According to Plan (A Loki x Reader Fanfic)

A Sticky Situation

City jail was a terrible place to sober up.

The soft euphoria you felt from the alcohol was now replaced by the arresting hardness of your environment. You could hear the buzzing of the aggressive fluorescent lights and the drip, drip, drip of a not-so-distant leaky tap on top of the cacophony of inebriated shouts from your fellow inmates.

You had been in the jail for hours, and even though the sun had set a long time ago, the cinderblock building seemed to trap the heat just as well as it caged the drunk and disorderly. It was sweltering, and bright, and loud. And you were promised a phone call. Not that you knew who to call at two in the morning that could make much of a difference anyway.

Most days you loved the unpredictability of your adventures in Los Angeles. That was the benefit of living in a city. In this city. One thing often lead to another, which often led to something that was exceptional. Or at least interesting.

You supposed this technically qualified as interesting.

You supposed that this was actually the very kind of interesting that you should have expected to come from chatting to mysterious strangers in secretive basements.

You were starting to wish that the evening had gone rather differently...

An officer shouted your name and interrupted your brief reverie. Finally time for my phone call, you thought, and got up and met the officer at the cell door. They led you past a few other small cells, and down a hall into the main police station and past an old dirty pay phone.

"Hey... wasn't I promised a phone call?" You asked, confused.

"You won't need a phone call," the officer replied.

Well that was alarming. Elias had a lot of pull with "law enforcement" but this seemed like a step too far. Did his money buy this loss of your liberties? Or worse, were they taking you somewhere to dispose of you quietly? Your hungover, sleep deprived brain was spiraling quickly down the pit of worst-case scenarios. When you finally reached the officer's desk they handed you a manilla packet that contained your personal effects - purse and phone.

"You're free to go."

"I'm sorry... what do you mean?" You stared at the officer as if there wasn't a brain cell left in your head.

"You're free to leave ma'am," there was that ma'am business again, "We're no longer holding you here."

"So no one's pressing charges?" You worried that asking too many more questions would be somehow incriminating. Was this some kind of backwards interrogation?

The officer blushed and began rearranging their desk. "We actually have no grounds to keep you here. There is no record of the complaint against you, or even, really, any intake record from your arrival here... It's a little like you don't exist."

You stared incredulously. You remembered very clearly the humiliating ordeal of arriving at the station and being placed in a cell.

"The LAPD is sorry for any unnecessary confusion. Like I said, you're free to go," the officer pointed to the low gate that led out to the lobby, and you got the sense that there was a matter of some urgency that you left. Like your presence was embarrassing and uncomfortable.

Good, you thought. They should be embarrassed. You turned in the indicated direction toward the lobby and out the front doors.

Comparatively, the early morning air was impossibly cool and impeccably fresh. Or as fresh as it ever gets in Los Angeles. You fished out your phone and purse from the manilla package, and tossed the paper into the closest trash can. Time to call a ride and get out of here.