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Still a woman, and Loki was doing his best not to worry about it. It certainly did offer an interesting spin on things, though, especially when it came to him going out and about in the hotel. When it came to attractiveness Loki had very little opinion, one way or another, regarding his own face. But as a woman he could easily see that he was attractive, at least to a certain type of person, that person being himself. It brought a strange sort of confidence to someone who was already confident, but not in the ways he was aware of.

So in that regard, he had decided, for a moment, to flaunt it. The dress he wore was a weave of green and black, off one shoulder and cut just above the knee, revealing more pale, creamy skin than he ever had as a man. A good section of calves was revealed, as well, topped in heeled, laced ankle boots. Style from different worlds was never something he had much difficulty in grasping, though certainly he had a tendency to stop once he had found something suitable and wearable. This had a distinct brush of Ruby's influence, though mostly he had simply followed the direction she had pointed him in.

While some of his peers from Asgard were more interested in keeping their body tuned, Loki preferred to keep his mind sharp first of all. He was sitting on a bench in one of the hotel's gardens, which he understood had an 'oriental' theme according to Midgard, and beside him there was a stack of books. The topics were all in relation to one another - they were extensive histories of different continents on a certain planet, covering everything from its societies to geological movements from fresh Stone Age to dirty, polluted end. One, however, described the pattern of movement of that planet within a certain solar system. Whoever could have written these documents, he did not know, for it was information that could be compiled only by a strange, vast mind. Yet Loki had read it all, and now he was translating it.

The original text was a very dead language, and he was carefully and calmly inscribing it using pen and notebook into the alphabet of Midgard. He didn't know of anyone who would like to read it, but it was something to do, kept his mind active. Translations were always interesting - though Loki read, wrote and spoke many languages, there were always words that fell into and out of use, or had no counterpart. In that he was entertained.

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Had he learned nothing else in his time touring with the girls, Steve had learned more than he had thought there had ever been to learn about how women dealt with hair and make-up and the (sometimes seemingly endless) layers of an outfit. As inconsequential as it might have seemed to have found clothes that fit the body that did not feel at all like his own, particularly given that he was not prone to dresses and lacy underthings himself, he couldn't deny that it was easier to manage the (hopefully temporary) transformation when he was not having to deal with tugging at and attempting to tuck his too large clothes around a body they had not been meant for.

The woman he had found in what had become one of his favorite places to read was beautiful, but coldly so, all knife-edges and drama to her. Nothing he thought to hold against her but one that made it easier to distance himself from the confusion of his own body and the hiccup of thought that came from the strangeness of her first statement.

He smiled, both for the fact that he meant no harm and for the fact that he saw no reason to be anything but cordial to the stranger. "That'd be great," he said, "As long as I'm not intruding."

"Your intrusion would depend on what sort of presence you plan on exhibiting while here," Loki replied, a tiny smile flickering around the edges of his lips. "It really depends all on you."

He was teasing, gently. Loki would not consider himself a particularly friendly person when left to his own devices, but there was a certain freedom in his anonymity at the hotel, and he felt more inclined to leave good impressions than bad ones. So far it was working out in his favour, though his past did like to creep up on him. He extended his hand, elegantly. "Please, sit. What are you reading?"

He asked out of curiosity, for though he could read the title easily enough, that didn't tell him much. A reader himself - the stack of books pressed against his hip being evidence to that fact - he was interested for the moment in what this new companion chose to divert herself with.

"Just looking for some sun and a spot to read," he replied, holding up his book as if he needed to illustrate what the woman already seemed to be aware of. Where he hedged around his usual instincts to introduce himself immediately upon first meeting, just as with the clothes he wore then, it was in a small avoidance of having to discuss why an apparent woman was named 'Steve' unless he felt like bringing it up himself.

At the woman's invitation, he smiled and nodded. "Thanks," he said, as he moved to do just that. The lingering unfamiliarity of his clothes had him taking a second longer to do so than was strictly necessary, smoothing the skirt out of his way to allow him to keep from crumpling it beneath him and quite purposefully keeping his knees together as he perched himself on the seat. He angled the cover toward the woman so she could see the yellow cover with its three little birds, "Someone recommended it to me after I was asking about life in the 1960s."

He had been told that there was a movie as well, but Steve preferred to go for the paper version first before he started looking at any of the adaptations. As much as he loved movies, and they were truly near and dear to his heart, how many he had been told he simply had to see numbered in the overwhelming as it was.

Loki noted the faint awkwardness in the girl's movements, if only because he was used to seeing and sensing when people were not at ease. He could tell, however, that this had nothing to do with him, not really. He was not making her uncomfortable, and why should he? There was nothing particularly threatening about him. Something else, then.

He smiled. "There's sun aplenty, here," he said. "Not that I'm quite used to it, these days." He held his hand above his brow, blocking out some of said sunlight, so he could better read the cover of the book. "Hm. Is it a decade that particularly suits you?" Who knows where this woman came from, what time she may have jumped in from? But as Loki thought that, the way she had arranged her dress, somewhat unfamiliarly - despite dressing in so feminine a manner - in connection with his wondering what timeline she was from, that something else occurred to him. It should have sooner, seeing as how he had entertained the idea of Thor being in the same situation.

"Not to offend, but are you supposed to be a man?" he asked. "Originally, I mean. You're quite womanly now. But there's been something happening with the doors these days..."

Fingering the pages of his book, Steve was reminded of the tablet S.H.I.E.L.D. had issued him and the instructions he had been given in how to purchase and access books on the device. The technology of the thing itself had been remarkable, and he easily agreed that navigating its system had been intuitive enough that he had taken to it in a matter of minutes, but as tempting as it was to have a whole world of books in his hand, it just not felt right. There was something in the weight of a book, in the delicacy of each page and the satisfaction of being able to thumb through it in his leisure that no electronic proxy could replicate.

The tip of his head came with the still unfamiliar brush of his hair along his throat as he gave the woman a small smile and chose his words with care. "I'm not as familiar as I would like with history. Names and dates and knowing which war was fought with whom doesn't really give you a real sense of the past, you know?" God knew what he had seen of what had been written of the time he had lived through had been exactly that flat or inflated, depending on how the subject had suited the writer and what their goal had been in writing it. "Hearing it from a woman or anyone who wasn't writing the history books gives me a more complete picture. If that makes any sense."

The rounder, feminine face he wore then still twisted in the same expression of mild consternation before he sighed and nodded. "Don't tell Natasha you knew right away," he entreated with no little resignation, though his mood was not without a touch of humor as Steve knew better than any how doomed to fail him attempting to pretend to be anything other than what he was was doomed to fail. No matter how it had seemed like a good idea at the time to try his hand at undercover skills. "You're right, of course." He smiled then, holding out a hand to the woman beside him, "I'm Steve."

Edited 2014-05-11 17:56 (UTC)

That was interesting. Most people he met didn't seem to care about those things; and how many people did he know who cared only for one set of facts, one story, and never anything else? No differing opinions, shared experiences? Too many. "Admirable. In my experience," Loki said, "most people don't seem all that concerned with what happened in the past. They don't even seem to care about what's happening today. It's always tomorrow; an unbroken landscape of what ifs. Strange how so much concentration is put towards the unknown, don't you think, that we miss the truth of what's around us?"

At the admission that the other woman (well, man) had also undergone the very inconvenient switch in genders, Loki laughed. "If we are thinking of the same Natasha, I shan't say a word about it," he said, with a smile that said he may or may not be telling the truth on that matter. "You needn't worry. I only saw it because I looked for it - we're in quite the same boat." He reached over and clasped his own slender, feminine fingers around Steve's. "I am Loki."

He settled back against the bench, and gave a dry grin. "In fact, I had for a moment thought you might be my brother in a woman's body," he said. "But then I saw you were holding a book, and that hypothesis went right out the theoretical window."

Hidden under the brim of a worn baseball cap and the expectation that he, Steve Rogers, the grand and glorious Captain America, would have been anywhere but in that exhibit, he had been shown what history had written of him. The lines S.H.I.E.L.D. had drawn of him in the files he had seen of himself (briefly and incomplete) had made him one man, the mosaic of information on the internet another, the Smithsonian still another. He had been made out to be a threat, an empty piece of propaganda dusted off for a new age, a hero of the Greatest Generation who had fought for what was right and true.

He could not have helped but seen the before and after photos of himself projected on the walls for children to measure themselves against, and heard the story of himself overlaid by the staunchly believing voice of a man he had never met. A hired actor, no doubt. As he sat there in the sunshine and thought of those reels of old film that told only part of the story, and the file that lay hidden in his room of what had been kept from him and the world, Steve thought he would much rather take the past as a whole. Not just for the bright and glorious pieces of it. Or, worse, what had been written only by the victors.

The revelation of who he spoke to then had him working not to let his smile slip, leaving him to remind himself with a kick of what Thor had told him. That the Loki of the Nexus had not lived that life yet. That he had not done what he had done in New York, and that, more pointedly, meddling in the affairs of time to repair or prevent the past only threatened the future. He shook the woman's hand firmly, allowing his trust in Loki's brother to extend at least enough to try to keep himself from judgement just yet.

When he released Loki's hand, it was to set his hands in his lap, curled around the binding of the book. With the consideration of all he did not know, and could not know in the situation, the memory of Loki having been called a sorcerer (among other things) rose to the top of his thoughts and allowed him what seemed like a safe enough avenue of conversation. "No one seems to know what's going on or how long this all will last. Do you have any idea?"

Loki shrugged. "Yes," he said. "I have a couple. It's a curious thing, certainly, to change our genders so suddenly, with no harm coming to us. I have considered the idea that in going through my door I jump-started a possible inter-universal blip, which means this body actually belongs to a very lovely young woman, who is now trotting around in mine." He tipped his head to the side, smirking. "Of course, I wouldn't be able to know for certain unless I had some very distinctive birth marks. If they were in the same spot on this body, I'd know. I've been too polite to ask anyone else, thus far. My other theory is that this is us - as we are, in another version of our world - and we have simply changed into that shape courtesy of the aforementioned 'hiccup' in space and time. That would explain why our bodies seem so true to our original gender.

"As to its permanence, well. I think that would depend on walking through that same door again, at the right time, where such chinks in universal doorways align. I suppose that's not very comforting," he added, "but when you consider how this place seems to be a collection of random coincidences, so highly improbable, well. I'm hoping we'll be changing back shortly. So that being said, it's nice to meet you, Steve. You look well."

Where they had been enemies before, and that there was no assurance that the choices Loki made from that moment forward (if not having already begun making before that moment in the sun) would not set them exactly on that path once more, Steve was nothing if not attentive in listening when the other man spoke. It would have been foolishness to ignore a potential source of information like that Asgardian prince, with a razor intelligence and more than a thousand years of experience beyond what Steve himself had known. All in matters Steve himself had never come to contemplate, out of either idle curiosity or need before that very moment.

The fact that he was able to look at Loki then and quite literally not see the man he had met on that street in Germany allowed Steve space enough to take the Asgardian as a question rather than a sure threat.

With that thought he laid his book across his lap and held his arms out before him, their shape as unfamiliar as all else to do with the situation, and looked not for the first time for some sign that that body was still (somehow) his own. "I'm afraid I'm fresh out of identifying marks." Finding some humor in the situation might have taken him a few days, but there he did allow himself to give the other man in woman's form a small smile. "I've been better," he admitted, but not without tipping his head or keeping that smile, "Been worse."

"If none of us have been worse than this, we haven't really been anything," Loki quipped, lightly. He translated another sentence, pen flying across the page, though he did it with the sort of absentmindedness that suggested he only did it because he needn't think too hard about it. No tricky words or confused cultural terms to trip him up.

"Where are you from?" he asked. "Are you used to this sort of interdimensional overlap, or is this all a shock?"

There was nothing Steve could deny in that, leaving him to nod in agreement as he fingered the pages of his book and looked over the minimalist cover. What he could say of the strangeness he had encountered even outside of the Nexus was a questionable thing at best, his world too long built of disastrous serums and loss and technology he had never imagined as a kid growing up. All before armies from outer space and gamma irradiated scientists had been thrown into the mix, or ghosts he had only just began accepting the loss of had come calling for him again.

"Brooklyn," he answered automatically. Where he doubted the Asgardian would care to hear of the borough and the city as he had known it - of the troubled headlines in the newspapers he had delivered, of hearing of Nazis on their doorstep right alongside the announcement for the StarkExpo, of egg creams and Hoovervilles in the city parks - he was sure to expand something on it. "I'm from New York, where Thor called Midgard. I'm only passingly familiar with the idea of portals and 'paths between worlds,'" he admitted, using a term he had read bandied about in the transcripts of his fellow Avengers. "This is...beyond me, really."

The name was vague-sounding. Loki knew many worlds and many palces, so many dates and names and events and landscapes jumbling up in his head, that the word 'Brooklyn' was a small footnote, a tiny word inscribed at the bottom of a map. 'New York' was easier to place; he had come across it when first sweeping Midgard for his brother, and where is father might have banished him.

But speaking of his brother... "Thor?" he asked, looking up from his work, pen stilling against the page, so light it left a tiny, blurred dot on the paper, and nothing more. "You know my brother?" Then Steve must know Loki, as Natasha had - 'in passing', she had claimed, but he was almost certain now that that was a lie. Was this Steve as good a liar as she was? He hadn't made any outward sign of recognition when Loki had introduced himself, but a lack of response was an easy thing to drum up when the disguise wasn't being prodded.

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