It was a trap! It was a trap! It was a trap!

It was only the morning after the feast Loki understood that. And he fancied himself a true Slytherin! But this team consisting of four Gryffindors, one Ravenclaw and one Slytherin managed to best him!

It started so well by the Avengers not showing any hostility to Loki - one would almost say they were acting friendly (and that should have been the first sign!). Loki was showed to truly brilliant chambers that were obviously designed with him in mind (Stark glossed over their existence mumbling something about creating room for his teammate's brother - that should have been another sign, wasn't that tiny wretched imbecile always exhaustingly bragging about his projects and accomplishments?).

The chambers exuded elegance and wealth. They were furnished with dark mahogany which was carved with nature motives, such as spring and fire, plus here and there were some twisted elements adding a few chaotic aspects to it. Loki had to admire the brilliant design. Where to contract someone who would create this in his apartment? It seemed like a hunt for an apartment-designer-minion was in order.

One entire wall was covered with bookcases almost overflowing with books. Loki found there many of the books he had already read and enjoyed, some he didn't know but looked promising, Harry Potter manuscripts that were thicker than should be and Loki found out they were containing scenes that originally didn't make it to the books (!) signed by JKR herself and then there were old grimoires containing Midgardian attempts to practice magic that Stark somehow managed to acquire. (Loki was truly tempted to stay in the room and spend the night reading while sending his illusion to the feast, but in the end decided not to - he could always steal these books later.)

The bed was very large and full of fluffy pillows (Loki couldn't control himself and had to plunge into it). The sheets were of Egyptian cotton incredibly soft to touch and handmade embroidered with Nordic motives often containing the God of Mischief but some of them a little modified - Loki was always the winner in them, on one even holding Mjolnir pointing it on Thor's chest. The god loved them and was definingly stealing them.

The pedestal desk was a masterpiece. Not only beautifully carved and inlaid, but was obviously containing many secret and hidden compartments. In the one the god discovered he found gold and smaragd cufflinks and could not wait to search for more. On the desk he saw calligraphy equipment and paper of the greatest quality. Yep, he was taking the desk as well.

The wardrobe was actually medium sized room containing perhaps enough clothing for the rest of Loki's life (Loki's life, not a midgardian one!). The suits were obviously of the highest quality, some inspired by what he wore in Germany (and didn't that feel like a long time ago!). But there were many other not so formal yet elegant pieces of clothing, and wait - that gold, green and silver (they noticed?!) thing… was that some kind of an armour designed with his abilities in mind? Yes, he was taking all of these as well (though where was he going to put it all?!).

The bathroom was another middle sized room. It was tastefully decorated with a large pool (no, that was not a bath, that was definitely a pool) and various selection of bath salts, aromas, herb extracts, scented candles to lit around and even a floating book holder. Loki… Loki realized that he will have to find a way to steal the whole apartment!

That was not going to be an easy task and not feasible anytime soon. But Loki was not one to deny himself any luxury. And Thor was today behaving a little less oafish than usual - perhaps he shall start visiting his brother more often?

When he finally emerged from the chambers he found Stark hovering outside them.

"Sooo, Reinde-" the billionaire cut himself as if painstakingly instructed not to address the god by some ridiculous nickname, "Loki, how do you like them?" he asked and if the Asgardian prince didn't know better he would almost say the inventor was both nervous and excited about something.

"Stark, I forbid you to let anyone else into these chambers. Ever." said Loki threateningly (well, at least he tried to do so in a menacing manner, but it seemed that he got it wrong since Stark grinned and beamed at him.)

Stark then led him to the feast. The other Avengers have already been there: showered, patched and wearing casual clothes. Thor was in an ugly tracksuit. Loki sighed. Figures. Well, at least he was wearing something. Sometimes after battles (and even other times) Thor didn't feel the need to clothe again after the bath and strolled around in his birthday suit. It was especially awkward in foreign courts and Loki was glad he no longer had to deal with smoothing these situations.

When the God of Mischief saw the prepared delicacies his jaw dropped. In the terms of selection it even surpassed Asgard banquets. There must have been every Midgardian sweet dish imaginable and are those Muspelheim fiery cupcakes? And wait, he just saw the Vanaheim famous spicy biscuits! If only he had the Elven wine dip them in! Oh! There were bottles of this delicious wine, and also Asgard mead and spirits! Well, if this was Thor's way of apologizing, perhaps Loki could be persuaded to listen. After all, he was a god. He could allow himself to be gracious from time to time.

He nodded to the Avengers as a greeting and even sent a small smile (well, more of a combination of a smile and a smirk, but still).

Now to the important part. Sample all the dishes he didn't know and hog his favorites.

As Loki took a plate and concentrated on piling the food on it, he didn't even noticed the rounds of high fives that were going around.

The feast itself was a pleasant affair. Many stories were shared (Loki had a great success with the tale of where Thor had to wear a wedding dress - Loki even conjured an illusion of the Thor-bride, despite his brother's protestations). The God of Mischief was pleasantly surprised that Stark and Banner were not utter dunderheads and their questions about magic were somewhat intelligent.

The disaster presented itself the day after.

Loki woke up still in the Avenger's common room and realized that the pillow he had been hugging was not an actual pillow, but the Asgardian crown prince. All right, he may have indulged a little bit more than usual last night, so it was only logical that his subconscious chose to settle down somewhere familiar and safe, namely: on Thor.

His only consolation that nobody that nobody saw it was short lived. As he turned on his phone he found out that last night Stark had had a brilliant idea of tweeting a picture of sleeping cuddling brothers with the caption 'Look who joined us tonight'!

And the public somehow took it with the meaning that Loki did not joined only the feast but the team itself! All greater media outlets were displaying an article about Loki becoming the seventh Avenger! The less serious ones were even showing some fanarts of the new team already and debated the possibility of new merchandise.

Moreover Loki found out several messages from his cupcake-minion congratulating him and generally being ecstatic about the matter.

The god was still in shock when his brother woke up and took him to breakfast (trust Thor to have his steady priorities). To Loki's utter horror the Avengers were actually taking it as a done deal as well. Did he drink so much he would forget an actual conversation about him joining the team? Loki didn't think so but also didn't know it for sure.

Bordammit!

It seemed that he was now stuck as one of his brother's teammates! Forced to reside in those chambers. Hmm. Also compelled to let out his frustration on some interesting monsters, attend feasts such as yesterday's one and let the public worship him as one of the heroes.

Hmmmm.

Well, as he thought yesterday, he was a god and could be gracious sometimes. He supposed he could endure these hardships.

It was only when his ex-minion was snickering at breakfast that Loki realized that someone had painted his nails pink last night.

The god narrowed his eyes. Well, now there was no doubt about it. He had to stay to retaliate!

And he did want the answer for his defeat to be a true 'god of mischief' revenge, didn't he? What better way than to annoy their everyday lives?

Now how will the Captain's shield look with a non-removable dirty limerick on it?

Integration of Thor's brother to their weird family was not very difficult. After all, the God of Thunder told them a lot of stories about his little bro, so they knew what to expect of the moody and dangerous emo-diva (Tony's words). And all of them had their little quirks.

The unofficial rules of 'Living with Loki' were (so far) these:

Do not steal Loki's food. While stealing Steve's pancakes was something of a sport in the tower, Loki's food was not to be trifled with (similarly in 'Living with Tony' rulebook there was Do not steal Tony's coffee rule). The fellow Avengers also found out that if they shared their food with God of Mischief, they scored some points with him (especially if it was something sweet).

Do not touch Salazar without Loki's permission. Loki's new team met his plushie soon after he moved to the tower since the god had the habit of carrying the fluffy snake on his shoulders and rant to it about this or that. Thor who loved snakes tried to immediately pet Salazar. And yes, unsurprisingly, the Thunderer was stabbed. (The variation of this rule was fairly common, such as with Clint's bow or Thor's Mjolnir).

Do not badmouth Slytherins. Apparently the new addition to the team identified a lot of issues concerning his upbringing and Asgard's bigotry with the Hogwarts' house and saying something poor about the Slytherins prompted him to explode in a mighty rant.

Tread very carefully around certain topics. The list was not short and included for example: frost giants, Loki's family (especially Odin) and the invasion. (Again, a very common rule also for the other Avengers who had their own issues that they did not want to talk about and thus had to be approached carefully, otherwise they prompted such things as an angry Hulk or a never ending lecture from Captain America.)

The breach of any of these rules usually resulted in some kind of a reaction.

The milder one could be just a rant or denying the tasting of the next batch of cupcakes baked by Loki (which the god shared if he was in a good mood).

The worse reaction often included stabbing (it needs to be mentioned that Thor preferred being stabbed to being denied cupcakes) or immediate spelling the person to look different (Loki's favorite way to deal with Stark was to banish the inventor's goatee).

The worst was though when Loki narrowed his eyes, put on his 'plotting face' and got really quiet. That truly meant that someone got on the god's shit list. Most recently it was Fury who quite rudely demanded Loki to be interrogated about the invasion (despite being warned by the rest of the Avengers about rule four).

Perhaps Loki would have react differently to a polite request but the way Fury approached it only resulted in Loki's sitting on the couch, steepling his finger and watching the ex-director speculatively. Fury had to retreat (the other Avengers were no help since they were not Fury's biggest fans after the reveal of Hydra and Coulson's alive status) and after Thor saw Loki's face he warned the other Avengers to steer clear of the spy for some time for them not to be caught in the possible crossfire of his brother's retaliation (Tony immediately told Jarvis to start monitoring Fury as much as possible so he would not miss the fun).

Loki's retribution came a couple days after when in the middle of Fury's important meeting in Washington the spy's voice suddenly changed as if he inhaled helium. Furthermore on his back appeared a big glittering inscription 'Ask me to make you a balloon animal'. No matter what clothes the spy changed to, the inscription stayed and moved to the new piece of clothing. Tony fell from the chair laughing when he saw the recording (as did Clint from his perch when the billionaire forwarded the video). Furthermore, Fury started to get unsigned postcards of photos where his stolen eye-patches collection was photographed somewhere around the world: eye-patches in front of a pyramid, eye-patches on the Eiffel tower, eye-patches on the Great Wall of China,...

Fury's answer was to try to shoot the god ('try' being the operative word) which resulted in mama bear Thor threatening the spy-on-helium with being flattened by Mjolnir and long lecture by Steve about safety. After three weeks of the helium spell still being in effect Fury apologized (with gritted teeth, looking as if he was rather performing harakiri with a blunt spoon) and smirking Loki graciously accepted the apology and cancelled the spell.

The eye-patches postcard photos continued coming though.

The Avengers sans Thor and Loki were having a regular meeting concerning their newest addition to the team. Bruce, who was established as the record-keeper of these meetings, pulled out a pencil and a green notebook where he kept the meeting agendas and changes to the rules relating to Loki.

Clint was today happy as a clam. He and the God of Mischief were continuously carrying out epic prank wars. The archer spent last week pretending to hate his beloved color purple only to wake up yesterday and gleefully found out that all his clothes, things, hair and even his eye color were spelled purple. The rest of the team so far didn't have the heart to tell Loki that Clint pulled one over him so the archer kept basking in purplesness.

"Sooo, let me start." said Tony. "I think something should be done about Loki's overusing the word 'minion'. I know we established that there is nothing sinister about it and Rock of Ages merely addresses anyone who assist him in some kind of way as his something-minion, but it's getting ridiculous. I am all for him to keep calling Fury as a SHIELD-minion and I guess I can deal with him calling Jarvis a ceiling-minion, but yesterday he called me an Iron-minion. Me! Iron-minion!" exclaimed the inventor animatedly.

Clint gave him an unimpressed looked since the billionaire only snickered when he complained about being called an 'ex-minion' by the god at one of their previous meetings, and then kept inspecting his purple nails.

"I am more worried about his relationships with his so called 'cupcake-minion'." said Steve. "She is a very nice girl and I do not think that Loki realizes they are dating. He never refers to her as his girlfriend, dame, betrothed or something similar, only 'my cupcake-minion'."

"Well, to be fair, Thor never calls Jane something like that either. It's always 'my lady Jane' did this or that." remarked Natasha.

"Wait, wait." said Tony. "Brucie Bear, put it on the next Thor agenda."

Bruce, who was also responsible for the other Asgardian, pulled out a yellow notebook and dutifully put a note into it.

"Now, back to Loki-doki." continued Tony. "Someone should explain to him how it is."

"Yes, someone should." said Natasha and raised an eyebrow at the billionaire.

"Wait, what? Why me?" said Tony in horror.

"Well, you are in a relationships." agreed Steve.

"And what about Mr. Married here?" said the inventor and pointed at purple Clint.

"Hey! It was me who had to explain to Thor he cannot walk around naked. And I also drew the short stick of having to give Steve The Talk!"

"Which you still didn't do." muttered Natasha.

"What talk?" said Steve.

"I've been mustering the courage to do so!" hissed Clint. "Nothing, Cap, nothing!"

Steve frowned but let it go for now. He shall find out later.

"Fine." sighed Tony. "I'll do it."

Loki was reading on of the Earth grimoires on the couch at the Avengers common room (the next batch of cupcakes was in the oven so he wanted to be nearby). It seemed that the mortals delved into magic more deeply than he had previously thought. The notes even mentioned a secret magic society led by someone called 'Sorcerer Supreme'. He will have to look more into it.

Someone cleared his throat.

Loki looked up from his book and saw Stark shuffling around. The rest of the team minus his brother was also in the room trying to look inconspicuously (probably waiting for the cupcakes?).

"Yes?" said Loki.

"You do know that you and your cupcake-minion are dating, right?" blurted Stark and someone in the distance groaned.

"What?"

"She's your, you know, girlfriend. Someone who has romantic feelings for you, doesn't have another partner but you and expects the same from you unless discussed otherwise, plans your future together, probably expects you two to start live together at some point and maybe even marriage and stuff, really depends on the couple and has to be discussed between them."

Loki looked at inventor surprised. "For how long?"

"Ehm, for life? Unless you break up, of course."

Loki creased his brows in thought as he pondered about that. Finally he said: "Midgardian life?"

"Yeees?"

"Oh. That is alright then." said the god and returned to his book.

Since Thor, Loki and Steve were still getting acquainted with the recent Earth culture, the team often had Movie Nights where they watched films and tv shows.

Most recently they started Game of Thrones. Clint tried to sell to the Asgardian brothers that it was actually a chronicle of Tony's family but only Thor bought it (and subsequently asked the inventor why he was wearing Lannister colors).

There was a little tension when watching the Lannister brothers on screen - one golden boy who loved fighting and was loved by their father and the other one relying himself on his wit and sharp tongue who loved books and was often ignored by their father. Yep, there was tension.

Fortunately even Thor saw the similarities and said so while remarking that the younger brother Tyrion was a badass (Loki taught him the word) and the tension went away.

"Well, brother." remarked Loki. "At least we do not have an evil sister."

"Yes, there is that." agreed Thor.

To Tony Stark's great dismay, Loki quickly became the public's favorite Avenger. When he searched how it happened, he found out that it culprit was the Instagram account of Loki's cupcake-minion.

The billionaire employed the whole PR team for the Avengers, but somehow 'a girl dating a god sharing photos from their life and ventures' was crushing them.

'Loki cuddling Salazar', 'Loki baking cupcakes in his Slytherins are the best bakers and brewers apron', 'Loki knitting a hat for Salazar', 'Loki eating ice-cream for the first time' were just some of the favorites.

The inventor complained to Pepper but she just laughed at him (and subscribed to the Instagram account, Salazar in his hat was so adorable!).

Years later Tennis came with his children to collect the rest of the stones. Loki found out that his actual name was Thanos and not Tennis, but the name 'Tennis' was on the file for years now after Loki told them about the invasion and the God of Mischief also thought the name fitted the purple grape better, so he proposed to keep calling the titan Tennis. The rest of the Avengers unanimously agreed (to the grape's great outrage).

The situation was dire as Tennis managed to collect all the stones and was about to snap. But Loki remembered the sling ring creating portals that he stole a long time ago from Stephen Strange (the two sorcerers didn't like each other very much) and created a portal at the titan's elbow effectively cutting Tennis' arm with the gauntlet from his body. Loki quickly summoned it and put it in his magic cache (he was going to have titan blood in his magic cache, ewww! But needs must.)

The rest of the titan was destroyed soon after.

Loki agreed to send all of the stones but one to Asgard with the Guardians of the Galaxy where it will be decided what to do with them. The process would be held on Earth (that was now quite busy celebrating the victory achieved by their favorite hero who was perpetually preening these days because of the attention) but Loki agreed for this 'honour' to be performed on Asgard in exchange for waiving away the rest of his one hundred year expulsion from Asgard - he really didn't care that much, but it was a little troublesome to keep sneaking in to say hello to mother. The god even sweetened the deal by sending Fury's eye-patches collection to Odin as well (he suspected that it was the true reason the Allfather agreed to waive the expulsion).

Loki also warned the Guardians not to leave too many stones in Odin's possessions since he would probably only drop them on some unsuspecting planet. Again.

Yes, Loki only kept one stone for himself (the Time Stone, so he could annoy Stephen Strange by having it). He briefly considered keeping all of them and figuring how to use the gauntlet so he could realize his long lost ambition of becoming an evil overlord but quickly discarded the idea.

After all, he knew that he sucked at villainy.