i'll take a quiet life and a handshake of carbon monoxide and no alarms and no surprises, please
Quietly taking up residence on Earth for a time not so long after having tried to conquer it was only logical, really. If nothing else, well, nobody's likely to look for Loki Laufeyson here, dwelling simply in a flat not so terribly far away from -- indeed, within view of -- the tower that he supposes he could consider the site of his downfall if he were inclined to being so horrendously overdramatic and short-sighted. After one's first millennium these things stop feeling like something worth making a fuss over.
He had, of course, gone to something approximating a prison. A very comfortable and very boring cell tailor made to him, with dampeners to cut his magic down to nearly nothing. With it he'd lost the universe. That they didn't anticipate. That they didn't understand. It had been, despite its outward appearances, appropriately monstrous. And Loki had suffered, which would please some. He hadn't repented, oh no, he felt little if any remorse for what had happened, fell back on a long chain of extenuating circumstances which he could if asked trace back to the very moment of his birth -- an impressive enterprise given how very long ago that birth was and how surprisingly fuzzy the record-keeping is where babies stolen as political hostages are concerned.
Personally he'd have thought that's the sort of thing one would like to certify. Regardless, talking about it would take days, and, of course, nobody ever did ask. Loki certainly couldn't say he minded. It might have set his release back... well, those few days of telling, at least.
Stepping out, moving back, feeling all of it settle back in, all of it, had been exquisite. Slightly world-changing, really. The sort of thing that makes a man look back at his life in an entirely new light, the sort that makes him want to... to... retire.
And so he had. To Earth, naturally, where he wouldn't have to put up with certain individuals galumphing about in such a way as to make him want to smash a planet again. That never really ended well for anyone and frankly Loki was tired of the stress. At the moment, it wasn't worth the trouble. So he packed it all in and meekly disappeared. Such as one could call paying rent and appearing in public records disappearing, anyway.
Perhaps another man might have found it in some way ignoble, going from the grandiosity of only a few Midgardian years ago to this but Loki has nothing but time. He's in no rush to get back to the mayhem. There are flowers to smell, so to speak -- or, to use more literal examples, there's Starbuck's to drink and street food to eat. He's the squirmy, vaguely nauseating mortal underbelly of an entire planet to explore, and he's starting out by getting some goddamned Peace and Quiet, trademark. Or whatever.
Generally, surprisingly, generally it's going fairly well. Occasionally some more mortal madman with an inability to just sit and savour for a while wreaks havoc around the city and Loki sits and watches it all unfold. He finds that it turns him into something uncomfortably like the humans around him: he becomes invested, he's excited, he picks favourites and cheers in some secret and secreted-away place in him for their victory. So they're not generally the ones most people pick. This he considers irrelevant.
The rest of the time he simply lives. An unusual state of being, not one he thinks he's ever permitted himself to experience before. It's atrociously dull, but he can't deny that there's a certain pleasant quietude in it as well. All in all a successful experiment.
Until, at least, today. Loki hasn't been this uncomfortably close to a robot in some time, not since that time he'd mistaken one of Victor's omnipresent robots for the man himself, and that certainly hadn't been in his own kitchen. This quite clearly isn't one of Victor's, either, which is relieving. The apology gifts are getting slightly out-of-hand. What's slightly less relieving is that he can't recall ever having seen anything quite like this before. As far as he can tell, it's not anybody's.
It also seems to be as surprised to see him as he is to see it, and how he gets that impression he really doesn't know, at is isn't as though robots are known for their ability to emote. That would be off-putting enough on its own, except maybe it's not him that's causing the surprise. Maybe it's-- what in, well, what in his name is that noise, anyway?
"Sounds a bit like someone trying to drive a cow with the parking brake on," he informs his unexpected companion. Which, he thinks in a bit of a huff as the growing din is joined by a strident, unnatural voice, surely isn't enough to warrant being shouted at. He was only being conversational.
And that, of course, is precisely when the lights flicker off. All of the lights.