Chapter Notes: Quarantine

First thing's first, since my schedule got all mucked up last week, and with some other changes I'm making to my uploads, I've decided to just move this to Saturday. I've got a fic that's going to be posting daily starting in a few days, so I figured it would be easier to focus on just that one, and this one, and shunt God of Outcasts aside for a while. Sorry if you were following that one, but everything's kind of all over the place over here, as I'm sure it is for a lot of people right now.

Anyway, that out of the way, this chapter. It's a weird one. Not a lot happens, and we spend a lot of time in Loki's head. It's probably clear by now that he's not doing okay. He's floating by at this point, just kind of relying on things around him to work out.

The trip to LA was kind of an excuse to spend a lot of time in his head like that. A central theme of vol 1 was Loki's extreme culture shock of moving to a city with a larger population than his entire country. And then he experiences the same thing in the opposite direction. Las Vegas to LA is not exactly a pretty drive. Stunning in its scale, but not pretty. You really do lose time out there, and it is the most surreal thing. So again, going from a place that actually has scenery and landscape, with living geology to mountains that are so old they're literally rotten is a bit of a shock for him.

On top of him still not really being used to where he is, I kind of wanted to expand a bit on something that got a small hint in vol 1. Originally, back when I had no plans to expand on this series, I kind of wanted his line about not being in the closet to be open to interpretation. But if I'm gonna do eight parts of this thing, I figured I'd better put a bit more context behind that line. And the easiest way to do that was to give him a boyfriend. One who, because he is Loki, he cannot stand, but a boyfriend all the same.

Darcy only finding out about this boyfriend now is a bit of subtext in itself as well. They don't talk about anything personal. He's been dating this guy long enough to be sick of him to the point that breaking up seems best, and this is the first she's hearing about him. Those boundaries she established have been respected, but it's come at the cost of isolation. Darcy has other friends. She has other people she can talk to. Loki doesn't. Which is why he's dating one of his brother's friends. He could go out and meet new people, but he's easily overwhelmed and chooses not to. Instead, he finds the first convenient dick to present itself.

It's a theme with him.

But now he's got his birds and a brand new problem. Darcy's caught him sleeping in the green room, and it is definitely not the first time he crashed on the sofa there. So now he's gonna be hyper-vigillant about doing it again, because nothing good will ever come of him being caught again.

At the same time, Darcy kind of already knows something's up. She's the one who suggests breakfast, when just a few chapters earlier she got a little uncomfortable about being seen in public with him. And Loki is so out of it that he doesn't even notice. He asked her to go with him to LA, and she'd agreed, despite the fact that it meant being in very close quarters pretty much all day.

Because my favourite thing about Darcy has always been the way she's a lot smarter and observant than she lets on. And now that she's noticed this, she's going to start to wish she hadn't.