Author's note: Hey guys, 3k reads?! Up by a thousand reads in less than a week?! I love you all ;)) Thank you so much to everyone who's read/voted/commented, this slow burn really is keeping me going through quarantine! <3 Here's chapter twenty three, I hope you enjoy it and this gif of Loki (which literally makes me melt) as much as I did ;) 

...

Two days later you were back on your feet, having thankfully not suffered any internal damage from the electrocution. The beginning of December had been confirmed by the first snow of the year and it was getting colder by the day. There had been no training for you since the mission; Loki and Nat rarely agreed on the same thing, but when it came to you wanting to train so soon after you'd been injured their decision was a unanimous one: you needed to rest. Maybe it was just you, but Loki had been acting kind of weird since the mission; you hadn't talked to him in your mind since you'd made him admit that it wasn't his fault you'd been kidnapped. You didn't want to bring it up, but something was definitely going on with him.

In the back of your mind, there was a small nagging voice which was calling for you to entertain the possibility that he might be having the same problem as you and was trying to hide his feelings from you... but you knew that was just wishful thinking. He was a literal god, you were an abandoned Asgardian left to fend for herself on Midgard with no idea how to use her magic. Not to mention the fact that Loki was immortal like Thor. You made a mental note to ask him how old he was next time you saw him; maybe that would put you off.

Yesterday you had been bored out of your mind with Bruce, Nat, Steve and Loki continuously telling you to sit down and stop straining yourself while the others watched on in amusement. Tony had snuck outside with you when none of them had been around and showed you his cars, and upon learning that you didn't know how to drive (you weren't sure why he was shocked) drove you in an Audi R8 to an abandoned empty car park twenty minutes out of town and spent three hours teaching you how to drive an automatic. By the end you were confident enough to drive back to the tower, and you did so well with Tony's guidance. The others hadn't been impressed that you had snuck away (especially Loki), and you were ordered to go and lie down for a while before dinner. You had planned on telling Loki that you were going out on your way downstairs, but had decided against it because he had closed his mind off to you.

That had been yesterday, and he still hadn't let you in.

Now it was mid-afternoon, and you were lying spread eagled on one of the sofas in the lounge scrolling through your phone while Loki sat opposite you reading with his feet up on the coffee table. He was forever reading; you didn't ask where he got all the books from. The others had been summoned by Nick Fury; Tony had tactfully suggested that you didn't need to tag along for it because it would probably be boring, and thus strongly suggesting that you hadn't been invited. A raised eyebrow from Loki (who had been stood behind Tony at the time) had confirmed he thought the same. The two of you were definitely being discussed, but you didn't mind and you weren't worried – the others would tell you what had been talked about when they got back.

Suddenly you remembered that you'd meant to ask Loki how old he was, and looked up to ask the question before realising he had heard you already.

"One thousand and forty-eight. Why?"

Your phone dropped from your hand on to the rug and your jaw went slack in shock as you stared at him.

Loki smirked at you. "What were you expecting?"

You struggled to form a sentence.

"Not that." you finally managed. "So, how old does that make Thor?"

"He's older by four hundred and forty-seven years, so..." he paused to work it out in his head, while your brain tried in vain to comprehend this new information.

"One thousand four hundred and ninety-five." Loki said matter of factly.

"...right." you replied, reaching down for your phone, which luckily was undamaged. Your mind was spinning.

"Why?" Loki repeated.

"Just curious." you shrugged. You lapsed into silence again for about two minutes, before you exclaimed: "One thousand-"

"-and forty-eight, yes." he smiled, shaking his head and your incredulous expression.

"I thought you were like, two hundred and something, at a push!"

"I'll take it as a compliment. And remember, time works differently on Asgard and Midgard, so there's no real way to tell..."

"Okay, enough, my brain hurts." you winced, holding up a hand.

"I wonder how old you are, really?" Loki mused.

"What do you mean? We know how old I am." you frowned.

"Yes, in human years, but you're Asgardian. Asgardians live way longer than Midgardians, and you can't remember when you came to Earth, so you might well have been alive for... I probably shouldn't have brought that up." Loki said, watching you in mild concern.

Your expression had glazed over; you were trying to contemplate the fact that you might have been alive for longer than you thought. It wasn't going well.

Loki kicked his legs up and off of the table and in a flash was sat next to you. You were so thrown by his comment that you didn't even have the capacity to make a sarcastic joke about him being too lazy to walk around the table.

"Y/N, try not to think about it..."

You turned to look at him incredulously. Try not to think about the fact that you could never know how old you were?

"Okay, it sounds bad when you put it like that. But age is just a number, it doesn't really matter."

That brought you crashing back down to Earth. You refused to even consider the thoughts which almost came to the forefront of your mind, which had mainly been along the lines of your earlier thought of 'age might put me off'. That ship had just well and truly set sail.

"Maybe to you." you said, meeting his gaze and suddenly realising how close he was sat to you. He looked away quickly. You were just plucking up the courage to ask him why he wouldn't let you in his mind when the sound of the jet reached your ears and you both looked towards the window.

Loki was back in the other sofa with the book in his hands again in a moment, and you looked at him with a questioning frown. All you got was a shrug in response, as if to say, 'isn't it obvious?'. It wasn't, but you let it slide.

Minutes later the team started filtering into the room, giving no indication of what had happened in the meeting with Fury. Suddenly Tony's appeared around the doorway.

"Y/N and Loki, can you come with me a sec?"

You and Loki shared a brief look before getting up and following Tony down the hallway and into the elevator.

"We have a new important mission coming up. I talked to Fury and he agreed that you can come on the next mission with us, but only because it's going to require your specific skill set. Y/N, this is important for you too, if you're up for it." Tony said.

"Obviously." you replied, right as Loki said "No." firmly.

You turned to look at him in surprise and indignance, while Tony ran a hand through his hair in agitation.

"Stop reading my mind Reindeer Games. And that was my initial reaction, but let me explain..."

"She... it's too dangerous." Loki continued in disbelief.

"Explain! What's going on?" you said, becoming more confused and annoyed by the minute.

"I'll show you." Tony said as the doors pinged open him and he started towards his lab. You followed him and sat down on a work surface while Loki stood next to you with his arms crossed, watching Tony bring up a screen on the projector. The face of a moderately good looking but self-righteous man appeared on the screen, and Tony turned to you.

"This is Alberto Ricci. He's been involved in loads of criminal activity, hiring people to steal stuff for him and selling it on; he's gotten filthy rich from it but until now there's been no evidence and no way to track him down." Tony explained.

"Did they try looking in Italy?" you smirked, and received two disapproving looks.

"Sorry. Please continue." you grinned.

"SHIELD spies have managed to track him down after almost two years; he's hosting a party in a private mansion in Connecticut next Saturday, and we've been asked to go and, well, 'take him down'. Obviously we won't be able to go as ourselves, and not all of us will get in; we'll need fake identities... which is where you two come in."

"I don't follow." you frowned, ignoring Loki who was shaking his head next to you.

"He wants you to go as Ricci's date and trick him into being captured." Loki said plainly.

"...how am I supposed to go as his date?!" you laughed, as a gorgeous blonde model woman appeared next to the target on the projector. Penelope Whittaker.

"That depends on you being able to cast an illusion." Tony told you. You both looked at Loki.

"Can you teach me?" you asked him.

Loki looked at you incredulously.

"You want to do this?" he asked.

"Yeah, why not? It'll be useful to be able to cast illusions too." you replied, secretly enjoying how concerned Loki seemed about you.

"You'll be in there too, with Buck and Clint, maybe Nat too if she can disguise herself well enough. Steve, Bruce, Thor and I would be recognised instantly so we'll be on stand-by nearby." Tony added.

Loki still looked unhappy.

"I'm in." you said firmly, looking back at Tony, who smiled.

"I thought you might say that." he said.

You looked back at Loki, and were surprised to see that he was glaring at Tony almost vehemently.

"Hey..."

"Fine, I'll teach you." he said shortly.

"Great, uh, tomorrow we'll start looking at the finer details..." Tony trailed off as Loki nodded distractedly and left the room. He turned to you wide eyed for an explanation, but you just shrugged.

"Don't look at me!" you told him.

"You can hear his thoughts Y/N, if anyone would know what that was about it's you."

"Not at the moment, he's blocking me from his mind."

"Oh." Tony said suddenly, looking past you in realisation.

"What?"

"He can read minds. I was thinking that he was being super protective of you when he started glaring." he explained.

"Oh." you echoed, sighing. Loki would have hated that. Any sort of emotion was viewed as a weakness in his head.

"He was though. Being over-protective of you I mean." Tony told you with a raised eyebrow and a slight smirk.

"What are you trying to suggest?" you asked, feeling a reluctant grin spread across your face. Your heart was beating slightly faster than usual.

Tony just shrugged, looking away nonchalantly.

"Oh, you can tell Loki I've got some gear for him when he's stopped being an arse-"

"Hey." you interrupted him, with a disapproving look.

Tony pulled a face. Dropping the gear he had picked up back into the box in had been in, he turned to a mess of metal, wires and tools covering the work surface next to him.

"Show me what you've been up to in all your sleepless nights then." you requested, hopping down from the table and joining him at the table.

You received a big smile, and then he started explaining his latest project to you. Usually you couldn't read other people's minds, but Tony's thought had been so loud and full of emotion that you couldn't avoid hearing it.

She really wants to know, she cares. I love this kid.

Resisting the urge to hug him, you listened intently as Tony talked instead.

This was how family should be.