kisses his knuckles, cutely, for once.
Loki does not often run calculations in the background where Wildscream is concerned. She is the one thing in his life he understands fundamentally. She is entropy.
And when she kisses his knuckles, cutely, for the first time in however many centuries they've known each other, it triggers a calculation.
He runs it in the half second between her eyes meeting his and her lips meeting his fingers. The reasons he comes up with are as follows:
One: It's a bit. It usually is, with her. This is the most likely explanation. She likes him uncomfortable. He knows this. She's playing at tender the way she presses flesh to her face, just to try it on. He almost stops here, accepts this as the explanation, and makes an acerbic comment. But his mind continues to run without his leave.
Two: She means it. He doesn't even know why he thinks this. It would be a catastrophe. Because Wildscream is someone who has never, not once, in her entire history, curated herself for anyone. This is the reason he—is fascinated by her. If the girl before him is kissing his knuckles and looking at him like that and it's real, he has to contend with the fact that she is becoming like everyone else he's ever known, that she's begun doing things to him instead of at him, and this—whatever it is—will stop being play and start being scripted. He manages to keep his nose from wrinkling faintly at the thought.
Three, and this is the worst one: She believes she's doing a bit, and beneath the bit is something real that she cannot yet see. The bit is the easy in. It's deniable, and Loki cannot call her on it because it's Wildscream. Of course it's a bit.
His thoughts spin further.
Because one bit becomes a pattern. A pattern goes from ironic to genuine very quickly. And lo, play to script, same as option two, only this time it's two frogs in a pot of water.
Loki feels something slither through him that tastes suspiciously like tenderness, and immediately beheads it.
"Very nice, darling," he says, smooth and faintly amused, the tone welded over him like armor. "If you could just figure out how to control that wicked gleam in your eye, you might convince the mortals you mean them no harm."
