A/N: Brain… why do you insist on these oddball plot bunnies?

Why are they even called bunnies? This story is a cross-over, so most undoubtedly AU.

Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine. They belong to the people who actually created them, though, I suppose, Loki never really belonged to Marvel since he belonged to mythology long before them… oh well. You get the idea!

Beta love: fluffpanda (who ends up having to suffer through all my derailments FIRST! Isn't she awesome! *tear*)

The Trickster and the Witch

"You don't have to keep pretending you're a rock," Hermione said idly, pulling her knees up to lay her chin upon them. "There is plenty of beach to share."

The man who was once a rock stood and peered at her curiously. "You surprise me, my Lady," he said.

Hermione chuckled. "I fear, I am no one's lady, my rock-friend." She stared out over the ocean surf, eyes upon the sea foam.

"What, then, might I call you," he asked softly, "lest I revert to calling you what you seem to think you are not?"

Hermione laughed, the sound of her bell-like resonance seemed to draw the man closer. "I am Hermione," she said with a tone of bitterness that countered her laugh. "I am no one you would care to meet."

"Perhaps, my Lady Hermione," he answered, a smile on his lips as she raised an eyebrow at his piecing both 'lady' and her name together rather than settling on one or the other. "Perhaps, you should allow one such as I to make their own decisions on whether or not you are someone I would care to meet."

Hermione tilted her head, brushing a bit of the mane that was her hair away from her face. "By all means, Mr. Mystery-rock."

He approached her, and pulling her hand into his, he brought it to his face, kissing the air above the back of her hand. "I am Loki, son of Laufey. A pleasure to meet you, Lady Hermione."

Hermione bowed her head with automatic courtesy, but her eyebrows lifted upon hearing his name. "Loki," she said simply. "The Trickster God. Have you come down from the heavens to take more away from me?"

Loki's eyes widened and he tilted his head with his own curiosity. "There are those who would cringe upon my name, throw themselves at my feet, or immediately attempt to test the supposed immortality of the gods starting with their fists, yet you do neither. Why is that?" The Frost Giant prince was curious. It was his one true failing.

Hermione, who had turned again to watch the sea, sighed. "There was a time when life was fleeting, Loki, son of Laufey," she said. "A time when I was as the otter playing in the seas, drifting on my back through the currents of time. I had friends I believed that would always be at my side, and knew my enemies from my allies, but that was long ago."

"So you sit here?" Loki asked, sitting down in the sand beside her. "Watching the ocean?

"Here is as good a place as there," she answered.

"And what of these friends you speak of?" Loki asked. "Have they betrayed you?"

"The worst sort of betrayal," Hermione said, tossing a rock into the churning sea. "They died, yet I remain."

Loki was quiet. "You have my condolences, my Lady," he said, and thoughts seemed far away, perhaps thinking of however many deaths that had taken those he cared about. "Most would call me a liar if they recognised my name. Why is it that you do not?"

Hermione gave a strange sort of smile that Loki recognised. It was the same smile he often gave his "brother" whenever he would ask a question whose answer seemed obvious. "Your magic spills off you like a scent, Mr. Rock," she said softly.

Loki's eyebrows lifted. "Of all the names you would latch onto, you decide upon 'Mr. Rock'?"

Hermione chuckled. "My apologies. Decades of teaching predisposes me to referring to more people as Mr. or Miss something or another than by anything else. I haven't taught in years, but the habit remains."

Curiosity reared up once again in the trickster god's eyes. "You do not look a year above what the humans' call their thirties, my Lady. Are you attempting to mislead me?" His voice came out surprisingly bitter.

Hermione's chin lifted. Something flashed across her eyes that was both pain and wistfulness. "You remind me of someone," she said softly. "A dear friend. His hair was much like yours in his youth. His eyebrows would furrow like yours when he doubted me, and oh would he doubt me. Every time I told him he was worth more than what others saw him him as." Hermione closed her eyes, one solitary tear trailed down her face. "Even when his hair was silver and shone like the fullness of the moon he doubted me. My friends called me nutters, you know, caring about a man who spent most of his remaining life trying to push me away onto someone younger—someone 'more deserving'." She shook her head and stared back out over the sea. "At least he believed me in the end."

Loki suddenly found himself in a strange place. He regret the harshness of his tone earlier. The bitterness, which had risen as it always did when his emotions got the better of him, had been unintentional, and they had somehow hurt this strange and enigmatic woman who knew him as Mr. Rock. "I apologise," he said, saying the words as though they were completely unfamiliar to him. "I assumed. High Father used to say," he trailed off as the memory, "that assuming is a failing of those with far less years to live by."

Hermione let out her breath slowly. "Sometimes the years make us jaded, Mr. Rock," she said.

Again, Loki found himself pondering how many years his unexpected companion on the beach had lived. She spoke as one with far more wisdom that her human age appeared. "Forgive me, my Lady. My mother would consider this question the ultimate rudeness, but I find myself wondering how old you are."

Hermione gave him a corner smile, the side of her mouth twitched upward. "Younger than you," she said with a touch of amusement.

Loki raised a brow. "That is a vague answer, considering my age."

"Do you even remember your age?" Hermione asked.

Loki thought about it, and his brows furrowed again. "It seems I have lost count."

Hermione snorted through her nose lightly. "So too, it seems, have I."

Loki scratched his head. The woman was an enigma. She was a wrapped present with no seams in which to open. Loki made it his business to be in the know of things before others, and he found that he knew nothing of this woman other than what she gave him. "May I ask how this came to be?"

Hermione brushed her hair back with one hand. "A childhood friend of mine worked for the Aurors. Muggles call them police. I have no idea what term you would find more appropriate."

"Guards," Loki said, but apologised again to let her continue.

"He was tracking this Dark Wizard that was trying to recreate the Sorceror's Stone," Hermione said. "Many have tried since the first one was destroyed, but none ever came close until this guy. Septimus Bloodcrow. The name should have tipped everyone off what kind of magic he was into, but for some reason, everyone just thought he was an eccentric old man that obsessed with transfiguration. It was I that helped him track down the wizard using his magical signature. It was my speciality of sorts. Ever since the war, I could see them clear as day, recognise them, and follow them."

Loki gave her an odd look. As much as he did dabble in the affairs of humans, he hadn't really paid much attention to the magic-wielding variety. It was a mistake that he realised he would have to correct if he was to understand this peculiar woman in front of him.

"Thing is," Hermione continued. "No one knew what he was brewing in that vat when the raid on his manor went down. All they knew was that his yard was full of gargoyles that had once been people. Every statuary on his property had been a missing child or villager. Harry, the idiot, was always rushing in where fools feared to tread. All he knew is that this wizard had turned over a score of people into statues for his garden, and he lost it. I'm not sure who was more the fool—him or me. He blazed in with wand out and flinging spells. I was the idiot that followed him. I along with five of his fellow Aurors blazed into the man's laboratory, and when the fight broke out, I was hit by a stunner from one of the Aurors of all people. It threw me back into a magic circle and trapped me there as the nearby shattered cauldron leaked out all over me. There was nothing anyone could have done. The circle was drawn to gather that magic of that cauldron together to make the new Sorceror's Stone. What no one had counted on was someone blasting me into it, and once that circle flared up to "protect" the forming stone, it basically destroyed me and then created me anew."

Hermione held her hand out in front of her face, making a fist and spreading her fingers out to examine them. For a moment, they were flesh and blood, and Loki could see the veins under the skin. Then, in a flash, her hand was pure magical energy formed into the shape of a hand. Blue and white bolts of lightning arced between her "fingers." Her eyes, which had been a very human brown, had become the blue and white glow of pure power. She turned her gaze to Loki, scanning over him as if to judge his character or his magic and then turned away as both her eyes and her hand returned to their more human "normal" appearance. "Healers told me I had a clean bill of health. My magic was strong, my body wasn't suffering from any ill effects, and short of the screams of agony the Aurors witnessed, I had no scars… not even the ones I went in with. Looking back on that, I should have suspected something." Hermione stroked her arm where the once scar of "Mudblood" had been carved into her flesh. Her skin, however, was pristine. "There were a lot of things I should have seen more clearly back then."

Loki, who had been listening with rapt attention, finally broke his silence. "When did you suspect," he began, "that things were not as they appeared?"

Hermione smiled. "A decade or so later, when I held Harry's grandchildren in my arms. He said, 'You haven't aged a day, 'Mione. Look at me with all my silver hairs."

"All that magic, and your hair was the first thing that tipped you off?" Loki sounded dubious.

"I'm a witch, Mr. Rock," Hermione said with a shrug. "Magic has been with me since birth, whether I realised it or not." She snorted. "To be fair, I came into my own slowly whatever enchantments Septimus did to his formula solidified and evolved inside me. I didn't just emerge from the circle shooting fireballs out my nose and lightning from my fingertips."

Loki's eyebrow twitched. "But you can now?"

Hermione shook her head. "I suppose if really wished to, which I do not." She gave him the look one usually reserved for overenthusiastic children who giggled at the word fart. "So tell me, Loki, son of Laufey. What brings you to this lonely beach where pretending to be a rock is preferable to whatever it is that gods do?"

"You sound as one who does not believe in gods," Loki answered.

Hermione gave a half smile. "Perhaps gods are simply those more in the know." She wave her hand over a small beaded bag at her side, and a miniature tea service sprung into her palm. She closed her eyes and it enlarged into a full sized version. She poured tea into two cups and handed one to Loki. "Tea? Standard black. Nothing too… crazy."

"Says the woman who brings forth tea from thin air," Loki quipped.

Hermione tsked. "I did not conjure it from thin air," she said. "Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration states that food cannot be created from nothing."

Loki smiled as he sipped the tea. "Air is not nothing. It is simply overlooked."

Hermione stared at him for a moment and then burst out laughing. It was a bell-like sound, both genuine and pure. "Fred and George would have loved talking with you," she said after a while. "You dodge my question, however, Mr. Rock. Do not think I have forgotten."

Loki sipped the tea again and realised that it was really good tea. It required no sugar and the taste was strong but not overbearing.

"I had a fight," he said after a while, "with my brother."

"Hrm," she answered. "Epic clashes of the gods sort of fight, or the kind of fight between two siblings that starts with misunderstanding and ends with two people being too stubborn to admit they are wrong?"

Loki startled, staring at her as though she might be a crocodile lurking amongst the reeds of his thoughts. "Perhaps both."

"Hn," Hermione answered, throwing a shell into the ocean surf. "And did things end worse than they began?"

Loki sighed. "They always do. No matter what is said or done."

Hermione traced runes into the sand with her fingers. "Wars rarely end the way we would envision them. Wars of the heart are no different." She cast him a sidelong glance. "Your brother, is he like you?"

"We are polar opposites," Loki answered, wondering why it was so easy to converse with her. There were no titles. She wanted nothing from him, was not trying to curry his favour, nor did she seem overly concerned with the truth of his answers, yet he found himself spouting the truth as though compelled to say it. This woman fascinated him. He glanced at the runes she was inscribing in the sand.

Laguz. Water. It was the rune adaptation and utilisation of what comes as it came.

Kenaz. The beacon. It was the rune of knowledge.

Gebo was the rune of gifts. It represented honour and connection between people.

Isa. Ice was the challenge or frustration.

Perthro was the rune of uncertainty and mystery.

Loki snorted softly. He knew quite a bit of all these things. Perhaps more than he cared to admit. "We were once inseparable," Loki admitted.

Hermione used her hand to wipe the runes off the sand in front of her. "And one day, you wondered what had happened. What had changed? Was it you? Was it them? Or was it something greater than other?"

Loki tilted his head. "We haven't been able to have a good heart to heart in many years," he said, trailing his words off with a sigh. "I will intend to go in and say something as we did when we were younger, and what comes out is not the same."

"Venom? Bitterness?" Hermione asked softly. "Unforgivable things?"

Loki scowled, but when he saw there was no enjoyment in her eyes, he let the look relax. "Yes."

Hermione stretched, her earth-toned robes fluttered as the breeze picked up off the ocean. "I once had a friend growing up. He, Harry, and I were almost inseparable. I forgave him for so many things over the course of our friendship, but one day, when we needed him the most, he left us in the woods, alone. He accused us of unspeakable things. He accused us of doing them together, and then he left us. It broke something in me, and I never forgave him. He came back and saved Harry's life, but I could not forgive. I could not let go. He died before I could finally let go of that anger and that bitterness. He died thinking I was the most unforgiving bitch on the planet. At least he married and had children… many, many children."

"He had children to get back at you?" Loki asked.

Hermione laughed. "No, Mr. Rock. It is the blessing or curse of his family to have many, many, red-headed children. Anyone who marries into the Weasley family is resigned to this fate."

"Ever been forced to turn yourself into a horse and lure off a stallion just so your 'peers' would win a bet and thus save your mother from being taken as a fee for building a wall around your city?" Loki asked conversationally.

"Can't say that I have had the pleasure," Hermione answered.

"I was a mare," Loki said with a curl of his lip.

Hermione's eyes widened with a little horror.

Loki had the expression Hermione remembered from Harry. It was his "never again" look.

"I feel like I should apologise for some reason," Hermione admitted.

Loki snorted. "Not your fault I ended up with a eight-legged horse calling me mom."

Hermione met his eyes and they held it together before bursting into laughter. She laid back in the warm sand. "I suppose there are worse things than being married and having children. That would be one of them."

They sat in comfortable silence as the sun began to set.

Loki stood up from the sand, brushing the debris from his clothing. He looked down at Hermione as she lay in the sand watching the clouds.

He extended his hand to her.

She stared at his hand as though it might turn into a viper.

Loki furrowed his brows. "I wish to," he trailed off as he tried to wrangle his words. It had never been hard for him to say what someone needed to hear, twist their thoughts, or manipulate their response, but he found himself struggling on something far more simple: the truth. "I wish to take you to dinner. There is a place down the beach that serves… food."

Hermione raised her eyebrow at him. "Offering to take me to dinner and taking me to a place that only serves coffee would be so awkward." Her eyes were laughing at him.

Loki flushed, wondering why his social skills were behaving so badly the one time he'd really like to come off as being suave.

Slowly, Hermione took his hand. "Very well, Mr. Rock. I would join you for," she paused to grin, "food." She pulled herself up using his extended hand and brushed the sand and litter off her robes.

Loki held out his arm to her. "If you would allow me to escort you, my Lady."

"I am no one's lady," she had said before.

As Hermione's arm entwined with his, they walked side by side down the beach.

As Loki cast an almost shy sidelong glance at Hermione as she walked, his lips curved into a smile. She was already a lady to him. He had centuries to learn the rest.

A/N: Just a little one-shot I needed to get the heck out of my brain. The idea was that long ago (and the years have passed so long that Hermione can't even remember when it was) she was helping Harry capture a Dark Wizard. Every since the war, she was very good at sensing magical signatures, and she was the best at it. In the battle, however, she was stunned by "the good guys" and thrown into a magical circle the man was creating a sorceror's stone in. So, instead of creating a stone, it remade her with the combined magic. She became the first and only living embodiment of the sorceror's stone. She became immortal. She became magic itself. People around her grew old and died, but she no longer aged. In my head, this new Hermione glamoured herself to appear "normal," but a part of her knew she would never be so again. She was gifted and cursed to wander the world, learning to dread making friends because they would grow old and die and leave her alone again.

So, one day, she is visiting a random secluded beach, and she meets Loki. The time seemed irrelevant. He's had a fight with Thor, again, and he's seeking the same sort of seclusion as she… and then this story comes into play.

Maybe it only makes sense in my crazy brain, but maybe it makes sense to more than myself. I hope so anyway. I hope you enjoyed it.