#pantswrites

Once inside Odin's quarters, you didn't bother to grab anything you'd left, knowing it was more important to get into Loki's pocket dimension than to cover your tracks at this point. You only took a single moment to look around, to wonder if you'd ever see Asgard again, before you dashed through the portal into Loki's study. Once there, you turned your attention to the two stones on the floor next to the wall you walked through to get in and out of Asgard. A shining arch of shimmering arctic blue magic in swirls and knots surrounded the sigil on the wall where the portal would open and on either side at the bottom sat the two stones covered in cobalt runes and knots.

Moving quickly, you reached for the stones. Around the size of your palm, the stones were nearly identical. Both were smooth and round, but flat on either side, blue light emanating from the runes carved deeply into the face of each. As you picked the first up, the light coming from the stone faded even as the arch vanished and the sigil flickered. When you removed the other from its place on the floor, the sigil vanished. Sighing in both relief and anxiety, you turned away from the now blank wall to move toward the desk. Unsure what to do with them now, you set the stones on the desk, on top of some papers that had been left there. A part of you found a touch of humor in the fact that such things were no more than a paperweight if you didn’t know what to do with them.

Now that you had escaped Asgard and closed the path behind you, tremors started rushing through your body. You fell into the chair, memories bubbling up and chasing each other in your mind. The shock and horror of the day was setting in now that you were safe, and images of the last hour battled with older memories, of plans for this day and pleas that he take those plans more seriously. You’d been standing in this room when Loki had given you the instructions for this eventuality, though he had never believed it would come to this, despite how you protested. You started to shake as his voice echoed in your mind.

"You know how I like to have an array of escape plans?" Loki had found you in the library where you'd been looking for information on the Fair Folk, since he'd finally deigned to tell you what the Alfheim merchant had told him about the necklace. Once he’d told you that your abilities might be related to yet another advanced alien race, one that had evidently played with your people in the distant past, much as the Asgardians had, you’d taken off on the new avenue of investigation.

"But none when you actually need them, yes." The words were acerbic, your irritation with him ripe in your tone. He'd pulled you from the library into his study, where he'd brought you to the portal to Asgard, but you weren't moving through it. You’d been thoroughly annoyed that he'd interrupted you during this particular project, again, as though he wanted to slow you down, like he wanted to find the answers to the mystery of you before you did.

Loki rolled his eyes and sighed in mild exasperation. He knew what incident to which you were referring, a mild kerfuffle on your last adventure, and considered it nothing more than a minor miscalculation. "Last week was an aberration and you know it."

You turned your head slowly to look up at his profile. You'd lost another favored knife because of one of his usual miscalculations, assuming someone was stupid or gullible. "Amazing how often I have to run because of 'aberrations' you don't plan for."

"Hush and listen." The words were stern, but the laughter was rich in his voice as he made the command. He wanted to point out that they'd had to run because of your unpredictability as well, like your smart mouth, but he had something important to tell you and didn't want to get distracted by an argument that would undoubtedly end in bed. "Should Thor uncover my little deception—" 

"Impersonating your father and usurping his throne is a little deception? What's a big one?" You cut him off with wide eyes and raised eyebrows.

"Should Thor uncover my little deception," Loki plowed on, refusing to get sidetracked. "I need you to do me a favor."

His face and voice were both painfully serious as he spoke and you stopped trying to tease. Dropping the bit, your face softened and you murmured gently, "You know I will," the words a promise.

Loki smiled slightly, surprised, as he always was, that he believed you, believed in you. "I do." If there was one thing he could believe in, it was you. Of all the creatures in the universe, you were the only one he trusted with all his heart and mind, and nearly all of his secrets. "If I signal that I've been caught, come here as fast as you can and remove these two stones." He pointed to the smooth runestones that seemed the source for the power that created the arch of magic on the wall. "That will cut off the portal to Asgard."

You looked away from the stones to his face in alarm. "Won't that cut off your escape?"

"No," he replied with a smile as he slid his arm around your waist. "I have ways in and out without an arch spell. This is more for you than me, but anyone could walk through if it's still open." The idea of his brother inside his private dimension made his blood run cold. This was his haven, the one place that no one in the universe even knew about, save you.

"And we definitely don't want that." You said it firmly, understanding that this was Loki's most precious secret. He'd never really explained why it existed, or why it was so important to him. He didn't need to. That it was important was enough to have you ready to protect it, because you would protect him.

Loki heard the determination in your voice, caught a glimpse of the power that hid in your bottomless eyes. There was something so steadfast and pure there, something so loyal, so true, that it began to blend into relentlessness. Never one to shy from danger, the feelings that stirred in him at your tone made him only love you more, no matter how his heart trembled in anxiety at the power you had. You were wilder and deadlier than any Asgardian warrior, because you didn't have their advantages, but would fight as ferociously. He’d taught you how to fight with daggers and throwing knives himself; he had no doubt you’d find a way to win. "No, we do not," he affirmed as he turned you into his arms to look down into your bottomless eyes.

"What about the arch to my apartment?"

A little frown was digging a line between your eyebrows and Loki bent to kiss it away as he answered. "Keep it open, but guard it with your life." You pulled your head back to look at him, startled. "The only way to close it is to remove the runestones, so you'll have to keep it open if you don't want to get trapped in here."

You grimaced, worried. A portal to a god's private dimension wasn't so worrisome when the god himself is in residence, but you weren't sure you were up for house sitting. "That seems less than ideal."

Loki shrugged in acknowledgement, but he'd already thought through the possibilities and this seemed the best, especially in light of the other plans he'd laid. Those were predicated on you having access to his pocket dimension. "It is. But I promise," he said with a soft kiss, "I will come back and take care of it for you." The only reason he wouldn't come back would be because of his own death, and the pocket would implode upon that event and take care of it for him. Not that he had any intention of dying.

You raised a skeptical brow, well aware that your husband, for all his spectacular abilities, had his limitations. "Even if you get caught by your brother?"

Loki's arms tightened around you, lifting you up until you were nose to nose with him. When your eyes were on his, he met your gaze with the full force of his own, until you were drowning in each other. His voice was low and throbbing and you'd never heard anything that sounded truer than the words he spoke now. "Nothing in the universe could stop me from returning to you." Your breath caught, because you knew exactly how he felt, like he'd move galaxies for you. "I feel like death itself couldn't keep me from your side." His eyes still on yours, he pressed the gentlest kiss he'd ever given you to your soft, astonished mouth. "On my mother's blessed soul, I will always come back to you."

You felt like your body wasn't strong enough to hold the emotion he was pouring into you, the emotion rising up to meet him. Voice raspy, you smiled, your lips trembling. The emotion inside you throbbed in the casual words. "I'm holding you to that." 

The blaze of love in eyes blended from one memory to the next as you remembered the last look he'd given you as he'd urged you silently to run. Your hand wrapped around the bracelet on your wrist, like touching the chain of metal would reconnect you to Loki. The events of the day fully hit you, and it felt like everything was draining out of you, leaving you empty. Dropping your head to the top of the desk, you started to cry, sobbing your broken heart out.

Somehow, this separation from Loki was the hardest.

The first time, you'd walked out on him. That had allowed you to comfort yourself with the fact that you'd been right to do so. You'd felt uncertain and off kilter for the few weeks he'd left you alone, but you'd salved your ego when he didn't come after you right away with your own intact self-respect. When he'd reappeared, you'd been able to walk back to him without hesitation, as an equal. That had more than made up for the few weeks of uncertainty.

The second time had been horrible, the way he'd left as brutal a breakup as you'd ever experienced. You'd grieved for months, left bereft of explanations or closure. In covering his tracks, Loki had even left you without any real evidence of a heart irrevocably changed. The dissonance you'd had to endure when the spectacular life you'd been leading came to a halt without warning had been intense and you'd struggled to cope in the aftermath. Even still, you had been coping, had been trying to come to terms with the fact that you'd probably never see him again. You'd been able to convince yourself that you couldn't live your life waiting for him to come back, and when he'd returned, you'd been trying to move on.

This time, you simply had to wait. You did not and could not know when Loki would return, only that he would, if he could. You had to keep going to work every day, keep watering your plants, shopping for groceries, texting your friends, because you did not know what was happening to him, nor could you find out. All you could do is keep living your mundane human life. All you could do was wait.

After removing the runestones from the portal to Asgard, you’d indulged in a good, long bout of terrified sobbing. Between the life-draining sensation Mjolnir had induced and the sight of your husband in restraints, you'd had an absolute nightmare of a date night.

When you'd purged the worst of it, you pulled yourself together, bathing and changing into your Earth clothes. Head high and spine firm, you walked out of Loki's pocket dimension and into your own apartment. You had no interest in extending your time without Loki by hanging out in there without him. And as it stood, the only portal open to Loki's dimension was now your linen closet door; you couldn't guard it if you were in it.

But then the waiting began.

You hated waiting.

Not that you hadn't been plenty busy. Loki had managed to get caught the Saturday before Thanksgiving in the United States. New York was already gearing up hard for the holidays, and you had promised to bring green bean casserole to Emily's Friendsgiving the following Thursday. She'd been orphaned at nineteen when her parents had been killed in an accident with a drunk driver and you didn't like to leave her alone on the holidays. It was almost a relief to worry about her this year, if only because it distracted you from your worry for Loki.

To your relief, you felt him signal less than twenty-four hours after you saw him last. That first slow slide of ice around your wrist felt like a caress and made your knees turn to jelly. You hadn't allowed yourself to think about what Thor might do to Loki, but once you had proof he was alive, you had to acknowledge that you'd been afraid he'd kill him.

You hadn't found Loki's "joke" about putting his father "with memory problems" in a nursing home particularly funny, even knowing that Loki was lashing out at Odin had because of the cruelty of his father's condemnation. You'd been horrified that a father could lock his own son in solitary confinement. It made you sick at heart that Odin had prevented even Loki's mother from visiting him in her own form, denying the son he'd failed in so many ways a hug from his mother, failing him again. Honestly, the whole thing had just made you sad for them both. If you weren't amused, you couldn't imagine Thor would be feeling kind.

At first, you felt that lazy touch of ice around your wrists six or seven times a day, which worried you. You could see Loki making certain to signal you when he woke or went to bed; though he hid it well, he had a romantic streak that would encourage him to reach out like that. But several times a day was odd, and it made you wonder why he would feel the need to kiss the rune at his wrist so often. Then, during Friendsgiving dinner, it went off at least six times in a few hours, the sixth signal sending you to the bathroom to breathe your way through a panic attack, the uncertainty of what it meant nearly driving you mad.

You felt it one last time as you were fake smiling your way through pumpkin pie, then not again until hours later. Lying awake at 3:34 AM, trying to figure out the pattern of the signal, trying to understand what he was trying to tell you, if anything, you felt it one more nerve-wracking time, then not again until the following afternoon. From there, it settled into an even rhythm, as though he was doing exactly what you'd expected from the beginning, kissing you awake, and kissing you before he went to sleep. Baffled, you tried to accept that you would not understand what was happening with the bracelet until you saw Loki again.

That's when the waiting started to wear, like a drip of water wearing a groove in your peace of mind. Months dragged on, unchanged but for those twice daily signals around your wrist, with no indication otherwise as to what was happening to him, when he'd be coming back for you, if he was even on the way. All you could do was wait and get ready to run as soon as he got there.

To that end, you moved nearly everything important to you into Loki's pocket dimension. You left most of your possessions in your apartment, however, including a few sentimental items, some pictures. You knew you'd probably have to simply disappear from your life and wanted to allay suspicions that you'd left without saying goodbye. Though you wanted to be honest, you couldn't explain why you were running away with a villain and a criminal. You hoped that not knowing what happened to you would be better than knowing you deliberately disappeared without an explanation. You knew it wasn't a good solution, but you couldn't think of a better one.

By the time you'd perfected the illusion that you still lived in the apartment, the new year had come and gone and Loki was still only signaling twice a day. You started going into the pocket once a day, walking through every room, looking for any sign of Loki. The periodic nature of the signal made you wonder if you were missing something, if there was any change in any of the spells or sigils. You studied as you made your nightly rounds, deliberately committing to memory every swirl in every room, though you found no changes.

The only place in Loki's entire dimension that you gave a wide berth was a single corner in the ballroom. After you'd spoken to him about making an escape before it was a necessity, he'd begun to transfer the things he thought he'd need to stay ahead of his brother. When Loki brought the dagger from his father's vault, you might have believed it was for that but for the pale fear that had taken his face when you'd asked about it.

"The knife was made on Nidavellir," Loki said, an emotion that looked like terror lurking in his eyes, "and the handle is made of mostly iron, so it would be best if you stay out of the dark side of the ballroom."

"Of course," you replied, confused as to why he needed a dagger that frightened him and endangered you, "but why do you need this knife in particular?"

Loki shuddered in a way you’d never seen, looked somehow smaller than you knew him to be. You went cold at the thought that your powerful husband could be frightened like this, like he knew what it was to be helpless.

"There are monsters in the universe that make me seem harmless as a kitten." He smiled then, but it didn't touch his distant eyes. "Such creatures can only be destroyed with weapons as dangerous as themselves." All of a sudden, he came back to himself and pulled you into his arms to fold you close. "But to plan for every possibility, I may need you to do me a favor some day."

Some day turned out to be May 30th. You were at an early lunch when the bracelet around your wrist instantly turned into ice so cold it burned. Nothing like either Loki's summons to the pocket dimension or your regularly scheduled kiss signal, this was nothing in one moment, almost cold enough to damage your skin in the next. Your heart kicked into a gallop; this was the signal that Loki needed the blade. Your stomach dropped into your feet and the rest of your body went cold, then hot, then cold again as adrenaline dumped into your bloodstream.

You were in line at a deli, so you simply dipped out of the way and out the door. Once outside, you took off running, calculating as you ran the fastest way home. Loki would only ask you to approach the blade if it was a life-or-death situation, because you were going to have to hurt yourself to help him. That helpless look of fear in your husband's eyes as he spoke of monsters in the universe was more than enough motivation to have you running to do so without hesitation.

When you threw yourself through your door, it had been nearly twenty minutes since Loki had first signaled. You were so frazzled with fear you nearly forgot to lock your front door. Loki had signaled again as you were running up your stairs, no patience for the elevator, and you were almost sobbing by the time you made it back to your apartment. As soon as you'd secured the door, you ran to your linen closet and through the portal.

Once through, you tried to calm down by reminding yourself that you now had an hour before another second would pass for Loki. You could afford to catch your breath and plan for how you were going to do what Loki had asked of you. You bent over, bracing yourself on your knees as you dragged in desperate breaths, having run far more than you were used to; you really wished you’d been closer to home. Once your breathing slowed and your mind cleared a little, however, you were back on the move, striding through Loki’s private quarters, trying to figure out a plan as you went, toward the Great Hall.

As you walked down the stairs you put your plan, such as it was, into action. You started wishing as hard as you could that you could find something to help you, something to protect you from the dagger. Either through the kitchen or down the hall made no difference in terms of distance, since Loki had placed the knife as far away as possible from the parts of the palace you most often used. You mentally cursed about that even as you chose to move through the kitchen and dining room to get to the ballroom. There’d be more opportunities on that route for Loki’s pocket to give you what you wanted.

Over the years, Loki’s pocket dimension had become more and more attuned to you, conforming itself to your wishes, like arranging books in the library where you’d like them, or being able to find snacks from Earth in the pantry. That connection had only grown stronger when Loki had stopped meeting you there. As Loki’s absence had stretched into weeks, then months, the palace seemed to lose a little of its shine. As though it missed him, or it was tuning into you and reflecting the fact that you missed him. Loki had mentioned that the power he’d used to make the pocket had been unique, its root in primordial forces, which meant you had no clue what the thing couldn’t do.

At a brisk walk, then a slow jog, you moved as quickly as you could through first the kitchen, then the dining room, still not recovered from the sprint home. You couldn't help but resent the length of the dining room, with its table meant for thirty-some people, considering only the two of you ever even came here. Before you knew it, you were at the far end of the dining room, as though you’d blinked and the dining room had rearranged itself for you. Still disoriented, you burst through the double doors into the ballroom where every lamp flared to life with the warm glow of magic fire, except in the far, far corner.

That corner remained dark, as it had since Loki had placed the knife there, what felt like a million years ago. You'd avoided the corner, because you'd never forgotten the look on his face. Whatever frightened him, the cold, sick fear taking the light in his eyes, tightening the corners of his mouth in pain, convinced you to take the dagger dead seriously. No matter how quickly or competently he'd covered it, that look had persuaded in a way his words never could have.

Which was why you automatically slowed as you approached the shadowy corner. Muscle memory of skirting this part of the room slowed your feet, despite your mind insisting that you did indeed want to approach the little table tucked deep in the shadows, tight in the corner. Through the shroud of darkness however, a couple of light sources glimmered at you. Biggest and most attention-grabbing, was the swooping, swirling spell covering a glowing green spot on the wall. The spell was silver-blue and gently luminous and between the two, you could easily see the dull pewter box on a small round wooden table.

The other light source came from the table, a bright blue light shining around the edges of the small drawer. This light was a purer shade of blue than Loki’s magic, cobalt to frost, and it beckoned.

You'd taken advantage of the time dilation in Loki's pocket dimension whenever possible to continue studying your own special sight. To that end, you had chosen to focus on the thing most ubiquitous and yet varied in your world that you and only you could see: Loki's magic. You'd studied the spells surrounding your home with the fervor of the zealot, and combined with your control of the library, you'd been able to track down a lot of the runes and script and swirls and their meanings in a tower of books. Your eyes had become even more sensitive to the variance in color, the shades of blue and green and silver that came together to create the spells, the definite difference between the sigils on the walls and the cobalt script that bound everything in the palace together. Between the months you'd been waiting, and the study you'd already completed before Thor had taken him, you knew at a glance what kind of spell you were looking at.

You made yourself keep moving forward, despite the hesitation you couldn't help but feel, scoffing out a half-laugh at Loki's audacity when you realized you were looking at a portal. You now understood why you'd have to take the dagger in your hand, why he'd ask this of you when you both knew that holding it was going to burn like fire and ice.

Before you reached for the box holding the dagger, you grabbed the handle of the drawer and pulled it open, the blue light flashing once, dazzling your eyes, then fading away. When you’d blinked the spots from your eyes, you found what looked like a cut-resistant glove, like those found in restaurants, but never used. Lifting the chain mail and laughing a little, you slid it onto your right hand.

You took a deep breath, remembering the terror in Loki's voice when he'd warned you to touch the hilt and only the hilt, despite the hilt being pure Nidavellir iron, and using your gloved hand, lifted the lid on the plain, unmarked box.

A plain dagger lay inside on a bed of black velvet. The blade looked like steel, triangular but for a notch cut in halfway down. He'd warned you that the blade was impregnated with poison, and the blade sharp and hard enough to pierce the thickest skin. You were almost as terrified of the blade as the handle, thinking about the kind of poison it would take to kill Loki's boogeyman. Loki had tried to reassure you (and warn you) that even a scratch should be fatal, but you could see the uncertainty and knew this was his best hope, not a sure thing. Thankfully, there was a small tang without much flair or decoration in between the blade and the handle, which would hopefully add a little more protection when you grabbed it.

Leaning on the wall, in case the glove didn’t give you complete protection against the weakness, you reached out and found you couldn’t touch the dagger. No matter how you tried, you couldn’t push your hand through the air to grasp the handle. A couple of inches all the way around the knife there was an invisible force field separating you, preventing you from touching it.

Careful not to make contact, you lifted your ungloved hand and brought it close enough to the handle to feel the cold of the metal reaching out for you. You looked down at the glove and chuckled a little, wondering once again if Loki’s pocket had a sense of humor, a sense of mischief. You’d wanted something to protect you from the knife and the magic behind the realm around you had given you a glove that stopped you from touching it.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” you grumbled, a chuckle trying to escape around the words. You watched your hands shake with the terror you were desperately holding back as you stripped the useless chain glove away, though you tucked it carefully back into the drawer, wanting to keep it safe. Despite the sick fear curdling in your gut, something about the situation was tickling what Loki had called your perverse sense of humor, maybe because something about it felt like him teasing you.

As your first idea had turned out to be a bust, you moved on to the next, which was sadly the last resort. Since he’d asked the favor, you'd been thinking of how you would do as Loki asked despite the weakness that would take hold as soon as you grabbed the dull gray handle. On the run here, you’d thought of nothing else. Now that you were faced with the enormity of the task, you found yourself hesitating, the sight of your own shaking hands forcing you to confront what he'd asked of you.

Your mind raced over the memories of when you’d touched anything with iron from Nidavellir in it. The original amulet had been made with a Nidavellir alloy, which was why it had taken Loki so much effort to discover that iron, specifically, was your weakness. That experiment had left you with a nasty burn after you held a tiny amount for only the length of time it took for your nerves to pass the pain onto the brain and the brain to send the command to DROP THE FUCKING THING. Between that and the horrifying energy drain you experienced in its presence, you were deeply uncertain that you could lift this much of it to chest height into Loki’s portal without passing out.

 You pulled the table holding the box close to the glowing spot on the wall, directly underneath the emerald oval where Loki’s hand waited for his secret weapon. Your breath speeding in the terror you wouldn’t let yourself give in to, you braced your shoulder and hip against the wall on the other side of the spell, giving over most of your weight. You braced that hand on the table you were snugged up tight against, hoping that the wall and table would help you hold yourself up long enough for you to get the dagger through the one-way one-time portal Loki had left for you.

You didn't let yourself think about it, knowing that to hesitate for even a second could be disaster for your already brittle nerve. Instead, you kept your eyes on the spot in front of you, giving every part of your mind over to focusing on the soft turquoise glow of the air around you. Silver blue and emerald green blended and danced in the air in front of your eyelashes, drawing and dazzling the centers of your retinas as you allowed your focus to diffuse like the shimmering light of the script of the spell circling your head and the glow of the portal at your breast blended together around you. Trying to exist outside of yourself, you lifted your arm and closed your hand around the handle of the dagger.

You had dreaded having to do this ever since Loki had made it a possibility. In small amounts, the substance sucked the life out of you, a feeling you were already experiencing this close to so much of it. Even just a small amount of it had burned immediately upon contact with your bare skin, left your insides feeling bruised. When you closed your hand around the dagger's handle, you were yanked back into your body with a vengeance and it took every ounce of willpower you had to not drop the red-hot poker in your hand, the spear of dry ice searing your nerve endings.

You fought your natural instinct to recoil from the brain-frying sensation combining scorching fire and paradoxical ice. You focused on locking your knuckles closed even as you resisted the dragging weight of the dagger. The knife may have been extra heavy, or you may have been extra weak, but it didn't matter when you couldn't seem to get the point of the dagger into the portal. All that mattered was that you overcome one or the other before you lost consciousness.

You'd been right to give the wall as much of your weight as you could, to brace yourself on the table as your knees started trying to give out, dragging you down the wall by an inch, then two, not helping your poor arm at all. You managed to push yourself back up, then locked your knees to keep yourself up as you felt tears burn at the back of your throat, knowing you couldn't bear to lift the dagger any further than you already had to. Blackness closing around the edges of your vision, the room-spinning vertigo turned into lightheaded relief when you saw the point of the knife press into the middle of the green spot you hadn't let your eyes leave. With the last bit of strength you had left, you pushed the knife into the portal, letting go as soon as you felt it pull from your hand.

Nothing left, you collapsed to the golden floor as the lights around you suddenly flared to life. You didn't see it, insensible to your surroundings for long minutes. Consciousness came clear in stages and blinking against the light, not certain if you'd fainted or not, you rolled into the fetal position, cradling your hand as you tried to collect your thoughts.

When the worst of the sickness had passed, you rolled to your back to see how your head responded to the change. When you didn't feel like throwing up again, and you were pretty sure any dizziness had passed, you gingerly pushed yourself up on your uninjured hand into a sitting position.

Once upright, you were relieved to find all dizziness, vertigo, and light-headedness was gone. To your dismay, they'd been replaced by the worst headache you'd ever had in your life. Feeling like someone had beaten you black and blue, you looked at the wall where the portal directly into Loki's sleeve had been.

"The ace in your sleeve, love," you murmured, looking away from the blank wall and down at your hand, red, raw, and blistering, edged in black, then quickly away in disgust. Hoping the pool in your bathroom could heal something of this magnitude, because you didn't want to try to explain your wound to an ER nurse, you cradled your wounded hand in your good one without looking at it and began the careful climb to your feet. "I hope it's enough to win."

Part Twenty-Three here>>

There had been a definite improvement over the horrifying black and nauseating scarlet edges, but despite all you’d done, your hand still looked terrible. The skin of your palm and fingers was intact, but also stretched and shiny, like a second-degree burn a couple of weeks into healing. Bright crimson and looking as raw as a fresh, mean sunburn, the kind only a couple of degrees away from blistering, there was no doubt that you’d done serious damage.

Loki had done some of his best magic in creating his pocket and it almost always produced whatever you wanted, as soon as you wanted it. Even so, there were limits, and apparently the wound on your hand had found one of those limits. As you couldn't imagine any Earth doctors doing better, and you had no idea how to explain how you'd received the injury, or what healing you had been able to administer, you didn't even consider checking with them. No doctor on Earth would have a treatment for your injury, even if you could tell them where it came from.

You’d never experienced anything like the sensation of holding the hilt of that dagger. Though the skin looked now like a burn, the iron in your palm had been cold, colder than you'd ever dreamed of imagining. You hadn’t known that a cold like that could exist, and your mind could not properly process the sensation of being next to such a complete absence of heat. It was a cold so intense it felt like fire, seared white hot, until you lost the capacity to tell the difference. You not only lacked words for that kind of cold, you lacked the ability to describe how it felt without sounding delusional.

Though you weren't certain of the accuracy of your perceptions, feeling like your imagination had run wild in an attempt to cope with the baffling sensory input, you would swear that the knife had done much more than simply destroy your cells the same way fire or dry ice would have. The sensation had been colder than that, too existentially terrifying for that, as though contact with the metal had brought to a halt the very atoms that made up the matter of your body, spreading out as each atom stilled the one next to it. Your hand had wrapped around the heat death of the universe.

You couldn't imagine there was a prescription for that.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a prescription for waiting, either. Your bracelet hadn't signaled even once since you'd sent Loki the knife, and there was nothing you could do, no matter how that scraped along your nerves like a cheese grater. Doing your best to try not to think about it, you curled up on your couch, your palm still tingling and aching under the gauze you'd loosely wrapped around your hand. Trying to relax despite the part of your brain that endlessly wanted to fret over Loki, you turned on the television and started flipping channels.

Less than an hour later, you sat up when the breaking news broke in with reports that Iron Man was fighting aliens in Greenwich Village. The news was a crazy montage of images, taken from their own reporting and footage from cell phones filmed by witnesses, showing four humans and two giant not-humans were absolutely demolishing lower Manhattan. Iron Man was unmistakable and thought you recognized Bruce Banner, but the other men fighting with them were unfamiliar, as were the beings they fought. You'd learned so much about the universe at Loki's side, but you didn't recognize either species. Despite everything, when the universe invaded your home, you still had no idea what was happening.

You lived nowhere near the epicenter of the carnage, but you hadn't been watching very long before you received a text from Emily, checking on your whereabouts. After assuring her that you were safe at home, you sat, stunned and scared as you watched the repeats of the battles, and the first responders helping those who'd been hurt, or trapped in rubble from the property destruction. Like everyone else watching the same reports, all the humans left broken by the gods and their battles, you were baffled once again by the destruction of your city.

You found yourself feeling angry, and resentful, at the power imbalance, at how easily the mighty forgot the ants crushed beneath their boots. The ants that had oftentimes worked together to build the boot that ended up crushing them.

Though Loki had been a lens through which you could see the universe more clearly, without him you saw as little as anyone else. It seemed cruel and unfair that you, any random person in the world, could die in a war from heaven, but never understand what the people who killed you even wanted from the people fighting them. No matter how big you felt at Loki's side, you were still very, very small. And that made you very, very angry.

Loki still had not signaled and now another cataclysm had befallen New York. All of the combatants had left, at least for the time being, and if anyone knew why they'd come or why they'd left, they weren’t telling you. All you were getting from the news were non-answers and PR speak out of the official sources. The internet, as far as you could tell, was a swarm of conspiracy theories. Perhaps one of them could possibly be a little bit correct, but you’d never have enough time to wade through the nonsense to find it.

Infuriated by the lack of information and the lack of options for obtaining more, you put your phone aside when it offered no more answers than the news had. Your scalp prickled and you sat up, feeling a rush of dread and longing that made you want to leap to your feet. Though you didn't know what you expected to see, you felt the need to go check the linen closet door.

Because you couldn't stop thinking about it, and that alone made you uncomfortable, you stood up. Feeling weirdly hesitant, yet compelled, you walked around the couch and down the hallway toward your bedroom. The apartment wasn't huge and as soon as you were in the hallway, you could see the sigil on the linen closet. As soon as you did, your whole body went cold with dread. Slowly, you closed the two steps down the hall to the closet, aghast to find the sigil on your door had changed, morphed into something you'd never seen before.

For years, the sigil had remained on your door, a welcome from Loki, a message for your eyes alone. This had been the door into home, the home you'd made with him, the man your heart considered your spouse, though the vows you’d spoken had been for his ears alone, though only you had heard his vows in return. The looping swirls had marked and symbolized the special, secret place you’d shared with Loki for years upon years, if you counted all the stretched time between time you'd spent in there. You could trace its lines and curves as easily as the veins and bones in the back of your own hands.

You could not explain why the subtle wrongness in each of the lines made your bones scream or why the shade in which they looped seemed to pull the breath out of your lungs. The lines weren't right, that much was blatantly clear. The most obvious wrongness was in the absence of the dramatic, embellished letter 'L' buried in amongst the curving loops and knots. That beloved letter had been replaced by a pattern you didn't recognize, and yet your bones sang as though they understood, though the resonant sensation made you vaguely sick to your stomach.

When you'd left the pocket earlier in the day, the sigil had looked as it always had, shimmering with a soft turquoise glow coming from the pattern. As usual, you’d been able to see the silvery blue frost of Loki's magic blending with the outline of the 'L' in his preferred emerald to give the sigil a lovely subtle shade. The color you were looking at now was even more jarring than the changed pattern, if only because it was so different.

The change was not subtle, nor was the color. The edges of each line seemed to bleed into the door around it, as though the bright cerulean was eating away at the wood. The interior, however, was a dense, midnight blue, so deep you felt like you could fall into it. Amongst the velvet indigo spreading over the door, tiny sparkles of sapphire and aquamarine winked and glowed in the deep. Those flashes had a rhythm, a frequency that you felt like you could decipher if you simply got closer, looked deeper. You were reaching for the door before you realized what was happening.

Stumbling back, you blinked your eyes clear of the trance the shimmering swirl of blue had inspired. Your heart was pounding, not in fear, but a wild excitement you’d never felt before. You wanted to leap through the door, a bizarre certainty coursing through you that everything you’d been searching for your entire life lay on the other side. That certainty seemed to be coming from outside of yourself, however, and that terrified you more than anything.

But something about the way each blue bled into the next seemed familiar, like you were seeing a pattern you'd been born knowing. This exact blend of blue, this precise pattern of sparkles and shimmers had been coloring every daydream you’d ever had. Your heart pounded and pounded at the sight, but in joyous anticipation.

You wanted to go through the door, yearned to yank the door open and dive through the shimmering curtain that separated you from Loki's pocket dimension with a fervor that surprised and frightened you. That desire was baffling and strange enough to keep you from reaching out when your own common sense had fled and everything else inside you was screaming for you to reach out and touch the spell in front of your eyes.

You didn't know how long you stood there, back against the opposite hallway wall, staring at your linen closet door, trying to untangle your thoughts from your feelings enough to make a rational decision about the door. You only knew that when you shook yourself out of the trance that had at some point taken you again, you were once more reaching out to pull the door open so you could step through it.

Frightened and confused, because you didn’t know why you wanted to go through the door so badly, what was calling to you so intently, you made yourself turn and walk back to the living room. Though the news was still covering the attack on Greenwich Village, you couldn't care about that anymore. Your mind stayed on the changed portal, on how badly you wanted to walk through it.

Aside from the inexplicable allure of the sigil, you also wanted to find out what had changed on the other side to make the spell change. If the bracelet at your wrist had done anything since you'd left the portal last, you'd have already jumped through, certain it was something to do with Loki. Without that signal, you couldn't know that your husband was behind the change, couldn't know that you wouldn't be walking into a trap, one set, perhaps, for him.

The next several hours were brutal. You tried to act normal, moving through your usual evening routine, but you gave up before bedtime. You checked the closet door two or three times an hour, looking for changes without spending enough time staring at the sigil to become entranced. There were no more visually perceptible changes, and yet you felt like you could see something in the dark center of the knot, something that was looking back out at you, into you. Unable to sleep, you ended up keeping vigil through the night, watching and waiting, though you didn't know for exactly what.

You were in your kitchen making tea early the following morning when your phone rang. Blurry eyed and bemused, and dealing with the vague irritation of having one hand not working, you pulled your phone from the pocket of your robe, scowling in sleep-deprived irritation. The irritation vanished, replaced by concern and confusion when you saw Emily's name on the caller ID. You frowned and immediately moved to answer. Emily wouldn't call for anything less than an emergency at a normal hour, let alone before dawn.

"H--"

"You're there!" Emily sobbed the words out the moment you started to speak, terror and relief stark in her voice. "Thank god!"

Terror had been your companion since your bracelet had gone to ice day before. You'd been tamping it down, but the sound of your best friend in tears, scared out of her mind, had sick dread clawing its way up into your throat.

"I'm here. What is…" You paused a little when you heard what sounded like screeching metal and the beginnings of screaming in the street outside your sink window, "…going on out there?" You leaned over your sink to try and see what was happening outside.

"People are disappearing! Or-- turning into dust?!" Emily's breathless explanation brought your attention back to her with a vengeance. "I don't fucking know! It's fucking fucked, y/n!!" Emily was starting to ramp up in her agitation, talking faster as she went. "I was putting together a bouquet for Mr. Todd, and he just crumbled away! And it's happening all over! To so many people! And not just the people! I just saw a dogwalker lose half her dogs!!"

You didn't know what to say, didn't know how to respond to this. Despite all you'd seen, all you'd learned in the last few years, you had no frame of reference for people turning to dust. You didn't doubt anything Emily was telling you; she was too grounded to be making it up and you'd seen enough wonders at Loki's side to know how strange the universe could be. But that didn't mean you had the first idea of how to respond, what to do.

Emily's voice, a little small, snapped you out of it. “Why the dogs, too?”

You had a moment where you weren’t sure how to respond and your mind went blank with the horror of it all. “Fuck.” The word fell out of your mouth, and the sound of your own shock helped you focus. Snapped out of your dumbfounded stunlock, you moved into the living room. "I'm turning the news back on." You grabbed the remote from the couch cushion and turned towards the TV.

Chaos immediately greeted your gaze as Emily asked, "Are you home?"

"I am," you answered absently, appalled at what you were seeing. The early reports had to be wrong. You prayed the early reports were wrong. What they were describing was a seemingly random, complete disintegration of people, animals, plants, trees. Life.

The scope of the loss was too big; too much was gone to wrap your mind around it. There was no force anywhere that could do such a thing; there couldn't be. The sense of general dread that had dogged you since yesterday narrowed to a pinpoint when you heard a scream come through the phone. The only thing that kept you in place was that it wasn't Emily. "Where are you?" You demanded it, something inside of you responding to the crisis and taking charge.

"I just left the shop."

The shop in question was a small florist only a couple of blocks from your apartment. Your eyes full of the scenes being haphazardly broadcast by news teams all of a sudden missing half their number, your mind raced over your conflicting needs and responsibilities and commitments. Understanding that everything had changed, you made a decision.

"Come to my place," you said, turning toward the hallway and the door you were supposed to guard with your life. Your heart in your throat, you started moving around the couch. "Safety in numbers, right?"

Emily's voice was strangled, both thick with tears and thin from running. "I'm so fucking glad you didn't disappear." A wave of guilt washed through you. If things had been different, you might have disappeared on her before any of this had happened.

You tried to push the sick guilt and fear away, but you could feel them in your throat as you rasped, “Me, too,” in response. Your voice had tried to escape as soon as you came face to face with your linen closet door, the sight of which made your whole body flush hot as adrenaline dumped into your bloodstream. At the same time, you shivered cold as your body drew the blood from your extremities in preparation for either a chase or a battle.

The sigil had spread in looping swirls and knots to overwhelm the majority of the door. Something had gone catastrophically wrong as even a few tendrils had escaped and were beginning to tease at the walls around the closet. Cerulean blue at the edges, midnight blue in the center, but with a dazzle that reminded you of a faceted gem, the pull to dive into it was ten times more powerful than it had been. Alluring in a way you'd never known, you couldn't stop yourself from reaching out without thought, the fingertips of your injured hand brushing the bright blue.

"Keep the line open--" you heard Emily say as you dropped the phone in your hand. The moment you touched the magic, you were sucked through, yanked into the pocket dimension with enough force to send you reeling.

To your astonished horror, the moment you came through, you were dropping to your hands and knees against the stone floor. Your body didn't seem to want to obey your commands, as though something had changed in some fundamental way and you could no longer move because you could no longer trust the laws of physics to act as they always had. No matter how still you held your head, your brain could not seem to grasp where it was in space. Trying to look around the room made everything spin around, even as the room seemed to stretch away from you in all directions.

What you could make out around the sickening ocular overload didn't comfort you as it appeared as though the walls were separating from the ceiling, the floor, each other. The spell script that lined each of the joining places in the palace was pulling apart, like a thread that held each seam closed had started to come loose. Bright azure light streamed in through the cracks in all directions. Something very bad had happened, because Loki's palace was coming apart around you in every way.

You closed your eyes in the hope that shutting out some of the contradictory sensory information would help you orient yourself. Your internal sense became no more certain about your body's location, but the lack of visual stimuli helped you calm your stomach a bit. You thought about trying to escape the way you came, but you weren’t entirely certain you could find your way back under these circumstances. Before you could decide what to do, if anything, the ground seemed to heave beneath your hands and knees, tossing you into the air just as gravity stopped working. Your eyes flew open just in time to see one of the dozens of books that had been thrown up too coming directly at your face and raised a hand to bat it away.

Not only books, but papers and pens and all of the furniture holding the room’s contents were tumbling through the air around you, as was the room itself. Cobalt blue light streamed in from a thousand cracks in every direction, reminding you that the only thing between you and the void of the unknown was Loki’s magic and the smooth stone walls that surrounded you. A sick understanding hit you hard and fast: that magic was failing, along with the laws of your universe, exposing you to that void. Whatever was happening, it was catastrophic.

Though part of your mind wanted to ask what could have happened to make the pocket react this way, and another wanted to ask what happened if you were still inside when the magic came apart completely, the rest of your attention was focused on the pain screaming through you. The sight of Loki’s palace coming undone hurt you in a way you’d never known you could be hurt.

You couldn't bear the thought of losing the place where you'd built love and a life with the most spectacular being you'd ever known. Your heart was crying out that this place was yours now, no matter that you weren’t its creator. You had a bond with it that even Loki didn’t have, could see its working in a way he never could. The pocket had attached itself to you in turn; it had changed to suit you, had chosen to become your home as much as you’d chosen to make it your home. You couldn’t let it go.

A cry of protest sounded in your mind and your lips parted in a wordless sound to echo that pain as you reached out to the stone slab closest to you. You thought it was the floor, a darker gray than the other slabs, but you weren’t sure of anything in your weightless tumble. All you knew for certain was that you needed to get a closer look at the light that was pouring into the room around you.

The sparkling blue glare seemed so like the dazzling blue light that had accompanied the chain mail glove, and hope flared that whatever power Loki had borrowed to make his palace might not mind you borrowing some, too. Unthinking, you slid your uninjured hand into the gap between the stone.

Your body still floating in mid-air, you wrapped your hand around the edge and pulled yourself close so that you could look out at the space between space and find the source of that friendly blue light. Narrowing your eyes against the searing glitter, it seemed the light was coming at you from every direction.

The harder you looked into the dazzle of cerulean, the clearer your sight became, no matter how paradoxical that seemed. Everything seemed to slow around you as you gazed more and more deeply into the heart of the light, your eyes picking out what seemed like a million shades of blue streaming from a source that you ached to see, but that remained frustratingly just out of sight. You strained harder, your dry eyes beginning to burn as you searched, unblinking, for the wellspring that poured forth the power you could feel streaming into your eyes and sizzling against your fingertips.

In the periphery of your vision and your attention, in the part of your mind still wondering why you weren't trying to escape, you noticed the spell script holding the pocket together had pulled further apart. The space between the seams of your and Loki's private dimension were spreading open and leaving you more and more exposed to whatever was pouring every shade of blue into your retinas until you felt filled to bursting.

Something in the light called to you, but by a name you hadn't known was yours. Once you felt the resonance of that name in your bones, however, it felt like a name that had belonged to you before you'd belonged to yourself. With that name came an understanding that couldn't find room for itself in your conscious mind. Instead it settled into your marrow, where your true self resided, truth calling to truth.

You didn't think, couldn't think around the flood of light over you, into you. You couldn't feel around the certainty thrumming in your bones, in your soul. When the light had filled you too full to hold any thoughts, all that was left was the thrum of harmony between yourself and the light. It felt like you'd been turned inside out, made some kind of vessel for the power pouring into you. All you could do was endure the light, hold it, seek it, fight to keep your eyes on the place where the blues were darkest and mysterious, where you saw movement in the center of the source.

Your mind washed clean, you were acting on nothing but instinct when you put the hand not gripping the edge of the wall through the now three-foot-wide fissure into the space beyond. The gauze you'd loosely wrapped around your palm sizzled as it vanished in the blaze of light, leaving your wounded palm bared to the burning blue.

A scream of pain pushed up into your brain and out of your mouth in a shriek as the light electrified the wound on your hand, the pain shooting up your arm and clearing your mind of a little of the all-encompassing light. Even as the pain pushed through you in wave after wave, it felt like the damaged atoms were waking up, like the light was doing the opposite of what Nidavellir metals did to you, forcing stilled atoms back into motion. The jolt of burning electric pain resonated the same way your bones were resonating, as though the swirling sapphire and midnight at the center of the source was speaking to you, but you weren't big enough, or strong enough, to understand.

The gap between the walls stretched further, the shimmering script like a thread barely holding them together and stretched nearly to the breaking point. With the extra space, you were able to lean out, unencumbered, into the space outside of the pocket. Despite your immediate lean toward danger, your uninjured hand was clamped around the edge of the floor where you'd been peeking out, the stubborn, human part of your mind keeping you tethered to reality despite the uncaring attitude of the rest of you.

The rest of you could not care, as you felt like your eyes had become saucers meant for holding only this vision. Lost in the wonder of what you beheld, you finally understood what the shimmering swirling center of the light had been trying to say. No single word could truly hold all the meaning held in the blaze of light, the rumbling vibration of your atoms, but the closest word you'd ever find would be, 'MINE.'

The primordial source recognized you, called you by name, but the name you'd been given in the space between space, in the time before time. You were one of its children, one of the few of your kind that had stayed behind when the rest had left. And even as each flash of understanding felt like a revelation, so too did it feel like dredging up memories of dreams in childhood.

You could remember touching the Source when it was new, when everything was, feeling your atoms dissolve even as the Source held you together in its center. Until you'd been separated by war, then death and rebirth, you'd never been apart, even when others had encased it in an attempt to dim its shine. The Source had broken free, and it once again shone as bright as when the universe was new. Finally, it was bright enough that it could show you yourself, loud enough to get through the generations of human ancestry to resonate your marrow, where the Queen of the Fair Folk lay dormant in your bones.

And with that, you understood instantly how to put Loki's palace back together, how he walked through cracks in space to hop around the universe at will. Loki had needed the script of his spells, magic the conduit through which the Source had communicated with him. As a Shadow Walker, Loki had an affinity for the Source that helped it work through him, but you had no need for that, not now that you'd heard it sing in your bones. Muscle memory had returned and you could shadow walk as easily as breathing, restitch the pocket with a thought. Such things seemed distant, almost unimportant, when you were basking in memories long denied.

Your vision cleared, and though there was no less of it, the light no longer seemed too bright. The swirl of azure and cobalt light emanated from the glittering stone you'd first found in the mountains of a planet that no longer existed, its sun long since nova, in the first of countless lives. Your connection to the stone had made you and your people the envy of the universe, worshipped as gods on countless worlds. Your loyalty to the power you could see inside it had left you alone when your people had moved on.

You could easily see the galaxies shimmering under the surface and knew that a piece of yourself had been traded for the piece of the source that resided in you. You blinked and it was like you'd zoomed out, teleported far enough away to see the Source and its neighbors, five more stones in different colors. Another blink and further back and you could see a web of rainbow colors holding together an ocean of bubbles, the blues shining out brighter than the rest.

The resonance in your bones changed, like every beam of blue was speaking the same word. So much love poured out from the Source, a protectiveness, even possessiveness, but the kind that comes from recognition, not ownership. The sensation flowed through each of the infinite blue lights into you, filling you full of a joy that came from the simple fact of existence. You wanted to weep at the beauty of being truly and fully alive.

Your palm, still stretched out in the flood of light, tingled cold, soothing after the feel of electric burn, and tears fell down your cheeks from both eyes, though your sight remained clear. The feeling reminded you of Loki and your fear and longing for him rose up and pushed out a fraction of the wonder that had filled you up, forced you to remember that you were more than your memories. You had a life and a name outside of the voices reminding you of a thousand wondrous lifetimes, including the last couple dozen on Earth.

The song in your bones had kept you in place, bathed in the light of the Source, your Parent, your Self, but the ache in your heart reminded you that you were also a human, with friends and loved ones, and a planet in chaos. You took a deep breath, working to stop yourself from leaping into the light, fighting to make yourself go back to the endless cycle of life and death outside of the shadows between each universe.

Your uninjured hand had remained firmly under the control of your human self and was still clamped around the edge of the floor. Sorrow meshed with joy and burst out of the Source in a bittersweet rush of light and force that shoved you back, breaking your grip for the first time. Something about the sensation felt final, like the Source itself was saying a kind of goodbye.

Not thinking, your body simply taking over in a motion you'd both never done before and done a million times, you grabbed the thread of script and pulled the seams of the palace closed, pulling the place back together. One quick knot and the pocket was once more stable and secure, this time bound fully to the magic in your bones.

Between one blink and the next, you found yourself sitting in the chair behind the desk in Loki's study, everything as it had been when you'd left, except for you.

For a very long time, you sat and stared at the palm of your hand, now healed as though you'd never had a wound. Before your experience in the shadows, you'd thought you'd permanently destroyed your palm print, but there was nothing wrong with your hand at all now, not that anyone else would be able to see. The shimmering sigil in the center, the color like the twinkling of infinite blue stones on a black velvet field, in a word from a long dead planet, was undoubtedly for your eyes alone.

‘MINE’

Despite the existential terror starting to break through the shock, your normal human mind in full control once more and starting to freak out, the message felt like an oath, not a brand. You could now remember being bound to the stone, in the light of those memories the message was a comfort, though the rest of the information was hard to process.

Unlike the others of your kind, at least the you that had been born in the early universe countless lifetimes ago, you'd never been exhausted by the millennia, never felt punished by time. A thousand years in human form, however, and you were tired. You'd deliberately locked yourself in a cycle of human life, death, and rebirth as long as the Tesseract had been on Earth, only to lose the entire reason you'd done so when cruel and arrogant humans had stolen her, then lost her. A lifetime of searching, only to lose yourself in rebirth until it was too late to fix anything. 

If only Loki had shown you the gem he'd used to create everything around you, instead of just bragging about it. If only the Asgardian vaults hadn't been full of Nidavellir radiation, the aspect of the iron that could damage you through your human shell. If only the creature in your bones had been able to move your human form that much closer to your eternal goal. If only the god of mischief hadn't been so spectacularly interesting, the Fair Queen may have woken up enough to notice that he was standing in front of what she was looking for.

You'd been out of the loop for a long time, so you didn't know who could have brought together all of the Stones or what they were going to do next. If turning a bunch of humans into dust was the opening gambit, you couldn’t imagine what the follow up could be. Knowing what only one Infinity Stone had done to you, there didn't seem to be any sense in combining six of them to simply murder people, even a lot of people. With the power any of the Stones could endow, it seemed so very small. Someone could do so much good, if only they wanted to; it made no sense to destroy, to indulge in the first impulse of an overtired toddler.

The human part of you that had kept you grounded wouldn't let you put your head down, though a soul-deep, bone-deep exhaustion weighed heavy on you. Despite the ego dissolving experience you'd just had, you still felt like yourself. You still felt like the human who'd had your life, regardless of what had happened to your bones before that.

And your best friend had sounded terrified when you'd stepped into this room. Your heart clutched and your stomach dropped at the thought, and you felt more like yourself than ever. Whomever you had been, you were still you, still loved who you loved, and you loved Emily. You had to try to protect her from whatever was happening back on Earth.

Feeling creakier than an old screen door, you nonetheless got to your feet. Looking at the room around you, you couldn’t help but see it differently now that you knew your bones were humming at the same frequency as the magic Loki had used to construct it. Though it had already been your home, the palace belonged to you now in a way it hadn’t before.

Smiling gently, you lifted the palm that carried the shimmering symbol and placed it against the cool stone of the wall, sending your love, your thanks, and the deepest wish of your heart out into the blue. With a wave of your hand, you opened a hole between your pocket and your apartment in the same place Loki's portal had been, your linen closet door, just in time to hear Emily's voice come out of the phone on the floor.

"--just in case, okay?"

You absently waved the portal away, though a piece of your mind was agog at your newfound power to walk between the shadows of the universe, to bend space itself to your will. Still feeling disconnected from yourself and everything else, you nonetheless bent down to pick up the phone, bringing it to your ear as Emily said, "Y/N? Are you there?"

The terror in her voice broke through the strangeness of stepping into time at the exact same instant you'd stepped out of it, though you had to clear your throat to get the words out. "I'm here," you said, your voice a rasp. "I'm not going anywhere."

Part Twenty-Four here>>

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Draped in the various tokens, baubles, amulets, and bejeweled chains that carried the net of spells Loki had created to protect you both, you, at long last, got your first sight of Asgard, stepping through shimmering silks into Odin's bedroom. The room was lavish and luxurious in a way your imagination could not have created before you saw it for yourself and left you speechless with awe, feeling almost stupid with it. Everything around you seemed soft and lush in a way you had never before experienced. Even the air itself caressed your skin more gently; never piercing, the light shimmered and bounced against every surface, scattering in a way that seemed to slide more easily into the eye.

Between the overwhelming awe and heart-pounding excitement sat weeping gratitude for the NPC effect of your wedding ring as you were openly gawking by the time you reached the main hall of Odin's palace. Struck dumb with awe at the grandeur you could see in every direction, you couldn't remember to close your mouth. Looking out across the length of the throne room, you fully understood for the first time why Loki's private domain was so dizzyingly lush. The room was bigger than Madison Square Garden and a thousand times more impressive. Faced with the reality that Loki's childhood home was a palace filled to the insanely high rafters with gold you began to comprehend in a new way how far apart the two of you had started. How you'd come together at all was a mystery and how you'd stayed together was incomprehensible, only becoming more so the more time you spent at this side.

The murals on the ceiling of that throne room, three stories high, made you imagine the dizzying task of painting such things and sent your own head spinning. You only made it worse trying to imagine yourself in the painter's shoes, and knew you could never match their skill with your feet on the ground, let alone suspended in midair above a possibly lethal height.

That first time you walked through the throne room, those massive, imposing murals high above you, you stopped in the middle, tilting your head all the way back, until the back of your skull was touching your upper back. Loki stopped next to you, fussing with something at the hem of his tunic to cover for his pause in the center of the room.

You couldn't move, needed utter stillness to strain your eyes enough to see the picture so very high above you. Though you were at risk of drawing attention from the guards, as painfully upright as their spears, who were placed at strategic points through the hall, you didn't care, needing to examine the portraits circling the centerpiece of the grandest mural of all. Even from this distance, you could clearly see that the work was incredibly fine and detailed, rich with color and edged in gold.

You peered carefully at the family portraits, closely examining each of Loki’s family, putting faces to the names you'd heard by now thousands of times. As the years had worn on, Loki had told you about his world, his childhood, his family, and you felt you knew them, despite having never met them. You recognized Thor easily, from his appearances on the news, and moved on quickly, wanting to focus on those you'd never seen. You studied Odin thoroughly, having an urgent need to understand what he was supposed to look like. As you couldn’t see Loki’s illusions, you hadn’t been sure how he'd appeared to others as you'd walked through his kingdom on his arm.

You wished that Frigga’s face was turned toward you, found yourself lingering as you'd fiercely wondered for years what Loki’s mother had looked like, whether her good heart was apparent on her face. If there was something worth loving inside Loki, it was clearly Frigga's doing. That he could love anyone in return, that he could love you, was because of the love she'd so freely given him. You’d imagined what she looked like, hoped to see that loving heart reflected in her face, had wanted confirmation. Knowing it didn't really matter, you let Loki pull you into motion just as your eyes fell on his portrait. Unable to help yourself, you scoffed out a laugh that echoed around the high ceilings.

"Did the mural painter have a vendetta?" You murmured the question half-seriously, incredulous at the way your husband was depicted in this masterpiece painting. He had been flawlessly painted, true to his features, but with such a sinister cast to his expression that you couldn't help the amusement bubbling up inside you. With such skill on display, the wicked portrayal had to be deliberate; none of the other portraits had anything like the aura surrounding him.

Loki paused a moment, glancing up at the mural above the two of you, a frown of confusion digging a line in between those undeniably wicked eyebrows. He was baffled as to what could have prompted the question as he couldn't remember the last time he thought about the painting. He honestly never even looked up at it anymore, so long had it graced the ceiling. "I don't know what you mean,” he replied, looking back down at you still puzzled, as he'd seen in the painting what he'd always seen, and had long, long since become accustomed to ignoring.

Chuckles tickling the back of your throat, you turned with a teasing smile for him. “Are you kidding me?” With a nod of your head toward the portrait, you didn’t quite hold back a small snort. “You are looking at the same painting of you that I am, right?" You asked, laughter thick in your voice. Despite the height of the ceiling, you could clearly see that his portrait was plotting something.

Loki looked once more at the ceiling, focusing this time on his own portrait amongst the riot of color. His eyes narrowed when he saw to what you were referring, acknowledging internally that his portrait was not as flattering as his brother’s, but that was expected and beneath his notice. Still, once you'd pointed it out, he could easily see the shadows around his brow, the menacing tilt of his head, the closed posture and understood why you had asked about them. The painter had made decisions.

He searched his memory, trying to remember who had painted the mural and what, if anything, he’d done to offend them. He had a vague memory of cruelties, both given and received. It had never occurred to him that his teeth could have been sharp enough at that age for his bite to have any impact, but your sight was often more clear than his, especially with the things he saw so often as to take them for granted. Speaking slowly, he looked back at you as he answered, both his voice and his face guarded. “She's a very talented artist, well-respected amongst my kind."

You couldn’t see through all of Loki’s lies; he was far too clever for that. That didn't mean that you hadn't learned how to read the expressions that flashed across his face. You knew when he wasn't telling you everything, when he was speaking around something and the way he was speaking around this made you wild with curiosity. He never talked about old flames and all it did was make you want to know more, but you couldn't pester him about his centuries-long love life. That felt unhealthy. But this was a chance to find out something, finally. There was no way you were letting this go.

You raised an eyebrow and looked back at the dark-eyed, shadowed figure that represented the man at your side as the two of you moved past the throne, heading toward the door out of the throne room, and ultimately down to the gardens. Your lips were curved in amusement as you pressed him further. "Then she had a personal problem with you, because you look sinister as fuck.” Lowering your voice as you were getting close to a guard, you finished with a wink, "Still sexy, though.”

Loki’s face relaxed into a wide smile and he chuckled at the wicked eyebrow wiggle you gave him. He wasn't worried about the guard overhearing your conversation; he'd piled so many illusion spells into the pendant at your neck, the ring around your finger, anyone who didn't directly interact with you would have a hard time remembering that you'd been there, and would never remember that you spoke.

The truth, something that would never pass his lips because he would never tell himself such a truth, was that he never talked about the lovers he'd had before because he barely remembered them anymore, barely remembered what it was like before he met you. Having you in his world, seeing his world through your eyes had banished even the memory of what came before, at least for the moment. He couldn’t imagine why he'd ever bother trying to dredge up memories from before, when he’d felt like no one understood him, or ever would.

 "I'm sure she had a reason,” he tossed out carelessly with a shrug, grinning at you unrepentantly. “Who remembers?"

You rolled your eyes, trying and failing to suppress a smile. You knew you were overindulgent, but you liked seeing him happy too much to dim it with questions about the past. "You're right. What am I thinking?” Loki drew you through door behind the throne, intending to take you through the smaller corridor to the back way to the gardens. He knew how natural beauty could awe you and he wanted to once again see your bottomless eyes go wide with wonder. You let him guide you, letting go and laughing out loud at his relentless nonchalance.

“How could you possibly remember every person who hates you enough to immortalize it in gold leaf?"

Over the following year, you became very familiar with Asgard. Loki drew you into his daily life as fully as he'd drawn you into his shadow realm, getting very comfortable with having everything he wanted in reach with nothing and no one in his way. He disliked being parted from you, often requesting that you join him on Asgard as soon as you were done seeing to your everyday life on Midgard. You'd gotten into the habit of coming home from work, hopping into Loki's extra-dimensional palace to change into an Asgard-appropriate gown before popping through the portal in his study that led to Odin's private quarters.

Each piece of jewelry Loki had seen fit to drape over you had its share of spells designed to keep you hidden and safe. You had yet to discover any weaknesses in your adventures, and Asgard was no exception. On the rare occasion that you'd drawn attention to yourself, it had been deliberate. To both your and Loki's relief, you'd been perceived as an Asgardian, and one of note only due to your place as Odin's companion. Everyone who met you had a vague sense of having met you before, an implicit understanding of your place in their world, but neither were they allowed to consider it for longer than a moment.

You learned the royal palace until you knew it the way you knew your own neighborhood, able to find your way through without ever passing by an ounce of Nidevellir iron. Like your own neighborhood, the palace had become familiar, but never routine. Unlike New York, however, the sprawling golden floors under soaring lavish ceilings never seemed fully real. Neither did the rivers the Asgardians skimmed in their flying boats, or the forests in which they hunted. You couldn't explain what it was about the world in its entirety, but it had a dreamlike quality that made you question reality. At the same time, there were moments with Loki where everything sharpened into an almost painful clarity. Asgard itself, however, or perhaps the interaction between the world and its occupants and the spells that Loki had woven around you, left you floating through.

Sometimes, however, for no discernable reason that you could see, you would be standing hand in hand with Loki, a new wonder spread out before you, as Asgard was full of them, and that dreaminess would fall away and it was like you were looking at the world through fresh eyes, eyes that were being allowed to see all that they could for the first time. There were moments, your heart pounding, your breath speeding, that you could almost feel your vision shift into a different state, as though you were seeing another range of color, or yet another layer of reality. Some moments, it seemed as though the practice with Loki's magic had made your unique sight even more powerful.

Though the merchant on Alfheim had provided Loki with his first real clue about that sight's origins, only part could be explained in such a way, and it did not explain why Asgard seemed to affect that sight. In many ways, knowing a possible source had left both of you with only more questions.

But questions and the search for answers animated Loki, gave him new excuses to hop from world to world, taking on new disguises and tricking others out of what he needed from them. If this wild love affair had ever been meant to last, you'd worry that his fascination with you would end with the solved puzzle. No matter how devoted, adoring, possessive he was toward you, about you, it seemed impossible that he could love you the way you loved him.

Everything about him, the flash of mischievous eyes, the curve of a wicked smile, even the dip of a sullen brow could make warmth and heat tangle inside you. The emotion was so much, swelling and filling you up until you felt like you were made out of love for him. Sometimes it felt like you were trying to be more than only yourself, like love had changed you, and you sought to be something more, something that could match how tall he stood in your esteem. Despite everything between you and Loki, a part of you remained always braced for the day he stopped making the thin chain around your wrist ice over in summons, the day he stopped craving your company, the day this crazed dream ended.

As it was, you could comfort yourself with the cold truth that you'd probably never have to find out if Loki would tire of you as he was bound to be found out any day, so little did he seem to care about his illusions. Nearly four years after he'd stolen his father's throne, he'd gotten too comfortable in the lack of resistance from the Asgardians. As long as life remained calm and their lives undisturbed, they were uninterested in challenging the status quo. Loki had used that for years to his advantage, had known that peace and prosperity would be more than enough to quell any questions about the man on the throne. Over the years, that lack of challenge had led to complacency.

And in that complacence, he began to chafe.

"Is there a protection spell on the floor?" You were sitting in Loki's pocket dimension, paging through a book about the Aesir language to look for familiar symbols, and trying to ignore Loki as he paced his study floor in long strides. You didn't look up as you spoke, but in your peripheral vision you could see him narrow his eyes as he snapped his head toward you.

The sneer on his face was becoming a familiar sight. "I beg your pardon?" he snarled softly, through almost gritted teeth. There was an undercurrent of warning to his tone, as though he suspected you were trying to bait him.

His suspicions completely accurate, your voice remained bored as you answered, "I’m trying to figure out how you haven’t worn a track in the floor yet." You raised a brow but kept your eyes on the book in your hand as you casually turned the page. "You pace it often enough." Well aware that you were testing him, were in fact deliberately taunting him, attempting to get under his skin, you kept your face mostly serene even as you lifted a single brow in mild disdain.

Loki's smile was sharp as a blade and his voice acid sweet as he replied with mock surprise, "My apologies for disturbing you." He stopped and turned to face you in a whirl of emerald velvet and midnight silk, his eyes firing with insult. "I didn’t realize this was your study."

For the first time, you lifted your gaze with a deliberate sweep of your lashes and met Loki's heated stare with cool frustration, letting a humorless half smile curve the corner of your mouth. "And I didn't realize you summoned me to watch you pace your study." Glaring at him on the emphasis, you shifted your attention back to your book in dismissal, though you knew he could hear the way your heart was starting to speed as the confrontation wore on.

"You're free to leave." Loki spat out the words in tones as cold as the world of his birth, one hand gesturing toward the armoire holding the portal that led back to your apartment, as he turned away from you and walked toward the desk in the corner. As he bent over the front of the desk, keeping his back to you, you rolled your eyes behind him despite the way your stomach dropped at his words.

You couldn't help but wonder if this was it, if the years you'd spent together had finally rendered you familiar enough to be worth his contempt. The part of you that had always believed it was only a matter of time before he tired of you would always hear rejection when his voice lost all warmth and color. Pushing back against the emptiness that echoed inside you at the sound, anger rushed in to fill the void and made your voice tremble slightly, making you sound more hostile than you intended. "And you're not. And that's why you're wearing a rut in the stone."

"Enough." The single word was an order. Loki bent to brace his palms on the desk, his head dropping down to look at the book open in front of him. When he didn't look at you, merely dropped his command like a stone, as though you'd ever obey, your icy façade crumbled in the blaze of flaming rage. Fury propelling you to your feet, you jumped up, eyes wide and mouth opening with the first of the flood you'd kept dammed up inside of you.

"It's not enough, Loki! You-- It's like--" You were so furious you were sputtering with it. With a stamp of rage that had him finally turning, you tried to clamp down on yourself but everything you'd been biting back came pouring out of you. "You're like a tiger dying in captivity! For months you've been chewing on me like I'm the bars of your goddamn cage!" Your hands clenched into your fists at your side, your eyes glittering with the beginning of unshed tears, you looked him in the face and finally said what you'd been most afraid to say. "If you want me to leave, stop being a coward and fucking say it."

Loki rarely flinched, and this was no exception. Anyone who hadn't spent years of time outside of time alone with him would not have had the opportunity to memorize his microexpressions as you had, would not have been able to see the pain tightening the corners of his mouth, his eyes. His voice still cold, though his eyes blazed with emotion, he stated firmly, "Do not put words in my mouth." He paused a moment, then spoke in a voice perceptibly more gentle. "If I no longer wanted you here, you would have no doubt on the matter."

Your knees went weak in relief as the fury drained out of you. Somehow, you hadn't known how badly you'd needed the reassurance until you'd received it. You didn't know it, but the look on your face was broadcasting clearly exactly what you were feeling and Loki's heart hurt with the realization that you'd indeed had doubt, but about him. Knowing he'd hurt you with his own frustrations made him ache with a rare remorse that, for once, he didn't bother to hide.

When Loki's face softened with tenderness, with apology, you ran forward, into his waiting arms. Grateful that, if nothing else, you still wanted each other, he caught you close and enfolded you tightly against his chest. You buried your face in his throat and let him take your weight as you felt his lips brush over the top of your head.

"I wasn't exaggerating, you know." You didn't move your head, simply spoke against his throat, your lips moving against his skin. Though his arms didn't loosen, you felt him pull away in resistance despite the fact that he didn't really move. Your arms tightened in response, and you felt the burn of swallowed tears at the back of your throat. "You're so miserable, like you feel trapped and it's killing you."

Loki wanted to pull away, not from you, but from what you were saying. He knew you were right, but he didn't want to consider what it meant for either of you. He'd found so much joy in simply making you happy that he didn't want to examine how he'd been ignoring his own growing dissatisfaction. "I have the weight of the Nine Realms on my shoulders." He could hear himself giving you half-truths, but couldn't make himself acknowledge the truth to himself either. "Our enemies stir and I have lost track of my brother, Heimdall, Sif. I have a few things on my mind."

You shook your head but you didn't take your face from its place beneath his ear. Though that was all true, it wasn't what was destroying his happiness. "You hate pretending to be your father. You like being in charge, but you hate the responsibility of actually ruling." At this, Loki began for the first time to physically recoil, but now that you'd uncorked these thoughts, you couldn't keep them to yourself anymore. You held on, refusing to take your own weight back from him, forcing him to either hold you or drop you, betting that he wouldn't do the latter. "No, don't. As much as you despise straight communication, you have to hear this. You have to listen." Tilting your head back, you looked him in the face and said, bluntly, your throat still aching from the tears you were still holding back. "Because living like this is killing you."

Loki wouldn't drop you, no matter what nonsense you were babbling about, but it took the sight of your eyes drenched with tears to make him listen. He sighed, and softened again, vaguely annoyed that anyone had such power over him, even you. "Living like what?"

You sighed in relief when you felt him relax against you, saw the annoyed indulgence moving over his face and knew he would hear you. Grateful for the chance to finally speak, you did so in a rush. "Without any real use for your talents. No one disagrees with you, no one argues." A line began to form between Loki's eyebrows as your words sank in, and he didn't interrupt. When he didn't protest, you didn't stop. "Not even maintaining the farce of pretending to be your father amuses you anymore because no one will call you out no matter what you do. Whether you've done it consciously or not, you've tested them by acting strange. They notice that you're not quite right as your father, but they don't say anything. The only people who would are gone, and you're bored out of your mind."

Loki's mouth had opened partway through the flood of words, but he hadn't tried to speak. Once you fell silent, however, he realized he wasn't certain what to say. As was your habit, you'd seen more deeply than he'd expected and had spoken a truth he hadn't acknowledged for himself. He couldn't deny that he'd been dogged by a sense of dissatisfaction, a feeling that had once presaged his most audacious mischief but now only made him pick at those around him, mostly you. "It's not boredom," he replied, slowly, his voice guarded. "Not exactly."

Even the guarded tone couldn't stop you, not now. You'd been trying to pry this door open for weeks, if not months, and you wouldn't be dissuaded now that you'd succeeded, even this little bit. "Then what is it?" You still had your arms wrapped around his waist, your chest pressed to his and your face lifted to search his with eyes desperate for understanding. Squeezing him, you pleaded with him, needing him to confide in you, explain why he was so unhappy, why he was pretending he wasn't. "Please, Loki. Tell me. Trust me."

Loki scoffed out a laugh, disbelief audible in the sound, and grinned wryly down at you. "I do. As I trust no one else in this universe." He shifted his weight as he paused, his face turning inward as he contemplated your question. As he moved to brace himself against the desk at his back, he dipped his head to brush his lips over yours. If he'd thought he could distract you, he may have tried, but the determined look on your face, the heartsick look in your eyes, told him not to bother.

With a deep sigh, Loki tried to put his feelings into words. "Boredom isn't quite right," he murmured, slowly, contemplating the itchy sensation that drove him to pace his study, "because I really do have a great deal to worry about." Looking inward, he didn't realize he was staring deeply into your bottomless eyes, falling in and speaking the truth without thought. "I can wear my father's face, but I cannot wield his power." At the sound of his own voice, the truth he'd been hiding from himself, he began trying to extricate himself from whatever lay in the depths of your eyes and would have the truth from him whether he liked it or not. Still, he spoke, "If these stirrings become more than a nuisance, I may have to call my brother back to Asgard. If that happens…" trailing off as he worked to disentangle himself from the power of your gaze.

A teasing grin flashed across your face, and the crinkle at the corners of your eyes allowed him to fully break free, amazed as always that you could catch him so. "Admit it." You spoke the words with a warm indulgence and a gentle shake, your arms still wrapped tightly around his middle. "A part of you cannot wait for Thor to come home." At the look of disgusted consternation that moved across his face, you burst out laughing, throwing your head back. "Don't look at me like that," you snickered, shaking your head at him, and not letting go despite the way he was tensing in your arms again. "Thinking about having to deal with Thor made you look alive for a second. You miss him."

You said the last gently, with a wealth of understanding, but that didn't stop the insult from bubbling up inside him. With a huff of indignant irritation, his hands lifted to your upper arms to pull them from around his waist, setting you away from himself with a cold, "I do not."

You didn't bother to disguise your amusement as he turned away from you to face the desk, pulling a journal toward him and turning it to focus on the notes there, pretending to shut you out. "Fine," you retorted as you turned and plopped down in the spot on his desk he'd just vacated, "if not Thor himself, you miss having an adversary." You snagged the coin Loki habitually kept on his desk and started practicing bouncing it across your knuckles. Loki thought your dexterity could use work, and though you had no aspiration toward pickpocketing, it made him happy to corrupt you. "One who knows you well enough to be a genuine challenge." You glanced over at him and smiled at the sulk forming on his face. "You're stagnating without one."

Loki flashed a smile at you, but made sure he didn't get caught in your eyes again. He really didn't want to have this conversation but you weren't letting go this time. "I'm still trying to understand you," he purred, leaning in to take your mouth in a kiss designed to deflect, as was his usual, as you usually let him. "That's become the greatest of challenges, my sweet."

You kissed him back, lifting your hands to his face to hold him there, taking you both somewhere sweet and dark for a moment. When you pulled your lips from his, it was to nuzzle your mouth against him, humming in pleasure as your fingers danced over the silk of his skin, the sharp edge of his jaw. "Flattery will not deflect me this time," you murmured, dancing kisses over his cheeks and mouth and making his eyelashes flutter, "no matter how sweetly you kiss me while you do it."

Loki's grin flashed again and he sidled over press a palm on the desk on either side of your hips, nudging your thighs apart with his knee and stepping between in one smooth motion. With that wolfish smile on his face, he took your mouth in a kiss both deep and hot, his tongue sliding between your lips to tangle with yours. You kissed him back with fervor, letting him wipe your mind clean for a moment.

Despite the part of you that wanted to dive into the oblivion he was offering, wanted to go back to pretending that everything was fine, you only allowed yourself a moment to indulge before gently withdrawing. You kept your hands on his face, even as you pulled your mouth from his to pin him with a solemn stare, though the corners of your mouth turned up in the slightest of sweet smiles. When you lifted an eyebrow, he sighed in resignation.

"Not deflect, really." While he'd been kissing you, he'd moved his palms from the surface of the desk to the tops of your thighs, and he squeezed gently now, pressing them open with his hips. "Divert, at worst," he quipped with a winning grin and a nip at your lower lip.

You fixed him with a stern look, using your grip on his hands to hold him in place. "Loki." You waited until he stopped fighting and looked you in the eyes. You hadn't wanted to force the issue, but he was more stubborn than anyone you'd ever known. As the silence stretched and he tried to resist the pull of your gaze, you waited, love making you patient. When his eyes met yours and his body seemed to sag in surrender, you leaned forward and kissed him, your lips a velvet brush against his. When you pulled back and met his eyes again, you tried to show him in your expression how you felt. "You're my heart." An understatement, if there ever was one. You felt like he'd become a part of you, and to lose him would be to destroy the part of yourself you loved most. "Do you understand that?"

Loki could see how you felt on your face and his heart throbbed in response, as he felt exactly the same. This time, he gave you the truth without a fight. "As you're mine, I understand nothing better."

"If what's happening inside you was happening to me," you kept your hands on his face, your eyes on his, looking deep as you spoke, "what would you do to put a stop to it?" You saw the emotions chase each other in a spasm across his face, love, pain, anger. He seemed to want to move away, a shiver moving through his body, but he stayed in place, his eyes on yours. When he didn't speak, you prompted, "Answer me honestly for once."

Loki's mouth twisted sardonically, struck by the irony of that statement while trapped in your truth-extracting gaze. With a laugh that was a half-scoff, he lifted his hands to take yours where they still cupped his face. Long fingers twined around yours, bringing the backs of your hands to his mouth, brushing his lips over your skin with a tenderness he so rarely indulged, even with you. "There is nothing I wouldn't do." The words had a fervor that made them resonate, the low rumble of his voice seeming to seep into your bones. His silver tongue could give lies lovely dancing rhythm, but the truth fell from his mouth in a pounding beat. "There's no end to which I would not go to shield you from any pain."

You cocked a brow, waiting for the acknowledgment that you were only acting in his best interests as he would act in yours. When he stayed silent, you sighed as your mouth curved in an indulgent smile. "Something has to give, love." You leaned forward and over your still joined hands, brushed your mouth over his. "I will not have that something be you."

"I'm not--"

Despite his sudden scowl, you cut him off with a shake of your head. "You should think about when to cut and run, and whether that's sooner rather than later, for your own sake." You smiled and snaked a leg around his hips, pulling your hands from his to slide your arms around his neck. "Maybe you should break the spell on your father from some luxury resort on a planet that doesn't have an extradition treaty with Asgard."

Loki's head was spinning. He didn't know how you could ever think that he'd be bored or tired of you when there was never an end to the surprises with you. He could never predict you, no matter how much time you spent together, no matter how he studied, what he read. The thrill of it never failed to awe him.

Nor did the thrill of loving you, he thought as his body curled toward yours in response to the invitation he recognized in the way your limbs were wrapping around him. More than willing, he bent to slide his arms around your waist, his hands spreading open to press his palms over your back, pulling you closer. "Are you ready to leave then?" He asked the question when you were nose to nose, then tilted his head to close his teeth gently around the edge of your jaw.

Your breath was already speeding, your body arching to his, and you ached with gratitude that this remained unchanged between you, that this feeling always rose within you both to meet the other. "At a moment's notice. I already have my go-bag packed." The words still packed a punch, for all they were said with only half your breath. You'd lost the rest when Loki began nuzzling his face into the skin of your throat where your pulse beat, the sensation sending shivers of pleasure over your whole body. "If that's what it takes to put the light back in your eyes."

The slightest of pauses and the breath of a sigh before the words, "So dramatic," were all the acknowledgment you were going to get, but you'd long since learned how to read the man you called your husband; for all the vows were said in private, with no witnesses, you'd bound yourselves together as surely as any two beings could, tying your fates together for good or ill. What happened to him happened to you happened to him happened to you. You would not be a passive object in your own fate.

You slid your hands into his hair, softly dragging your nails over his scalp as you went, glorying in the purr you pulled from him in response. Tightening the thighs you'd wrapped around his waist at the same moment you tightened your hands into fists, you pulled his head up, surprise leaving him without resistance. "I know you are, but I love you anyway," you murmured with a soft-eyed smile. Taking advantage of the surprised laugh you'd pulled from him, you pulled his face to yours and pressed your mouth to his, wanting to remind him that you weren't one of his treasures, another object in his hoard.

The tangle of tongues was more like a duel than a kiss, but neither wanted nor called for quarter, for mercy. When you finally broke apart, you tossed back your head to gasp for air, your body already yearning for him. The rumble of his voice, the vibration of his lips settled into your skin as he murmured, "You're the light in my eyes." Your legs tightened around him in response even as one of his hands dropped to your thigh. He slid his hand, surprisingly hot, underneath your thigh and gripped tightly, using the leverage to press more firmly against you. "You're a part of me, Y/N," he paused as he lifted his head to look you directly in the eye and what little breath you'd managed to catch fled, "and I miss you as such when you're not with me. I don't think it's possible for me to ever want you to leave."

For some reason your throat had flooded with tears, as though this had been eating at you and the reassurance was something you'd needed more than you'd been able to acknowledge until you'd received it. Whatever the reason, you had to speak through them. "You're not tired of me yet? Even after all of this time, and not-time?"

Despite the smile you'd given him on the little half-joke, he could hear the tears clearly, could see the beginning threat of them in your eyes. That you could question for even a moment what you meant to him told him more than anything else you'd said that his mood and behavior had become untenable, that something had to change.

Using the grip on your thigh and the arm wrapped around your back, Loki lifted you, the room spinning around you as he turned away from the desk and toward the sofa. His eyes seared into yours even as his voice caressed your ears with a velvet purr, "Was it not yesterday?" The whirling journey ended when Loki placed you on the couch and stretched out on top of you, his hips spreading your thighs wide. The arm behind your back lifted to curl around your head, his thumb brushing over your cheekbone as his eyes continued to burn on yours. "When I first found myself caught in bottomless eyes that saw deeper than any I'd ever before known?"

Your heart melting, you went soft in the face of such sweetness. Loki was next-level charming when he turned it on, but this wasn't that. This was something sincere and heartfelt in him that cut to the core of you faster than anything else ever had. You'd always been unable to stop yourself from wondering if this would have been who he'd been if he hadn't needed the armor of lies against his world. Defenseless in the face of it, you met his mouth eagerly with your own when his head dipped to yours.

By the time your head cleared enough to remember that he'd never actually addressed your original concern, he had dragged the loose collar of your sweater down over your shoulder and was devouring the skin of your neck and collarbones with soft, sucking kisses that were making it impossible for you to catch your breath. Still, you stopped arching your neck into his mouth and spoke, "Wait. You're trying to deflect me again."

Loki had tensed at the word 'wait' but relaxed immediately with a laugh. "Divert!" he cried, burying his face in your throat to laugh for real when you scoffed in response. Nuzzling into your skin, he rubbed his face on you like a cat as he cuddled you close with a shimmy of his whole body that had you melting again. "If the stirrings become rumblings, we'll run." He lifted his head to smirk into your face. "Does that satisfy?"

You tilted your head and leveled a serious look at him, wanting him to take this seriously, just this once. "I worry that we're pushing our luck, that if we're not ready escape will become more difficult, or even impossible."

"Are you doubting me?" Loki lifted up on the elbow braced next to your head and looked at you with mock indignation.

"Loki." The wealth of patience in one word carried the years of living and playing alongside this man and made his lips twitch whether he would or not. When you dropped his favorite endearment for you, "Darling," and looked at him like you were already tired, he wanted you like it was the first time all over again. "You act like you've never miscalculated."

A flash of a grin, he knew his part in this dance. "I don't know what you're talking about." Everything about him cried innocence and an outside observer would never know that he was anything but sincere, but you could see the twinkle in his eye, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, and knew what he was doing.

"The day we met." You said the words sharply, with the tone of someone who'd had to say these exact words many times before, and indeed you had, as Loki loved this kind of play. Indulging him would lead to him trying to distract you from the conversation with seduction, as he had already begun pushing your sweater back so that he could trail his fingertips over your collarbones.

"Please." He waved his first miscalculation as though it wasn't the catalyst for all the came after. "Hardly of note." His head dipped, his mouth replacing his fingers and brushing delicately over your skin.

You did nothing to stop him, simply focused on keeping your wits despite what he was doing to you. You weren't trying to stop him, wanted him as he wanted you, but you needed to resolve this. You arched into his mouth even as you said, "Attracting Heimdall's attention by forgetting not to touch me."

You felt his lips curve against your skin before his breath, "Easily remedied," then his lips, pressing more of those soft, sucking kisses into your skin. His hands slid underneath your sweater, and the slight chill of his skin against the warmth of your skin made you shiver.

"Nidevellir iron," you said, the sound more like a moan thanks to the sensations his mouth, his hands, his body were inspiring.

"Shhhh." Loki was chuckling even as he lifted his head to press his mouth to yours in an attempt to shush you.

You wiggled away, your head twisted so you could glare at him. "That luck spell you put on my necklace that almost had us interrogated in an alien casino dungeon."

"Stop!" He almost cried the word, openly laughing and the sight of him genuinely given over to humor had your stern expression melting into loving indulgence. The sight of you looking at him like that, like he was worth the love and devotion you'd shown him, had him leaning back down to kiss you, another sweet meeting of mouths that said what words could not. When he pulled his mouth away from the kiss, he rested his forehead against yours and sighed. "I will endeavor to create an escape plan so perfectly mischievous that even you'll have to stop fretting." The words sounded like they were teasing but you recognized the promise buried underneath the teasing.

You lifted an imperious brow and smirked at him. "That is all I ask."

Loki threw his back and laughed out loud, delighted with you. His face soft, he brushed his lips over one eye then the other, admitting softly, "Your life on Earth brings you joy," and for once it didn't seem like the truth was being pulled from him against his will. "I don't want to take any joy from you until I must." Your breath caught at the expression on his face and when he paused you didn't speak for fear he'd stop. He seemed to be thinking deeply for a moment before his face cleared and he continued, "But, in the meantime, I'll speed up my preparations to leave quietly." Now that there was a problem to be solved and plots to be hatched, Loki could feel the fire light inside him and knew you'd been right, that he'd been stagnating. "I want to cover our tracks thoroughly. Thor will send Sif after us and she's relentless when she feels insulted."

You could see that he was already more animated than he'd been only an hour ago and grinned, ready to tease. "Old girlfriend I need to worry about?"

Loki snorted. "Hardly." With a wolfish grin, he lifted up enough to pull the sweater up over your head, tossing it with abandon. The next instant most of his clothing was gone, and the cool skin of his chest was pressing against yours. "I prefer my women sweet and sarcastic," he said, satisfaction all over him as he smiled into your eyes, as you smiled back. A twist of his lips, "And she prefers my brother," and you understood immediately the nature of that relationship.

"Ah." You sympathized; unrequited love was always a bitch.

Loki could hear the sympathy and knew it could be detrimental, especially when dealing with someone was dangerous as Sif could be. "And she is loyal to her core," he warned, "so she'll hunt us with her all."

You grinned and reached between you to flip open the button at the waistband of your jeans. "So you're saying you have a challenge," you retorted with a grin and started working your jeans down as best you could with him in the way.

Laughing again, Loki realized that he hadn't let himself really laugh in a long while and reveled in it. Grinning back at you, he straightened enough to help you wriggle out of your pants. "I suppose I do."

Part Twenty-One here>>

Through much of the journey, you moved a few feet at a time, as many of the roads were still blocked by wreckage. The Snap had hit during the peak of the morning commute on the East Coast; across the United States, every major highway had been strangled closed by multi-car pile-ups. When so many of the drivers on the road had disappeared while the cars were in motion, it wasn’t a surprise that a country obsessively reliant on the automobile had suffered so much destruction on her highways.

The focus during clean up had been on finding survivors, not on cleaning the highways, so it was slow going, even where the roads had been cleared. You had the windows down, both to let in the balmy summer air, and to hand out bottles of water to the people you passed, diligently working by the side of the road to remove the wreckage, to find anyone left who hadn’t been turned to dust but still hadn’t made it.

"I don't really have a choice, Em," you answered, your voice as tight as your throat with the apprehension climbing towards dread the closer you got to the man whom you fervently hoped had the answers you needed. "He wouldn't simply stop signaling if something wasn't wrong." You were trying to keep yourself calm by focusing on the people outside the SUV's window, smiling as you pulled bottle after bottle from a portal you’d made between your feet where no one but Emily could see it. You were deliberately keeping your attention on your fellow humans, on how they come together to help one another when catastrophe strikes. It helped to remind yourself again that you were still human, despite the terrifyingly exultant experience you’d had inside the unraveling pocket dimension.

As the survivors huddled in clusters and everyone tried to hold together the systems that kept people alive, the loss of half of every living thing rippled immediately and horrifically through the world. Every piece of machinery, every vehicle on Earth had had a coin flip chance of being unmanned. More catastrophe had followed the first when so many of the invisible yet vital structures had fallen apart without their operators. More death and loss had followed the first horrific cataclysm as things like planes fell out of the sky when they lost their pilots, or trains that derailed when their conductors disappeared.

That was when the everyday heroes had come to the forefront, the regular people who keep the world running and don’t stop when everything goes to hell. Those normal, everyday people did what they always do, and kept it running even when half their number had disappeared. Janky and rickety though it was with so many lost, the machinery of humanity kept grinding forward, thanks to those people.

By and large, when everyone could see that everyone else was holding on by their fingernails, no one complained. Instead, stories passed from person to person, community to community, of regular people that risked and sometimes gave their lives to save others. So many more could have died if not for those everyday heroes. Though some had taken advantage of the chaos to loot and vandalize and worse, many more others had protected and saved one another. When things were at their worst, humans had proven that they could care so much, could do so much.

"What if the box doesn't work?" Emily glanced down at the small decorative box in your lap. A lovely thing, the box was a bright smooth silver, inset with a runic pattern of faceted emeralds and onyx. Though you were both hoping that the golden locket inside meant something important to the God of Thunder, neither of you knew why this was the object you'd been instructed to bring in order to prove that you came in Loki's name. To her credit, she was here, but she was having a much harder time having faith in Loki than you were. "What if he won't see you?"

You barked out a laugh, the sound a bitter thing that had not existed three weeks ago, because this was the least of your worries. Thanks to your newfound ability to move through space at will, you'd have no barriers to forcing a confrontation if Thor gave you any trouble. You could pull him into the shadows between where you had no limits to what you could do. You could make him talk if you had to get mean about it.

You very much did not want to get mean about it, however. Once you convinced him to meet with you, you expected the item in the box to get through to Thor if the box itself did not. Something about the gentle fingers that had lowered the locket into the box, the soft eyes and the aching tone in Loki’s voice, made you believe that he was sending you with something that would get through to Thor no matter what, a remembrance of their mother.

"I'll use my shortcut and make him." You'd told Emily everything the day of the Snap. The two of you had hunkered down together in your apartment when she'd suggested barricading the door. Sick of the lies and unwilling to let your dearest friend worry about anything unnecessarily when so much had befallen everyone and everything, you'd given her the absolute truth about Mystery Man and what spending so much time with him, and time between time, had done to you. You’d showed her your new ability and let her come with you into the shadows between to prove that you could take someone with you.

You hadn’t known how you’d known that you could take her with you, but the certainty had been coming from your bones, and you’d trusted it. You weren’t certain what you were trusting, the voice that had called a name both yours and not, or the being to whom that name belonged, the one resting in the core of your being. But in the depths of the bright blue light, you could swear you’d seen shimmering, rainbow-over-black eyes wink at you in the last moment before your pocket had closed around you the day of the Snap, and knew it didn’t matter. Somehow, the two were one and the same, not that you understood what that meant at all.

Emily had been grateful to know that the two of you were safe in a way no one else could be, but the information about Loki had been overwhelming. Emily herself would have described it as breathtaking. She'd had no idea how to respond, how to be a good friend in this particular madness, was honestly still working on it. She felt utterly inadequate to the situation, often found herself vaguely wishing for the days when she'd thought it was something as simple as an affair with a married man. She'd never been the sort to abandon a friend, however, even when they were making choices she'd never understand. She didn't intend to start now.

She'd been the one to suggest the drive upstate rather than taking your shortcut straight away. Though you were impatient for answers, she was more interested in protecting you than finding out what was keeping Loki. That meant not giving away any clues as to what you could do unless necessary.

Emily had immediately realized how dangerous your secrets were to you. There was no way to know who had survived, so there was no way to know who might have use for someone who could only teleport herself and others. If anyone found out what else you could do, it could and undoubtedly would make you a target. She had no intention of ever letting that happen. As you didn’t disagree, though you were less concerned for your own safety and more concerned that someone would hurt her to force you to comply, you let her convince you to keep it hidden. Moreover, you were simply touched and grateful that she was still trying to look out for you.

But that didn’t mean you couldn’t, or didn’t, help. When people needed formula for their babies and you were offering it without strings, they generally didn't ask too many questions about how you got it. You'd been able to access Loki's palace and the bottomless pantry, and had found anything you wished for there. Grateful for a chance to make a difference, you’d started wishing with all your might. Emily had been overjoyed to be the conduit.

A couple of days after the Snap, as the electricity and cell grids were stabilized, Emily began reconnecting with her network of family, might as well be family, besties, friends, friendly acquaintances, acquaintances, associates, contacts, and informants. Better connected than most journalists, Emily quickly heard of both the everyday heroisms and the everyday hardships that had taken their toll on the regular people in the world.

The way her eyebrows had twisted in pain when she asked for help for her friend had told you that his was a horror she couldn't bear. His wife had turned to dust and he was having trouble finding formula for his four-month old baby. The father was frazzled, mired in grief and pain when his child had begun to cry with hunger because he'd had to ration what little he had left. Every store was out of stock and no one knew when shipments were going to come in. Unable to bear the thought of any baby going hungry, you'd walked into the pocket, wishing with everything you had to find formula in the kitchen, unsure that the magic would still work with Loki gone. There'd been an entire wall of shelves full of baby formula when you'd opened the pantry door.

That had been the first time you'd broken down, wracked by terror and grief. This pain was something you'd never even imagined, could never have imagined. You'd lost loved ones, but so had everyone else. You didn't even know how many loved ones you'd lost, like most everyone else. Unless there had been a witness, or someone had turned to dust in their own home, it was difficult to know who had been lost to the Snap. There was no way to be sure whether anyone you couldn't find had dusted, disappeared, or died. The uncertainty could sometimes, somehow be worse than the grief.

Your bracelet hadn't signaled once since the message asking for the knife. You knew Loki would have signaled if he could have. The only information that had been confirmed was that half of all life had been destroyed. The rumor was that the Avengers, among many others, had done everything they could to stop the being responsible, but sometimes even the greatest of heroes lose. Sometimes the villain gets his way and then gets away. According to Emily's network, Thor was back on Earth, could be found at the Avengers compound, but Loki was not with him.

Deep, deep down, in the deepest place inside you, there was a pit you wouldn't acknowledge, let alone look into. In that pit was the knowledge that you couldn't accept without proof. You didn’t want to acknowledge that his continued absence and radio silence could only have bad explanations, and one very obvious one. But if you kept asking where Loki could possibly be, kept that question at the forefront of your mind, you wouldn’t have to listen to the hissing voice from the pit giving you any of those terrifying answers. You couldn’t let go of possibility.

Under your deliberate attempts to drown it out, the voice in the pit whispered that he would have come to you had he escaped, would have signaled you if he could have. You knew that voice was whispering the truth, that it was highly unlikely you were going to get answers you wanted today. But you were paralyzed without those answers. You needed to know, needed to be certain before you could move in any direction.

Thor was your best, closest, and only lead.

You'd spent the hours of the drive trying to decide if you wanted him to have the answers, to end your suffering with one quick slice so that you could escape the limbo, let go of hope and simply drop into grief. You didn't really want to let go of hope, wanted to believe there could be a way to wiggle your way out of all of this horror. You were desperate for a way to find him safe and whole, but every day that went by without any sign from him made it harder and harder to have faith.

The events of the past three weeks had given you a mixed perspective on hope. The only hope you really had these days was in the people around you, not the universe itself. The universe had proven itself cold and cruel, taking any and everything without a concern for the pain it caused. The universe was capricious and random and could not be trusted.

The people, however, had proven far better than you could have expected, had shown that each and every person mattered. The grief on every face, the kindnesses despite it, confirmed that every person lost rippled through the rest of you. The human race was a fabric, and each thread pulled closer together to fill in for those taken from all of you. In this global grief, the human race had huddled together to grieve those gone. The fabric was tattered, but intact.

You'd seen that in the network turned web that Emily had created, the people who were working together to make certain that no one went without the necessities of life while the systems that kept people alive rebalanced in the new reality. Shipments of food and other necessities had been sent into the city, but those were intermittent and often delayed, if not completely hijacked.

No one knew where the slow trickle of help came from, but you and Emily worked day and night to find out what people needed and how to supply it. Because you needed to remain anonymous to protect yourself, you also had to maintain distance between yourself and those you helped, which is where Emily’s network came in. But you had a magic pocket; you had to use it.

As soon as she'd heard that the roads were clear enough to get upstate, she'd used that network to find someone who'd let you borrow the SUV you were riding in, and the gas it was taking to get there. You had a couple of gas cans in the back under a blanket in case you couldn't find a gas station that had any in stock. Emily had arranged this entire thing for you, knowing that whatever Thor had to say, you needed to hear it if you were going to move forward and not merely run in place, waiting for Loki to return.

As the miles passed and you got closer and closer to the answers you sought, you could feel your throat get tighter, feel the ache intensify with every passing mile. By the time you were less than twenty minutes from the compound, you absent-mindedly lifted your hand and began to rub your throat in agitation, trying to soothe the pain and anxiety.

Emily noticed the movement out of the corner of her eye, and her heart throbbed in sympathy. She'd known you long enough to know what the motion meant, what you were holding behind a falsely serene façade. Silently, she took one hand from around the steering wheel, reaching across the console to take your free hand, the one that bore a symbol she couldn’t see. Squeezing gently, she said nothing, but she held your hand the rest of the way to the Avengers compound. The reminder that you weren't alone eased the ache in your throat a little, helped keep the fear at bay.

After a drive that had taken three times longer than it would have a month earlier, you and Emily pulled onto the long drive that led into the compound. Reaching an unmanned security booth, Emily stopped the SUV at the closed gate. Rolling down the window, she looked around and wondered how long it had been since anyone had manned the booth; it appeared as though it had been months, if not years.

When the intercom box attached to the building crackled to life, Emily jumped and let out a little shriek, startled. You let out a laugh, or at least its echo. But as faint and pitiful as it was, it was a real laugh, and you treasured it, as those were few and far between these days.

"Sorry. We're not accepting visitors right now." The voice was male, gruff and brisk, with an undercurrent of exhaustion, and more than a hint of rudeness. The voice did not give the impression of someone who possessed an abundance of courtesy, even under normal circumstances.

As these were not normal circumstances, you had long since exhausted your own supply of concern for etiquette. As Emily's lips parted to answer the intercom, you leaned across her to speak, proximity to your goal leaving you more impatient than you'd been when you'd started the drive. "I have to speak with Thor Odinson."

Emily was happy to act as your advocate, but she was a good one because she wouldn't stand in your way if you wanted to advocate for yourself. She would simply play whatever role she was needed in, when it was needed. In the meantime, she sat back in her seat to give you room to reach the open window, waiting for an opportunity to help.

There was a longer pause than could be accounted for by the intercom technology, then another curt response. "Thor's not accepting visitors either."

You were having a very hard time holding on to your temper. "I'm not a visitor. I'm a messenger," you bit out, knowing that screaming would be the worst way to get what you wanted, but you could feel yourself coming unglued. "I have a message from his brother."

"His brother's dead."

You'd known. The pit had been yawning ever wider the longer you went without a signal from Loki. The voice's unemotional announcement cut the rope that had been holding you, but you'd been aware that it had been there before you began the plummet. A lack of confirmation hadn't meant a lack of grief, and there was a touch of relief in being released from the hope that had left you stretched over oblivion.

You were vaguely aware of your own voice speaking, blankly, as a wave of cold hollowed you out, leaving you empty and aching. "Then I guess my message is even more important." Your limbs tingling, you noted hazily the interesting fact that your body could continue to function even as you fell out of it, endlessly.

"What's the message? I'll pass it along or whatever."

The man's voice was digging under your skin, assisted by the feeling that he was trying to irritate you. You could not avoid the impression that the man on the other side of the intercom thought he was doing you a favor by making the offer, and the condescension infuriated more than had he been hostile. The rush of infuriated heat spread outward from a burning ball of rage in your center and brought you back to your body with a vengeance. Whether this man deserved it or not, you needed the fury to keep moving forward, to finish what you'd come to do.

"Look," you growled, the single word harsh with the enunciation used to get it through your teeth, "I don't know who I'm talking to, but you're starting to piss me off." By the time you reached the end of the sentence, you were leaning far enough over Emily to be heading out the window and your voice was more than a little pissed off. "My business is with Thor, and Thor alone."

You weren't yelling, but your voice was raised and there could be no doubt that you were losing your cool. "But if you want to waste everyone's time, tell Thor that I come as kin, bearing kin-gift, and I beg an audience with my brother." The intercom crackled like the man was going to speak, but you cut him off, as close to yelling as you could get without tipping over into it. "Those exact words. I come as kin, bearing kin-gift, and I beg an audience with my brother. Got it?"

"Why those exact words?"

This last touch of resistance, so unnecessary, sent your brain into meltdown. After the horrors of the last several weeks, anyone who acted like this set you off worse than anything else. Right now, you could not stand anyone who decided to act as an obstacle, an obstruction to anyone trying to move forward, trying to rebuild. Your hands braced on the driver's side door, you thundered, "How is that any of your fu--"

Emily had seen the outburst coming, had felt it in the tension in your body. Before the Snap, she'd rarely seen you lose your temper. Of the two of you, she'd been far more likely to pop off and push back because you'd always maintained a calm façade, wanting to blend into the background. Since the Snap, you'd lost most of your patience and all of your concern with outward appearances. Your ability to remove yourself from any situation had unmasked you, left you completely unwilling to waste time on anything you deemed unnecessary.

"Hey." Emily cut you off as quickly as she could when she heard the tone that told her you'd reached your limit. She lifted her arms and placed her hands on your shoulders, gently but firmly pressing you back into the passenger seat. "Let me," she said, her voice as gentle but firm as her hands. Lifting her voice she called out, "You offered to pass the message along. Why are you still interrogating the messenger?"

"Who are you?" The voice had an accent that you couldn't quite place, but it had a similarity to the voices that called to each other in your Brooklyn neighborhood when the sanitation workers came through. Though it wasn't the same accent, it was projecting blue collar and busy. The combination of hostility and disinterest was both alien and familiar, and the sound of Emily bulldozing it in her signature way had a laugh tickling the back of your throat, despite the grief tightening in your chest.

"Emily Duncan," she answered, pleasant but neutral. "Who are you?"

Emily had worked in a bank's call center during college, and had learned at a young age how to endure hideous abuse with a porcelain doll façade. She’d since tried to use for good what she'd learned there, a knowledge earned enforcing the inhuman policies of a sociopathic corporation.

When needed, when faced with anyone, regardless of the attitude or authority they claimed, she could step into a mindset where she could not be escalated, would meet any energy with a slow, unfazed determination. She moved like a glacier: slow, cold, inexorable, and leaving the geography unmistakably changed in her wake. This man had no idea what he was up against. When Emily became this fusion of rock and water, a stone that can flow forward, she was unstoppable.

"Rocket," came the reply, and had you and Emily looking at each other in confusion.

Emily didn't ask any questions of the strange voiced, strange named man acting as Thor's intermediary. Instead, she spoke as though she was on the phone with customer service, waiting for the representative to go speak to their manager. "Cool. Thanks for taking the message, Rocket." Polite and unfazed didn't mean slightly sarcastic, however, "I suppose we'll wait here, then?" She smiled then, and you could hear it in her voice, but you could also hear the fraying patience. "I mean, I have no doubt Mr. Odinson will want to talk to his brother's widow, but you can let us know."

Rocket sighed loud enough to be clearly audible through the speaker. Considering this whole compound had been built by Tony Stark for himself, it wasn’t a surprise that everything was of high quality, even the intercom. Sounding aggrieved, but resigned, he finished the sigh with, "Yeah, okay."

With the agreement from Rocket, Emily turned away from the speaker toward you, leaving the window open in case he spoke again. She didn't intend to encourage him, however, wanting to get through him and to Thor for you.

Watching Emily roll over someone like a velvet covered boulder had been so wonderfully normal, for a moment, it had helped your heart slow and your temper cool. The soft-eyed sympathy already written on her face did the rest.

"Thank you." You snorted a little, an echo of humor. "But 'Mister Odinson' sounds so funny," you protested. As you spoke your face dissolved into a smile even as you dissolved into tears. You weren't sobbing, the air was still moving in and out of your lungs almost normally. Still, your body bowed inwards of its own accord, your muscles moving into a protective curl by instinct. Though the pain was emotional, your body could not tell the difference, and reacted like it was wounded. Though you didn’t cry out loud, the tears poured from your eyes in streams, as though the grief was a river flowing through you.

Emily smiled, as gently as she could, bearing too much recent experience with grief to react with anything but compassion. "That's what I'm here for. I've got you." She popped open the center console and pulled a package of tissues from it. She put them in your hand as she closed the compartment, then grabbed the other and squeezed it. "Obviously, you're not okay, but are you okay?"

"God, no." Your voice quavered as your breath shuddered in. "But I knew. I knew he wouldn't just disappear on me." You couldn't stop the tears, but you'd found some calm in the eye of the storm that allowed you to keep moving forward, no matter how dream-like the world became without anger to keep you focused.

"Even though he's disappeared on you before?" Gentle didn't mean Emily would be able to stop herself from responding honestly. She'd heard your story from beginning to end and had a hard time understanding why you'd believe in him so fervently after the things he'd done to you, personally, let alone everyone else. "Even though he's faked his death before?"

You smiled through the tears. "Even though. If he was alive, he would have sent me a sign." You couldn't blame Emily for her doubt, though you didn't share it. She'd never seen the way he looked at you, as though he was both delighted and astonished by the fact of your existence. She hadn't been there as he'd worked hour upon hour to design and craft a thousand spells and workarounds to keep you hidden and safe. She didn't know the joy that beamed out of him whenever he struck you dumb with awe. You'd been there, and were certain of that bond, if nothing else.

Despite your conviction, Emily still looked doubtful. Your smile bent wryly at her expression, even as grief continued to work through your body in slow, rolling waves. Though the two of you had taken multiple laps around this conversation before, you squeezed her hand, and tried one more time to convince her that you saw him clearly.

"I know it sounds silly to have faith in a self-proclaimed god of mischief, but I do, I did." You let out a scoffing laugh at yourself. Something about allowing yourself to begin to grieve released a dam that had held you back from speaking of him honestly, and the words came out a little wild with that sudden freedom. "That's the thing, Em. I know he was a liar. He lied all the time, to me, to everyone, about everything and nothing, just because he liked to lie."

Emotion rose up to choke you for a moment as you thought about your life with him, the thousand little things he’d said and done to make you feel loved, to convince you of his fidelity. The two of you weren’t merely in love; you were each other’s favorite person. You were his lover, yes, but you were also his best friend.

Loki loved to show off for you; he would never have left you out of his mischief. One wave of grief seemed bigger than the others and came out as a single hiccupping sob as you said, "He wasn't lying when he promised he'd always come back to me."

Emily took the package of tissues from your hand and took one from the plastic wrap. "I may not trust him even a little bit," she said, wryly, as she lifted the tissue and blotted at the tears covering your cheeks, "but I trust you.” She shrugged a little, hoping to make you smile. “Even if I think you've gone a little crazy because of him."

Having your friend dry your face made you very aware of the wetness that had run down your throat. You lifted your hand to take the tissue from Emily and began mopping at your neck, despite the tears that still ran down your face. Your throat ached as you fought to slow the flood, to regain control of yourself. "I've gone more than a little crazy over him," you replied in a croak. The absurdity of that statement in the world you currently inhabited hit you and you barked out a bitter laugh. "But the world's crazy now, so I fit in."

Emily opened her mouth to reply, to comfort, but at that moment the intercom crackled to life with the same voice as before. "Okay. Go ahead and come in. Drive to the big building in the center, the one with all the windows and the big-ass 'A' on the side. Take a left into the roundabout and park in front of the building."

"Thank you." Emily answered in her neutral tone as she shifted into place, waiting for the gate to open.

"Don't thank him, he's been a dick," you insisted as she rolled up the window. The only thing helping you choke back the tears was the bitterness and you were holding onto it with everything you had.

Emily waved you away, as the gate swung open. "He's letting us in!" She reached over and patted your knee, trying to be encouraging. "They wouldn't let us in at all if Thor wasn't going to talk to you."

You didn't respond, using the time it took to drive all the way to the big building at the far end of the compound from the entrance to wipe your face and throat and cram your emotions back inside you, like trying to cram a genie back in a bottle. The cork was barely in by the time you reached your destination, despite the length of the drive.

You and Emily got out of the SUV and stood for a moment on either side, looking up at the enormous building and its floor to ceiling windows. On the passenger side, you stepped out directly in front of the looming building, grateful for the weight of the box in your hands; holding it kept them steady as you watched Thor approach through those giant windows.

Emily came around the front of the SUV to stand at your side just as Thor was coming through the glass door. He burst through it and your heart ached at the sight of him. He looked like he'd been to hell and back and the journey had not been edifying. Hair shorn short, eyes that didn't quite match, royal robes and armor traded for regular Earth jeans, t-shirt, and hoodie told you Thor was not the same man who'd confronted Loki so many months ago.

Another change was the lightning. When you'd seen him that pivotal day in Asgard, the lightning had arced and sparked around him haphazardly, as though he wasn't in control of it, or even knew it was happening. Now the electricity peeked out from behind only one bright blue eye and lit up his veins and arteries underneath his skin. Whatever had happened had left Thor in command of the lightning, in command of himself. He stood on the bottom step, waiting for your approach according to the rules you'd invoked with the ritual words Loki had given you along with the box.

You took a deep breath and then a step forward, stretching your arms toward Thor to offer him the little box, the words Loki had told you to say coming out in a rasp through a throat thick with unshed tears. "Handfast to Loki, I offer this kin-gift as token." Tears were already standing in your eyes, your throat aching like fire with the effort to keep them in place.

Thor murmured the words expected of him, though they burned in his mouth as his home had burned, "Our house is cloaked in mourning," as the house he spoke of had narrowed to none but him, and now, maybe, you, "but I thank you for your kin-gift."

You'd chosen your outfit carefully from the closet in your Pocket. You were wearing Midgardian clothing, but the blouse was made of fabric made from the silk of a species of Asgardian moths, something that could only have originated on Asgard. The amulet Loki had bought for you on Alfheim hung around your neck, the pulsing nebula in the black opal's center something that couldn't have come from Earth.

You needn't have bothered.

Thor recognized you instantly, though Loki had remained largely circumspect about his ally on Midgard. Though his brother had said little about the woman who'd enthralled him while Thor had been gone, what he had said and done had told Thor everything he needed to know about Loki's feelings. Loki had never had faith in anyone with the fervor he'd shown you, the person who'd sent the blade that had come so close to ending this before Thanos could enact his horrific plan. They'd all come so close to stopping him.

One of the few things Loki had been explicit about was how Thor should treat a Midgardian woman with eyes as deep and clear as Heimdall's, that seemed to see through to the heart of all things. The necklace around your neck, the ring around your finger, only confirmed your identity. Thor could look at nothing but the bottomless depths of your eyes, filled with a grief that matched his own. "Dark sister, you are welcome." Thor's voice was a low, heartbroken rumble as he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around you, his body bending towards yours in an electric arch of grief.

Part Twenty-Five here>>

You met his eyes in the mirror and grinned at his reflection, clearly amused by the air of mischief that surrounded him. The knowing smirk you shot him as your gaze raked over him, mostly naked amongst the mussed blankets, had the already effervescent sizzle in his blood sparking and sparkling. “Well, I do enjoy having my humors tickled," you retorted impishly, and he grinned back at you, delighted with your never-ending willingness to play with him.

Some days, when separated from you, he would think of you, miss your presence and the experience would leave him baffled. He’d had to face the astonishment, again and again, that he'd never grown tired of this particular mischief, when all others before you had bored him within weeks. Still, you were his match in so many ways that even as the fact of your perennial allure surprised him, he’d long since stopped questioning it. Today he didn't even think of it; you'd popped through the portal in a sunny and sassy mood, your demeanor perfectly matching his own and the plans he had for you both.

You turned from the mirror and spread your arms as you crossed the dark gray stone floor toward him. "Am I appropriately dressed for one of your surprises?" You asked the question with a raised brow and suspicious eyes, though an indulgent smile teased the edges of your mouth. "Sometimes we have to run from your surprises, and this fabric is a bit heavy for that sort of thing."

Loki put the bed furs back and rose to his feet, crossing to you in a couple of strides as soft Asgardian robes shimmered into existence around him. "You're not going to have to run, darling." Once directly in front of you, he took your chin in his hand to tilt your face for a kiss, wanting a taste of the sin that curved your mouth so wickedly. He lingered a bit, luxuriating in the softness of your lips, the sweetness with which you offered them to him, and only him. He was feeling warm and indulgent and found himself wrapping his arms around you to pull you close and hold you for a moment. He bent his head over yours and breathed deep of your scent, releasing it in a sigh of what in another man might have been contentment.

When you slid your arms around him in return and snuggled close, your face a little warm against the skin of his throat where you'd nuzzled in, he felt the burn of desire that always warmed his blood in your presence turn into something lighter, something that bubbled. He chuckled and squeezed you tighter as he turned his face to kiss your temple.

Of all the treasures he'd stolen for his own, you were the only one he felt truly belonged to him, because he didn’t, couldn’t own you. Because you'd seen him at his worst, but you'd still chosen him of your own accord, had in fact chosen him over all others in every way, he could hold you in a way he’d never held anything before. And though he knew he didn't deserve you, he also knew he'd fight to keep you in a way he'd never fought for anything in his life. He was terrified to take you on the run with him, but he couldn't leave you behind, not when you wanted to come with him. Selflessness never came easy to him and he was far too selfish to let you go when you didn't want to be released.

He was in no way ready to run, however, and had no intention of doing so yet. "Tonight," he murmured, and at the sound of his voice you pulled your face away from his throat to look at him, "I thought we'd take in a little theater." He smiled and lifted a hand to cup your cheek, brushing his thumb over your skin as you smiled in return. "The Asgardian Players have a lovely play they're premiering."

Your smile twisted and your eyes narrowed in suspicion and Loki felt his whole body tighten with a tangle of love and lust in response. "The Asgardian Players?" you asked, the question ripe with doubt. "You guys have an acting troupe? Since when?"

Loki laughed out loud at the mistrust all over you. He loved when you did this, when you saw through him and his minor deceptions. He very rarely tried to genuinely lie to you anymore, but he was a creature of habit and also rarely shared all of his information or the whole truth on any given subject. But you always knew that he was hiding something, even if you didn’t know what, and somehow, being seen by you, being known by you, made him feel warm and loved.

"Since forever." He shrugged, attempting to deflect the question with the careless movement of his shoulders. His smile had a wicked edge, and his eyes were twinkling as he released you and stepped back to offer you his arm. "They're a very enthusiastic group, and they're very excited to show The Allfather their work." He tried to look innocent when you hesitated to take his arm, but amused anticipation danced around his mouth and gave him away. "Why are you so suspicious, dear?" Guileless wasn’t an expression he often tried on you, but when he did, it nearly always presaged an experience that would leave you breathless from love, lust, and the exertion of yet another hasty escape, not that he’d ever thought about it. "This is a fairly mundane offer for your kind, isn't it? Dinner and a show?"

Your mouth twitched as you fought a smile, and the flat-eyed suspicion with which you regarded him made him ache, caught between conflicting needs. The flat tone of your voice matched your gaze as you pinned him with your bottomless eyes. "Exactly. Mundanity isn't your usual M.O." You leaned in and searched his face with narrowed eyes, the sight of which filled him with the urge to kiss you, though he resisted, lest he get distracted from the rest of the evening. "What are you up to?" you continued, doubt dripping from every word.

"Nothing of consequence, my love," he replied, keeping the amusement from his voice with an effort. He frowned at you in mock confusion and nodded toward his still extended arm. "Shall we?"

You glared at him a moment longer over the outstretched arm, then dropped the bit and let the laughter bubble out of you. The wicked flash of Loki's smile made you shake your head even as you took his arm. "Since nothing yet has stopped you," you said as you leaned into him, affection on your face and in your voice, "I suppose we shall."

"Oh, come on."

At your exasperated words, Loki almost lost the battle with himself and burst out laughing. He'd been anticipating your reaction to the statue in front of the theater and was not in the least disappointed by the almost indignant ring to your voice and the disgusted look you shot his way. As he was surrounded by Asgardians while draped in his father's form, however, he did his best to keep his laughter to quiet snorts, a difficult task because you weren't done.

"Is this why I've never been to this side of the city?" You stopped to gawk in horror directly in front of the giant golden statue of your husband in his massive horned helmet. The statue's arms were outstretched in what in another would have looked like welcome or supplication, but, on Loki, looked like he was merely accepting the adoration that was his due. You sneered at him. "Because this absurdity was here?"

Loki maintained as much of his solemn air as he could and kept walking up the stairs to the theater with the same unhurried pace. "I don't know what you're talking about." If you could have seen his illusions, you may have believed the innocent look on Odin's face. Because you could see Loki for himself, however, you weren't fooled.

"Sure," you rolled your eyes and trotted up the steps to catch up to him, dipping around Asgardians who only noticed the movement of air in your passing. You grinned cheekily at him once you were at his side again. "You were hiding the Loki Odinson Memorial Center for the Performing Arts from me because you thought I'd be too impressed."

"I wanted this to be a surprise!" Loki placed a hand over his heart in mock dismay, as though hurt you believed otherwise. When you laughed and leaned into him, bumping your bodies together in warmth and camaraderie, he lowered his voice and leaned in to purr, "And darling, if you like the statue, you're going to love the play."

By the time (you hoped with every iota of your soul) that the play was almost over, you were numb with shock. You hadn't known what to expect when Loki had said you were going to see an Asgardian play, but this most certainly had not been it.

"This cannot be real." It was not the first time you'd muttered the words, but it was the first time Loki had shushed you. As far as you could tell, up to this point, Loki had been enjoying your confusion and dismay. Now, however, as the play focused on Loki's big (fake) death scene, it seemed he wanted to genuinely pay attention.

If he thought he could drag you to this and not bear the consequences of that decision, he was sorely mistaken. You resolved to riff the whole thing, just out of spite for having to sit through the first two hours. "Why?" You asked it with a toothy, humorless smile. "No one can hear me but you."

Loki shot you a quelling look from the divan he stretched across, but his lazy sprawl blunted any effect he might have had. You weren't certain the man was capable of sitting in a chair properly, but he looked especially degenerate as he lounged and smirked at you and popped another plump green grape into his mouth.

"How can a people be so advanced in science and space travel and yet so behind in theater?" Asgardian theater seemed to you to be oddly informal and even improvisational. If you found out they'd never really rehearsed, or only had a partial script, you would believe it. Considering that, the insulted look Loki shot you felt like nonsense, as though you weren't both watching the same play. "Don't look at me like that," you sniffed, "this is even more ridiculous than that monument to your ego outside."

Loki pressed his lips together and seemed to deliberately focus on the play. You didn’t know why he seemed so interested in what was happening on stage all of sudden, when he’d spent most of the play watching your reactions.

"But like, really, this is meant to be a drama, right?" Your voice interrupted again and though the look he shot you carried irritation, he also looked more amused than annoyed. You continued undeterred and unrepentant. "Why does it feel like improv comedy?"

You kept talking, not loud enough to drown out the actors, even for Loki, but rather as a quiet commentary on the strange things they were saying on stage. "Don't get me wrong, it's funny, but it shouldn't be, should it? It just doesn't make sense in this context." When he simply turned his head and smiled widely at you, placing another grape into his mouth and crunching down with that same taunting smirk, you sneered in return.

"This is why you brought me, isn't it?" You narrowed your eyes at him in accusatory resentment, knowing he would love feeling like he was in trouble, like he'd succeeded in tricking you. "So you could sit over there eating your grapes, snickering as you torture me with improv drama, which isn't a thing, because that's insane." You were fighting the urge to gesture, but there were too many Asgardians around you and you didn't want to risk drawing attention.

The next line out of the actor portraying your husband had you dropping your face into your hand as he allowed himself to chuckle in response, always amused by the reminder of this specific mischief. You sighed, long and loud, in his direction, even as your head felt like it was suddenly trying to lift itself off of your shoulders. "Why a frog in particular? Is this, like, a pun in your native tongue that I don't understand because it just sounds like English to me?"

Loki didn't look at you because in the next moment, he was echoing his shadow, whispering the words, "I didn't do it for him."

And for a few moments, knowing whose face was in Loki's mind, knowing whom he honored with those words, you kept your silence, even as a mild weakness began to drag at your limbs, making your arms and legs feel oddly heavy.

And then a small blue child came on stage and you couldn't hold it in anymore. "Good god. They kind of had a moment going, and now we've got a blue-painted child." You covered your face with your hands and released a little groan of distress. "I feel like I might actually die of cringe. Please tell me it's over… oh thank god it's over!"

You leaped to your feet to applaud, fighting another inexplicable wave of dizziness, as the choir sang their final notes. Deeply grateful that the end of your ordeal was nigh, you glared at Loki as you clapped for the actors taking their bows. "You're a monster and I hate you," you snapped as you handed him the glass of wine you'd been holding for him.

Loki gave you one of his sly-eyed mock-innocent looks and took a sip. "I thought it was an excellent play."

Your mouth began to spread in a smile even as you felt another rush of lightheadedness, your stomach dropping to your knees. The laugh that had started to bubble out of you was cut short by both a sudden intense weakness and a deep rumbling voice you'd never heard before but somehow recognized immediately.

"Father?"

"Oh shit." Loki's eyes went wide with panic as he looked at you over the rim of the wineglass he'd just taken from you.

"Oh shit." You felt the blood drain from your face as you folded your hands together in front of you and tried to hold onto your composure. Every part of your body had gone cold, but with what emotion you couldn't say. In and around the terror that Thor inspired just by his presence, it also felt like his appearance was sucking the life out of you. Though you wanted to run, you didn't feel like you should, even if your feet would obey.

Loki could see it, could see the sag of your body that told him his fears about Mjolnir had been correct. Desperate to get you some distance from the metal in Thor's hand that he could see was already having an effect, but having no idea how without simply picking you up and making a run for it, he turned with a smile and a sweeping arm gesture.

"My son, Thor, has returned!" He boomed the words in his father's voice as he met his brother's eyes. In them he saw flat distrust and knew Thor wasn't here to visit; his brother knew something was rotten in the state of Asgard. With nothing to do but brazen it out, Loki tried a welcoming smile. "Greetings, my boy."

You watched your husband drop back into a seated position and knew that whatever happened next, Loki was not in control of it at all. Your voice may have been weak, but the dark amusement came through loud and clear. "We are so fucked."

"It's an interesting play." Thor walked forward but kept the same general distance from the dais you were standing on, to your relief. "What's it called?" He was smiling, but you could see the tension around his eyes and felt like he was letting Loki play this out, as though he'd done this a thousand times before. You wondered if everyone could see the lightning crackling in his eyes, the sparks around his hand where it was clenched around the handle of the giant silver hammer, or if it was once again your special sight allowing you to see more. Whatever it was, it was clear that the only creature you'd ever seen in your life that could be more dangerous than Loki was the man standing in front of you, looking at your husband with furious disappointment.

"The Tragedy of Loki of Asgard. The people wanted to commemorate him." You rolled your eyes, knowing that Loki's ego had landed him in trouble yet again. If he wasn't so self-absorbed, Thor might not have known immediately who sat on Odin's throne. As it was, all the evidence led right back to Loki, thanks to his craving for admiration and attention.

Thor smiled, and you knew it was meant to look pleasant, but you could see the edge in it. "Indeed they should." His voice carried a laugh, but no amusement, as he said, casually, "I like that statue. A lot better looking than he was when he was alive, though." A sly expression flashed across his face and you could see a resemblance between the man in front of you and the man at your side for the first time. You knew they weren't really related, but that mattered little when they'd been raised together, brothers in every way but blood, family in all the ways that actually matter. "A little less weaselly. Less greasy maybe."

You couldn't help yourself. When Loki's face fell a little, but turned petulant, you snorted. "He knows." The words were flat, but you were using every ounce of will to stay upright in the face of the terrifying lethargy and sick dizziness that was trying to drag your body to the ground. If only you could move away from Thor, you might be able to do more than offer commentary on the disaster unfolding in front of you.

Thor lifted the other item in his hands, a large, dirty metal item that looked like a mask with horns, wrapped in chains. "Do you know what this is?"

You didn't, but Loki clearly did and looked horrified to see it. "The skull of Surtur? That's a formidable weapon!" His eyes widened, but he made no move to get closer to see it, clearly wanting to stay out of arm's reach of his brother.

Thor offered it to a guard, who stepped forward immediately to take it. "Do me a favor. Lock this in the vault so it doesn't turn into a giant monster and destroy the whole planet."

Loki's brow furrowed for a moment, but he used the moment to gesture behind his back at you. It was clear he wanted you to move away from him, to escape while he was dealing with this. If you could have moved, you may have obeyed, but you didn't have the strength. Regardless, you weren't certain that you could have left without knowing what happened next, so you didn't fight very hard to try. Keeping your gaze fixed on Thor, needing to keep your eyes on the threat, you shook your head.

Loki turned to hand you the goblet in his hand, taking the opportunity to look you over and try to assess how much damage Mjolnir was doing to you. "Thank you, dear," he murmured as he searched your face for the barest moment. He could see how pale you were, how much effort it took for you to lift your arms and take the goblet, how heavy your feet seemed as you took a single step back. All he wanted was to get you out of this situation, was sick that he hadn't listened to you sooner and made an escape before this could happen.

All he could do was try to get Thor far enough away from you so that you could run for the palace and the portal back to safety. He'd long ago given you instructions for just such an eventuality, though that had been a backup of a backup of a backup plan. Thank the Nords he knew he could count on you; he just needed to give you a chance to act.

Loki turned back to face his brother, heavy with dread. "So, it's back to Midgard for you, is it?" He moved forward and tried to lean casually on the pillar next to him, blocking you from Thor's view. It seemed that the illusion spells he'd thrown around you were working, making you appear to be an unremarkable Asgardian, if you appeared at all. But since all of his plans save those that depended on you were in shambles, including those intended to keep you safe, he wouldn’t risk his brother noticing you.

Thor had turned away, tossing Mjolnir casually into the air. "Nope." He caught it just as casually and if anyone had been looking at you, they would have seen you nearly swoon as the hammer tumbled up and down. Something about the movement of it seemed to be trying to pull your consciousness from your head. You stayed on your feet with difficulty and tried to hear Thor’s next words. "I've been having this reoccurring dream lately. Every night I see Asgard fall into ruins." Another toss and catch of the hammer and you nearly threw up.

Loki saw you out of the corner of his eye and moved forward, towards Thor and away from you, hoping he could give you some distance from Thor’s hammer. "That's just a silly dream." He smiled gently at Thor, going for fatherly kindness. "Signs of an overactive imagination."

Thor shrugged, though the movement was anything but casual. "Possibly," he allowed, but you could tell he was getting angry, "but then I decide to go out there and investigate. And what do I find, but the Nine Realms completely in chaos." Another toss of Mjolnir punctuated his rising temper. "Enemies of Asgard assembling, plotting our demise, all while you, Odin, the protector of those Nine Realms, are sitting here in your bathrobe, eating grapes." Thor moved forward slightly as he spoke, reaching out to flick at Odin’s lapel, the menace in him growing with the barely controlled motion.

"Well, it is best to respect our neighbors' freedom." Loki wanted to retreat, but he knew that he couldn't, both to protect you and to maintain the illusion he was his father, though he was certain that illusion was in tatters, at least in Thor's eyes.

From behind him, to his relief and dismay, he heard you ask, dry and unimpressed. "Why do you sound like you’re winging this?"

You'd lifted your voice a little and Loki was relieved to hear you sounding stronger, though he also didn't need the criticism at the moment. He was, indeed, winging this, unfortunately. There had to have been a number of failures in his plans and defenses for Thor to show up so unexpectedly. That he’d had no warning meant that there had been a number of tiny failures in the system, or he’d made a catastrophic mistake along the way, missed a vital variable in his equations. All of that, the fury, the fear, the irritation and relief, dissipated in the terror that flashed through him as Thor threw Mjolnir right past his head, in your general direction.

"Of course," Thor stated, his barely banked rage clear in the words, "the freedom to be massacred."

Loki watched the hammer fly past him and back and tried to stay calm, watching you sway, your hand to your head as you tried not to fall or faint. He looked back to Thor when you stayed on your feet. "Yes, besides, I have been rather busy myself."

Thor smiled, but there was no humor in it. "Watching theatre."

"Board meetings, and security council meetings­­­­—"

Thor, who was somehow even taller than your giant of a husband, moved forward, each movement carrying an implied threat, despite the gentle smile on his ridiculously handsome face. Despite the waves of dizziness, the creeping blackness, the terrifying weakness, your voice burst out of you, to cut Loki off, only a half-second before Thor’s next words. "Lie better!!" You said it as loudly as you could, but Thor was right in Loki's face.

"You really going to make me do it?" He asked the question softly but you could see he was as implacable as stone.

Still feigning a guileless confusion, as he had no idea what to do instead, Loki asked, "Do what?"

Something about this innocent act told you everything. It was so pathetic, so clearly an old habit Loki had fallen into when all of his lies and plots were laying in pieces around him, demolished by his blunt object of a brother. Understanding hit you like the metaphorical light bulb, lighting up your mind and telling you in flash the moment the words were out of his mouth that everything had truly fallen apart and all there was left to do was try to salvage what could be saved.

Immediately following that bright flare of comprehension came the sick flare of dread that understanding brought, horror at the coming consequences shuddering through you. That dread was immediately validated and inspired to new heights when Thor threw his hammer far into the distance, then moved behind Loki as he spoke. "You know that nothing will stop Mjolnir as it returns to my hand." He cupped his hand around the back of Loki's neck, whose eyes widened in a fear you'd never seen before. "Not even your face."

Loki didn't struggle, knowing there was no point, but you wondered what this looked like to everyone around you. For the rest of them, they were watching their beloved prince preparing to murder his father. The confusion had to be intense, if only because this was something that Odin should be able to handle easily, yet he was still only talking.

"You've gone quite mad. You'll be executed for this!" Loki cried the words, looking around at the guards who had moved into defensive positions, shields up and spears out, but they seemed immobilized, unable to decide if they should try to stop Thor, baffled that they would need to. 

Thor's voice was low and mildly amused as he murmured, "Then I'll see you on the other side. Brother."

Just before Mjolnir was too close to avoid, Loki shouted, "Alright, I yield!" and dropped his illusions, though for you there was no difference besides a change in clothing. You dropped the goblet you'd been holding and stumbled back with a gasp just as Mjolnir returned to Thor's hand, both the fear for your husband and the hammer's effect sending you reeling. 

Loki turned carefully, his arms out, hands open in surrender, his face serious. Then, his face spread in a grin meant to charm, a mischievous expression that you'd seen a thousand times when Loki was caught up to no good. You privately thought of it as his 'ain't I a stinker?" look, but this was something quite a bit more than a Bugs Bunny style prank.

At that moment, Skurge, covered in some kind of green slime and out of breath from running, burst through the crowd to shout, “Behold— Thor— Odinson—" Each word was separated by heaving breaths as Skurge struggled to stay upright.

Loki turned with a look so furious and resigned, you could tell he was already cursing himself. "You had one job," he stated, one finger shaking in Skurge's direction. "Just the one!"

You could not believe that Loki had depended on Skurge, a man you'd been able to recognize on sight as someone almost as silly and self-absorbed as Loki himself, but nowhere near as clever. Furious, and not knowing when you'd be able to yell at him later, you took advantage of the fact that only Loki could hear you to whine, "Skurge? Don’t tell me Skurge was your first line of defense!"

Loki glanced at you, reluctant amusement coloring the aggravated look on his face as he narrowed his eyes and turned slowly back to Thor.

Even the fake smiles gone, Thor still didn't raise his voice and the quiet question held more menace than shouting. "Where's Odin?"

"You just couldn't stay away, could you?" Loki either didn't hear his impending doom in Thor's voice or had grown inured to it. You found the person Loki became around Thor fascinating, as he seemed to regress in Thor’s presence, becoming less mature the longer Thor glared at him. Gesturing and looking to the people around him, he did what he always did and started trying to talk his way out of trouble. "Everything was fine without you. Asgard was prospering. You've ruined everything. Ask them."

Talking was not going to work, not with Thor, someone who'd heard Loki's excuses for centuries. Angrily he moved forward as Loki retreated and you could see electric violence sparking and crackling around him, curls of lightning arcing over his body.

"Where's father? Did you kill him?" As Thor demanded answers, he and Loki came toward you. You fell backward, stumbling and falling to the ground as the proximity of the hammer and what you assumed was more Nidavellir iron tried to pull you into unconsciousness.

Loki saw you fall out of the corner of his eye, sick that he couldn’t go to you the way he wanted, not when his brother was still advancing on him, rage in his eyes. He kept talking, barely thinking about the words coming out of his mouth when you fell, when you stopped moving. "You had what you wanted, you had the independence you asked for!" Thor merely lifted Mjolnir and used it to push Loki onto the couch, pinning him there. "Ow-ow-ow! Alright! I know exactly where he is." His voice was tight from the pressure of the hammer sitting on his chest, but he was also breathless with relief when he saw you lift up a little, enough to crawl away from him and Thor, pulling yourself to your feet using the short wall you’d fallen close to.

You used what little strength you’d recovered to drag yourself with difficulty to your feet. You turned back to the disaster in front of you, giving the sturdy parapet your weight, relieving both your exhausted legs and spinning head. Your vision cleared, just in time to see Thor lift the hammer from Loki's chest. You breathed a little sigh of relief when he didn’t immediately lift it in violence. He clearly wanted answers more than he wanted revenge at the moment, so your husband appeared to be safe as long as he had those answers. Thor wasn't going to kill Loki, at least not right now.

Thor yanked Loki to his feet by the neck of his leather tunic, a move apparently familiar to Loki in the way he simply leaned into the momentum like he'd expected it, landing fairly gracefully considering the force of his brother's pull. The blond giant was already shouting as you sat watching, trying to gauge how Loki was planning to handle it. When a guard came forward with a pair of what you would call handcuffs, but larger and clearly more elaborate, Loki simply rolled his eyes and put his arms out so Thor could fasten them around his hands and wrists.

Thor glared into his brother's face as he bound him, furious, but also concerned by Loki’s silence. It wasn't like his brother to go quiet, not at a time like this; he should still be trying to talk himself out of it, as he’d started. Thor had to assume that Loki was hiding further mischief, but his brother was merely staring into space, as though watching something in his periphery. Thor could see nothing and no one in the direction of Loki’s gaze, but he didn’t drop his guard as he turned toward his approaching friends.

When Thor looked away to greet the Warriors Three, Loki looked at you, knowing Thor would be distracted for a few moments. As only he could see you, there'd been no reason for you to retreat much further than a few feet, not that you were sure you could. The movements of Thor's hammer had left you dizzy and disoriented and you were still working on getting your body to obey you.

When his eyes met yours, when he fell into bottomless wells that held equal parts love, fear, and determination, all he needed to do was nod his head slightly in acknowledgement. The understanding lit your eyes instantly, sending a rush of smug satisfaction through him at the knowledge that he was better at picking his partners than his tools. In the next moment, however, your bottomless eyes filled with tears and his heart clutched in response. Keeping half an eye on his brother, who’d been lifted in a crushing bear hug by Volstagg, Thor’s jovial red-headed companion of old, Loki quickly lifted his bound hands. His eyes on yours, he shook back his sleeve to reveal the rune he'd tattooed on the inside of his wrist.

Dropping his gaze to your wrist where his bracelet always rested, he lifted and turned his arms to press his lips to the rune, around the bindings he seemed heartbreakingly familiar with. You drew in a slow, soft breath, one single traitorous tear falling down your cheek as the silver chain went cold, but not the way you were used to. When Loki used this to call for you, it went to ice in a flash, the sensation sudden and significant, and just as quickly fading away.

This, however, was a brush of cold, in a slow glide starting at the clasp and circling lazily all the way around. Your eyes soft and wet with the rest of the tears you refused to let fall, you lifted the wrist bearing the bracelet to your chest, wrapping your other hand around your wrist and the bracelet to press it close to your skin and your heart, dropping your own lips onto the ring on your finger that matched the one around his.

"I love you." The words were a whisper, said as you lifted your face and blinked back tears, but Loki heard them clearly despite the shouted commands of his brother, who was now done with his reunion and back to business.

Loki merely smiled as he dropped his hands back down to his waist, afraid that anything further would draw Thor's attention. Loki nodded very slightly in the direction of the palace, hoping to prod you into leaving him. Escape was still possible, especially as long as they didn't find out about you. If all of his plots had fallen apart because he’d been too focused on you, at least he could be sure that the magic he’d woven around you was holding firm.

You nodded once, bent down and hiked your skirts up into your fists to hold them out of the way of your legs, then rose carefully to your feet. Giving your head a moment to settle on your shoulders, you took a deep breath, then shot Loki a look of deep resentment as you said, in an aggrieved mutter, "Not gonna have to run, my ass."

“My love, you should’ve known better by now,” Loki murmured back, making you laugh, just a little.

“What?” Thor demanded, having caught the last few words. With narrowed eyes and unflagging suspicion, he stepped close to Loki, his face closer.

“You should’ve known better by now, brother, than to trust me unattended, even when you thought me dead,” Loki said with an almost sunny smirk, offering cover for your escape even if it didn’t appear you would need it; neither Thor nor his allies had even glanced in your direction. Though the work he’d done for you appeared to be his best, he wouldn’t take anything for granted today. He had to give you every chance he could to get away clean.

You did your best to smile and blew him a kiss. Your heart breaking, you used the parapet to support you until you were far enough away from Thor’s hammer that your legs were mostly under your own control again. As soon as you had the strength, you took off at a stumble for the palace, your body getting stronger and your gait evening out as you got away from Thor and Mjolnir. As you moved away from the familial tableau behind you, a little laugh lifted out of you at the sound of your husband's voice, sounding alive again as he started to taunt his brother.

Part Twenty-Two here>>

Loki was buzzing around the room, as active as you were lethargic, his new project animating him. The energy wasn't positive, however, but edgy and fretful. He wanted answers, and every denial only heightened his frustration. Every obstruction became fuel for the fire that drove him. You, on the other hand, were half-asleep, a defense mechanism against the crackling shiver his dissatisfaction left in the air. First you tried to escape by reading, but ended up dozing in defiance, a book falling out of one hand and a small cube of metal held tightly in the other, in a fist next to your heart.

"Time," Loki said, seeming to appear out of nowhere, his sudden appearance startling you out of the beginning of a dream. You would have sworn he'd grumbled his way into the next room, but you'd only been half-awake at most and couldn’t be sure you hadn’t slept through his return. Though he could slip in between the shadows when he wanted to disappear from one place and appear in another, his pocket dimension was already between the shadows. He had not yet found the way into the shadows within the shadows, and so could not pop in and out as he did outside of his palace. Surprised, but still too sleepy to react much, you blinked up at him.

Loki had his hand out and his eyes on you, but he wasn’t seeing you, too lost in his own thoughts. In his furrowed brow and far-off gaze, you could see he was distracted by the calculations he was still working in his head. Despite his absent mind, he reeked of impatience as you tried to remember what the two of you were doing. He seemed to seethe for the brief moment it took to shake yourself fully awake.

You lifted your arm, the cube in your hand only a few grams and easily handed over. "Nothing," you said, smothering the indulgent smile that wanted to overtake your face at the sight of him frazzled and on the verge of disheveled, "not even a tingle." At least not from the cube; the look of Loki, on the other hand, had tingles of excitement beginning to ripple through you. Despite that fact, you kept your face neutral and your hand out for the next cube.

"Were you even awake?" Loki replied doubtfully.

"Barely.” You answered the question with a sneer and sigh of irritation. “But I know the difference between dying and dying of boredom.” That your hand was still out made you sniff in impatience, waiting for him to hand you the next.

He raised an eyebrow and dropped an opal matching the ones in the pendant bought on Alfheim into your palm before turning away in a swirl of bad temper. You couldn't explain why, but little revved your engine like seeing him surly and on the verge of mild violence. His temper was in no way directed at you, and somehow the cold sneer of frustration on his face only made him sexier.

Unable to help yourself, you carefully stripped your voice of any emotion but innocent curiosity and asked, "Any progress?" You made sure your expression matched your tone as you carefully prodded at his temper.

As he settled behind his desk and picked up his pen, he shot you a look as vicious as it was arousing. The more he snarled and sneered at you, the more you wanted to push his buttons. If you pushed him far enough, eventually all that frustration would turn into a passion that he would unleash upon you like a storm. You fucking loved it.

Loki's eyes narrowed as he took in your guileless demeanor. You were teasing him, and despite the aggravation climbing from the base of his spine to the nape of his neck, some part of him loved the endless paradox you presented. You sat there, smugly mysterious, no matter what effort he expended to solve the puzzle, or how complete your cooperation. To find his predicament amusing was simply adding insult to injury.

He would always wonder and never understand how you could so consistently set his temper ablaze even as you made him hard as iron. That he could see a twinkle in your eyes telling him that you knew exactly what you were doing made his heart flutter. Nevertheless, the fun of the game was in the playing. His voice cold as the world of his birth, his eyes molten emerald, he replied, "Even the elimination of possibilities is a kind of progress."

You felt like licking your chops, he was so delicious. His hair was mussed, tumbling around his face in defiance of the tie into which he’d pulled it. The slightest of flushes colored his cheeks in the heat of both vexation and desire. You waited until his eyes dropped back to the page in front of him before you spoke, the laugh under your voice almost, but not completely, suppressed. "So, no, then."

Loki’s eyes snapped up to toss a quick glare and snarl your way before immediately turning his attention back to his notes. You snickered, delighted with the progress you'd made in annoying him, and went back to your book. Converting Loki's irritation into desire was a slow, careful process. You decided to back off for the moment to let him simmer down a little before you added more heat to the fire.

Loki stared, unseeing, at the page in front of him, trying and failing to understand this new puzzle. He wasn't really making any progress. The thought struck him that loving you was yet another kind of double-edged sword. The things that made him love you were also the things that made you impossible to decipher. Even with the extra information he had gone back to Alfheim to collect, he still had a mystery on his hands.

On Alfheim, Loki had cornered the merchant that sold him the necklace that had hurt you so, determined to find out how such a harmless looking thing could come so close to incapacitating you. As it happened, he'd had a long list of questions for the being. Not least of which, he wanted to know why the merchant had said nothing about the possibility of harm, though he’d suspected it was because of the illusion that made you appear Asgardian while you were at his side. He couldn’t quash the hope that a being who encountered so many different peoples would give him some kind of lead on why you were so stubbornly magic resistant.

He hadn't told you about the trip before he left, figuring it was better to ask forgiveness than permission for what he might have to do. Really, he'd only had to terrify the merchant a little, had drawn hardly any blood, so even after his return, he'd seen no reason to worry you with the details of the conversation. They'd still been breathing when he'd left, if one counts hyperventilating in fear, and Loki absolutely did.

He knew you would probably be angry at the way he'd threatened them, though, which was why he wasn't telling you. He'd had to be sure that they'd told him the truth, all of it, and that had required more severe tactics than you'd accept. He wondered if he should feel guilty for lying to you about it, but he couldn't work up the energy. He'd told you that the merchant had been easily bribed, and you hadn't inquired further. He saw no reason to worry you with the dirty details, and it wasn't as though you didn't know him to be an unrepentant liar.

Regardless of the ethics of his methods, or your opinion on it, Loki was as close to certain as he could be that the merchant had told him the truth of exactly how and of what the necklace was made. Between the merchant’s dismay that the necklace had harmed you and Loki’s imaginative threats, he was reasonably confident that the merchant had answered all the questions put to them truthfully. Wanting time and space to systematically experiment, he'd dragged you into his pocket dimension to discover the truth. As per usual, when it came to you, the truth was elusive.

Which is how he'd ended up in his study, trying to hurt you to protect you. To prepare for the experiment, he’d dismantled the necklace, noted the component pieces and their amounts. He’d then acquired everything he thought he’d need, created carefully portioned samples to match everything in the necklace. He had to find out if it was some specific substance that was hurting you, or something unique to the necklace that he couldn’t see. Perhaps something that matched what he didn’t see in you.

But experimenting on you to discover what other vulnerabilities you had in addition to those that already tormented him was even worse than he’d imagined. Every time he had to hand you a cube of metal or a gem in the hopes that it would weaken you, his stomach would drop in dread that he was about to hurt you, that you would collapse into that terrifying weakness. Each time you failed to react, his body prickled all over at the knowledge that he would have to keep trying to hurt you.

He tried to focus on his notes, on the next items he'd need you to test, but all he could think about was the close call on Alfheim, all he could see was your sickly face as you'd sagged against him. His eyes were on the cube of Alfheim steel he had to hand you next, but his gaze was on his own terror. He wasn’t sure there was a way to make you safe enough to satisfy him. Still, his heart yearned to balance on the edge of danger with you, to share the shadows with you.

The safest place he could think to take you, and a trifle almost killed you. Loki would laugh if it wasn't so infuriating.

Loki looked up when your shadow fell over him, startled to find you had somehow moved across the room to his side and he hadn't noticed. Your expression serious, your eyes narrowed in concern and the corners of your mouth tight, you raised an eyebrow in question. Loki responded automatically, pushing back from the desk, turning his chair to offer his lap.

As usual, you immediately took advantage of his change in position to slide into his lap, holding out the hand that held the Asgardian opal he'd given you. "This one isn't doing anything, either," you said, as you dropped the jewel onto the desk in disdain when he didn’t immediately take it from you. You slid your hands around his neck and linked them, pouting into his surprised face. "And I'm bored."

While Loki had been brooding, you’d been watching him stare at the book in front of him in dark contemplation. He'd clearly been lost in thought, and those thoughts seemed to torture him. You could see that the challenge wasn't thrilling him in this project, that the lack of progress was discouraging rather than energizing him. Worried by the disheartened look all over him, especially when you’d been trying to rile him up, you’d hatched a plan to pull him out of his black mood.

When the testing period seemed to come and go and he still hadn't looked up from his unseeing stare, you took the opal back to him, determined to distract him from what was bothering him. Just because you couldn’t fix his problems didn’t mean you couldn’t take his mind off them, as well as take your own mind off all the problems you and he created for one another.

You looked over the desk, counted seven more items to test and smiled to yourself. Seven shouldn’t be too much of a challenge, even considering his preternatural control. Holding out your hand, you huffed, eyes sparkling with the thrill of beginning your game. "Gimme the next, then."

Loki leaned back and looked at you where you sat in his lap, suspicion narrowing his eyes when your hips shifted to slide your hip and ass over his groin, blood immediately rushing to the area in response. You shifted again, encouraging his erection, and he could see light come into your eyes and mischief trembling on your lips. "What are you up to?" he asked with an amused drawl and a raised eyebrow as he reached out to snatch up the Alfheim steel.

Your smile spread in wicked glee when he put the cube in your hand. "I'm making this interesting," you replied as you slid from his lap to your knees facing his erection. You placed the hand holding the piece of metal on his knee while your other hand worked at his waistband to bare him to first your gaze and then immediately your touch.

Loki's head fell back with a sigh at the feel of your hand gently circling his length. He smiled at the ceiling, unsure what had brought this on, but hardly interested in protesting when he was the beneficiary. "You have my attention, love," he murmured when he felt your breath on the tip of his cock.

"Good," you replied with a low chuckle, thrilling at the sight of him already giving into you. Your hand softly and slowly twisted around him as you smiled sultrily up at him. He lifted his head to look at you, wicked green eyes watching you with excitement tempered by a wary amusement. Your smile widened in response to the vague suspicion you saw on his face. "Because there are rules."

Loki’s head dropped back down onto the back of his chair as he huffed out a petulant sigh. "I hate rules."

You laughed out loud and placed a gentle kiss at the tip, making his cock jump in your hand. "I know," you purred, smug that you could have him breathing faster so quickly. He looked back at you, unable to resist watching you pleasure him. The sight of you kneeling of your own volition at his feet brought him more satisfaction than any other offered supplication of his life. "That's why rule one is if you break any other rules, we trade places."

"I accept rule one," Loki replied, grinning down at you. You laughed up at him, unsurprised by his ready agreement. You both knew Loki didn't follow the rules when there were negative consequences; this first rule was tantamount to inciting rebellion.

You bent to place your mouth back on the tip of his cock, your tongue flicking out to taste him, your eyes falling shut as you closed your mouth around the very tip. His eyelids fluttered in response to the feeling and he groaned in his throat as he watched you take him a little further into your mouth. At the sound, your gaze lifted to his, burning excitement incinerating you both. "The next rule is that you can't come until you're done testing what you have on your desk."

You whispered the words against the soft skin beneath your lips before fully closing your mouth around the head of Loki's cock and sucking gently. The wondering sigh of pleasure that escaped his lips made you shudder with lust, your own heart speeding with excitement. Stoking his desire always inspired in you an equally powerful need, the two of you alike in that way. Making the other moan and quake and beg was something you both found unbearably exciting.

You lifted away from him for a moment to speak, but your hand moved with purpose as you twisted it up and down his length, spreading your saliva over him and making him shudder out a breath. "Last rule is,” you gasped, your breath already coming fast and shallow, “I only stop if the something in my hand feels different." When Loki snickered and reached down to brush his thumb over your cheek, you shot him one last wicked grin, and bent to the challenge you'd set yourself.

You wanted to make Loki come before he finished his test. You loved taking control, making him lose his. The exhilaration you felt that you could, that he trusted you enough to turn himself over to you, was as glorious as any you’d found with him. Maybe it was cheating to expect him to realize he was still in charge of the testing, but you couldn’t keep track of everything. Besides, he was supposed to be preternaturally clever; you assumed he could figure it out.

Still, you were enjoying yourself nearly as much as he was, though his hums and purrs of pleasure made clear he was especially lost. While the current sample remained in your palm, you didn’t see any reason to rush. You held his cock in the hand not resting on his knee while you placed sucking open-mouthed kisses slowly down his length. Your eyes never left his burning stare as he watched you place the flat of your tongue against the back of him, lingering as you dragged it up his length.

When you got back to the head, you took him back into your mouth. Before you closed your eyes and sucked him deep, you raised your brows and tilted your head towards the hand that still rested on his knee. In the next moment, you slid your mouth down and over him, relishing the sensation of smooth skin covering steel. Loki cursed and you chuckled around him when you felt the other steel in your hand disappear to be replaced by a larger sample of metal. When it, too, had no effect, you focused on driving Loki out of his mind.

"Oh, love," Loki moaned, already half wild as his head tilted back in bliss. He loved the touch of your hand, the feeling of your mouth moving over him with teasing gentleness. His hips were trying to move but he held himself back, trying to keep command of himself. He couldn’t control both his hips and his breath, which shuddered out in rapture. "Your mouth is magic."

You hummed happily, the corners of your lips stretching in a smile around him even as your mouth began to move over him a little more quickly, a little more firmly, taking him a little deeper. Your hand wasn't still either, working up and down along with your mouth to push him higher. You hadn’t considered when you started this challenge that you’d tied one hand behind your back, so to speak. You were used to touching him more, had to get creative.

Loki's hands left the arms of the chair where he'd had a white-knuckled grip, holding on to his control. Lost in the feeling of you sucking him into your warm, soft mouth, his hands reached for you, cupping your cheeks to tilt your head toward him. When your eyes fluttered open to burn into his, he couldn't help the tiny thrust of his hips into your mouth.

You'd taken him deeper than ever before when you chuckled in response and the feeling of your laughter around his cock had his eyes blurring. He was doing everything in his power to hold back his climax, even if he could remember exactly why when your mouth and throat and hand were so diabolically working him toward ecstasy.

Despite how much he loved to watch you please him this way, his eye was drawn to the wiggle of your fingers around the cube sitting on the hand you hadn't moved from his leg. He could barely concentrate, the swirl of your tongue around the head of his cock destroying his mind, but he snatched up the metal in your hand and dropped it on the desk on his way to grabbing the next sample and giving it to you.

Loki forced himself to focus on control, determined to hold back until you had the second to last of the test materials in your hand. He wasn't going to leave you unsatisfied at the end of this. Even if he didn't love using his mouth to bring you to sobbing pleasure, he'd still want to show his appreciation for you. He’d been losing himself in the future and you’d brought him back to the only thing that mattered, the glorious now he was sharing with you.

Focusing on control, however, meant concentrating on you and what you were doing to him. You wanted to win, and you were doing everything in your power to drag him to the edge. The longer he held out against the diabolical things you were doing to him with your mouth and hand, the closer he came to delirium. The desperate need had teeth clamped around the base of his spine; only the strict grip he had on his body was stopping him from fucking your lovely face.

By the time he dropped the sixth item into your palm, he was sweating and on the edge of begging or taking, he didn’t know which. You had done everything you could think of, had whipped out every strategy you’d ever heard of, had exploited every weakness you knew, to push Loki to this point. His hands wrapped around your upper arms, his grip tight almost to the point of pain but an exhilarating kind. The kind that made your heart race and your blood boil.

"My love," he growled when you moaned long and low, in an almost whimper, in response to another of those little thrusts that he couldn't always control. His hands held you in place to rock exceedingly gently over your tongue. "I'm about to come down your lovely throat."

You moaned again, moving faster, insanely aroused at both his control and every little sign of its loss. To your shock, Loki was suddenly standing, the chair sliding out and away from him as he came to his feet in an almost violent burst of movement. His hands were on each side of your head in the next moment and you were dropping the cube in your hand to brace yourself on his thighs.

"I need to--," Loki cut himself off with another purr of pleasure as he began to slowly, easily rock himself in and out of your mouth. "Pinch me if you want me to stop. I swear I'll stop if you want me to…" he trailed off when you gripped his thighs and shifted to allow his cock to glide more easily over your tongue.

His head fell forward on his neck to look into your glowing eyes when he felt your hands moving to encourage his thrusts into your mouth. He didn't know how you managed to forever surprise him, but as he fucked your mouth with faster, rougher thrusts, you welcomed each as you stared with burning eyes into his.

Those burning eyes started to water as he pushed his cock more deeply into your throat, but you didn't retreat, wanting to feel everything, wanting to give everything, wanting to take everything. When a single tear fell down your cheek, you pushed yourself forward to meet Loki's thrusts and it was all he could take. At every line, every boundary, you always danced with him along the knife edge of anything and for someone like him, nothing in the universe could compare.

With a stuttering groan of your name, Loki slammed himself deep into your mouth, the long wait, the aching teasing before the rough loving finally wearing through the last frayed thread of his control. For the first time in what might have been centuries, Loki’s mind went blank. He could barely hear your pleading cry of desire, surrender, the tip of his cock choking you as he did as he'd warned and came down your throat. You swallowed and swallowed, your body wracked with arousal as you savored the knowledge that you'd made him lose control.

Loki looked down at you, his hands still holding your face, his thumb catching a small drop that had escaped the corner of your mouth. You turned your face a little to take his thumb in your mouth and suck the last drop from it. The sight had him shuddering with fresh desire as his hands left your face to grip your shoulders and pull you to your feet.

Before you could blink, you were sitting in the chair, and Loki was kneeling at your feet, pushing your skirt over your knees. He picked up the sixth sample from where it had fallen to the floor and threw it to the desk. Picking up the last, he turned back to place it in your hand. The next thing you knew, Loki was spreading your legs and hooking them over the arms of the chair to give him an unimpeded view of and access to the core of your body.

Loki flashed you a wicked grin before bending close to run his fingers over your folds and whisper, his breath brushing your overheated flesh, "Rules are rules, my love."

A long time later, you and Loki lay curled on his study floor, naked and satisfied. Loki had thoroughly loved you with mouth and hands, bringing you to the edge of orgasm over and over until you’d begged for mercy. When he’d ultimately given in to your sobbing demands, the climax that took you was the most powerful of your life, leaving you boneless and breathless, draped across another of his high-backed leather thrones.

When he’d risen over you like the pagan god he was, your thighs had trembled, in trepidation or anticipation even you couldn’t be sure. He’d cooed to you then, in love and praise, before arranging you to his liking and sliding the iron bar of his erection inside you. You'd been sure your body couldn't climb to yet another peak, but he'd wrapped one arm around your back and cradled the back of your head in his palm to tilt your head for his kisses. With his other hand, he’d taken a hold of the back of the chair in a crushing grip and used it as leverage to pound into you. The burning focus of his eyes and the wild abandon of his surging body was something you rarely saw him indulge and never tired of witnessing.

By the time he came inside you with a roar, he'd pushed you up and over twice more.

You were deeply grateful to be done with the testing, at least for now, because you were completely exhausted. You wanted a bath, a snack, and a nap, in that order. As soon as you could find the energy to get off the floor, you were going to drag Loki off for all three.

"Did you drop either of the last two because they felt odd?" The two of you had been sharing a companionable quiet in the aftermath of so much passion when Loki's voice gently broke the silence.

"No," you murmured against his skin, smiling slightly at his ability to immediately get back on task after being diverted. You didn’t move your face from where it was pressed against his chest but snuggled into the arm he’d snaked around you to hold you tightly to him. "Nothing today felt like the necklace did.”

Loki sighed, and you heard the frustration in the sound, though his words had a sexy, teasing cadence. Though you’d managed to thoroughly distract him from his dark musings, the troubles that followed you both couldn’t be so easily dodged. "You know that means more tests."

You sighed in resignation, though the secret romantic voice in your mind sighed at the undercurrent of devotion. You knew he wouldn't stop, because despite his recklessness, he wouldn't be careless with your safety. A thought dug into your brain like a tick that he may never be fully content with your protection. You knew how your human frailty distressed him. Still, the testing may have been boring, but you didn’t mind too much, not now that you’d found a game to keep you both occupied in the meantime.

"Then I guess I better hydrate."

Part Sixteen here>>

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Still, he'd forgotten the double-edged nature of choosing for oneself. That he had been the one to make his own choices was cold comfort when he still felt the need to escape them. He didn’t want to be home, his need to flee moving him to walk the streets in a frustrated attempt to wear himself out. He knew he couldn't be there when you got back, and he needed to be exhausted before he walked past your door.

His neighbor, his friend, his greatest desire, he'd watched you leave tonight with the same man as last time, and the time before. This was the first time you'd left with the same person more than once. Bucky couldn’t explain why, but it felt momentous that you’d gone on a third date.

Bucky couldn’t decide if he was happy for you that you'd found someone else after he'd fucked it up or if he was infuriated that he’d been so easily replaced. Torn between relief and fury, he fumed as he walked, the battle blinding him to the streets that passed. The relief was cold and empty, the only comfort that the choice would be taken from him and with it the temptation, but the fury was hot and dangerous, ready to bubble over at merely the thought that someone else would share your bed, would touch what his heart insisted was his.

Bucky had no right to be jealous, and he damn well knew it, but that didn't stop the green bile from rising into his throat at the thought of anyone else discovering the taste of your skin, dewed with the sweat of desire, or how it felt to sink into your silken wet clasp. His own choices, his own careful silence had come between you, and he had no right to want to make the other man disappear before he was given the opportunity to find the exact frequency at which you moaned in pleasure.

Bucky didn’t have a problem with this particular person, really. He didn’t know anything about him, had carefully not asked for even a scrap of information. His low-grade urge to find him and smother him with a pillow was nothing personal; there was no way it could be. He simply couldn't help but have a problem with the very concept of anyone but himself sharing your bed.

He'd started to fall for you about a week after he'd moved in. He'd leaned out to grab his paper, the printed word an anachronism he still preferred, at the same time you'd opened your own door. Bleary-eyed and only half-conscious, you'd scooped up your own newspaper as you'd grunted, "Morning," in his general direction, waved the paper, and turned away, cursing absently when you scraped your shoulder against your door frame. Something about the mix of irritable, polite, and confused of a morning made his heart soft, despite his determination to not get close to anyone.

Over the next several months, however, you'd somehow become his friend. Neither of you seemed to seek it out, but you were always friendly without being pushy whenever you ran into one another, and the two of you often fell into casual conversation. One evening, you'd knocked on his door with a wry smile and a plate full of food when you'd made enough for a guest that had cancelled at the last minute.

After licking the plate clean, starved for the taste of homemade, he had washed it properly, returning it with a note offering both his phone number and his stomach for any extra food you wanted to get rid of. Before either of you were expecting it, the two of you were sharing dinner at least once a week. He began spending many of his nights on your couch watching tv and movies, trying to catch up with the world he’d missed while first frozen inside the Soldat, and then again during the Blip. Once you knew his full identity, something you figured out early and ignored almost entirely, you did your best to answer any questions he had about what he'd missed.

Your blasé attitude towards his past confused and delighted him, and he never quite knew what to make of it. Did you truly not care about his past? Did you have an opinion at all? If you did, how did he still never feel judged when he was with you? Something about you let him set down the person he'd been in those lost years, not to forget, but to rest for a moment. When you looked at him, he didn’t feel damned by his multitude of sins. He didn't know what it meant, but he couldn't stay away either.

Bucky had spent countless evenings on your couch before the night you'd ended up in his lap. He couldn’t remember if he'd pulled you on to him or if you’d climbed aboard, but once you were there, he couldn't resist filling himself with everything that tempted him, had been tempting him for months. You were like flame in his arms, warming him to his bones, and the sensation of your skin against his was too much to deny.

He'd left in the gray light of the pre-dawn, forcing himself from the softness of your bed, your arms, but he'd been afraid of how right it had felt to lose himself in you. It would have been terrifyingly easy to stay, to let himself pretend he had no past haunting his present, shaping his future.

Only a few hours later, he'd opened his door to your knock with dread a rock in his stomach, convinced he'd lost his friend because he couldn't keep his hands to himself. You'd stood there, a sardonic smile on your face and the boots you'd brought back to him at your feet. A brusque, "Don't make it weird," was all you’d said as you walked away.

That had led to Bucky asking Sam for help in deciphering what had happened, a thing he hated to do, but he didn't know where else to turn. Sam had made him pay for the requested information in his usual good-natured mockery, but at the end of the conversation Bucky understood that he'd set the boundaries by leaving the way he did. To his surprise, you'd accepted his unspoken limits without comment.

Part of him blessed you for it, grateful that you wouldn't force him to explain how little the likes of him deserved what astonishing kindness you'd already shown him. Another part of him cursed the fact that you'd never confronted him, never told him what you wanted, never forced him to confront himself.

Because he hadn't stopped spending time with you, had he? He hadn't stopped touching you in any way you'd allow, hadn't stopped warming himself at your fire. He kept sharing your meals, occupying your time, monopolizing your attention. The guilt he felt for not offering you what you deserved in return couldn't overwhelm his need to see you, be near you, feel the electric charge of your presence crackling over his skin.

You, however, treated him with the warmth of a friend you occasionally nailed, leaving Bucky at a loss. Bucky couldn't tell if you even wanted more from him; you seemed so at ease with the situation. Sam didn't think the arrangement unusual, even insisting it had its own initialism, FWB, but Bucky often didn't understand what Sam took for granted.

The first time he'd heard you at your door with a date, he'd had to exert all his self-control to not physically assault the man kissing you goodnight. Only the night before, your regular Friday night movie night had ended, as it most often did, with him easing quietly from your bed. This time he'd heard you sigh, sad and forlorn, and he'd paused, but he had not turned back. He would not speak of his feelings for you, his own self-loathing holding his tongue.

He was lucky you'd allowed him to touch you at all; he would not taint you any more than he already had, nor would he risk your rejection. That didn't mean he had any control over the jealous rage that filled his head at the thought that he might lose you, that another might take his place in your bed, in your life. Knowing you'd been out with someone else had driven him mad, and only superhuman control had allowed him to walk away before he found out if you'd invited your date inside.

Such things were none of his business. He'd made sure of that.

That had been a couple months ago. You'd continued to date others, but still you kept coming back to him, still allowed him into your bed. You'd remained his friend throughout, never speaking of the dual nature of your relationship. The friend never acknowledged the lover, the sexual heat between you something separate, held away from everything else. He didn't know what you thought of it, because you never spoke of it. But he never spoke, either, because he lived in terror that to do so would be to invite catastrophe, that he'd lose everything he so highly prized.

Tonight, he had once again escaped his apartment to escape what he'd continued to tell himself he couldn't have. He was walking the streets, no particular destination in mind, his thoughts on the way laughter looked in your deep, warm eyes and on your soft luscious mouth, when he rounded a corner and was smacked in the face with the sight of you.

You and your date were dining al fresco, the warmth of the summer evening making you glow, pretty and passionate in the fading light of the setting sun. You were dressed in more warmth, a deep, rose red that made you look like heat personified. The dress hugged your curves while remaining modest enough to tease the imagination with what couldn’t be seen. Like a moth to your flame, Bucky had yet to figure out how to resist your pull. He had yet to figure out why he wanted to.

Stopping in his tracks, he barely noticed the few blows of people bumping into him before the flow of foot traffic around him adjusted to his sudden halt. His heart kicked into an immediate gallop at the sight of your face, animated with the story on your lips as you gestured with your fork. He hadn't touched you in weeks, since before your first date with the man who sat, enchanted, across from you. The lack hit him suddenly, like a punch to the gut, along with the thought that he may never get to touch you again, all because of his own cowardice.

Unable to watch you bewitch another the same way you'd enthralled him, Bucky turned away, pushing through people in his desperation to get away, his heart heavy and his vision red with fury. If he let himself give in to his baser instincts, he'd be striding through the crowd to pick you up and carry you off like the caveman he felt. Instead, he walked aimlessly for hours, trying to do everything he could to make sure he'd have neither the energy nor the inclination to knock on your door on his way home.

He had no right to interrupt your evening just because jealousy was like an acid burning in his brain. If you were alone, he wanted to change that, impress into your skin that you needed no touch but his. If you weren't alone, he wanted to change that, throw the other man from your bed with every shred of brutality that still burned at his core. That he had no right changed nothing. His muscles were still tensed for a fight, the catharsis of violence calling to him despite his determination to be better than his past, to behave like a civilized human being.

That determination was sorely tested when he heard your voice as he came up the stairs to his apartment floor. He never took the elevator, didn't trust closed places with minimal escape. On top of that, he'd rather make the climb than give any possible ambush advance warning of his arrival. Old habits died hard, and he couldn't, wouldn’t stop watching his back simply because he wasn't on the run anymore.

Those warm and sultry tones that had so easily seduced him dozens of times over echoed into his ultra-sensitive ears, sending shudders over his skin and making his vibranium hand clench at his side. He stopped on the stairs, seven or so feet from the stairwell door, open just a crack, but enough to let your voice through. He was determined to give you as much privacy as he could, no matter that he wanted to ease close enough to make out the words being said.

Before he could blink, his body overrode his integrity and he was already in motion, easing silently up the stairs to close the distance, to eavesdrop on you and your date. He wasn't proud of himself, but he couldn't help himself, either, not when he felt like his entire future hung in the balance.

His heart slowed as his breathing fell into a silent, even rhythm. He moved forward until he was just outside the line of sight for the floor he shared with you. Your door was more than a few steps away from the cracked stairwell door, so Bucky moved until he was behind the door and stuck his ear to the gap to listen to you and your date. He didn't know what, if anything, he would do with the information he was trying to get, but he needed it, nonetheless.

"Hmm," your voice was warm with the soft edge of sensuality, quiet enough that only Bucky's enhanced hearing allowed it to crawl into his ears like spiders, all legs and fangs. "Very nice."

"Nice enough to get me inside?" The man's voice was muffled, and Bucky could hear a shuffling of fabric that told him the likely picture that awaited him on the other side of the door. His muscles locked down in response to the rage that washed through him. He would not give in to the violence that had shaped him, no matter the provocation.

He had no right. He had no right. He had no right.

The mantra kept him calm until he heard a little more shuffling, then a surprising quiet. "I don't think so." Your voice broke the silence with a wry regret that was both firm and yet gentle. You were turning your date down, but you were being careful with him. The hand around Bucky's throat eased as his most immediate fears were relieved.

"Tonight?" Your date asked the question kindly. "Or at all?"

A long pause had Bucky confused, wondering what kind of nonverbal communication he was missing. When you finally answered, you sounded like you were covering your face with your hands.

"Oh god," you answered, your voice strangled. "I'm so sorry. It's really obvious, isn't it?” 

"You very carefully talk around someone," Bucky's rival sounded disappointed, but resigned. He couldn't know that he was putting possibilities in Bucky's brain, making him wonder if he could make things right with you.

Would he, if he could? Would he speak of his feelings if given another chance? Could he find the courage to do so?

In the next moment, you sounded so lost and hurt that Bucky was once again having to exert the same intense amount of self-control to remain still. But this time, it was to stop himself from leaping through the door to take you in his arms and protect you from whatever had made you sad. "I'm hung up." Your voice was thick, and the thought that you might have tears in your eyes made him feel physically ill. "I don't know when I won't be."

"Hey, don't worry about it. Sometimes the timing's off." The man's voice was kind and almost made Bucky feel bad for him. The triumphant crow sounding inside his mind at the thought that you would not sleep with the other man tonight was much louder, however. "Call me when you get off the hook?"

Your soft laugh and warm retort, "You'll be the first," cut off that crow of triumph, giving room for the possessive voice in the back of Bucky's mind to snarl viciously with the same jealousy that had been driving his steps since he'd watched you leave with the other man the second time.

Bucky had realized then that he could bear anything but losing you. Your presence in his life had become necessary to him; he could not stand by and let you walk out of it. He stepped back from the crack in the door when he heard you exchanging your goodbyes with your date. The two of you couldn’t help but be a little awkward, as it was clear that there wouldn't be another date any time soon. Leaning against the concrete wall behind the door, he waited for you to go into your apartment and for the man to leave the building.

Bucky listened to your apartment door open and close as footsteps made their way toward the elevator, but with only half an ear as his mind was mostly on the conversation he'd overheard. He knew he'd spend the next several hours lying on his floor, trying to test the exact weight of the words 'hung up' and wondering whether they were in reference to him. If they were, what, precisely, did they mean?

He heard the elevator doors open and close and pushed away from the wall, determined to get into his apartment as quickly as possible so that he could start parsing the meaning of both your and your date's words in private. Despite himself, he slowed as he neared your door.

To his own shock, he soon found himself facing your door, raising his hand to knock.

On the other side of the door, you slumped in defeat against the wall for a moment before kicking off your heels. You hated that you'd had to do that, but it had only been fair. You'd humiliated yourself because of Bucky Barnes yet again, and you thought you might be at your limit.

To be honest, you'd thought that a number of times at this point, but you couldn't save yourself from the allure he held for you. A hidden sun obscured by shadows, your body craved the dark while your heart craved the light. A beautiful juxtaposition embodied in one insanely sexy man, every part of you was attracted to every part of him, both good and bad, light and dark, peace and violence.

Sometimes he would sit laughing on your couch, his face shining and beautiful in unguarded enjoyment, and the sight would stop your throat with emotion. His happiness was too glorious to risk never seeing again, too precious to risk never inspiring again. A wonderful, charming companion, his warm smiles and dry humor had made him the best friend you'd ever had. Keeping your friend quickly became your highest priority. You'd fallen so deeply in love with Bucky, you'd done whatever you had to do to stay close. 

And when his jaw clenched, the muscle moving in his cheek, the final sign that he'd given in to desire, your body wouldn't say no. Despite every tear you'd shed each time he'd left your bed before he had to look at you in the cold light of day, you couldn't stop, wouldn't stop. The fire in his eyes called to you, no matter how you tried to resist, no matter the damage to your heart. His touch made you weak in ways you'd never known, ways you both loved and hated, but you couldn't walk away of your own volition. 

Which was why you'd gone out with Neil three times when you'd known after the first date that it was hopeless, that you couldn't be with anyone as long as you were still in love with Bucky. You'd fooled yourself for a while that you just needed time and space, that a couple of dates with someone good and sweet would be enough to help you get over this obsessive need.

Tonight, you'd admitted to yourself that you'd been wrong, that you were stringing Neil along for your own needs. You'd been using him to shield yourself from the temptation just down the hall. You'd had to be honest with both yourself and him that you weren't really available, not as long as this thing with Bucky remained unspoken and unresolved. 

When the knock came at your door, you pasted a smile on your face as you turned back around, hoping Neil wasn't going to make it weird.

When you pulled the door open, his head lifted and, even in the dim light of the hallway, Bucky's eyes seemed to burn into yours. He was wearing his usual uniform of black t-shirt and jeans over boots, only the missing leather jacket a concession to the heat of the day. You would swear that his hair was mussed from his own hands dragging through it in frustration; he looked frazzled, something you’d never seen.

"What does 'hung up' mean?" Bucky asked the question in low tones, the rumble of his voice both gentle and dangerous. Goosebumps erupted over your skin as his eyes raked over you with banked heat and you realized he'd overheard your conversation with Neil as you'd sent him away. A cold chill of hot rage swept through you and the words were tumbling from your lips before you had a chance to think them through.

"It means I sent a good guy away because I can't stop thinking about you."

Bucky's left hand clenched into a fist at his side as his entire body clenched in desire. Your eyes flashed to his even as one eyebrow quirked slightly. He deliberately opened his hand, stretching his fingers. "May I come in?" His voice was a rumble even deeper than his first question.

Your core had clenched when his hand had, something about that show of held back passion always made you crazy. You knew that if he came in, you were going to end up in bed, sooner more likely than later.

"Yes," left you in a breath, consequences be damned. You craved him, your body screaming out for the feel of his. To your body's purring delight, assent was barely past your lips before Bucky was pushing upright in a ripple of strength and he was striding forward to take you in his arms. Your body flashed hot as firm muscle and cool vibranium banded around you, lifting you up and carrying you into your apartment as he kicked the door shut behind him.

His lips found yours and you were sinking in with a sigh of relief. You hadn't touched him in weeks, hadn't been wrapped in the feel, the scent of him. The return to his arms felt like coming home, and you knew why you’d tried to escape, understood why you couldn’t.

“So it’s not just me,” he murmured against your mouth, his hands skimming over your sides down to your legs. With seemingly no effort, Bucky’s hands gripped your thighs and lifted. You bounced a little on your calves to help and before you could blink, your legs were wrapped around his waist, his hands were on your ass, and the rest of him was pressing you into the wall at your back as his mouth took yours again.

You kissed him back with all the pent-up emotion inside you. You wanted him until it hurt, but feeding the need also brought pain. You ran your hands frantically over the muscles of his back and arms, your fingertips grazing the back of his neck and making him shiver in your arms, a sensation that always made you feel outrageously powerful. Your hands dived into his hair to drag his head back so that you could fix your mouth on his throat.

So engrossed with the salt of his skin as you scraped your teeth over that perfect jaw, you didn’t understand at first the words tumbling from his mouth in a growling rush of passion. “I don’t want you going out with other people. I don’t want anyone’s hands on you but mine.” The words sent a shudder through you and your hands tightened in his hair as his hands began to skim over your thighs, kneading the muscles and rocking you gently against one another. “I want to hunt down and destroy everyone who knows how soft your lips are,” you knew it was wrong, but the sound of his jealousy made your heart skip and clutch, “because I’m fucked up and violent and you should stay away from me.” Except you were fucked up too because you knew exactly how he felt. “I know I shouldn’t drag you into my fucked up life, but I can’t stop.”

You scoffed and lifted your head to look into his face. Your eyes blazed with the mix of feeling he inspired in you, exasperation, adoration, fury, despair. "I know, Bucky." Your voice was desolate with the pain he'd caused every time he'd walked away and for a moment, you dropped the casual façade and let him see how much you felt for him.

Bucky looked startled for a moment, like he hadn't anticipated the depth of feeling he had uncovered. He'd shown up when you were weak, when you had no defenses, and then had the temerity to look surprised when you were so easily conquered. You wanted to bite him, it made you so mad.

You opened your mouth, whether to bite him literally or just with your words you didn't know, but the surprise on his face melted into one of burning emotion that found its match in you. However infuriating and confusing you found him, he had apparently been feeling the same. His mouth slanted across yours once again and you could taste the complex mix of emotion in his kiss.

You kissed him back, your hands still in his hair holding his mouth to yours with a fervor born of desperation. You wanted to hold back all of this feeling, afraid to show him your heart when you had so little understanding of his, but you were caught on the wave. He seemed equally unable to hold back, and you finally felt like he'd let you see beneath his scowling veneer. He was holding you like you mattered, and you couldn’t pretend he didn't.

Abruptly, Bucky tore his mouth from yours as he pulled away from the wall to carry you the couple of steps down the brief hallway to your bedroom. “I’m taking you to bed," he growled, as though daring you to stop him, though you would swear you saw fear glimmering in his eyes that you would do exactly that.

“Damn right you are.”

Part Two here>>

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He braced himself on his vibranium elbow as his other hand gripped the back of your thigh to spread your legs for his gently undulating hips. He buried his face in your throat to close his mouth over the sensitive skin under your ear, desperate for the taste of you on his lips. When you arched into his mouth with a low moan, it made him shudder with the stifled urge to lose control, the need to ravish your body with his own.

When he'd knocked on your door, he'd had no idea what he was doing. He'd known it was dangerous to confront you when in such a wild and reckless mood. He felt possessive, jealous, and he knew that he needed to stay away from you until he could tamp it back down. Despite all he knew, he couldn’t help himself, needed to have it out with you with no filters. He'd been unable to stop himself from demanding answers, damn the consequences.

The honesty with which you'd answered, the emotion quivering at your mouth as you'd done so had nearly brought him to his knees. Your refusal would have been literally painful, but he would have understood. Your acceptance had been so sultry and soft, he'd been unable to keep his hands to himself. Whatever his intentions, he always found himself circling back to you, bound by what was between you.

Bucky finally had to admit that his every attempt to keep you at a distance had been a complete and utter failure. He was hung up on you, too, and he knew he needed to tell you that, but when you'd opened the door looking like an angel, any intention toward conversation had gone up in a puff of smoke, incinerated by desire. He'd wanted to assure you that all that stood between you was his own fears and insecurities, but the look on your face had left him stunned and weak, unable to form the words.

Now that he was sinking into the softness of your bed, the softness of you, his heart rose to his lips and tumbled out in soft sighs of adoration as his lips brushed over your shoulders, nudging the straps of your dress aside. If this was what it was to be vulnerable, it was worth the risk. "Beautiful," he whispered, a moan in his throat, as he pressed open mouthed kisses to your collarbones.

Your arms moved to slide up under his shirt, around the barrel of his chest, lost in the feeling of Bucky's mouth worshipping your skin, making you feel like affection was seeping beneath the surface and spreading through you in a warm wave. He’d always made you feel wanted, desired, but never like this. He’d never given you the soft and sweet the way he was now, even as his hands pressed and gripped with a greed you’d never felt from him before. You shivered when you heard him whisper, his voice sweet and smooth as honey as his words spilled over you.

"I hated the idea of you inviting him in," he murmured as you dragged his shirt upwards, trying to get him naked as quickly as possible. His relentlessly rocking hips were driving you crazy, made you need to feel more of him. "Hated that I don't have the right to hate anything you do."

The growl in his tone was dark, almost angry. Something primal inside you growled in response and your hands grew even more frantic as they raced over him, pushing at his shirt, the waistband of his jeans. Regardless of the black mood that spurred his words, you couldn’t help but thrill at the avarice underneath them.

In a move so quick and easy it made you blink, he'd lifted up so that the tight grip of your thighs around his hips tugged at his jeans around his hips. He yanked his shirt impatiently over his head and toed his boots off while you yanked at the button fly of his jeans. When he came back down, you discovered that he wasn’t wearing anything beneath his jeans when his bare cock slid against the damp silk at the apex of your thighs.

He had only gotten harder as you'd frantically pushed his jeans down over his hips to bare him to your gaze, your touch. Pressing his body to yours, he took your mouth in a rough yet tender kiss as his cock went from rock hard to diamond, the electricity of every touch arcing through both of you from every place your bodies touched. The feeling of him sliding against your clit through your almost embarrassingly wet underwear added another layer of frantic desire and had you moaning together.

His hands fumbled at your waist and hips to drag at the scrap of fabric there, eventually giving into frustration and tearing it away. Your body quaked in reaction, pure lust washing through you as you watched his hands close around your thighs so that he could spread you open and bathe in the wetness his hands, his mouth, his body had brought forth. Your head fell back on your neck as you whimpered in need.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, the hoarse sound rasping lusciously over your eardrums and sending shivers through you as his hand slid up your side, searching for the zipper he'd seen under your arm. "I'll pay for those." He leaned close to breathe the words into your ear even as his vibranium arm slid beneath your shoulders, his hand dipping beneath your dress to deftly unsnap your bra as he went. Your thighs tightened around his waist when his other hand, having found and vanquished the zipper, pulled at your dress, discarding your bra, until you were bared to the waist. With a purr of pleasure, he palmed your breast, squeezing and kneading as his mouth continued to move gently over your skin.

This wasn’t the first time he'd torn your clothes off, nor the first time he'd expressed remorse for doing so, but you loved it when he did things like that, whether you should or not. Maybe you’d feel differently if he’d ever touched you with anything resembling violence, but only passion could occasionally push him into any kind of wanton destruction, and that only against your clothing. You knew who he was, what he’d been, but you did not, could not fear him.

You stretched your neck to give him better access to your throat, arching your chest to press your breast more fully into his hand, flexed your thighs to meet every gentle thrust against your clit with one of your own, dragging him through your folds. You wanted more, wanted to feel him all over you. For the first time, it felt like he had opened up and you wanted to bathe in all the passion flooding over you.

Bucky had never felt so out of control and yet so at peace with it. You were out of control with him, and that was all that mattered. His eyes narrowed on yours as he lost himself in you. He couldn't get enough, dipped his head further to the breast he wasn't already teasing. He took your nipple in his mouth and began to suck in the same rolling rhythm as his hips and the sensation had your hands scrabbling at his back for purchase as you pressed yourself up and into him as much as you could, wrapped in his powerful body.

You were getting hotter with every second in his arms, but there was something about this moment that left you unguarded in a way you'd never been before. With a growl, your hands dove into his hair, pulling him gently but firmly away so you could look into his face in the dim light coming in through the curtains from the street.

Bucky could only watch in awe as your arms fell to your sides and you braced yourself as your legs tightened around him, tilting your hips. To his surprise, he was suddenly pressing against your entrance and your diabolical thighs were tightening to take him inside you. Arching, you thrust yourself onto him, panting in desire, eyes glittering on his as you began to rock gently, inviting him to slide deeper.

Shocked, but hardly displeased, Bucky found the fire of your passion arousing beyond anything he'd ever known before. His eyes were locked onto your face, and the carnal look there had his hips shifting downward to press his cock more deeply into you. You bit your lower lip as he slipped deep and the sight, the sensation, had him shuddering. He dipped his head as he held still to pant and pray for the strength to resist the siren song your body sang, at least until you’d sang in pleasure first. When he thought he’d pulled himself back from the precipice, he gave a little testing thrust that made you purr and forced a groan from deep in his throat.

Finding his mouth only a breath from yours, he closed the gap. As his tongue slid between your lips, you whimpered softly. The sound made him feel a strange combination of feral need and infinite tenderness and he thrust gently to see if he could make you do it again.

The sensation of his cock, rubbing gently deep inside you even as his teeth were scraping over your lower lip, had you shuddering out a sigh of pleasure. Everything seemed both slow and dreamy and yet painfully real and intense.

Bucky devoured your mouth with a tender voracity that had you wrapping your arms and legs around him in desperate need as he pulled slowly out, enjoying every dragging inch. When he slid back into silk and wet, he thought the pleasure would destroy him. You felt covered by him, surrounded by him, filled by him, the feeling so lovely you hummed with the warm bliss of it.

He knew he had only himself to blame for the hard distinction between friend and sometime lover that defined your relationship, but all of a sudden he couldn't stand it anymore. "God, babygirl," he growled as he broke the kiss to drag in air. Your eyes widened in surprise when he took your hands in his and pressed them into the bed next to your head, his elbows outside yours. His body enclosed you as he bent close, nose to nose, his eyes bright and fierce. "How do you do this to me?"

Your breath caught when he started to move more quickly inside you, his eyes still burning into yours, his gaze devouring your face. You were shocked to see that the wall he'd put between you was down and he was showing you everything that had been beneath his studied indifference.

"Bucky," you gasped, the sensation of his body petting yours both inside and out making you breathless with pleasure, despite your confusion, "I'm not trying to hurt you."

Bucky stopped moving at the sound of your voice, pain under the baffled tones making his heart throb in response. His hand moved from its place next to your head to brush his thumb over your cheek to wipe away the trail of the single tear that had fallen down your temple.

“I’m crazy about you, doll,” he murmured, his heart in his throat. “But I’m not safe, and I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone, or you, because you make me crazy.” He hadn’t meant to say it that baldly, but the darkly possessive part of him that existed whether he would or not was in charge right now.

At last, your heart called out, understanding relaxing your muscles and your mind. Instead of letting him surround you, you slipped your arms around his neck, your limbs a twining squeeze, your body caressing him as your hips rocked slowly and deliberately up into his. The honest admission allowed you to let the rest of your questions go, for the moment. He was as lost and confused by this as you were. You could lay back and enjoy being lost in feeling with him in the light of that.

Bucky had admitted to feelings for you. What happened next could wait until you'd dealt with the fire in your body threatening to drive you mad. "Okay," you murmured as you lifted your head to suck soft kisses into the skin of his throat. “Crazy’s okay.”

Bucky couldn't think straight when you touched him like this, all softness and honey. You seemed always able to draw him in, down into a place of dark pleasure and soft torment. Your hands dove into his hair, tugging gently, or skimmed over his back and arms, nails digging in just enough to leave a prickle of sensation. Your thighs tightened rhythmically, lifting your hips to meet his with each thrust.

He caught your eye, watched your face as the tempo of his thrusts increased, your hips moving faster to match him. Pleasure-soaked wonder chased sorrow across your face. Bucky didn't know how, in the moment, to take away the sorrow, though he wanted to do so with all of his heart. As he couldn't relieve it, he shoved forward and up, seeking a new angle with which to drown your sorrow in ecstasy.

Bucky slid one arm beneath your hips and the other beneath your shoulders as he shifted until his knees were under him. At this angle, and with this leverage, he could thrust both deeper and harder. "Crazy’s okay?" he muttered even as his head dipped to sink his teeth into your shoulder in irritated lust.

You laughed, losing your focus in the feeling of being held so tightly against him. His arms were uncompromising bands around you, holding you in place for every brush of his body against yours, every surge of his hips between your thighs. You were wrapped around him like a vine, meeting every thrust with ever-increasing force as you climbed rapidly to peak.

“Just please don’t stop,” you moaned, the tiny warm shivers heralding your impending orgasm. Between the even friction of Bucky’s pelvic bone against your clit and the delicious rubbing of his dick deep inside you, climax was inevitable as long as he kept doing exactly the same thing.

Bucky kept moving at the same force and speed despite his own body urging him to pound into you. Experience had taught him to take you literally in your commands. He was almost immediately rewarded for his restraint when you started to shiver and cling to him while you whimpered in your throat as soft waves of pleasure began to shudder through you.

As your limbs twined around him and squeezed, Bucky kept moving, watching the pleasure move over your face. This was always his favorite part of making love to you, the part where your body took over and molded itself to his in ecstasy. He never felt closer, like he was seeing all of you, than when he looked into your eyes as they blurred and fluttered closed as your climax took you.

When your body went limp in his arms, whimpers for mercy escaping your lips, something primal reached up from the depths of his mind and grabbed him by the throat. With a growl, he loosened his tight grip around your body and gently let you fall to the bed. He lifted up onto his knees, sitting back on his heels, his torso a smooth curve of movement as he sat up. The sight inexplicably sent you right back into wanting him, your core clenching despite the waves of your climax still shimmering through you.

Bucky’s hands were eminently gentle, if inexorable, as they closed around your hips and flipped you with an alacrity and speed you found astounding. Once you were on your stomach, those demanding hands pulled your dress from where it bunched around your waist, down your body and onto the floor. He kicked his jeans all the way off and pulled your hips up so that you were on your knees as he positioned himself behind you. In no way averse to this particular turn of events, you braced yourself on your elbows and clenched your hands in the sheets, knowing from experience that you were about to really enjoy yourself.

A low rumbling growl came from deep in Bucky’s throat as he drank in the sight of you, on your knees, braced and ready for him. He loved seeing you like this, loved that you trusted him with your body completely. He placed the tip of his cock at your entrance, still holding your hips, and watched as he slid easily inside you. He never tired of watching himself join with you, a singular pleasure that gratified something both soft and sexual inside him. Being allowed to be with you like this was more vital to him than he'd realized, the connection more important than he'd wanted to admit. The fear of vulnerability couldn’t counteract the simple satisfaction, however, and he reveled in the sight of that union.

Bucky pulled out slowly, enjoying the gentle rasp of his cock against your walls as he withdrew. You responded by shuddering with pleasure, a ripple of sensation around him that incentivized him to take his time. Wanting to feel more of your skin, he leaned over so that his chest was brushing against your back and his hand was reaching under you to cup your breast. His other arm slid, cool and solid, beneath your hips, right where you were bent at a right angle to receive the hypnotic rocking of his hips against your ass, his cock rubbing deliciously inside you.

"I get primitive about you, can’t help it." His voice was a low rumble as he nuzzled the back of your neck. The way his body was wrapping around you, the feeling of his breath on your skin, the relentless rhythm of his digging hips made you feel like he was surrounding you, filling you, destroying you.

Bucky's teeth closed around the cord of muscle between your shoulder and your neck, squeezing gently. You moaned out loud at the feeling, the slight prickle of his teeth sending shivers over your skin to meet the shudders he was evoking with his fingers plucking at your nipples. "Like that," he murmured against your skin, thrusting in a little harder, a little deeper. "Make that sound again. It makes me crazy."

You laughed, low and breathless as you stretched up into him, pushing back against him as much as you could inside the circle of his body. The sultry sound, along with the soft give and tight clench of your body, made him groan low in his throat and press deep. You responded with another soft moan, the kind that haunted his dreams, and the sound seemed to shoot straight to his stomach. His muscles locked down in response so that he wouldn't let go too soon but resisting the allure of your body was a battle.

You felt him go rigid around you and recognized one of the signals that he'd been pushed over the edge into need, rather than just want. Sometimes the heat between you became something more, something electric, like when lightning follows a volcanic eruption. That eruption was always preceded by this absolute stillness, and when he froze for a moment around you, inside you, the muscles of your thighs flexed in preparation, in anticipation.

Cool air sent goosebumps over your skin as his chest left the skin of your back bare when he straightened behind you. His hands closed around your hips in a tight grip, and you fell to your elbows to lower your head and pant as he slowly pulled himself almost entirely from your body.

The eruption blew through you when his hips started to slam into you. In contrast to the slow, methodical rhythm he'd stuck to until the feeling of your body, the sound of your pleasure had gone to his head, he was now pounding into you with abandon. Fast and hard enough to send crackles of electricity through your whole body with every thrust, he fucked you relentlessly, driving cries of need from your throat.

Bucky loved this moment with you, when everything else, past, present, and future, fell away and there was nothing left but you and him in a timeless moment. The arc of your body spread out on your knees before him was deliciously sexy. The position had the added bonus of keeping him from your all-too-perceptive eyes. He was too afraid that the joy he felt in the feeling of you coming around him would give away how deep his emotions truly ran.

But your voice was calling out his name, pleading for more, demanding satisfaction. Your body was clenching and rippling around him, insisting that he give in and join you in your tumble into ecstasy. Whether you knew it or not, he was yours for the taking; he could not deny you anything.

Still, he had intended to ease back rather than chase his own climax when he felt your hips shift under his hands. In the next moment, you had readjusted your leverage and were pushing back into him with the same relentless force and speed that he'd been driving into you. Pleasure grew teeth and clamped into his spine as he lost the rhythm and came inside you with a shuddering groan and stuttering hips.

When Bucky's moan blended with yours, the quakes rocking through you only increased in intensity. You sobbed with sensation when you felt his fingers dig into the flesh of your hips and ass to thrust as deeply and hold you as tightly as possible. It was a rare thing to make him lose even an iota of control, and the surprise you could hear under the moan told you he hadn't been done when he'd finished. You smiled into the sheets even as you waited for the tremors of your own climax to fade.

He made a sound halfway between a purr and a rumble even as his hands skimmed over your back and ass, thighs and belly as he bent close to press appreciative kisses in between your shoulder blades. The two of you slowly fell into a heap, his arms still wrapped around you as he kept you spooned together even as your bodies naturally separated.

No matter how many times you'd engaged in this activity, he'd never held you like this after. He hadn't been cold, but he had always remained deliberately casual. You weren't really certain what to make of this tenderness. His arms felt like rapture, however, the press of his body against yours a joy, and you had no willpower to remove yourself.

Bucky shifted slowly, easing the both of you onto your sides with his vibranium arm underneath the pillow where your head rested. His other arm curled around your waist to snug you firmly against his body. You felt wrapped in him, cradled by him, and it felt like a warm and generous heaven.

You felt yourself getting drowsy, tempted to fall into the deep slumber that called to you now that both your body and heart felt satisfied, safe in the circle of his body. Unable to face the prospect of waking up alone without any more understanding than you had in this moment, however, you forced yourself to burst the contented bubble that had encircled your bed.

"What was all that jealous shit about?" Your voice was gentle, not wanting to disturb the peaceful atmosphere, but needing to have this out, once and for all. The words he'd poured over you when he'd first walked in and taken you in his arms had stuck inside your mind. They'd been pushed to the side in the tide of pleasure, but now that your skin was cooling and your breathing had returned to normal, all the questions you'd ignored were making themselves known.

Bucky was more relaxed than he could remember being in longer than he'd care to examine. The softness of your bed didn't seem to bother him when he also had the softness of your body caressing his where he'd wrapped himself around you. He had been hovering somewhere between awake and asleep when you spoke and responded with a drowsy, "Hmm?"

"All that shit when you first came in," your voice stayed calm and quiet, but you had no intention of letting this go, "about not wanting me to go out with other people and wanting to hunt down anyone who's ever touched me. That shit."

The length of the following pause may have driven you insane if it hadn't been accompanied by the gentle but firm tightening of his arm around your waist, the way his body seemed to curve even more firmly around you. When he finally spoke, his lips rested against the back of your shoulder and their brushing movement sent shivers through you.

"I'm not rational about you, doll. I…" The warm purr of his voice trailed off, leaving you waiting with ever-increasing impatience as he remained silent. You couldn't tell if he was done, or if he was still thinking about what he wanted to say.

You considered rolling over so that you could see his face, but you weren't sure you had the courage to ask for the answers you needed if you had to look into those guarded, tired eyes. "So this isn't just sex for you?" You were able to control the volume of your voice, able to stay calm, but the ache underneath was crystal clear. "You have feelings?"

You closed your eyes, afraid that your heart, so defenseless out there on your sleeve, was about to be crushed by the kindness of a friend who wanted nothing more. Still, you'd reached your limit, could no longer pretend that you could maintain the careful separation between friends and lovers without damage.

"Too many feelings," Bucky answered in a murmur. Feeling your breath release in a sigh of relief, he realized you'd been holding it in. He'd thought you'd known how highly he thought of you, would understand that his reticence was due to his own fears. It had never occurred to him that you wouldn’t know how much he adored you. "I almost threw that guy out the window tonight.”

The jealous growl of displeasure in his voice rumbled through you and inexplicably made your body tighten in desire. He didn't sound angry, or violent, and so you felt no fear or discomfort at the sound.

“His name is Neil," you retorted, snotty and superior. You felt Bucky's lips curve in a smile against your skin and the sensation encouraged you to keep going. "And you didn't almost do shit. You skulked around the stairwell to eavesdrop like a creep and then knocked on my door to grovel.”

You snuggled back into his arms, feeling the same relaxation that had brought Bucky to the brink of sleep before you'd started this conversation. Now that you knew that there was something to discuss, that there was some emotion here to unravel, you could take your time in doing so. You simply couldn’t stand the uncertainty anymore.

“I wanted to murder him." Bucky was incredulous at how serene you seemed despite his confession. You never reacted to anything the way he expected, always took the things he struggled with in stride. "Why doesn’t that worry you?”

To Bucky's shock, your body softened fully against him, and your voice sounded almost bored when you answered his question with one of your own. “Why should it? You didn't murder him." You shifted your head slightly to peer awkwardly over your shoulder with the mildest of suspicion. "Haven't murdered anyone recently, right?”

“No, but--," Bucky's voice betrayed the confusion your matter-of-fact questions had inspired, but he shook it off quickly and went back to trying to warn you. "I was a weapon, y/n. I'm still trying to figure out what I am now.”

You'd heard this empty tone from him before, whenever you'd poked around the edges of his past. You'd been careful up to this point to treat the subject with kid gloves, not wanting to cause pain or distress. By now, though, you had run out of the energy you needed to tread quite so carefully. You had to speak your mind. “Was a weapon," you retorted wryly. "Is that why you run hot and cold? You're afraid of yourself and you think I should be too?" Your voice was mild, not a trace of resentment or anger, which is why you were surprised when he didn't respond.

After the longest pause yet, you gave into the urge that had been riding you since the beginning of this conversation. This was the closest you'd gotten to real answers, and you wanted desperately to see the look on his face, wanted that extra bit of information to make sense of all of this. Unable to resist any longer, you moved to roll over without leaving Bucky's embrace. His arms loosened to give you room to move, but once you were nose to nose with him, your legs tangling with his, his arm draped itself back over you to pull you close once again.

The sensation of his body enfolding you, the warmth and tenderness with which he held you made it impossible to even imagine being frightened of him. Whatever he'd done before, whatever violence still lived within him, you felt in your soul that you were safe with him, in every way. Your eyes devoured his face, searching the carefully blank expression there for some clue as to what he was thinking.

"Bucky, if you want me to be afraid of you, you're gonna have to make me."

You murmured the words seriously, but Bucky could hear the lightest of teasing underneath your tone. His heart throbbed in reaction, adoring the warmth you showed him so easily, but his face fell into a scowl. "I don't want you to be afraid of me." In fact, he hated the idea, would do whatever it took to make certain he never gave you a reason to fear him. "I don't want to hurt you," he murmured, his voice soft and lost.

"What do you want?" You spoke softly, calmly, afraid to push too much and have him shut down again. He'd been more honest about his feelings tonight than the entire rest of your friendship combined. You were hoping that he was ready to tell you the truth. You needed to know, so that you could make yourself finally decide what to do.

"You." He breathed the word as he took your mouth in a kiss both deep and passionate, but different in character to any other kiss he'd ever given you. This kiss wasn't new in its searing heat, or its desperate need, but it was extraordinary in its sweet tenderness. His lips clung to yours gently, his tongue tangling with yours in soft caresses.

You kissed him back, all your shields down for the first time. Your mouth met his with open devotion, unable to disguise it when he was being so warmly affectionate, so candid in his feeling. You wanted him, had wanted him for months. If there was a chance for more, you were willing to risk nearly anything for it.

He pulled his mouth from yours

"Y/n…" Your name fell from his lips in a rasp of hope, then trailed off at the sight of your lips swollen from his, parted to let gasps of need in and pants of excitement out. His hand came up cup your cheek, his thumb brushing over your lower lip and causing a shuddering sigh to escape you. He wasn't surprised that he was already hard again. He always wanted you more, again. Only the coming dawn had ever chased him from your bed, full satisfaction always out of reach. "What do you want?"

Though you loved his honesty, you didn't love that it obligated you to return it. As much as you wanted to hide, you felt like this was your chance to reach out and grab what you wanted; you simply had to have the courage to tell him the truth of how you felt, as he had done. "I want you to stay until morning." Your voice was a breath of sound, afraid to speak too loudly and startle the woodland creature that you'd convinced to sniff your hand. You didn't want to scare him off. "I want you to care," you gave him a wry half-grin to take the sting out of it, "at least a little."

"I care way more than I'm used to, doll." His arms tightened around you and an exhilarated thrill ran through you at the growl of frustrated desire in his voice. He paused a moment, searching your face. You wondered what he was looking for even as you looked back at him, used to his habit of pausing to consider his words. You knew that he simply needed another moment by the tension in his mouth and patiently waited for him to finish his thought.

Bucky stared into your gentle eyes, wondering if he could resist the tenderness in your face, in your touch, if he even really wanted to. His voice gruff, he told you the truth. "I have nightmares. I'm afraid I'll hurt you in my sleep."

He'd dropped his eyes to your mouth when he made his admission, so he didn't see your eyes soften with the compassion that welled up in you at the admission. You melted like butter in the sun, but still needed to ask basic safety questions.

You kept your voice soft and calm as you asked, "Have you hurt someone else, broken anything?"

"No," Bucky frowned, realizing that he hadn't damaged anything in his sleep since before Wakanda, wondered if Shuri had done even more for him than he'd known, "but I haven't slept next to anyone since…"

Bucky trailed off, realizing he hadn't slept next to anyone in a very long time, that it was the intimacy of doing so that had given the final push each time he'd left your bed before morning came. He didn't want to leave, wanted to sleep with you in his arms, wanted to wake next to you, your face the first thing he would see. All he had to do was take the chance.

You saw him search your face, waited again for him to either keep talking or decide he was done. His eyes warmed with his small, but very real smile, and you saw that he'd made his decision to stay. Your heart swelled with joy and excitement and you smiled fully back.

"For science, then." You leaned in to catch his mouth in a soft, happy kiss. The smirk on your face when you pulled back could only be described as arrogant. "If we're both still here in the morning, I'll make pancakes."

How could he refuse? He loved pancakes, and he adored you. If he was supposed to leave you alone, he didn't know how to do that as long as you liked having him around. If he didn't deserve this kind of happiness, it didn’t matter; he couldn't refuse it. He belonged to you, wanted to claim you in return. He pulled you in tight, so that your legs were tangled together, your arms around one another, your head underneath his chin.

"If I hurt you, I'll never forgive you."

You gave a laughing hum, low in your throat, and snuggled in closer. "I'm obviously totally worried about it."

You woke on your side, Bucky spooning you. His body was curled protectively around you, his arm tight but gentle around your waist as he snugged you into him. His breathing was deep and even and you assumed he was still asleep despite the iron bar of his erection pressed into your ass.

You couldn't help yourself, had to move your skin against the soft skin over steel. Gently, trying not to move too much and wake him, you rocked your hips against him. The sensation of his hot hardness against your ass made you sigh out in pleasure. You kept thinking about how easy it would be to move so that you could trap his cock between your thighs.

Once you'd started thinking about it, you couldn't stop. The thought worked on you until you rocked slowly up and precisely back down until Bucky's dick was sliding between your thighs and through your folds. Once he was there, you paused to breathe in quick, excited pants.

"Thank god you're awake," Bucky rumbled behind you, his hand coming up to cup your breast as he started rocking back and forth between your legs.

His other hand found your clit at the same time you asked, "Powdered sugar and fruit?" You squealed a little when his hips tilted, and he slid slowly and inexorably inside of you. "Or a river of maple syrup?" You finished the question on a breathless gasp of wonder at the sensation.

"First you." He didn't know where the two of you were going, but the two of you had already cleared several hurdles. You made him happy, and he believed he was making you happy, somehow. He'd keep it up as long as possible. "Then pancakes."

When you felt his lips skimming from your shoulder towards your neck, you tilted your head so he could kiss your throat. You gasped when he rested hilt deep inside you, “Well, you are my guest.”

Bucky thought the warm laughter in your voice was one of the loveliest things he'd ever heard. Pulling you in tight, he began thrusting into you slow and easy as he purred in your ear, “Thanks for having me, doll.”

-The End