car before,' she said. 'How can you drive one?'

'How hard can it be? I've driven other vehicles before.'

He was so beautiful, lit up in the gas light. His hair was black, his face starkly white, his eyes very green in the darkness, his lips soft and pink. He looked like a masterpiece coloured in all the wrong colours, and he was a masterpiece all the same. Everything about him, everything right down to his fingers, gripping the steering wheel. He had beautiful fingers.
He sensed her lingering gaze, and met her eyes.

His eyes were so bright, so full of life; his lips were slightly parted. She had never noticed so many details in one face. The sharp line of his jaw, the shadowed cheekbones, the creases in his white forehead. His face was a landscape. She almost wished she had a camera, to capture this moment; how he looked to her, how he looked at her.

Somebody's voice, sounding a lot like Dreykov's, whispered in her ear: Why are you looking at him?

Why was she? She was just driving him to Los Angeles. They'd part ways in less than a week. She needed to get her head focused, needed to concentrate on what was lying at the end of the road in L.A. for her.

She looked away from him. The silence got too pressing.

'You're looking at me so intensely, Loki,' she said. Half-teasing.

He turned pink and looked away. 'I just - you look tired.' Always so flattering. 'I can drive us further. We can get to your job faster - and -' he glanced at her nervously, as if trying to look at her as little as he could - 'and I'd feel bad if you had to drive all the way.'

She turned and smiled into the darkness, so he couldn't see how wide her smile was.

(She didn't want to reach L.A.)