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Chapter Text

If pressed, Loki would swear up and down the fates that it was complete chance he was in Midtown when he saw his brother. And if Loki had made this trip several times in the last month, past the diner that boasted, “Avengers' Favorite Eats” on the window display, well, that too was a coincidence.

This time, unlike the first...few, there was a small gaggle of tourists taking excited photos by the door, and a familiar blaze of long blond hair behind the tinted diner windows.

Thor.

Loki slowed, then crossed the street to the opposite side at a light jog, his heart rabbiting. It was instinct to avoid this confrontation, to slip away into the shadows. Even as another instinct tugged at him to go back and see how close he could get to Thor.

He wasn’t afraid that Thor would recognize him. Not truly.

The great buffoon with his hammer had never gotten the hang of seeing through Loki’s disguises. Of seeing Loki. Why would this day be any different?

Even if Loki didn’t have his powers of illusion now, his magic crippled and bound by Odin’s spell, he was still a trickster god, and it was a bright, bitterly chilly fall day. A large knit cap hid Loki’s long hair, the scarf obscured most of his face, his bright green eyes were hidden under brown color contact lenses. The rest?

A small spell, the one Loki wore on a thin chain under his shirt and blazer, kept people’s eyes slipping by him, seeing what they expected to see: a harried office worker out on a lunch break. That was a spell it took Loki weeks of careful crafting and multiple failures to finally coax to life. Give it a push, and it would break and collapse. This ghost of power was all that Loki had left to him ever since Odin had bound Loki’s power and sent him to Earth to serve penance under Thor’s watchful supervision.

It had taken Loki less than four full midgardian days to escape. What came after, though. That hadn’t been as easy.

Loki’s fingers rubbed the inside of his right wrist where he’d carved a rune for secrecy onto his skin. This spell had taken much longer to craft, and did something much greater. The rune rested like green ink on his skin, and sometimes, in the quiet moments between trying not to think and thinking too much, he could feel the rune pulsing as it swallowed down his petty stores of magic to stay active. With it, Heimdall’s all seeing eye could not find him. With it, he was safe from Asgard.

For now. For a while yet.

But a skin rune was old magic - effective and dangerous. It would not break, not while there was an ounce of magic in Loki’s body that it could pull on to power itself, not until it drained him dry.

And at which point, Loki supposed, he’d be dead, and Asgard finding him would be the least of his worries.

Desperate times.

For now, though, Loki’s crippled reserves kept up.

Loki stood on the other side of the street from the diner and tried to bring his hammering heart under control. He knew that Thor never paid attention. No tourist would recognize him (why would they?) but it still took almost a full three minutes for him to get his breathing under control and turn around to wait for the light to cross back across the street. The light changed.

Loki couldn’t make himself move. Not until a shoulder jostled him from behind, and he took the first step. The next few came almost on autopilot.

His stomach was churning as his eyes flickered to the diner window, then the diner door, then up and down the street for threats.

Loki thought that he would be angry when he next saw Thor. This was the so-called-brother that had taken him in chains before Odin and stood by when the All Father had sentenced Loki to rot in Asgard’s dungeons. This was the same Thor that mourned over Loki’s body on an alien planet when he thought Loki was dead, then turned on him months later when he realized Loki had survived.

This was the Thor that brought Loki to earth to do penance and thought he could be kept on a leash and under guard, like a prisoner. Or a pet.

And each thought hurt. Loki drifted over to a wheeled cart of tourist chachkies for sale as he stared through the dim diner window at the gold shape of the back of his one-time brother’s hair. Loki was not alone in watching the diner. The New Yorkers going about their business flowed around the tourists that were lollygagging on the sidewalk, hoping for an autograph.

Loki wondered if his own disguise would hold up if he were to walk up to Thor in the guise of a fan asking for an autograph? Would Thor’s eyes light up with recognition, or slide right on by? And what would come after recognition? And Loki’s mind shied away.

He knew the answers to his own questions too well by now.

But still, there was a hollowed out part somewhere in Loki’s chest - the part that had raged as he found a life in a dingy basement apartment in New York City, scraped together a life, unable to leave town, unable to move on. Unable to, without his powers, do anything beyond scavenge on the outskirts of the city’s underworld, and spend sleepless nights trying not to slip into dreams of darkness and ice.

Would it be so bad to take off his hat and unravel his scarf, lean casually against a light post and say, “Greetings, brother.”

His heart twisted.

From down the street, Loki’s watched as Thor’s form moved through the diner, and then stepped onto the street to the excited chatter of tourists. And then, Loki could finally make out his former brother’s lunch companions. The captain and the archer.

Loki’s half-formed plan to approach Thor - in disguise, of course, perhaps as a tourist. Perhaps to -

That all scattered to the wind. The archer would not hesitate to put a knife through Loki’s eye. And with Loki’s powers so bound, so drained by the constant effort to stay veiled from Asgard, he couldn’t be sure -

He wasn’t going to -

Thor and his companions finished signing shirts and arms and photos, and were pushing their way down the street. In less than a minute, they turned the corner and were gone, leaving behind excited chatter and laughter.

There was a bitter taste in Loki’s mouth. It tasted like a missed opportunity.

It tasted like relief.

Thor had looked...happy. Carefree. Like he had moved on and found himself new companions to replace Sif and the Warriors Three with his new Avengers friends.

To replace Loki.

The public was awash in information about the Avengers, but they all boiled down to dramatic exposes about Tony Stark’s life, a new spate of stories about the undying friendship of the two icicle soldier buds (and what were the chances that they both ended up superfrozen and in the future?) and a surprisingly deep rumor ecosystem that placed the Black Widow at the heart of a Kremlin plot to undermine the American Way Of Life. And, of course, this Bucky Barnes, a new player, whom the good captain had rescued after the collapse of SHIELD.

Loki learned more about the Avengers from Clint Barton’s briefing during Loki’s short few days invading Earth than anything else he’d seen since.

Which one of them replaced Loki in Thor’s life?

Or, perhaps, there had been no hole to replace at all.

Loki’s lips twisted, and it could have been a smile.

“Are you getting something?” the man minding the stand of tourist items demanded, and Loki glanced down to see where he had ended up. Avengers merchandise.

“I will take this one,” Loki said, picking up a box of plastic Avengers action figures with one hand, and pulling out a ten dollar bill with the other. “My brother is a fan.”

***

The walk home passed in a blur of unease, Loki’s thoughts scattering like a shoal of fish startled by the shadow of something large passing nearby. Thor’s presence in Loki’s life had always been...outsized. A larger than life shadow. A more brutal betrayal than anything Odin could have managed when Thor threw Loki from the Bifrost and into the timeless void beyond Asgard’s edge.

Loki slipped into an apartment complex, ragged and worn with age and too little maintenance, then continued through it to the back entrance and into the backstreets where there were no cameras or eyes. Another ten minutes, and he was descending the five steps into the basement apartment he rented.

Rented.

As if he weren’t a Prince of Asgard, Trickster god, a sorcerer of the Nine Realms-

Well, he wasn’t any of those, now was he?

He walked through the door, eyes alighting and checking on the sigil on the other side of it to make sure it was intact. It was a faint power, a solid week of almost draining himself dry, to shield the small cramped apartment from prying eyes. Sometimes, the effort to stay unnoticed seemed too much and Loki wanted to cut the rune tattoo from his arm, walk out into the uncaring sun glare outside, stretch his arms out and scream at the sky.

Do you see me? Do you see me now?

Have I made you all proud?

The answer to those questions would always be a resounding no.

It was barely afternoon, but Loki was done for the day. Done for the week, the month, the year.

He dropped the box of Avenger figurines on the small coffee table he’d scavenged from the side of the street. It was the first item he had found and taken home. That first time, months ago, there had been a stillness in his head as he stood on the pavement, stared at the peeling table and its cracked glass panes -

He didn’t need it, he told himself. He could steal the money to furnish himself with elegance. He could con his way into the life of a powerful patron. He could -

It was all truth, and also entirely false.

In that moment, he couldn’t find the energy to scheme.

His long fingers had trailed over the long cracks that crisscrossed the reflection of the sky in the table's glass cover. His own figure was a dark, distorted block in the glass as he stared at the broken, abandoned piece of furniture. A car rolled past and broke the spell, and Loki took the coffee table home.

The first time had been hard.

After: A small, ratty (but comfortable) couch appeared in his small space, followed by a lamp, and a television and three miss-matched chairs. Used, ragged books followed, filling the spaces in between.

Loki turned on the tea pot, and let the low murmur of a news program fill the small space like the illusion of company.

***

He spent the evening reading, looking up only when a familiar voice caught his attention. The news show had switched to a recording of an Avenger’s press conference. Steve Rogers and Tony Stark stood by the podium, both out of costume and in their civilian wear. The archer, Clint Barton, stood on the other side of the group in parade rest. The Black Widow and the Green Beast were nowhere to be seen. It was time to turn off the television.

“ - grateful to have the verdict released this Friday,” Steve Rogers was saying. “It has been a long journey but I am - “

Loki hesitated, the remote in his hand, and his hand hovering in mid-air.

Thor flanked them in his Asgardian armor, and half a step behind him hovered the hunched form of Sergeant Barnes in what looked like a uniform. Army, Loki guessed, but for all he knew, it could have been a costume.

Thor looked out of place on the press conference stage. Like an illusion badly cast - a piece of golden detritus from a foreign planet that had somehow washed up on this shore. 

Perhaps we are not quite so different.

Loki could almost regret not speaking with him earlier. Perhaps next time their paths crossed, Loki could pass by close enough to slip a note into Thor’s pocket. Or a live snake.

Thor loved snakes.

Loki grinned at the thought, and tuned back into the conference. They seemed to be fielding questions about their most recent mission - something about Doctor Doom, infrastructure damage, and whether the metal from the robots could be repurposed without contamination.

“People are calling this attack a repeat of the Battle of New York City. What do you say to that?” A reporter called out and Loki raised his eyebrow. Do tell.

Loki hadn’t even heard about this incident, so it can’t have been all that impressive.

“With the help of New York City’s finest and the implementation of the Emergency Red Alert system, we were able to contain the incident within minutes of learning about it,” Rogers said. “The Battle of New York was the first of its kind. We’re ready now, and we can respond to it quickly and efficiently.”

“We’re so ready. If Loki ever comes back, he won’t know what hit him,” Barton pitched in with a grin, leaning around Rogers. “We can take that antlered bag of crazy with our eyes closed and send him home with his tail between his legs.”

“Have care how you speak,” Thor snapped, glaring over at the archer. With his booming voice, he didn’t need the microphone. “Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard. And he is my brother.”

Why Thor, Loki thought, staring at the screen, and he felt his lips twisting into a wry smile. Thor’s other teammates took that in as the pause stretched. That was both terribly awkward, and sweet.

“With all due respect, Mr. Odinson. It sounds like you are defending what he did,” one of the journalists called out, a blonde woman with bright eyes and an even brighter baring of teeth. “He caused billions of dollars in damages, left thousands homeless, and more than 200 people died in New York City the day of the invasion. What do you have to say to that?”

Thor blinked. “Ah, he’s adopted?”

Captain America rushed into the breach. “Ah, thank you Christine. Does anyone have any questions about Sergeant Barnes or this latest incident?”

Loki stared at the screen, frozen, as hands shot up from the audience.

Adopted. Three years of his life and torment, reduced to a punchline.

Loki's cheeks felt on fire. He looked down at the top of the small coffee table where the small Avengers action figures he’d bought outside a diner were arrayed.

Iron Man and Black Widow were trapped in an empty tea mug, Captain America hanging onto the edge in his attempt to clamber up the side in a doomed-to-fail rescue attempt. (He didn’t even have any rope. That venture was doomed to fail from the start). The archer was on the empty toy box, providing cover.

And Thor - well, somehow during the conference and their adventures across the tabletop, Thor had ended up in Loki’s hands. Loki stared down at the small toy and realized his hands were shaking.

Crack.

He didn’t realize he’d thrown the action figure until he heard the sound and saw the small dent in the wall. The toy bounced to the floor and tumbled to a stop by the closet door. It hadn’t broken, though. Of course it hadn’t broken.

The toy was plastic, and Thor was a god.

And Loki was…not sure why he had expected anything else from his -

From Thor.

From Thor Odinson, son of the man who’d stolen Loki as a babe, bound his magic, lied to him his entire life -

From Thor, who had never truly taken Loki’s side in anything. Not in any way that made the smallest difference.

The coffee table followed the toy across the room with another crash, taking the adventures of the action figure Avengers along with it. On the screen beyond the wreckage, the program went to commercials.

Chapter Text

Two days after the tele-conference and one day after he raided a weapons locker owned by the local criminal element, Loki was rolling his car along a small street. The car was a battered, coughing thing Loki had gotten for next to nothing from a fixer in Brighton Beach - Galina had a nephew who had a friend who was looking for a quick sale - and the machine looked right at home in the worn aesthetic of the port district.

Light from the setting sun glinted off the dark windows of yet another industrial building as Loki turned towards the water, green eyes scanning the empty street. He hadn’t bothered with a disguise for this. He wore a dark tan trench coat over a white collar shirt, his eyes furious and his hair loose around his shoulders. The don’t-look charm around his neck was quiet, deactivated, the protection charm next to it humming along the best it could.

If anyone saw him, let them know.

Let them know that Loki of Jotunheim was here to unsettle their complacency, to take what was rightfully his and -

There.

He saw the building. Nothing set this brick structure apart from its neighbors - small paned windows, a chain link fence, docking bay for deliveries. And somewhere inside, a pile of boxes (or crates, or shipping containers, or trash bags) of ephemera that SHIELD had stowed away. Forgotten and abandoned, not important enough to bother anyone now that SHIELD was gone.

Not important to anyone, that is, except Loki who had spent the last months since his escape digging first through rumors and then through SHIELD and HYDRA’s data dump.

Among the piles of confiscated equipment and contraband, there was a box, and inside the box, a bauble crafted to hold the energy of the universe - or some faint, echo version of it. It was the power that could unlock Loki’s powers. His freedom.

And his vengeance.

Until the conference, this location and item had been at the bottom of Loki’s list - the data too sparse, the location too close to the Avengers' home base.

After the conference, Loki was done waiting. He’d find this item of power, use it to break Odin’s curse, and burn the city down.

Loki’s eyes drifted along the fence as he pulled over to the side of the small side street. His eyes caught on the large white sign tacked to the fence as he put the car in park.

Stark Industries.

Property of Stark Industries. No Trespassing.

Loki’s hands clenched on the steering wheel and the plastic buckled under his strength.

Apparently, Stark Industries had taken over this building after the fall of SHIELD. Instead of some defunct alarm system, this place would have state of the art security that would ring to hell and back the moment Loki vaulted the fence. If Loki was particularly unlucky, Iron Man would come sweeping across the sky to investigate the break in himself.

Loki had been so close. The smart thing would be to keep driving. To wait. Find another source. Another item of power.

Loki would stay a prisoner for a while yet. Maybe for weeks more.

Months.

Years.

While Thor lived it up, free and cracking jokes with his friends.

The thought of having to live just one extra minute like this, worthless and wretched and powerless, filled Loki’s mind with cold static, his ears with a high pitched whine.

The cold rage that had driven Loki for the last two days turned incandescent.

His body was moving before he quite realized it, swinging out of the car and stalking to the trunk. He dumped the bag he’d acquired from a storage locker owned by the Russian mob on the ground, with less care than he should have considering the explosives inside, and yanked the separator up from the bottom of the trunk. There, the grenade launcher.

In case he ran into Thor. Perfect.

Loki swung the strap of the duffel bag over his neck and shoulder, secured it with a twist, and set the missile into the grenade launcher with a clang. His hands were steady and the motion smooth, and some part of him was surprised at that. He put the weapon on his shoulder, and crossed the street. With a jump, he grabbed the top edge of the chain link fence and pulled himself over.

Dropping to the ground, Loki took two steps and braced his feet.

He pulled the trigger and the building exploded in noise and fire.

***

Much later, Loki would be forced to admit that shooting a grenade launcher straight into a brick wall less than thirty feet away was, perhaps, not his most clear-headed decision. Using up the only tool he had that had a chance against one of the more resilient Avengers...well, even amid the smoke and adrenaline rush of his rage, Loki knew he needed to be gone by the time anyone investigated.

Before the Avengers investigated.

The backfire from the rocket launcher had blown out the car windows behind Loki. The actual blast had filled the air with smoke and debris, and Loki’s face stung from nicks and scrapes.

Loki dropped the grenade launcher and stalked forward through the smoke, his ears ringing and the world shimmering in front of him in smoke. Making his way over the debris, he could see the north wall in front of him had a gaping hole in it, bricks and plaster hanging like jagged teeth around the edges, bits of flame sputtering and spitting embers into the air.

Loki coughed and swiped his face, as he climbed through and tried to orient himself in the large building. His eyes, still preternaturally sharp, adjusted quickly to the smoky murk inside.

Crates. The building was full of rows upon rows of crates. Well, he’d known that.

Loki strode down the rows of wooden containers, hand placing an explosive plate on every fifth crate, the wire unraveling behind him, as his eye scanned their sides and his heart pounding along his still-ringing ears. When he reached the last explosive, he stuck it on a load bearing wall, and jammed the trigger device into his pocket.

He was looking for a needle in a warehouse. But he had come prepared. The SHIELD files gave him a number, F4662, and bless the little mortal bureaucratic hearts, each crate in this building had a number sprayed in white on the side. He kept his cough smothered in the acrid smoke from the explosions.

His time was running out.

Within a few more boxes, Loki understood the filing system. He broke into a jog. One aisle, two...

There.  Crate, with large stenciled letters. F4662-69. 

Loki wedged his fingers into the small space between the wood slats to lever the top off. The wood and splinters dug in, but he still had some of his old strength - enough that the wood gave with a creak and came off.

The fire suppression system finally kicked in, turning the sprinklers on across the warehouse. The water slicked Loki’s hair and made a shudder run through him at how much the pounding in his ears sounded like thunder.

Just the sprinklers. Or perhaps an override from Stark's security systems.

Loki needed to get out of there.

Inside, boxes lay amid packing straw and Loki tore through them. Halfway through the crate, his hand brushed a box and it was like touching a livewire. A buzz of sensation, pure magic.

His hearing was going in and out, but he could hear himself panting as his hands scrabbled at the plain rectangular shape. He had it. In his hands.

It was the size of a thick hardback novel, the box wrapped in paper and twine, and Loki’s fingers tore at the ties and -

Crash.

The roof exploded as something dropped through metal and concrete in a blaze of gold metal and shining white lights. Iron Man burst down through the roof and landed amid the debris in a half crouch and a blaze of light. The armor straightened with a whir of servos and one metal hand came up, repulsor whining as it pointed at Loki.

Loki froze, his fingers aching in their death grip on the box. Inside the box, he could feel the pulse of the object of power inside. He just needed a little bit of time.

A little bit of time and space and a quiet workshop, too.

Instead he had a so-called hero in glowing armor, a building on fire, water in his eyes and smoke inhalation. And a trigger for blowing half the building useless in his coat pocket.

“Hey Rudolph, long time no see,” Iron Man’s metallic voice cut through the rush of falling water. “You know you can’t just steal my stuff. It’s an earth thing. Drop it.”

“I drop it,” Loki called out, holding the bundle out to the side as if to do just that, his teeth bared. His other hand came to rest at his hip. “This entire building comes down. Would you care to see how that ends?”

Loki’s chest was heaving to control the cough building its way in his lungs, and he turned the sound into a laugh. He knew he looked deranged and wild, but if he started coughing, he didn’t think he could stop.

“Crashing your way into a warehouse, setting off every alarm between here and the next county over and then blowing up a building with yourself in it? Not a great plan,” Iron Man said, the repulsor aimed at Loki whining as it cycled power. “Seems to be a thing with you. Not enough time in the workshoping phase?”

But Iron Man had paused before he replied - to relay a warning to his teammates, perhaps - and that told Loki all he needed to know. One of the baseline humans must be near, or on their way.

Well, if Clint Barton were anywhere near here, Loki had no doubt the archer would have put at least one arrow into Loki by now.

“Ah, but what about your little spider?” Loki said, his arm still outstretched as held the box like a threat. He gave it a wave and gave Iron Man a smirk. Look here, not there. The fingers of his other hand found the switch on the remote detonation device through the material of his coat. “The one who sprung my trap? You should hurry, she doesn’t have long.“

“The hell are you -”

Loki flicked the switch. In that same same moment, he lunged to duck behind the crates, box under his arm, and hit the ground in a roll. Behind him, the crate where he had just been shattered in an explosion of propulsor blast and wood shards. And another second later, the entire east side of the building exploded in a chain of fiery crates and shattered concrete columns.

Iron Man’s attention was split - save his teammate from Loki’s nonexistent trap, or go after the fleeing trickster god. And from the lack of missiles at his back, it appeared that the bluff and the smoke had bought Loki time.

Loki stuffed the box into the duffle bag at his chest and raced towards the west side of the building. A beam landed with a scream across his path and he vaulted it. Beyond lay the pier and river - Loki’s best bet for a wet and undignified escape.

Loki burst through a set of windows and landed on the pavement in a crouch and patter of broken glass. The setting sun almost blinded him, water streaming from his soaked clothes and hair. Loki coughed, tears streaming to clear the smoke from his eyes, and spun around -

No Iron Man. Not yet.

Loki ran down the alleyway, the dull metal gleam of shipping containers ahead was a welcome sight. He was almost to the water.

A movement flashed in the corner of his eyes. He spun around just in time to see the Black Widow emerge like a wraith from around the side of a shipping container, her leathers blending with the long evening shadows and her hair in her braid swinging like a red war banner.

The woman pointed a gun at him in one smooth motion, and shot.

Loki dodged, and instead of his heart, the bullet punched through his shoulder in a spray of blood. He felt the protection stone fail in a zap of energy before he felt the pain of the wound. The Black Widow’s eyes widened slightly in shock and she hesitated.

Her shot should have been a mere annoyance to the Asgardian prince, but instead, Loki staggered, snarling and bleeding.

Surprise.

Not an Asgardian prince anymore.

Loki was barely anything anymore.

“I’ve engaged Loki,” she spoke quickly. “I’m fifty yards from the pier, shooting to incapacitate.”

Fury and panic tangled in his chest, the pain in his shoulder rushing through him in stabbing splinters. The runes on his wrists pulsed, a painful tug, like a rope tied to his heart. Loki wobbled back, teeth bared. The Black Widow’s expression steadied as she aimed for his other side. But Loki’s foot slipped under him, sending him sprawling on the ground. Her shots went wide and Loki barely caught himself from face-planting into the iced over puddle under his hand.

Ice?

He didn’t have time to think about it. The fall bought him a second, and it was long enough for him to grab the drained protection stone on his neck. With a yank, the chain snapped, and he sent it skittering along the ground at the spy. She dodged, leaping out of the way and taking cover behind the container once again.

It would be a couple seconds before she realized it was not some kind of magic grenade.

Loki didn’t hesitate.

He turned and ran down the thin alley between the pier and the remaining wall of the burning building. His shoulder blazed with hot, angry agony. But it wasn’t his first - or even thousandth dance with pain - and he ignored it.

The concrete just a few meters in front of him exploded in pieces of asphalt and the sound of a repulsor blast.

Loki skidded to a halt, panting.

“End of the line, Rambo,” Iron Man said, strafing out from around the building, his armor scorched but whole. In the distance, Loki could hear the roll of approaching thunder. Lightning flashed.

Loki was out of time and out of tricks.

“You’re looking quite a bit worse for wear there. Last chance. Don’t make this harder than - “

The world went white.

Chapter Text

Much much much later, with the help of the early frazzled news reports and the later wild conspiracy theories, Loki was able to reconstruct the sequence of events. Somewhere in the warehouse, among the forgotten collections of low-priority SHIELD artifacts, something in a well packed crate had not reacted well to Loki’s impromptu barbecue. It reacted.

Explosively.

Or perhaps it reacted to another item’s reaction. Or to getting wet. Or there was a gas line in the building.

Or the fates were laughing.

Hell only knew.

The resulting explosion took what was left of the building and demolished it. The concussive blast sent Iron Man spinning off course, his propulsors struggling to compensate for the force and avoid the flying shrapnel.

At the same time, the explosion took out the remaining west side of the building and threw Loki more than thirty meters, to land, like a rag doll into the ice cold waters of the upper bay.

Loki came to choking, hands scrabbling at the black water that surrounded him. Something large and heavy - concrete and rebar - slammed into his side, dragging him down for a good few meters before instinct took over and Loki managed to twist himself away.

So that's down. Pieces from the building, thrown by the explosion, sank past him, like large, strange shaped fish flashing in the black waters.

His right arm wasn’t working right, he realized when he tried to swim upward, his chest convulsing as he fought the instinct to inhale. With preparation, he could hold his breath for minutes. With magic, he wouldn’t have needed preparation; he could have stayed underwater for hours.

Loki had none of those things, and only a best guess of where upward even was. Panic was beginning to set in, sparkles beginning to dance in Loki’s vision, when a blaze of hot white light from the sky lit up the water. Thunder rolled after, the rumble thrumming through the water like the heavy beat of a drum.

Loki oriented himself to the flashing lights, and swam for the surface.

His head burst out of the water with a broken gasp. Lighting ripped across the sky above, illuminating the choppy waves studded with floating debris. Beyond, Loki could make out the angry red flames of what used to be Tony Stark’s recently acquired warehouse of artifacts.

A wave sent Loki under briefly, sputtering and choking. When he came up, it was just in time to feel the skies open up and dump a deluge of water in a heavy sheet of rain that just went on and on. It obscured everything, the burning warehouse becoming a mere red glow in the distance.

Loki coughed painfully and started swimming parallel to the shore. The water wrapped around him like an icy hug, the runes the only part that felt warm as they burned against his skin. Was Asgard looking for him even now? Or was his magic too drawn down and beginning to fail?

He was too close; he couldn’t afford to fail now.

Loki struggled for each meter of distance he put between himself and the Avengers, the bag around his neck heavy as if filled with bricks and swearing in his head to the rhythm of his strokes, switching between the midgardian languages he knew to keep from repeating himself.

By the time he realized he had to get out of the water or risk drowning by fainting, he was half frozen. He crawled up a boat ramp, still too close to the warehouse - he could still make out the faint glow of the warehouse through the cursed rain, though the pouring thunderstorm made it impossible to make anything out in the smoke-filled street.

It gave Loki cover, even as the rolls of thunder made him shudder and eye the skies, and he staggered to take cover by the walls of the nearest building. He started walking, using the brick walls to keep himself upright with his last, functional arm.

Loki made it two more blocks before he collapsed, his lungs moving in an uneven and ragged rhythm that made it impossible to catch his breath. His vision sparked and darkened at the edges in time to the throbbing of his runes. Or perhaps it was the lightning flashing across the sky.

He could hear sirens in the distance. Was the rain easing up?

Someone probably had a heart to heart talk with Thor the Thunderer by now about his temper tantrum.

Loki knew he was going to lose consciousness soon. And once that happened, it would be a race to see what got him first - the Avengers or his magic.

No. He was so close. His remaining functioning hand scrabbled at the zipper of the bag which had, miraculously, stayed strapped around his chest. It took him a few tries to find the box. He pulled it to his chest where its quiet hum felt like coming home.

Loki was not going to fail this close to his goal. In less than a day, Loki had faced earth’s mightiest heroes, burned down Tony Stark’s warehouse, stolen an object of power, and gave his brother this slip again. He refused to bleed out in a dirty alley on Midgard, his freedom literally in his hands.

Loki forced himself up again, box cradled against his chest, and started walking. He made it maybe another block before he saw it. An awning, and empty paper boxes, stacked flat against the brick wall. He collapsed beside them and dragged the pile on top of him - nothing to see here, just destitution and poverty of humanity. The lingering rain had washed away the worst of the blood and at some point, Loki realized he’d stopped shivering.

That was a problem, but Loki’s thoughts kept skittering away from him when he paid them too much attention. It didn’t make sense, though. His injuries shouldn’t have counted. Loki had walked off worse when the green beast had attacked. He’d survived so much worse when Th-

No, he wasn’t -

He didn’t think about that.

The rain was easing up, but thunder and lightning still rolled across the sky. The sound covered the sound running footsteps until they were almost on top of him.

And at that point it was too late.

Right there, under the awning and two feet from a back entrance, Loki was a dark shape under the blanket of toppled cardboard boxes that shielded him from the rain - and from the bright flare of flashlight that swept the street. Loki’s don’t-look-at-me charm tried to flicker to life, and died with a silent and almost apologetic whine of escaping energy. And then all that was left was the cold and wet and an inevitable discovery.

But the footsteps didn’t even slow as they passed the huddle that was Loki.

There was more than one way to be invisible, Loki thought, absently. And with another sickening pulse of rune magic, he passed out for the second time in less than an hour.

***

This time, waking up felt like a slow, aching climb out of a dark, cold well. The first thing Loki felt on regaining consciousness was how worryingly slow his lungs were working. He exhaled, and for what felt like minutes, he didn’t feel the need to inhale. Resting still seemed simpler, his entire self balanced in some strange, almost comfortable knife’s edge between being alive, and just being.

Another moment, and his lungs decided they did need the oxygen and expanded on a breath.

Loki blinked his eyes open slowly, frost pulling on his eyelashes where it had pressed them to his face. The pale pink light of morning was beginning to creep across the sky. Everything felt heavy and was he sure he wanted to wake up.

He contemplated that thought of sliding away into that tempting bit of sleep and quiet again. The box, still pressed to his chest, made the decision for him.

Loki wanted his powers back. He was just a few good decisions away from getting his powers back.

He’d rest later, when his enemies were broken and in ruins at his feet.

That last thought galvanized him enough that he could push himself up with his uninjured arm. The carboard of the flattened boxes that he'd used as shield and blanket stuck to him, half frozen to his clothes and skin, and left pieces on him when they finally toppled off.

He wasn’t sure how he got up, and wasn’t entirely sure how he got moving either. But some homing instinct took him down the sidewalk, out past the empty street that was blocked off with police tape, and towards his place.

It should have been an hour brisk walk on a good day. But that barely there dawning of a day was not, by any definition of the word, good. Some hindbrain instinct for self preservation took Loki down the camera-free alleys he’d memorized on the maps, and down the roundabout roads that eventually, slowly brought him to his door.

All the while, the box in his arm was like a promise: everything was going to be okay.

Unlocking the door without letting go of the box was a challenge to his stuttering brain, and he imagined that this was what drunk mortals felt like. Drunk and, perhaps, run over by a bus a few times. But eventually he managed the key. He managed the door.

And he even managed to lock it behind him.

I did it.

Loki had done it. He had taken on the Avengers and won. He had found and retrieved his prize. He had eluded pursuit.

Part of him expected to hear the propulsor blast of Iron Man at his door any moment now. Part of him just wanted to collapse and sleep.

But just in case, just in case, the Avengers or their clever law enforcement allies somehow tracked him down, he couldn’t afford to rest yet. His entire body feeling like one giant bruise that had been stuffed full of sharp, uncomfortable pieces of broken glass (- he’d had worse. He wasn’t going to think about it, but he’d had worse. This would not end him - ), Loki staggered to the couch and put the wrapped box on the table.

Slowly and one handed, his fingers clumsy, he pulled apart the twine and heavy wrapping paper to uncover a small wooden box, its top and sides inlaid with carvings. The soft hum of protective magic purred under Loki’s hand, keeping the orb inside protected and hidden from his senses. The box alone was too weak to be of use to Loki in what he needed. He needed a real object of power - an object that stored power that he could access.

Loki could not see the spellwork of the curse that Odin had placed upon him - just felt the suffocating weight of it like a falcon tethered and hooded on its perch. But he could guess at how Odin’s work had been done. How Loki would have gone about doing it. It was a dam that redirected power. But make a crack in the dam with a single powerful pull of power, and the universe’s magic would flow through. Keep pulling on that flow, and the entire structure would shatter around it.

Now, Loki had the object of power. He just needed to pull.

Gently, almost reverently, the box on his lap, Loki unhooked the clasp and tipped the lid open.

A colorless crystal orb the size of an egg lay on a black velvet cushion. Carefully, Loki picked it up and stared at it.

He closed his eyes and sat very still.

There was -

There was nothing.

No power, no magic, no energy.

Not even a hint of a spell in the depths of the crystal. It could have been a fancy paperweight. Perhaps it was. 

Perhaps it had lost its power over the centuries. Or perhaps the real orb of power had been lost to time or hidden by someone more clever than SHIELD. Perhaps it was just a fake.

Loki wanted to scream and throw the useless thing and watch it shatter. But he hurt too much. It hurt too much.

Instead, Loki placed the lifeless ball of crystal gently back in the cradle of its cushion setting in the box, stood painfully, and walked the five steps to the bathroom. He leaned against the sink and stared at his reflection, because he needed to share this moment with someone, anyone, and this was the best he had. The best he’d ever had, really.

Wide green eyes watched him back he reached up and wiped his face with a bloody hand, the streaks of smoke and grime that the rain had failed to wash away. His hair had been singed by the blast, the ends ragged. A bruise was forming on the entire right side of his face and his clothes hung on him, wet and torn in chunks.

He had been so close. His eyes stared back. They seemed almost shocked at his failure; they judged him for it.

Loki felt like he himself would shatter from a sudden move.

He had been mere moments away from getting his powers back, having the energy of the universe winding its way around him like a charmed cat. The power of illusion at his fingertips, the paths of the universe just a slip and slide through the gaps between dimensions.

Instead, all his hopes and expectations had collapsed like a house of cards.

Instead, Loki began the slow process of pulling off his ripped clothes one handed and dealing with the damage underneath.

The awareness of his absolute failure that day stayed with him.

As did the look in his eyes.

Chapter Text

“Listen, Thor, We haven’t found a body. That’s a good thing.”

Thor ignored Tony, his face set in intense concentration as he stared at the suit’s captured image of his little brother on the tablet in front of him. Loki was caught by surprise in that still, eyes wide, in a grime-streaked face, his long jacket a mess, one sleeve ripped to shreds up to his elbow and the other sleeve soaked dark with blood. Moments later, the building would explode and Loki would be gone again.

All the Avengers had gathered in a large conference room on the thirty ninth floor, Steve, Natasha, and Bruce sitting around the large table, piles of paper and several tablets scattered on the metal and wood surface. Clint was sprawled on a rolling chair, pushed far from the table, a stapled packet of documents in one hand, a pen twirling in the fingers of the other. He hadn’t looked at anyone since the debrief began.

Thor was still on his feet, looming over the table. He’d refused to settle, scowling at the chairs like the very concept of sitting at such a time offended him.

Tony paced the space as he flicked through the holograms he had rigged in the so-called mission room. Usually, they met there to go through the intel they’d collected on their enemies, or debrief after battle. Tony filled the silence.

“Thor, buddy, I know that looks bad, but his injuries had to be an illusion. You said it yourself. Why would a gun hurt him? It was a trap to lure us in and blow us up, that’s all,” Tony said, his fingers swiping through different screens on his own tablet. “I scanned for body heat after, and there was no one in the area but first responders and police. He must have teleported out, if he was even there in the first place.”

Thor stared down at the footage for another long moment, then looked up with a nod, and clapped his hand on Tony’s shoulder as the man’s pacing took him within Thor’s reach. “You’re right, Tony. Loki is too clever by half. This is just like one of his tricks.”

“We’re running down the car right now,” Tony said with a strained smile. “We’ll find him.”

“Thank you, my friends,” Thor looked around the room. He picked up the stack of printed out stills. “May I take these?”

“Of course.”

“I must go, but I will return anon,” Thor pronounced, nodded at the people arrayed around the room. On his way out, he passed Bucky who had appeared to hover uncomfortably at the doorway, wrapped in an oversized gray hoodie.

“We will let you know if we hear anything,” Steve called to Thor's retreating back. Otherwise, the room was quiet for a long moment, as they listened to the elevator ding and carry Thor away.

Natasha looked up from the SHIELD storage inventory manifesto. “Loki looked pretty rough at the end there, assuming it’s even him. We all saw the suit footage when the building blew. If he could magic himself away, why didn’t he do it earlier?”

“Don’t let Thor hear you,” Tony said. “We owe it to him to assume old antler head survived the plunge. Divers haven’t found anything, at least.”

“It’s the bay. There’s the tide,” Natasha said with a shrug.

“Were we able to get any samples of blood from the scene?” Bruce asked, looking at Natasha.

“Too much rain.”

“But you’re sure it was real blood?”

“Yeah, I touched it when I went after him,” Natasha said. “Thor said his illusions have no physical form.”

“And we still have no idea what he was after,” Tony said.

It wasn’t a question, but Clint said what they were all thinking.

“If we’re lucky, he’s dead and it no longer matters.”

Chapter Text

Loki opened his eyes the next morning to find his body one giant swell of agony. His mind, though, was still and clear. There was a very specific flavor to this feeling. Over the years, Loki had grown to know it too well - that strange almost dissociation of waking up as if from a dream and seeing the last few days (- in some cases, weeks. Once, almost an entire year, but he didn’t think about that anymore - ) in the brilliant, sunbright light of clarity.

The last forty-eight hours of fire and fury played back in Loki’s mind, image after excruciating image. Closing his eyes didn’t change the truth, nor stop the slow parade of memories.

He had pursued a lead with no confirmation or planning. He had raided a local mob boss’ weapon stash. He had provoked the Avengers into battle with no back-up plan. He brought down a building around himself and lost his car. He had almost frozen to death in the back alley of a shipping yard.

Loki wished he could pretend his quick thinking saved him, but he was too familiar with lies to fail to see the truth. He had gotten lucky.

He had lost himself again and was lucky to be alive. He owed his life to chance and Iron Man’s reluctance to go full out after Thor’s little brother.

And after everything, Loki was left with nothing again.

Certainly, a theme in his life.

No, the encounter hadn’t left him with nothing. Loki tried to shift to sit up on the couch, and then just settled for turning his head.

The box that was the cause and goal of last night’s misadventure lay open on the coffee table in front of him. The small orb inside was still dull - a powerless fake, or perhaps the real deal, but long ago drained of any magic it might have once contained.

He reached for it carefully with his left hand but it was too far, and the angle too awkward.
The green rune marks at his wrists were scabbed and throbbed in time to the pain in Loki’s head. At least two ribs were cracked, hopefully not broken, from his time in the water. There was something...wrong with his right arm from the shoulder down.

The bleeding had stopped, the bullet had gone through, but the night had not been kind to his injuries and his arm barely twitched when he tried to move it. Nerve damage, perhaps, Loki thought as he pulled his arm across his chest with his left hand. He didn’t have the magic reserves to do anything about it right now.

Loki had to do better next time.

He could hardly afford to do worse.

***

The resolution to do better next time came easily.

The immediate next steps for how to do that came a little slower.

Without his powers, Loki had a chance against perhaps only the weakest Avengers. Certainly, he was still stronger than a baseline human, and his knife-fighting skills were nothing to scoff at. He could, perhaps, still craft a misdirection spell without completely passing out from the strain. And ultimately, with enough years of planning and shoring up his resources, clambering to the top of this or that underground organization, or a clever enough ruse, he could put something together that would hurt the Avengers.

But now? In a world in which the Avengers traveled in groups, lived in their high tower fortress, and harnessed the green beast…

Loki needed his powers back. He needed to heal. He needed a direction.

He needed a win.

In the meantime, he cut his burned hair short, changed his makeshift bandages, and rested as his body healed.

Slowly.

Excruciatingly slowly.

Slowly enough that Loki found himself wondering during yet another sleepless night on the couch if the unholy pairing of Odin’s curse and Loki’s own runework had somehow combined to smother Loki immortality, doomed him to live and heal and age and die as a mortal. He dismissed the thought as foolish, but the idea took root and Loki found himself more than once on the internet, worriedly perusing health websites to measure his own healing against the medical texts.

He was, still, even as weakened as he was, healing faster than a mortal. As for the idea of aging within a mortal life span, well, he’d rather die than face that.

Well, you would, a sardonic part of him pointed out. Die, that is.

That was the whole point of old age.

Loki’s brooding thoughts, the painful ache healing, and recent memories of yet another failure did not make for good company. Several times, he'd even tried to, well, he'd thought of the ice he thought he remembered on the ground during his run-in with the Black Widow on the pier, and he held a cup of cooling tea in his hands and watched absolutely nothing happen to it.

Even before, this part of his, what he was, he hadn't been able to access it, not without an object of power like the Casket of Ancient Winter or the touch of a frost giant and he did not like thinking of it and it was almost a relief when his halfhearted thought to turn water into ice with his mind too revealed itself to be a dead end.

Loki put the ice out of his mind. It had been cold that evening, that was all. 

His hands kept drifting over the small wooden carved box he had claimed from SHIELD’s warehouse, the soft buzz of magic like the purr of a sleeping cat under Loki’s fingers. He could pull out this magic to speed his healing. But then the magic item would too be drained, inert, and useless, like the small crystal bauble that it came with.

Like Loki -

Loki pulled his fingers away and grabbed the television remote instead. It was either that, or thinking, and Loki was tired of thinking.

As Loki first settled into this mockery of life on Midgard, he found small tasks for his mind to dwell on. Learning the language and culture was one of them, first through simple daytime soap operas and education programs, then reality television, and then, finally, to the talk shows and news reports, with their rapid speech and quick flow. Books and the internet helped with the written word, until finally, Loki could almost entirely bypass the universal translation spell that was All Speak. After English came Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and even a refresher on some old Norse. Loki was surprised that he remembered more than he thought he would.

As he healed, Loki found himself revisiting a comfortingly pointless cooking show with innumerable episodes and their simple and childish emotional arcs.

Sooner than he wanted to, his rapidly emptying kitchen and larder forced him on a short night walk to a nearby market - arm in a sling, scarf wrapped snugly around his face, long coat just a tad too warm for the weather, but not yet conspicuous. Walking helped with the not-thinking.

No Avengers tracked him down to his door. Loki took that as the victory it was.

He hadn’t liked the idea of having to move.

Technically, Loki had a storage unit he could use, and an apartment under an assumed name a half hour walk from his current residence that he could have retreated to - a small place, paid through the year with money from a crushed ATM machine. Loki had meant to move in shortly after he signed the lease under a false name, but had delayed. And then delayed some more. It was just not -

Loki refused to use the word home to describe the destitute basement with its small space, dank smell and ragged furnishings. But sometimes, when Loki looked around at the water damage on the walls and the cracks in the coffee table, the place seemed to fit how he felt. It reminded him of what he’d lost and why he needed to keep fighting. Comfort would have been an illusion that he could drown in and pretend everything was fine.

Plus, Loki had already drawn the runes for secrecy and protection into these old basement walls. He wasn’t keen on the idea of having to do it all over again.

And so the days passed.

And Loki healed.

And his plotting went nowhere.

Loki had compiled a list of items of power, notes on locations, dates cross-referenced. But they were all out of reach - the eye of Asgard made travel difficult, and movement cross country or cross the Atlantic would expose Loki like a mouse skittering across the empty space of a field under the watchful cold gaze of an owl. No, better to stay amid the millions of skittering human bodies of this city. But that left him no simple options.

Just as Loki was feeling well enough to begin to eye photos of the Stark Tower, wondering if he should just take a leaf out of the Mandarin’s book and get his hands on some drones and explosives, Loki’s contact came through with an email about another set of recently unencrypted SHIELD data.

When the SHIELD leaks happened, Loki had still been reeling from his binding and banishment to Midgard, fresh from giving Thor the slip, and busy negotiating for his basement apartment. By the time he’d settled in and gotten his hands on some technology (because if anything, Loki was good at adapting to local technology on whatever planet he landed on), SHIELD’s fall was beginning to slip into the second and third pages of the news, Loki was still a wanted man, and a lot of the information from the dump had been pulled. What was left and available looked just a little bit like cheese in some digital mouse trap.

So instead, he had found Galina, an information broker in Brighton Beach and for an envelope of dollars and a home-made version of a truth serum made from scrounged materials and a spark of power (partially effective, side effects may vary), she promised to get him an unencrypted thumb drive of Hydra’s greatest hits that he was fairly certain wouldn’t land him on the radar of law enforcement. They had maintained a relationship ever since.

The afternoon was overcast, the gray clouds threatening rain when Loki headed down to Brooklyn, dark coat swishing, all the way south until he hit Brighton Beach. Galina Arkadiyevna - Babushka Galya as she was known to her customers - ran the small apothecary squeezed in between a dumpling shop and a laundromat. The place sold all sorts of standard (and some not-so-standard) herbal supplements, and had one ear to the ground of the seedy underbelly of Brighton Beach that was the Russian mafia.

Loki had first come to her shop for her stock, but kept coming back for the gossip. She, in turn, appreciated Loki’s interest, glib tongue, money, and his willingness to occasionally sell or trade some of his more interesting concoctions. They never spoke of it, but Loki suspected she thought he was a contractor with a penchant for information and hard-to-trace poisons. He leaned into the role with an occasional oblique comment about a business trip. His reputation - or rather, the reputation of Michael Brinsky - opened doors.

“Babushka Galya, I picked up some jam for you on my way here,” Loki said, as he made his way past the crowded shelves to the counter where the woman was measuring ingredients into a bag. He pulled a jar out of the plastic bag on his arm. “It’s black currant, your favorite. I was hoping I wouldn’t be too late to join you for tea.”

“Misha! It is never a bad time for tea,” Galina said. “Come, come to the back and we will catch up.”

Galina was the quintessential old Russian lady, eyes bright like a jackdaws, her chestnut hair mostly hidden under a dull red paisley scarf tied under her chin, the blouse, cardigan and long skirt giving her the air of an old country grandmother.

Good for business, she had told Loki a couple visits ago, the heavy crows feet around her eyes crinkling as she laughed. Everyone knows you can trust an old babushka.

When she forgot to play up her age, Galina moved with the energy of a much younger woman.

On some visits, their conversations over tea lulled Loki into an awkward sort of homesickness that stayed lodged in his chest for hours after. They reminded him of happier, more ignorant times when he would settle into a warm afternoon with his mothe- with Frigga, and the conversation that wandered into philosophy, palace gossip, magic, gardening, and any hundreds of other topics.

Then again, like afternoon tea with Galina, those sunny Asgardian moments were no less a farce and a lie. Like most things in Loki’s life.

Galina led Loki through a doorway hung with bead strings to the small stock room and kitchenette area in the back. Mirrors hung around the walls, bringing an extra bit of reflected space and light into the cramped room, and letting the old woman keep an eye on the room no matter how she stood.

She put out a neat set of tea cups on the small table as she crooned over Loki’s short hair - so much nicer and neater for a nice boy like him - and fussed with a bowl of bread-rings. Newspapers sheets covered the surface instead of tablecloth and they rustled as Loki folded his tall frame onto the small wooden stool and took off his gloves. The muffled sounds of music filled the quiet as Galina shuffled back with an electric kettle full of water and set it up next to the chipped china.

As the water heated and bubbled in the plastic pot, Galina shared her latest news; her nephew was driving her to distraction, her neighbor had recently gotten a small but rather loud dog, and she was sure her new assistant wouldn’t last the month.

“Anton is a sweet boy, but he just doesn’t have the head for keeping all the orders straight. Isn’t a strong thinker either,” Galina explained. “A customer asked for a box to carry his purchases - almost a hundred dollars worth! - so Anton gives him a box from the back and then the silly boy tells the man he has to come back and bring the box back. A plain old cardboard box, just imagine! - ”

Loki nodded along and sipped his tea, waiting for a lull before he nudged the conversation towards business. “I was glad to get your call. It’s been too long since I visited.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, I almost forgot. This old brain of mine isn’t as sharp as it used to be. I have that drive for you,” she said, turning around in her seat and pulling a worn hardback off the shelf behind her. She removed an envelope from between the pages and held it out to Loki. “New material to hit the market, clean and unencrypted. Same password. Took some getting, but I don’t mind. Your last delivery worked like a treat.”

“Thank you, Babushka Galya,” Loki said, taking the drive with both hands and bowing his head over it slightly. Then, he made it disappear in his coat. Galina always loved an extra helping of good manners and respect. And if Loki had to pretend to overlook that this was a more-than-fair transaction in order to keep the old lady happy, well, he’d done worse things for a smaller payout. “I am very grateful for your help.”

“You are a sweet Russian boy,” she said. “Respectful. Not like the young kids these days, hooligans, half of them don’t bother to learn to speak properly, making an old woman like me try to figure out English as if - “

Loki nodded. He used to be an Asgardian Prince, but at least he could be certain that he was nicer than the average up-and-coming young tough. 

How far the great have fallen.

“I admire how things used to be. Respect for history, family, the right way of doing things,” Loki spoke, practically on autopilot into a pause in the conversation. His eyes dropped to the newspaper on the table where his finger tapped an absent rhythm on the face of Captain America under the heading, Bromance or Romance? Insider Reveals All In Secret -, half obscured by a tea saucer. “It’s a strange time we’re living in.”

“The dead coming back like ghosts,” Galina snorted, following his gaze. “Nothing good will come of it, you mark my words. Their sort doesn’t belong here.”

Loki briefly wondered if she was talking about deep frozen American icons, super soldiers, gay super soldiers, or just plain ghosts.

“I can’t imagine that will be much of a problem,” Loki said lightly. The supersoldiers were firmly ensconced in their tower. Somewhere in the store, the bell on the door rang.

Galina’s gazed sharpened for just a split second, before she shrugged and waved her hand as if to dismiss the very idea. Then, with a groan and a creak of her chair, she stood and picked up the teapot.

“You know, little Misha, I had a dream about snakes last night,” she said apropos of nothing as she rinsed out the pot in the small sink in the corner. Loki frowned at the abrupt change in topic. “You watch out for snakes. They make a good deal you want to take, and then, well, they bite. You cut off its head, and think, no more snake, no more problem. But there are always more snakes.”

Cut one head off and two more will take its place.

Loki leaned back in his chair as he stared at the old woman’s back, tension flooding him. He recognized the slogan. Of course he did - anyone would, in the aftermath of the fall of SHIELD. But why did Galina think he needed to be warned away from Hydra? What did it have to do with Captain America’s newspaper face under his teacup?

Loki might have shrugged it off as the strange ramblings of an old woman.

Except. Except, Babushka Galya, who sold information to mobsters and had nephews and nieces in every mafia family this side of Bushwick, was warning independent contractor Michael Brinsky off.

Now that’s interesting.

“Babushka Galya - “ he began, when all the hairs on the back of his neck stood up on end. He had been so focused on the old woman and this new mystery, it took him a second to understand why. The front of the store had gone quiet, the music had been turned off. Loki’s eyes flickered up to the mirrors that ringed the room to find Galina watching him steadily. In the reflection beyond her head, he could see himself sitting at the small table, and behind him, two men entered through the curtains with a rattle of shifting beads, their steps heavy. Light glinted off their guns as they adjusted their coats in warning.

“Thank you, Galina,” a voice rumbled behind Loki in accented English. “We’ll take it from here.”

Loki rose slowly from his seat and put his back against the wall.

“Gentlemen,” Loki said, switching to English too. All Speak made people hear what they expected; this wasn’t the right time to play language roulette. “How can I help you?”

“You are a sweet boy,” Galina pronounced stepping up and patting Loki’s forearm with her bony hand. “Now, I need to get back to the front, get Anton back on track before he ruins another order. Come see me again soon, Misha, if you’re still around.”

And then she was gone.

Chapter Text

“Brodsky,” said the older and shorter of the two men. There was something in his sharp-eyed blue eyes under the mop of dark hair that set Loki’s instincts on alert. "Boss wants to see you."

“Who’s your boss?” Loki said, his mind shuffling restlessly through options: fight, flight, feint, or follow along. He needed more information. “What does he want with me?”

“You’re not in any position to be asking questions,” the younger man snapped, practically bristling, his hand under his coat and glare daring Loki to try something. Definitely the angry one.

“Andrei, it’s fine,” the older man chided with a polite smile. Definitely the leader. Under his coat, he wore a knitted sweater that looks like it was made by his grandmother over a black tracksuit with white stripes. Under the fold of his coat, his hand also rested on his gun. “Mitchkin wants to have a word with you. We got a car out front.”

Loki recognized the name: Vladimir Mitchkin, one of the small time players in the Russian Mafia and one of the local bosses. And now Mitchkin wanted to chat with Loki - or rather, Loki’s alter persona, Michael Brodsky - just a little over a week after Loki had stolen a bunch of explosives and an RPG from a local mob storage locker.

The options weren’t great. Loki could have the fight here, break Galina’s china, ruin her storeroom, piss off the Russian Mafia and lose a good chunk of his contacts. He’d have to seriously consider relocating. On the other hand, he could play along, be taken to a second location where he was guaranteed to be outnumbered, and see if he could twist whatever this was to his advantage.

He was Loki. He’d gotten out of more complicated scrapes than this.

“Lead on,” Loki said, with a gesture.

Of course, they didn’t quite lead on. First, Knitted Sweater had Angry Andrei frisk Loki, and then frowned in suspicion when all they found on Loki was a small plain knife, a wallet, the envelope with the drive Galina had given Loki, and a pendant on a chain in Loki’s pocket. Neither could sense the quiet energy of the charm on the pendant, and everything was returned to Loki before they set out.

Andrei led the way out of the storeroom and through the store, and Knitted Sweater followed on Loki’s heels. Galina was fussing over the jars she was restocking at the front, and didn’t look up as they left with a jangle of a door bell.

There was a gray sedan car idling on the street, its windows tinted. Loki settled in next to Knitted Sweater in the back, Andre in the front. The woman in the driver’s seat twisted around to give Loki a close once-over. Wide shoulders, square jaw, a peppering of small scars across her neck and face, Loki guessed ex-military or ex-military adjacent.

“Huh,” she said. “Any problems?”

“No, just drive.”

“Yup,” she agreed and turned back into her seat. And they were off.

Loki kept an idle eye on the streets as they drove - north then west, past a cemetery and park to roll to a stop on a residential street by a medium sized brick row house. No one had bothered to try to keep the location secret, which could have meant the location didn’t matter. Or that Loki knowing about it wouldn’t matter for long.

Throughout the ride, Loki made several attempts to get a conversation going with his companions - none of them went far. But Loki did learn that the driver’s name was Dasha when he asked about the black fingerless gloves she wore, and they briefly connected on the advantages of leather over synthetics before Knitted Sweater (his name was Kolya, Loki also learned) cut into the conversation and plunged the car back into silence.

Kolya and Andrei walked Loki up the small steps to the porch and then into the rowhouse. The space had been set up as if someone had wanted a living room, and someone else wanted an office space, and then everyone had given up and compromised. There was a large TV and a man sprawled on a couch playing a video game, the sound muted. There was an empty receptionist desk next to a door. There was the weight of cigarette smoke and bottles of beer on the table by the couch and the lampstands.

“Through here,” Kolya said, leading Loki through the door and into a back office. A man - Mitchkin, Loki guessed - paused the video he was watching on a tablet and looked up.

“You must be Vladimir Mitchkin,” Loki said, no harm in being polite, as the other men settled around the room. “I’m Michael. Your men told me you wanted to see me.”

“You’re not an easy guy to find, Brodsky,” Mitchkin said. He was a large stout older man with a scraggly short beard and pink face. He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands on the desk in front of him. “I ask around, people know you, but no one knows your number.”

“Phones are hard to keep track of,” Loki said. “I live a simple life.”

“Galina said you do good work. Keep mouth shut.”

“Yes,” Loki said, tension slowly draining from him. This game he understood. They wanted to hire him.

“Do you know, a month ago, we have break in. Storage unit, no merchandise taken, just equipment.”

Oh, that wasn’t good. Behind him, he heard the door open and steps as someone else walked into the room.

“Are you asking me to find out who did it?” Loki tried. Because he was, occasionally, an optimist.

“You know, as Americans say, shit happens,” Mitchkin said with an expansive shrug. “And then a few days back Matya gets visit from these spooks in suits who want to know about his old car. Now, we don’t like spooks so we say, car stolen. Junker like that? Waste of time to report it. Funny thing, turns out that car got itself all messed up in that big Stark warehouse explosion.”

So. Definitely not a job.

Loki had been careful with the cameras when he’d stolen the weapons. But the car? Entirely traceable.

But they were in a carpeted office room in a rowhouse in a residential neighborhood, not a cement floor basement with drains. And Mitchkin was fishing for information instead of making an example of Loki by shooting him in the head. That meant Loki had leverage. He just had to figure out what it was.

Galina's fake dream was a clue. Mitchkin’s roundabout approach was another.

Loki exhaled and shook his head.

“Well shit, I didn’t think they’d have the balls to try to frame you,” Loki said, mimicking Mitchkin’s casual energy, letting some of Mitchkin’s pattern of speech slip into his own cadences. When in doubt, Loki knew, match your speaker. It was a thin line not to overdo it, but Loki had practice. “One of my contacts said something was going to go down in the area. I drove over and walked the area to see what I could spot. I’m a chemist, but information’s money too.”

“What load of bullshit,” Andrei grumbled under his breath.

Mitchkin ignored him. “Who’s they?”

Loki let his shoulders relax, and stared the mobster straight in the eyes. “Hydra.”

The room went very still.

“Those sons of bitches!” Andrei exploded, cursing in Russian, and shoved himself away from the wall he was leaning against. “I told you they were - “

“Andrei, be quiet,” said Kolya.

“Damn Hydra,” Andrei ignored Kolya, still furious. “They can’t just show up in our territory like that. I say we shove a RPG up their -”

“Shut up!” Mitchkin snapped, still glared at Loki as Andrei settled with a angry mutter they all pretended not to hear. “Tell us what you know, Brodsky.”

Loki’s breath escaped him on an exhale and he shrugged weakly. “Listen, I know it doesn’t look good, but I heard chatter that Hydra was after something in one of Stark’s warehouses and I just wanted to see what was what. This kind of information sells well. I parked and took a stroll. I got as far as pier five when all hell broke loose. I’d no idea they’d gone after your stuff.”

“Who did you see?”

“I was six blocks away by then. I saw the explosion, which, fine, I did my time in Chechnya, it’ll take more than a bomb to spook me. But then - “ Loki shook his head and grimaced. “Iron Man showed up and then I saw the lighting and no way was I going to stay around for whatever was big enough to get the Avengers to our side of town.”

Mitchkin’s face was blank, Andrei was scowling, and Kolya who had drifted around the room so he could see Loki’s face looked entirely unimpressed. Tough crowd.

“So you saw nothing,” Mitchkin said. “That what I’m hearing?”

Loki snorted. “I saw plenty, just nothing useful. Whatever they wanted, though, it must have been real important to take such a huge risk and to then blow up the whole place the way they did. Probably to hide what was taken.”

That got a reaction. Mitchkin’s eyes flickered over to Kolya and the two men’s eyes met for a split second.

“And we’re supposed to believe this?” Mitchkin said with a snort. “Dasha, does this sound like a likely story?”

“Not really,” Dasha’s voice came from behind Loki. That explained the mystery of who was lurking behind Loki and making the hair on the back of Loki’s neck stand on end. Good to know.

“He either did it or he’s with them,” Andrei grumbled. “We need to send a message.”

Loki did not like the idea of the Russian mafia sending Hydra any message that involved him. He considered the odds. Just a few years ago, when he still had his powers, his illusions alone would have made escaping child’s play. Or he could have just gone through all of them like they were wet tissue paper.

Instead, there was Dasha behind him, three armed men before him, and hell even knew how many others scattered in the building. Loki could take Andrei and Mitchkin out with his knife before the other two had time to draw their guns. He could grab his charm to help avoid detection and make it hard to focus on him.

But that wouldn’t stop bullets.

Loki’s shoulder burned with a remembered pain; what if this time, a bullet hit something vital?

“Listen, I get it, I really do,” Loki said with a hapless shrug and spread his hands. “But I’m not dumb enough to steal from the biggest game in town and then just roll on up to Galya’s place like nothing happened. And I’m certainly not lucky enough to tumble with the Avengers and get away without a scratch.”

I can take four mortals. Loki was stronger, faster, and more resilient than any of these worthless humans. He knew he’d be fine. But still he hesitated, odds feeling scrambled when he tried to run them through his head.

“Who told you shit was going to go down?” Mitchkin asked.

“A contact I have. Another information broker.”

Mitchkin watched him, but even as Loki met his eyes with cool and honest confidence, most of Loki’s attention was on Kolya in the periphery of his vision. The man was a much better weathervane for where things were going. And Kolya was frowning thoughtfully.

Mitchkin grabbed a pad of paper off the desk and pushed it to Loki. “Name, information, contact, where we can find them, everything. And don’t even think of trying to pull one over on us.”

Loki looked down at the pad of paper, then up at the scowling men and took a breath. Galina thought Michael Brodsky, straight shooter and polite contractor for hire, would get out of this alive. He had to pick and play and stick with it. What did Galina think Michael Brodsky would do when asked to give up a contact?

“Once I work with you,” Loki said, adding as much emphasis as he could on the you without making it obvious. “I don’t go back on my contract, and I don’t talk.”

“We can make you talk,” Mitchkin pulled out a familiar looking glass vial from a drawer. Oh for heaven’s sake. As if Loki’s would sell anything to Galina that could be used against him or work on his physiology. Yes, it wouldn’t be pleasant. No, it wouldn’t make him talk.

At least it wouldn’t have before. Damn it all to hell, he really didn’t want to see what these pseudo-truth drugs would do to his already weakened system.

“That won’t work on me,” Loki said with a wry, almost apologetic smile. “I tested too many batches on myself. You’ll just be wasting good product.”

Mitchkin smiled back, and it wasn’t a nice smile. “There’s always the old fashioned way.”

“There is,” Loki agreed.

“So what, you’re just lay down and die to protect some guy who gave you a stack of dollar bills,” Mitchkin snapped. “Or that Hydra scum you’re working for?”

“I’d rather die than work for Hydra,” Loki snapped out, glaring, channeling the righteous anger of a man falsely accused and being pushed into a corner. “As for the other...protect my contact? No. Protect my honor and reputation? Yes. I’d die for that.”

There was a long silence as all three men stared at Loki. Aw, shit, too much?

Okay, he needed to reel it back in before they -

“All right,” Mitchin said, leaning back again. “I can respect that.”

Seriously?

“Galina spoke well of you,” Mitchkin said. “She has a sixth sense about people. You have good reputation.”

Seriously?

“I just wish I could help more,” Loki said, letting his own shoulders relax.

“You can,” Mitchkin said, taking back the pad of paper. He scribbled something and passed it across the table to Loki.

Loki picked it up and glanced down. He glanced down. Zeros and a dollar sign, a fairly sizeable chunk of money; one of Loki’s eyebrows rose and he had to work hard not to smirk. Maybe he would leave this place with a job after all. This was enough to have someone killed.

“What is this? Do you want me to find track down the Hydra cell?”

“No, we know where they’re squatting. This is what you owe us for missing weapons from the storage unit,” Mitchkin pronounced.

“But I had nothing to do with it,” Loki protested, because an innocent man would protest. Loki could hardly complain that this was more than five times the value of what he’d actually stolen that day from the storage locker.

“Maybe not, Brodsky,” Mitchkin said with a hard smile. “But you knew something about it and we lost good merchandise and now we have spooks asking questions because of you. You have until end of the week to get us first ten thousand. And then we’ll see if Galina was right about you. We good?”

Loki kept his eye contact steady and his expression a combination of frustrated and respectful as he slipped the note into his pocket. “We’re good.”

“Good. Dasha, Andrei, make sure he gets home.”

And thus find out where "home" is. Loki smiled tightly as he rose.

“And Brodsky?” Mitchkin said, eyes hard. “Don’t play us.”

Loki decided that getting out was more important than getting in the last word, and gave a sharp nod.

****

Loki did not, in fact, take Dasha and Andrei anywhere near home. What he did was take them out drinking.

It took a bit of flattery, fake relief at everything turning out okay, and the very reasonable explanation that he really needed a drink after his adventure. But it worked, and before they knew it, they’d all decided to swing by Andrei’s favorite bars on their way to the false address Loki had given them.

The street lights were just coming on when Loki and his new drinking friends left the third bar, all of them wobbling. Andrei was telling a joke, but he kept having to stop and go back and explain things in a mishmash of Russian and English. Dasha couldn’t stop laughing - at Andrei, not the joke.

“You said you’re just around the corner,” Loki finally interrupted, voice slurring the words as he patted at Andrei’s chest. “You gonna get home okay?”

“Yeah, just over there, yeah,” Andrei agreed, pointing, then frowned, pivoted and pointed again. “That way.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Dasha said. Her brown hair was coming loose around her face from where the braid was pinned up at the back of her head, but she was steadier on her feet. “I’ll get him home. You’re not half bad Brodsky. See you next week, yeah?”

She’d almost looked worried when she said it. Next week was when Loki’s first payment was due.

Loki blinked owlishly at her, swaying, and bobbed his head. “Yeah.”

Dasha grabbed Andre’s arm and pulled him down the street after her.

Loki watched them turn the corner. He was no longer swaying, his eyes clear and sharp. Loki pulled out his charm and looped it around his neck before turning to start making his own way back to his apartment.

He was alive, he had avoided a fight and he learned about new moves and new players in the underground. He had lied his way out of a sticky situation, and had even managed to ditch his watchers before they forced him to burn his one backup safehouse.

Loki decided that he had won this round.

And then he tried really hard to believe it.

And what did any of this have to do with Hydra?

Chapter Text

The answer to the mystery of Hydra in New York City came together over the next few days courtesy of gossip and a bit of daytime television.

Loki made his first cash delivery practically the next day as a show of good faith and well ahead of his deadline, and invited both Dasha and Andrei out for dumplings and vodka to celebrate Loki not getting killed by the Russian mob. The chatter in the local underworld had gotten heated enough that his new friends were happy to share their indignation over the entire situation after just a few shots.

“Okay, okay, here’s the deal, but don’t tell anyone I told you,” Andrei said, leaning over the small round diner table. Dasha rescued his bowl and poured the leftover dumplings into her own plate. “Whoa, hey, I wasn’t done with those.”

“Should have been eating instead of running your mouth,” Dasha told him, met his eyes, and popped a stolen dumpling into her mouth as if daring him to say something about it. Andrei looked like he was about to protest, before indignation over his gossip won over indignation over his stolen food.

“Whatever. Listen, so, you know the guy. The one who wrecked DC a while back. Well, he’s here,” Andrei leaned even closer to Loki and whispered the next words in Russian as if afraid someone would overhear in the almost completely deserted diner. “The Winter Soldier.”

“Here?” Loki asked, making a vague wave around them, and letting his hand land on the vodka bottle. He poured them all another shot.

“Well, not right here.” Andrei threw back the shot glass and chased it with a pickle, his hazel eyes wide with excitement. “But, okay, so you know how him and the Captain America dude were super tight? And they fought Nazi scumbags in the great war? And then they live in Stark Tower - ”

“Oh bozhe moj,” Dasha rolled her eyes. “You can’t tell a story worth shit, Andrushka.”

Between Andrei’s rambling, Dasha’s commentary, half a bottle of vodka, and some subsequent TV watching on Loki’s part, the picture finally started coming together.

It came down to this: Less than a week ago, Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes had moved out of the tower and into a small cozy building in Brooklyn, right across from a lovely park. Trailed by a posse of paparazzi, the good Captain had pronounced that he and his friend needed to adjust to the new world and their new home, and made an earnest entreaty for the media to respect their need for privacy.

The speculation on the morning talk shows was wild and unrestrained.

And then the Russians caught wind that a small row house 75th Street now housed a small weapons arsenal (brought in with a moving van full of clattering boxes) and a not-so-small group Hydra operatives. The criminal rumor mill also claimed that this little group had brought with them (or knew of, or could get their hands on, or had mail ordered, or had stolen from a certain Stark warehouse by the pier) a secret weapon that could take the Winter Soldier down with no fuss.

The Russians, to put a fine point on it, weren’t happy - something about the Winter Soldier actually being theirs or part of a legacy that certainly didn’t belong in the hands of those Nazi scum. It didn’t help Hydra’s case that their many-headed bureaucracy had just suffered a pretty decisive blow with the fall of SHIELD, and was still staggering for solid ground.

Really, Hydra just needed their Russian connections to stop stepping on their heels and let them get on with their asset retrieval. The Russian mob, on the other hand, wasn’t about to roll over on an asset that could one day be theirs, assuming they could figure out the secret to Hydra’s secret weapon. So the mob made a nuisance of themselves by sending young men in tracksuits and baseball caps to hang around the park in front of the good Captain’s place at all hours of the day (and night).

Meanwhile, unmarked cars with squinty-eyed clean-shaven fellows made it a habit to bring their coffee and donuts to hang out and watch the area and exchange solemn nods with Captain America whenever he passed by on his morning jog.

Under this scrutiny, Hydra wasn’t about to risk drawing attention to themselves. And creeping around Brooklyn peering through windows trying to catch a glimpse of their lost asset while followed by young and restless groups of local Russian thugs and watched by plainclothes security people, well, that would have certainly qualified as suspicious.

It was a stalemate. And it was hilarious.

Loki found himself splitting his time between digging into endless files from Galina’s Hydra drive, making oblique inquiries to a few contacts, cultivating his new Russian friends through booze and flattery, and avidly following the drama happening in Brooklyn.

One afternoon, he missed his usual subway stop and ended up at Prospect Park. The day was chill and sunny, and Loki carefully rewrapped his scarf to hide as much of his face as possible. The weather was finally cooling down enough that Loki’s hat, scarf, and layers blended with the crowd, helped along by his don't-look-at-me charm.

He meandered through the park, letting his feet take him where they would, spooking the wandering pigeons that didn’t quite realize he was there until he was right on top of them. They fluttered away with indignant coos and soft snap of wings.

Eventually, he found himself strolling south, slowing down as he passed two young men in tracksuits sharing a bag of chips as they watched the street. Loki’s charm buzzed briefly as they dismissed him as a passing pedestrian. Loki found a small park bench that had a clear line of sight to the buildings across the street.

There: the plainclothes security in a boring blue car. There: a small, squat building maybe a few stories tall. There: somewhere inside it, Captain America and the Winter Soldier were making a fresh start.

Loki stayed for another ten minutes, his eyes roving over the street, before he moved on. Coming there had been an impulsive decision. Being so near anyone affiliated with the Avengers, especially with this much surveillance, was a risk he couldn’t afford to take. And he kept telling himself that.

Except, the next day, Loki found himself making the forty minute stroll to walk past Barnes’ new home. The day after that, he brought a book and stayed for half an hour, watching and pretending to read. Despite the clear presence of surveillance on the street, Loki saw no sign of supersoldiers. It was a...disappointment, even as a part of him was relieved.

A chill that had nothing to do with the imminent fall crept up his back as he wondered if this entire thing could have been a trap baited by the rumor that the Winter Soldier was unguarded. A trap that had done an excellent job at pulling in Hydra, the young toughs of the Russian Mafia, and one exiled trickster god. Before Loki could follow that thought much further on his next visit, he got his first glimpse of Steve Rogers since Loki almost said hello to Thor in Midtown. The man was woefully underdressed for the weather in a tee shirt and pants. He had a baseball cap on his head and a purposeful stride to his movements. Loki kept his head down to his book, and watched Rogers with keen interest out of the corner of his eyes until he was gone.

So, perhaps, not a trap.

There was something familiar at using his almost-invisibility to watch his enemies that reminded Loki of simpler days - of Asgard, of travelling the realms, of having power and using it with a light touch. It was like having a small piece of himself back. Soon, Loki’s mornings were dedicated to research, his afternoons to feeding pigeons, pretending to read, and watching for super-soldiers. And his nights, well, they were filled with television, bars with the Russians, and staying awake to see the sunrise.

Occasionally, on the evenings when he could stomach it, Loki did witchcraft.

It left him wrecked.

Once, Loki had been a mage to be reckoned with. Now, though, his access to the energy of the universe blocked by Odin’s spell, his craftwork was not worth writing home about. The small spells he could craft for his arsenal - painstaking attempts to infuse crystals with enough power for a sleep spell - were barely worthy of the days of migraines and weakness that followed as his energy regenerated from the drain.

Each failed spell was a reminder of how much he’d lost. Each success was a reminder of how far he’d fallen, surrounded by small baubles and carved stones and petty spells.

The days passed in a blur of magic, frustration, and research, Loki learning way more than he ever could want about Hydra’s pet projects. Galina’s files included content on the Winter Soldier that talk show hosts and Russian mobsters just couldn’t shut up about.

“Sergeant Barnes was cleared of all charges.”

“By a closed military court,” one of the interchangeable television hosts pronounced. “If this man is going to be walking free where we live and our children play, we deserve to know just what secrets he is hiding and what he’s capable of.”

“Captain America wouldn’t vouch for him if he were dangerous. James Barnes is a prisoner of war and a survivor of more than seventy years of torture.”

Loki snorted. Did it really count as torture if you forgot about it after every time it happened? It wasn’t like Barnes had even been awake for the entire seventy years, and it wasn’t even real torture -

Loki flinched and his mind shied away from the thought like a spooked animal. He picked up the chisel his suddenly shaky fingers had lost grip on and took a deep breath. There were some things that he didn’t think about.

“- and instead of welcoming him back like the hero he is, they’ve put a tracker ankle bracelet on him, like a common criminal on house arrest for heaven sakes! It makes me ashamed for my country.”

Loki waited for his heart to slow down again before he put the chisel to the runestone he was carving.

Bucky Barnes’ story was in the news often, these days. The man had come to the nation’s capital, guns blazing, mind broken, leading a strike force to mow down people and take over the country. Barnes’ former brother in arms, the champion of all that was good and right, had faced off against him and...risked his life to bring Barnes in, refusing to believe his old World War II buddy had gone evil. And then, when the law, implacable in its inevitable roll, tried to crush Barnes, Captain America risked reputation and politics to stand at Barnes’ side. Despite everything.

Despite the atrocities the man had committed.

Loki’s eyes flicked up to the television which was rolling silent footage of a recent interview with Barnes. Or rather with Steve Rogers about Barnes. The man’s shoulders kept hunching, his smile uncertain and his chest moving too steadily under deep, controlled breaths. Next to him, Steve’s mouth mouthed confidently through some touching defense, shoulders straight and gaze unwavering. Barnes had murdered hundreds, and it hadn’t mattered one bit to his brother in arms.

Why him? Loki had gone over the leaked court documents twice now, and he still didn’t understand. Why did Barnes get a second chance?

Loki found himself searching obsessively for live interviews of Barnes, to little avail. The man seemed to let Steve Rogers do all the talking for him, replying to questions rarely, and mostly with one-word answers. The court transcripts were the longest Barnes appeared to have spoken, but those were documents, not live recordings.

It was research, of course, nothing more. Research for when Loki had his powers back. He needed to know his enemies so he could take on their guises, fool them with his illusions.

It was maddening though, because so many hours of footage and research later, he still had no answer: What made Barnes so special?

And so Loki kept finding himself going back to his bench in Prospect Park again and again, long after he had established a dangerously predictable pattern for his enemies to exploit. His only consolation was the knowledge that if Thor or the Avengers had even an inkling of suspicion that the brown-eyed, short-haired man who came to the park to read and feed pigeons was Loki, they wouldn’t have waited this long to jump him, put him in chains, and rainbow bridge him to Asgard’s prisons.

Loki learned a few things during his daily visits to the park.

One: The noisy pigeons had somehow learned to spot Loki despite (or around) his charm. The moment they saw him coming with his bag of bread crumbs, they’d flock excitedly to his bench. He bore their squabbling and chatter and how a few brave ones would try to land on his arms, shoulders and even, once, the top of his head.

Two: There was a rhythm to life around the park. The mafia guys rotated, the security team switched off who’d make the coffee run at noon each day, and the park regulars would go about their routines. There was a homeless man who’d shuffle through, a bedraggled old woman with a cane who also fed pigeons, and the constant movement of locals (mostly young parents) and passers by. In a strange way, Loki had become part of that rhythm.

Three: Rogers came and went often and as he pleased, sometimes with others, sometimes alone. Barnes rarely left the building, and never unescorted by the Captain. When Loki spotted him the first time, he stared hungrily, forgetting to pretend to read, trying to see what it was about Barnes (or Barnes and Rogers) that made the man so special, that granted this man so many allowances. But Loki didn’t see it; Barnes walked with his head down, eyes on the ground, following half a step behind Rogers, his shoulders hunched against the wind and world.

A week into lurking, Loki realized his daily walk to the park had become a highlight of his day, despite the very real drain on his already weakened powers to keep his don't-look charm active. He also realized, with a rising sense of foreboding, that amid all these small distractions, he had a predictable routine and he wasn’t even trying to make plans.

Over his dinner of instant noodles that night, Loki thought about his options. He still had a week and a half until Michkin expected his next installment of cash. And Loki had no intention (or interest, or energy reserves) of making that deadline. The problem was, the moment Loki failed to deliver, he became persona non grata to the local Russian element. Yes, he could go to ground, but he’d also lose all his contacts in one go. He'd lose Dasha and Andrei and their other interchangeable Russian buddies.

It really was, he thought, time to leave town.

And yet, Loki thought, putting down his spoon and shuffling through his fake identification documents, travel remained a problem.

His runes protected him from Asgard’s eye, and his small basement apartment was warded, but only to a point. Asgard, if it was watching, had a general sense of where he was. New York City’s vast population and sprawling high-rises worked to Loki’s advantage in this. After all, not even Heimdall would have the patience to look through every apartment and every work space in search of one man.

But if Loki hopped on a trans-Atlantic flight, he’d be moving over a whole lot of no one and nothing for at least twelve hours. Thor and his friends would have time to receive a messenger raven from Asgard, arrange for someone to greet Loki at an airport, with plenty of time to spare to set up a holding cell or two and schedule some media interviews. That is, if Asgard didn’t just snatch the entire airplane with the Bifrost and yank Loki to their version of justice.

In the meantime, there were several promising leads on magical artifacts: a hint of something in Latveria, a digital trail that seemed to lead to Sokovia, and a spectral ring that had popped up on the west coast before falling off Hydra’s radar.

He marked the promising hints of artifacts in China and that one sabre in Iran as a no go. Loki would stand out like a tourist there, runes or no runes. No, better stick with Europe. If only he could figure out a way to boost his secrecy runes without outright killing himself.

His hand drifted to the magic box. He’d gotten into the habit of leaving it on the couch next to him, where he could rest his hand on it and feel its comforting purr of magic. It had enough latent power for a small spell. Possibly enough for a few hours of safe travel.

But, even as Loki rested his hand on the box, something in him rebelled at the idea of using up its leftover magic and losing perhaps the only thing he had that felt like home. There was something ugly about taking all of it's magic and leaving it a hollow, useless shell. Loki did not want to examine that thought.

His unease stayed with him for the rest of the evening and well into the next day. Loki only felt it start to ease when he came within sight of Prospect Park; what had started as curiosity and a bit of stalking had become a daily escape, despite the risks.

Well, if they hadn’t noticed Loki yet, they weren’t about to.

That day the area around the Supersoldier Building (as Loki had started calling Barnes abode it in his head) was more busy than normal. The Russians were out in force, huddling in their tracksuits, and pretending not to watch the two (two!) surveillance cars parked further down the street that watched them back.

Nothing seemed to be happening though. Loki settled on the park bench and was swarmed by his flock of stubby bodied feather fiends. The pigeons cooed in excitement, ready for their midday snack. One of the regulars, an elderly woman with a cane, gray hair piled on her head, and two layers of coat, was making a wobbling trek past Loki's bench.

“You need to stop doing that. You’re gonna kill them,” she was mumbling. “You need to stop. You need to stop.”

The pigeons scuttled out of her way, pecking at the crumbs around her feet. Loki threw another handful of crumbs to them as he waited for the woman to pass. Except she didn’t pass.

“I said stop!” she shrieked and smacked Loki’s leg with her cane hard enough to bruise. Loki leaped from his seat like a scalded cat, breadcrumbs going every which way as the bag fell off his lap. “No! No-no-no-no!”

She lunged for the bag with gnarled fingers and yanked it up from the ground and to her chest where she shielded it from fluttering birds. Loki stared, eyes wide, his fingers white around the charm around his neck. The charm still hummed with energy; she shouldn’t have seen him.

Was she a witch?

“You bastard, you’ll kill them all,” the witch hissed at Loki. She grabbed her cane from where she’d dropped it during her scramble for the bag and swung it at Loki again, her eyes wild and furious, hair a gray halo of frizz and loosened locks.

“What are you going on about, old hag?” Loki hissed, catching the cane with his hand and shoving it away. His skin was crawling; she was making a scene. Loki couldn't afford to be involved in a scene. “I’ve done nothing to you.”

“You’re killing the poor babies, killing them all, making them sick, feeding them this shit,” she shook both the bag and cane at him. A pigeon tried to flutter and land on her arm and she cried out again, hiding the bag of crumbs under her coat and away from the beady-eyed bird. Loki gaped.

“Oh hey, Misha, is that you?” a familiar voice said, and Loki’s head jerked around, startled. One of the tracksuit Russians had wandered over, drawn by the shouting. “Didn’t see you. Everything okay?”

Loki recognized the middle-aged man as the dark haired, brown-eyed Slavka from Loki’s nights out with the Russians. Best Loki could tell, Slavka and Dasha were an item, though he’d yet to spot them do anything to prove this theory. But when they were in the same space, where Dasha went, Slavka followed. What Dasha asked for, be it a fetched drink or a change of scenery, Slavka delivered with good natured patience and cheer. That good nature, Loki quickly discovered when Slavka almost broke a man’s arm for trash talking in his direction, applied to Dasha and Dasha only.

Now, Slavka was aiming a hard glare at the pigeon witch as he drifted to position his body between Loki and the woman’s waving cane.

Shit. Any attempt at being unnoticed was completely blown, and Loki could feel his heart pounding.

How long until the Avengers noticed? The security teams had guns, and one of the Avengers lived right there. How long until -

Loki had to get out of there.

“You’re what’s wrong with people these days,” she yelled. “Murderer! You good for nothing bastard! I've seen you! Hurting creatures that never did a thing to hurt you! I'm watching you!”

“Thanks, Slavka. I was just passing by,” Loki managed at Slavka’s back, backing away, even as he couldn’t seem to break eye contact with the shouting woman. 

“You’re a monster!” the witch shrieked.

Loki turned and fled.

Chapter Text

After the confrontation with the pigeon witch, Loki retreated to his apartment and the safety of his wards. He cycled through anger and fury and denial, all equally empty and impotent and useless. He’d raged against the witch who’d chased him away, furiously denied her words, and finally, late that night, pulled his laptop open to prove her wrong.

He carefully typed in his words into a search bar. He didn’t like the results, so he changed the words. Then tried again.

The information didn’t change.

She hadn’t been wrong.

Bread crumbs were bad for birds.

In the long run. Over time. Generally.

Loki hadn't known.

Which didn't change the facts.

Loki felt his anger with the pigeon witch crumble into shame.

It hurt, this newly discovered truth that Loki had, once again, failed and almost destroyed something beautiful. There was so little light left to his world that even this felt like a tragedy.

Loki wasn't stupid. He knew (he knew) that his reaction to the situation was outsized and ridiculous. And he knew what was happening to his life - what had been happening to him since perhaps before he'd landed on Midgard the second time. Between his imprisonment on Asgard to this new self-imposed exile in New York City (a prison so much more secure because it was self-imposed, a mockery of free will), Loki's world had becoming smaller with each passing month, and he along with it. His things were ragged and small, and so were his contacts and his ideas and plans.

Knowing this truth, though, was far crueler than ignorance.

The thing was, Loki did not play games that he couldn’t win, and now, in this small city on this small planet, the games he stood a chance of winning had become petty and trite.

When Thor had come to him during Loki’s imprisonment and told him about the attack on the palace that injured their mother, Loki had channeled his desperation and rage into a finely honed edge. He had taken down their enemies, faked his dramatic death, and returned home to -

Well, to batter himself at the unyielding wall that stood between him and everything he was owed. And he was owed.

For the centuries his so-called parents lied about his true nature.

For the betrayal of his so-called-friends when they committed treason to find Thor and bring him back to Asgard to depose Loki, the rightful acting monarch.

For the void that swallowed him whole.

For the -

- No, he didn’t think about that one anymore -

For the shattered bones and muzzle when he lost the battle of New York.

After Loki faked his heroic death on a desolate realm, he had made his way to Asgard in disguise. When he had crossed the hall to the throne room where Odin had just heard the news of the battles of the convergence, of Thor's bravery, and Loki's own demise, Loki did not have a plan. He just wanted to see. See what? He still did not know. But when Odin had looked up from his silent contemplation in the empty throne room, Loki had unveiled himself from his magic. He was alive, and he watched emotions flicker across Odin's face: surprise, wariness, suspicion. It was true that Loki couldn't have said what he had wanted to see in Odin's eyes upon his resurrection, but this -

This was not the look of a loving father finding his lost son returned to him. After that, words might have been said, Loki wasn't sure. But what he knew was that his magic had lashed out, driven by something more raw than anger, and it caught Odin and dragged the king down into Odinsleep like a wave rolling ship into the depths. In that storm of green power, Loki wove an invisibility veil so tightly around Odin, who lay there on the steps in front of the throne, that it was silk and steel and magic. He picked up Gungnir from Odin’s limp hand, and felt its power hum as it took Loki’s measure, both curious and judgmental. And he wrapped the glamour of Odin’s shape around himself like a cloak, and took the steps up to the throne in a daze, because Loki had faced down the AllFather and he was still here. And he had won.

"Did you feel that?" His mother entered the throne room from one of the hidden side doors in a swish of fabric. She was frowning, her gaze distracted and she was looking away, down the hall, as if waiting for something to happen. "I could have sworn..."

Her voice trailed off thoughtfully. Her hair was coiled around her head in elegant braid, her outfit both armor and dress, and her shoulder and side wrapped in a neat bandage that hid the damage from her battle with the dark elves.

In the guise of Odin, Loki looked at her. There were excuses Loki would make, intrigue and plots to send her away, so she would not look too closely as he replaced the King her husband. He lined them up as Frigga turned to him and he inclined his head at her as Odin always did, and schooled his features and illusions into Odin’s customary look.

And his mother stared back at him, and said, “Loki, what have you done?”

Time passed strangely after that. Loki remembered the dungeons (again), and Thor (again), and the throne room (again). He remembered being led, his magic bound, to the rainbow bridge for a flight back to the Midgardian city where it had all started. Or ended.

Again.

Loki had spent so much of the last four years battering himself bloody against the circumstances of his birth, the lies of his childhood, wrapping himself in anger and rage and cleverness. He’d clung to the scraps of who he was, as if that would save him from breaking. From falling. (It hadn't.)

But during this most recent year in the city, the truth had crept up on Loki. There was...nothing to batter himself against here. He’d tried to throw himself against the walls of this new cage, and somehow kept missing. The walls moved, always just a bit out of reach, not giving him the satisfaction of even that futile battle.

Loki, who had walked the shadow paths between the realms and touched the stars, now ate noodles from small cups, made a daily trek of less than three miles to a park, and returned to a moldy room in the belly of a rotting building where only piles of books and broken furniture waited to welcome him home.

Loki could see it happening, his world becoming smaller, his plots petty, his contacts minor and meaningless half-bit players with no role in the world drama of this realm. It nagged at him, the whispery truth that if he’d just pull himself together and try a little, he could entrap a politician or two, rise to power, rule from the shadows, regain his magic and thrive.

The very thought exhausted him, filled him with dread. And the fact of that dread itself filled Loki with dread until he turned his mind away to a rune or a television show.

There was a part of him - the part that clung to the past, that refused to think about the void and the- the other thing - that preferred to sit on his ratty couch and pretend that carving runes into cheap stones would make even an iota of difference in the long run. His world had become small, and he had become small in turn as well.

And then there were the pigeons in the park that Loki had been poisoning. 

It was stupid, but he’d thought, for just that once, that he was doing a good, clever thing. The birds were small, dumb and feathery and they seemed so happy to see him. He’d observed other people in the park feeding them bread, and he’d wanted to do it too.

“You’re a monster.”

Loki felt his world become smaller yet, a tiny window closing that he hadn’t even realized had been creaked open until it was gone.

***

Days passed, and Loki almost didn’t go back to the park. He started by taking small walks when his apartment started becoming suffocating, and when the empty fridge and cupboard meant hunger gnawed at him. There, a grocery store. There, a small neighborhood. Loki had quit his meetups with Dasha and Andrei and their friends after the pigeon witch incident; he told himself he didn’t want to answer any questions about why he’d been at the park. He ignored Galina’s email inviting him for tea. He couldn’t focus on his research.

But he kept his walks. And eventually, his steps led him down familiar routes and he looked up to see his usual bench was still there waiting for him. The pigeon witch was nowhere to be seen. The leaves fell slowly amid the soft autumn sunlight.

The cooing birds flocked to him, excited, and fluttered around his feet. Slowly, they realized that he had come empty handed, and disappeared by twos and threes. Loki sat down, pulled out the book, and lowered his eyes to read. This time, though, neither the words in the book or the tracksuit lookout down the street or the stakeout in the car was able to hold his attention.

The next few visits were no less miserable, but Loki went anyway - it was something to do. It was a small defiance. It was a habit and a risk to visit the park, surrounded by surveillance and mafia elements who were just a charm failure away from discovering him there. But some part of Loki refused to let the park go, refused to let the pigeon witch win and refused to let his world shrink that much smaller. Yes, it was a risk. But it was also a break. And it was a small defiance.

He was sitting on the bench, pretending to read and feeling the sun warm his head chest through his layers when he heard it. The uneven clomp of a three-legged approach. Or rather, two-legged and a cane.

Loki tensed. The pigeon witch.

He refused to look up. The awful old hag would walk past. She had no business with him; he wasn’t feeding pigeons anymore. She shouldn’t notice him anyway, not after he’d reinforced his don’t-look-at-me charm twice over.

Her uneven steps approached, and slowed to a shuffle by the bench. This close, her shadow fell over Loki, and he could feel the chill when she blocked out the sun. He ignored her, turned a page with two gloved fingers, and focused on not reacting. He’d wait her out. Loki could smell her as she hovered too close, like a bog brought to life, too close and too -

He couldn’t help his flinch when her fist came into sight right under his nose and opened. Something white and small poured onto the open pages of his book.

It was a small pile of dry oatmeal. Loki looked up and stared at her, wide eyed, his heart racing again.

The old woman met his gaze for a second, blinking fast. Then she was gone, shuffling along down the pathway, her coats fluttering around her, until she disappeared around the corner into the park.

A pigeon landed on Loki’s arms in a flutter of wings. It pecked at the book and cooed in excitement. In seconds, he was swarmed with small, warm feathery bodies. He picked up half the oatmeal and scattered it on the ground in front of the bench to give them a little bit more space. He left the rest in the book on his lap and let himself be mobbed by the little hungry birds.

***

Loki secretly enjoyed weaving together imaginary scenarios on just how Hydra might try to capture the Winter Soldier. His current favorite pet theory involved Hydra snatching Barnes when he was on his way to court mandated therapy (Mondays and Thursdays) with Captain America. Except it would have to be a day when Rogers was called away, so one of the weakest Avengers would be Barnes walking companion. Then, Hydra would make its move.

And get their teeth knocked in by an unholy combo of the Fist of Hydra and angry locals.

It was a great scenario.

The days ran together, and before he knew it, his time was up to pay the next installment to the Russian mafia. Loki sat in silence for a few hours before folding to the inevitable and dipping into his emergency stash to pay the next ludicrously inflated installment of blood money to Mitchkin. No matter how he looked at it, Loki wanted to stay in the city just a bit longer, and he had nowhere else to go. That evening, he joined Dasha and Andrei for a night out that he’d been out of town on a job. It explained his disappearance, and the money. If Slavka had said anything about Loki checking out the Supersoldier Building, no one cared enough to bring it up. Instead, everyone got drunk, and Dasha got Slavka to kick off a surprisingly competitive round of karaoke.

Life continued, and the park remained the center of intrigue. At times, it seemed the street by Prospect Park was a stage, and everyone on it were actors practicing their roles.

The mafia toughs hung out with their eyes on the phones, lazily scanning the area in between texts, videos and games, and drifting away and deeper into the park when Captain America went out on his morning run or afternoon errands.

Loki read his books and fed pigeons. (Pigeon witch approved oatmeal only.)

The security team had picked their outpost further down the street, in an old parked car. Loki suspected they might have been the remnants of SHIELD. Surely any other secret shadowy organization would have had enough funds to at least rent a nearby apartment for a long-term stakeout like this one.

Occasionally, someone from Hydra would wander by - easy to spot. The Russian would bristle and tense at some passerby, whip out their phones, and start taking pictures. Faced with this welcome, Hydra mostly kept their distance.

The Winter Soldier didn’t make an appearance. Occasionally, Loki thought he’d glimpse a twitch of a curtain or a shadow in the alley beside the building. Not that Loki was watching.

Loki wondered, sometimes, what Bucky Barnes was making of this small performance playing out in his backyard. Did Barnes and Rogers even notice?

Surely they had to.

This standoff in the park couldn’t last. But while it did, Loki spent his afternoons feeding little bits of oatmeal to his pigeons, avoiding pigeon witch, enjoying the sun and watching the New York City criminal underworld stalk the Winter Soldier.

“Here, you greedy menaces,” he told the birds, scattering the oatmeal further away to save his coat and give himself space to settle down on the bench for another afternoon. He shooed the one that tried to land on his head. “I am not fooled by you, soon you shall be too round to fly.”

He used All Speak with them, and a part of him liked the idea that perhaps the small brainless feather kettles understood him. 

The surveillance couple was back again, this time with a bland gray car. The man sipped something from a thermos, the woman leaned against the side of the car, pulling on an electric cigarette and soaking in the warm midday sun. The park regulars were also there - the thin man napping on the park bench near the monument, two young women chatting as they walked while their kids ran around them, playing tag. The pigeon witch stayed on her side of the park, not paying any attention to Loki now that he was no longer giving the local birds deadly indigestion. Loki glared in her direction anyway, just in case.

The Russians were sparse on the ground that day. Just one of the regular kids, sitting on a low rise wall, his legs swinging to the music playing through the one earbud in his ear.

The setup felt...comfortable in its familiarity.

It unsettled Loki how much he had gotten used to this community of strangers who would as soon shoot each other than share a cup of coffee. Well, perhaps the two young mothers wouldn’t shoot anyone. But Loki wouldn’t put it past the pigeon witch to be packing as a backup to her cane. The agents and the Russians, well, that they were armed without saying.

It promised to be a quiet afternoon. The captain spent his Wednesdays at Stark’s tower, and Bucky never left the building without him. House arrest? Or his choice? Perhaps the sergeant’s world was small too.

Loki had just gotten truly settled into his book when a sharp popping sound snapped his eyes up - just in time to see the lookout kid crumple to the ground. Across the street, the smoking agent was just starting to turn when another pop sounded, and she too jerked and fell.

Four men were moving fast across the street, guns out. The man in the security car had just enough time to draw his weapon when he too was shot. His gun went off with a loud crack.

The park pigeons exploded into the air, startled by the sound. Two of the men swept the street with their guns, eyes scanning for threats. The other two raced for the entrance to Captain America’s building, and attached something to the locking mechanism.

The door opened in seconds.

Huh. Loki thought, staring from his seat on the bench as he was entirely ignored. This is happening.

A large white van raced up the road and came screeching to a stop by the building. Loki expected it to disgorge a clown car’s worth of special forces trained badasses to go do battle with the Winter Soldier. The green shirted goon yanked open the back doors to reveal -

- no one.

No one rushing out. Just an empty compartment with what looked like a blinking computer tower and what was probably a generator or a battery to power it.

Loki frowned from across the street, his eyes rising to the upper floors of the Supersoldier Building. He’d read the court documents, he’d seen at least a partial of Hydra’s files on the Winter Soldier. Did these four men really think that they’d be able to get the Fist of Hydra on his own turf so woefully underprepared? They made Loki’s own suicidal run at Stark’s warehouse look like the pinnacle of planning.

Two ruffled looking men in suits ran out from the driveway in the building down the street, guns in hand, using the cars as cover.

So someone had been staking Barnes out from a nearby apartment. Loki had wondered.

The two Hydra goons by the van spotted the approaching men (cops? agents? mercenaries?) and opened fire. Loki felt his muscles clench tight at the sound and his heart skip a beat. It was fine, though. He was not in the line of fire. He was safer waiting it out, where he was, than trying to move and risking his charm failing.

Further in the park, someone yelled. Civilians, running away.

What bothered Loki, beyond the gunfire and how vulnerable Loki was to bullets nowadays, was that it was all so disappointing. After the build-up of the last couple weeks, he couldn’t believe this was...it. This was Hydra’s grand plan. Take out communications and then race in with a smash and grab? He’d been excited to watch the drama of Barnes confronting his torturers, ripping his way through the men who had stolen his freedom and will and breaking them into little pieces.

Instead, he got a shootout and a silent building.

He couldn’t believe he’d wasted his resources to stay in town for this.

Loki’s eyes flickered nervously up and down the street, fingers clenched on his book. The two security men had hid behind a car for cover. Hydra did the same behind their van.

Time was running out until authorities showed up, no matter what tech magic Hydra had gotten on their side. Loki eyed the corner where he suspected Barnes’ bedroom was - the curtains there were always dark and closed. But there were no goons flying out the windows, more the pity.

Wait, what -

The building door swung open and the Hydra agent in the black jacket stepped out and started shooting. The new angle of gunfire forced both suits to scramble for better cover and Loki tensed, ready to dodge out of the way if the line of fire shifted his way. He’d been shot once, and he wasn’t interested in a repeat.

And then the second Hydra agent stepped out, Bucky Barnes at his side. One of the Hydra agent's hands was on Barnes' shoulder. With his other, he had Barnes’ right arm twisted behind his back as he marched Barnes towards the van, his partner covering him.

Loki frowned, closing the book that had been resting open on his lap. He found himself rising from his seat, brow furrowed in consternation. Loki had expected bloodshed and revenge. Instead, Barnes looked...perfectly calm as they led him to the van, if a little rumpled, his hair mussed, and his black tank top half tucked into his jean as if someone had grabbed it and yanked.

This wasn’t right.

This isn’t how this is supposed to go.

***

They all saw him, of course, but he didn’t quite catch their attention. Loki could feel his charm growing hot against his chest as he crouched down beside the gray car to pick up one of the security woman’s guns from her shoulder holster, her cigarette still glowing where she’d dropped it when she'd fallen. There was blood on the ground in a pool around her and she didn't stir. Loki rose, stepping around the car for a better angle. Black jacket was shoving Barnes at the open back of the van, while the others kept the suits pinned and trapped.

Loki shot the van driver first, through the open window, and then the four men one after the other in quick succession. Not all of the bullets hit center mass, but whatever was in the gun seemed to just need bodily impact to take down a human.

“Shit, thanks,” the suit said, staring at Loki from where he was crouched. The two men rose on shaky legs. “Did the director send - “

Loki shot him and his partner too.

Interesting.

Instead of red blood, his victim’s white shirts were stained with the blue of some substance, their chests rising and falling in slumber where their bodies lay crumpled on the ground. Some sort of stunning potion. That was useful.

Reluctantly, Loki dropped the gun. Humans were so clever at their trackers and technology.

Loki couldn’t risk it.

He moved swiftly around to the van, because movement kept the shakiness he could feel through his body away. Barnes was still standing where he had been put. He turned his head to look at Loki calmly.

The entire episode, beginning to end, could not have taken more than five minutes total. That was an entire eternity. The police, much less the Avengers, should have already been on their way. Whatever Hydra had done to disrupt or distract them wouldn’t last forever.

Loki needed to go. His luck wouldn’t hold, and Barnes’ friends would be here any minute. But Loki had spent so much time wondering, wondering what made Barnes so special, that he had to steal just one more moment before disappearing. His eyes searched Barnes almost hungrily: The metal arm whirred then settled, the shirt stretched across broad shoulders, a five o' clock shadow dusted his face and his eyes were a pale gray. Whatever that special something was, Loki just couldn't see it. 

“How does it feel? To know that you owe your freedom to me, even as all your guardians lie fallen around you?” Loki said, though there was no recognition in Barnes blank expression. Drugs, if Loki had to guess. Something strong to take down a supersoldier without a fight.  “Is there not a certain irony in that, a vicious twist of fate?”

“I am ready to comply.” Barnes answered in an even Russian. “What are your orders?”

Chapter Text

“What?” Loki said, staring.

“I am ready to comply,” Barnes repeated.

Apparently, he was ready to comply.

“I do not have time for this,” Loki muttered. They were out in the middle of the street, dead and unconscious bodies lying around them on the asphalt like broken puppets. The windows of the nearby houses blank and sunlit, like empty eyes. Loki didn’t hear the sirens yet, which was a Hydra-given miracle all of its own, but it wouldn’t last. Well, I suppose I shall have to make time.

Loki stepped past Barnes to the open doors of the van and grabbed the computer tower. He yanked the object out from the back of the van. The wires separated from the large suit-case sized block with a crackle of electricity, and the tower landed on the asphalt with a crack of plastic and an unhappy rattle from somewhere within. The large block of battery followed.

“Get in the van,” Loki said, and jolted when instead of climbing in the back, Barnes made his way around the van and to the passenger door up front. Right. Fine.

Loki slammed the back doors shut and hurried to the driver’s side of the van.

The driver Loki had shot through the window slumped out of the van when Loki pulled the door open. Loki caught the man by the back of his jacket and pulled him out the rest of the way to drop unceremoniously onto the ground, taking care to avoid the blue smears of sleep potion on the driver’s face and chest. Beyond, in the passenger seat, Barnes watched the scene placidly, the glint of metal in his lap.

Where the hell did he get a gun?

Loki almost balked, almost turned around and started walking in the other direction. But the gun wasn’t pointed at him, the van was a quick way out of there, and, all rationalizations aside, Loki wanted answers. For the first time in a very long time, Loki’s mind felt clear and sharp. He could see the threads of a plot coming together, the different possible outcomes, the mystery he could unravel, the strategy of the next five steps in this game, and the keen bite of adrenaline as he decided to play it.

Heart pounding, Loki climbed into the driver’s seat. His fingers found the van keys, still in the ignition.

Barnes was a war hero when he wasn’t playing at being a human-sized doll. Both versions of the man put Loki’s chance of surviving a bullet at higher than average.

Though he was called the god of chaos, Loki understood rules: Magic was defined by them, people believed in them, Loki used them, and, when needed, broke them. And right now, in this curious and fragile moment as the white van peeled out down the street, it appeared that Barnes obeyed them.

That flimsy assumption kept Loki from doing something stupid ( - like trying to grab the gun from the zonked out Hydra assassin - ), even as he peeled out onto the street and, one tight U-turn later, headed south.

Dump the van, go to ground.

Get some answers.

As a plan went, it would have to do. But first they needed ground rules.

“Soldier?”

“I am ready to comply,” Barnes said, the words gravely and hoarse with disuse. Or perhaps Barnes had worn it rough with screaming earlier that day.

“Don’t shoot me,” Loki said tightly, eyes on the road, his attention split between calculating the streets with less surveillance, and watching Barnes in his peripheral vision.

“Yes, sir.”

And then, because Loki was not particularly fond of loopholes when they weren’t to his advantage: “Do not do anything that would, through your direct action or inaction, lead to cause me harm.”

There was a pause before Barnes replied, and a faint furrow forming on his brow. “Yes, sir.”

Loki’s hands tightened on the wheel. Fine, no complicated orders for Barnes. Loki’s mind ran through options.

Finally: “Disregard these last orders. Your new orders are to protect me from harm. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Barnes said, his voice that same even tone, but without hesitation this time. “Understood.”

It would have to do for now. Loki made quick work of the street, keeping within speed limits, until he saw what he needed. He pulled into a narrow alley between buildings and rolled the van to a stop. The doors did not have enough clearance to open, so Loki clambered over the seat into the back and shoved the van back doors open. The smell of rotting food and piss hit Loki’s nose as Barnes followed him over the seats and out the van like a ghost.

“Follow me, do not draw attention to yourself,” Loki said. He pulled his spare charm from his pocket and looped it over Barnes’ neck. Then, Loki shrugged off his own coat and swept it over Barnes shoulders to tie the sleeves around his neck. The coat was at least one size too narrow to fit Barnes broad shouldered build, but it hid the metal arm. “Keep your left arm covered. Do not shoot anyone unless my life is in imminent danger.”

It was becoming easier to give orders.

Loki headed down the alley at a smooth jog, and Barnes paced him, a foot behind and to the side. The former prince of Asgard could almost pretend that Barnes was an attending guard trailing him down a city street in the golden city, obeying Loki because it was an honor and a privilege.

They slowed to a quick and easy walk once they had put distance between them and the van, and gradually, Loki’s pounding heart slowed. Whatever Hydra had done, whatever clever, dastardly trick they’d pulled, their efforts had slowed the Avengers and the police enough to give Loki and his trailing companion a head start.

A part of Loki kept waiting for Barnes to snap out of it, to come stumbling to a stop, and then come at Loki, swinging.

He didn’t. Drugs, or magic, or a new trickery of midgardian technology - whatever it was that kept Barnes down and pliant, it had staying power. It lasted through several street crossings that Loki took to avoid buildings he knew had surveillance, and a detour down a residential neighborhood. It lasted as they walked over the chalk drawings that four kids, teenagers and one toddler, were scrawling down the sidewalk, oblivious to the assassin and killer that brushed past their intense discussion about the correct color of a cartoon character.

Blue, Loki could have told them. He’d seen a few episodes during a sleepless night two weeks ago. Blue with yellow stripes.

Finally, almost ten minutes after they left the van, and with no sign of pursuit, Loki slowed to a stop in front of a familiar brick row house. The street was empty of familiar cars - almost everyone was out. Not ideal, but it would have to do.

“This house. Circle around to the back and wait for me in the backyard,” Loki paused and cleared his throat as he thought back to Barnes’ court records. That research would come in handy. “This is a high priority infiltration. Do not be seen. Do not engage. Wait until you see me to approach.”

“Yes, sir,” Barnes said and drifted away, his steps light, Loki’s coat still hanging over his shoulders like a cloak.

Loki didn’t bother giving Barnes a head start. He took the porch steps two at a time and pushed the door open to the house owned by the Russian mafia.

No charm would save Loki’s identity as Michael Brodsky at this point. Loki assiduously avoided cameras, he was careful in his routes, but he wasn’t foolish enough to think that he would be able to escape the entire, focused attention of the Avengers and their friends on their home turf. There would be very real surveillance footage of small-time Russian Mafia adjacent Michael Brodsky kidnapping the honorably discharged war hero Sergeant Barnes. It was just a matter of time.

Loki’s life as Michael Brodsky was well and truly over.

As a last hurrah, though, Loki would use mafia boss Vladimir Mitchkin’s little informal clubhouse as a temporary safe house, rather than burning one of his own. When the Avengers came for Barnes (and they would come), the presence of armed mobsters would slow them down - for long enough, Loki hoped, that he could throw Barnes at the Avengers and make his escape.

Hopefully, they would see the Russian connection and dig no further.

Inside, he found the living room dim, the window curtains drawn, and Alex and Kolya looking focused and intent. Alex, who spent every time Loki stopped by playing a video game on the large screen in front of the couch, was crouched over a laptop, the game on the TV paused and abandoned. There were glasses on his nose and his expression was a scowl, lit by the blue glow of the screen he was squinting at. Next to him, Kolya was sitting at the table, the short man in his usual knit turtleneck and tracksuit pants, five flip phones arrayed in front of him. He was texting something on the sixth one.

“Hey Kolya,” Loki said and leaned against the doorframe. “Are Dasha and Andrei in?”

“Everyone’s busy,” Kolya grunted. Alex ignored them both.

“Yeah? When are they getting back?”

“Everyone’s busy, Brodsky. Some shit went down in Bushwick,” Kolya grumbled, then grabbed one of the phones and tossed it to Loki. “If you want to be useful, get down to Prospect Park to check on one of our guys while I deal with this shit. Kid missed his last check in. I’ll text you the address.”

Loki caught the phone, considered the nature of irony, and then tossed it right back, “Nah, I’m good.”

“Then fuck off,” Kolya growled, glaring at Loki. Another phone buzzed with an incoming text and Kolya grabbed it off the table. "Hell if I know what they see in you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Loki agreed, looping his charm back over his neck and letting the door swing closed behind him, with him still in the building. Loki’s charm warmed up, and then Kolya was saying something to Alex, Loki forgotten, and the two men were back to managing whatever operation or - from their tone - clusterfuck that went down in Bushwick. Hydra had been busy. Loki was almost impressed as he drifted out of the room, down the hall, and to the kitchen and the back door.

When Loki stepped out into the small, overgrown backyard, part of him was not surprised to see it empty. He tried to decide if what he felt was disappointment, worry, or relief. The disappointment: He’d lost Barnes, which meant he’d lose the thread of any plans he could have formed. The worry: Barnes was now out there, in the immediate area, a highly skilled assassin who had no real reason to be fond of the man who’d just been giving him orders. The relief: Barnes was no longer Loki’s problem.

Except if Barnes went missing in a larger way, the Avengers would assume that Michael Brodsky had done something to him, and they would not let up their hunt for Loki.

Before Loki could decide anything, Barnes stepped out into the sunlight, practically materializing out of nowhere.

Loki startled, then scowled. Barnes was still wearing Loki’s charm, but this wasn’t the charm’s ability to match people’s expectations. Loki had crafted the spells that powered the small rune stone on a chain; its powers wouldn’t work on him. No, this was all Barnes.

“Come,” Loki said with a regal gesture that only went so far to recover his dignaty, and gestured at Barnes to follow. Like ghosts, they made their way into the house and up the steps to a spare bedroom. The room had all the personality of a cheap, run-down hotel room: bed, one cabinet, large side windows with half-open drapes, and a closet with no door.

“We won’t be able to stay here as long as I thought,” Loki said. “I’d hoped for more people to use as a distraction if we’re tracked, but everyone is out. Probably at a different, secure location.”

This row house was where Mitchkin went to hang out, check in, and run low-priority deals. The heavy stuff would be done somewhere else.

“Yes, sir.”

Loki turned to Barnes, closing the door behind them. “Now, let’s take a look at you.”

Barnes stayed perfectly still as Loki closed the distance between them, his hands loose at his sides, arms still hidden under Loki’s coat. Loki stared intently into Barnes’s cool gray eyes, coming so close that his breath stirred the mess of the man’s hair where it hung over his face, and none of it got a reaction. Loki’s skin crawled; Barnes could have been a doll, or a statue for all that he reacted. Except no, Barnes’ gaze did drift slightly to the side when Loki’s body blocked his sightlines.

The man, or whatever was left of him, was aware of his surroundings. Just frightfully obedient.

“How awake are you?” Loki murmured. “Do you see me?”

“Yes, sir,” Barnes said. “Awaiting orders.”

Aware and obedient.

“Winter Soldier,” Loki tried the words out.

“I am ready to comply.” The same answer, in that same, cool voice.

Now that they were out of immediate danger, Loki’s earlier sense of exhilaration of a well-executed heist shifted into unease, like small insects skittering over his skin. Loki took a step back and paced across the floor, forward and back. Once, twice, and stopped, staring at the blank wall in front of him. In his peripheral vision, he could see Barnes, still standing at attention.

“You look ridiculous,” Loki said, walking back to Barnes and untying the sleeves of the coat. Like an obedient child, the Fist of Hydra let Loki pull the coat off his shoulders. Barnes' arm glinted in the sunlight streaming through the window, Loki's charm dangled on his chest like a small pale river stone against the black shirt, and the gun was nowhere to be seen.

Loki had Captain America’s best friend, obedient to his every order. He could...order this automaton that was Bucky Barnes to do anything. Loki’s imagination was the limit, and he had an incredibly clever imagination. A wholesale slaughter of civilians would end any hope of Barnes ever being a free man - simple enough to arrange with a few easy orders. Or Loki could send Barnes after the Avengers, perhaps as both a lure and a trap, or armed with a weapon and words to go after their most vulnerable mortal champions. Or Loki could order Barnes to flay the skin off his own body in strips before dousing himself in kerosine and -

For the Captain to find and -

Loki could have ordered Clint Barton to do any-

Loki jolted, spinning around and moving fast across the small bedroom floor, as if he could outpace those thoughts. He didn’t think about those things any more. He didn’t think about what happened then, or what he did to the archer -

There was nothing to think about. Simple as that.

Nothing at all.

Loki shuddered and ironed his hands hard over his face. He had to get a grip on himself; he was making a fool of himself before Captain America’s loyal sidekick.

“What am I to do with you?” Loki whispered.

“I am ready to comply.”

“Yes, yes, so I’ve heard. Fine, answer my questions,” Loki said. That was, after all, the whole point of Loki’s daring kidnapping of Sergeant Bucky Barnes. “What happened when Hydra found you at your home? The building you shared with Captain Steve Rogers?”

“Field operatives engaged the asset as part of a retrieval operation,” Barnes promptly reported. “Code words were executed and accepted, and mission parameters reset and an override provided.”

“Well,” Loki mused. “Those are definitely words. Fine, the field operatives - those were the men from Hydra that I shot?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What are the code words?”

“Code words reset mission parameters.”

“What were the specific code words?”

“Code words were said to reset the mission parameters.”

“Right,” Loki said. Magic sometimes got like this, when spells would come back not-right. Always, it was because an incorrect assumption was made, the wrong ingredient used, a flawed formula referenced. Loki loved magic for its straightforwardness in execution; the solution was always there, you just had to be clever enough to ask the right question. “What were the mission parameters after the reset?”

“To return to base.”

“And what was the override?”

“To comply with orders.”

Before he could lose his nerve, Loki took a step forward, gathered his mental powers (what little he still had), pressed the palm of his hand to Barnes’ forehead, and reached.

Mind magic, much like his sorcery, was such a part of Loki that it could not be taken away entirely without killing him. Even the small amount that he was able to access through Odin’s bindings was enough to earn Loki a small glimpse into Barnes' state of mind.

Where Loki had expected sharpness and memories and the terror of a bound man forced to obey the whims of a stranger, instead Loki found an almost soft blanket haze of attentiveness, a boundless desire to do well and avoid error, and drive that was almost pain in its clarity to obey. It was almost comforting in its simplicity, like a hug, or the warm wash of blood over chilled skin -

Loki came to on the other side of the room, gagging and gasping as he tried to catch his breath. He wasn’t sure how he’d gotten there, shoulder pressed against the wall, half crouched and arms wrapped around his torso. But as he tried to straighten back up, he looked back at Barnes, still where Loki had left him, he had to squeeze his eyes shut at the image.

Loki snapped his eyes open again. Darkness made it worse.

He couldn’t...he didn’t think he had the strength to walk back to Barnes for the third time. He wanted to leave. Surely whatever had been done to Barnes would wear off. Loki would leave and surely Barnes would wake up and go to find his shield brothers.

Loki’s imagination, always quite clever, supplied a vision of Loki telling Barnes to wait. And Barnes waiting. Just waiting. How many days would it take for a supersoldier’s body to give out if no one checked this room?

Loki got up on wobbly legs and crossed to the bed to sit by the headboard. He sat and looked at Barnes.

“Come here, soldier,” he said. Barnes came and towered over Loki. “Sit down, please.”

Barnes did. But instead of sitting on the bed next to Loki, though, Barnes crouched down, perfectly balanced on his heels and angled so he could still see most of the room.

Saying please somehow made the order worse, and Loki immediately wanted to take that word back, erase it. Please, as if Loki wanted them both to pretend that his words were a request Barnes could ignore, as if Barnes were a guest instead of a prisoner, a friend instead of a slave.

It was a game that Loki knew well. He wouldn’t use the word again.

“You know,” Loki said, pressing the back of his head back against the wall above the headboard behind him. “There was a time I could have broken this hold on you, the tight ties that bind your mind. I am no mind healer, but it is not a realm unknown to me. You might say I have...some experience in this.”

Loki rolled his head to the side to look at Barnes who still crouched at Loki’s side, eyes scanning the space for threats.

“Look at me,” Loki said quietly, and Barnes did. “Is there not irony in this? Were it not for the chains of so-called-justice that bind my magic, I could loose you into the world a free man, into the arms of your noble captain. I suppose I could order you to go to him regardless, tell you to find your way to him - ”

Loki broke off and stared down at Barnes, whose gaze had drifted again. “I could order you to kill him, I suppose. None of the heroes of Midgard would enjoy that one bit. Or I could keep you, a weapon and a shield, and rise to glorious influence.”

With the Fist of Hydra at his back, Loki could plot and scheme his way into any number of Stark warehouses on his search for scraps of magic. But the thought just made him feel tired and his mind kept drifting to the park, and the afternoons soaking in the sun amid the flutter and crooning of the small, winged rodents of Midgard.

That pigeons and park chapter of Loki’s life was closed. The sunny afternoons in Prospect Park were now out of reach, the pattern of his days in the city irreparable broken.

“I could give you a mission,” Loki felt his way through those words, and Barnes glanced at Loki, like a dog hearing a familiar word in an otherwise irrelevant stream of human conversation. For a second, their eyes met, then Barnes went back to watching the empty room for threats. “I could order you home. That would keep you safe, would it not? You would follow my order and walk straight home. Well, until some passerby bumps into you and tells you to take a hike into traffic. Soldier, whose orders do you follow?”

“The ones that I am given.”

“Any orders you are given?” Loki murmured, but Barnes’ super-hearing picked the words up easily enough.

“I am ready to comply.”

Loki stared into space for a long moment. Another loophole. It had to be closed. This thought too should have filled Loki with sharp satisfaction.

“Soldier, you are to follow my orders only,” he finally spoke, the words tasting like ash in his mouth. “No one else’s. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir, you are my handler. I obey only you.”

Loki rubbed his cold hands together. He had done this before to the archer, his own hawk at his side like a loyal pet. Now he had a hound, crouched at his feet, as he added yet another hero of Midgard to his collection.

Did it matter?

Loki’s own so-called parents had long ago decreed him unredeemable before sending him to his exile, his own not-brother had turned against him. This latest bit of callous cruelty would not surprise any of them.

When the Avengers found out, the fallout would be spectacular.

For the first time in a while, the thought of their helpless rage did not fill Loki with glee.

“Perhaps your companions would know better what to do with you,” Loki said gently. “Do you know who I am?”

“You are my handler.”

“Do you know my name?”

“You are my handler.” A pause, and an almost imperceptible flicker of gray eyes to check for Loki’s reaction. For Loki’s approval. Then a course correct. “I am ready to comply.”

Small mercies, at least there was a chance Barnes wouldn’t realize who Loki was after the inevitable rescue, wouldn’t go tattling to the Captain that Thor’s nasty little brother had twisted Barnes to his wicked whims.

Small mercies indeed.

Chapter Text

The muffled quiet of the day filled the room, and time passed around Loki - between breaths and slipped through the cracks of his thoughts. Loki couldn’t have said what he was waiting for. A part of him couldn’t quite believe that he hadn’t been tracked down yet. That the Avengers and their allies were not arrayed around the block, just waiting for Loki to exit with Barnes before swooping in and bundling their precious Bucky off to the captain’s warm embrace, and Loki to the manacles and chains of the latest prison built to contain him.

In the stillness of the sun-drenched room on the second floor of a mob bosses clubhouse, Loki was like a small child playing stop-go. As long as he stayed still, as long as he didn’t move, he could have this. No one could tag him out of this game he kept losing.

“I am a fool,” he told Barnes. “Worse yet, I am a fool who sees clearly enough to know he is a fool.”

It wasn’t an order, and it wasn’t a question. Barnes didn’t respond as he kept his silent vigil over his master. Loki had done this with the archer, too. He’d have entire one-sided conversations about nothing when the archer was in the room, meandering through his own thoughts, or what was left of them ( - but he didn’t think about that - ) as if confiding to a friend. An unkind bystander might have pointed out that it said something about Loki that the closest people Loki had to confidants were all enslaved to his will. Loki was no stranger to this thought himself.

Finally, Loki stirred with a long exhale and looked at Barnes again. The man was still in his crouch by the bed where Loki sat, his body relaxed and his gaze alert and attentive. Knock-off supersoldier serum or Hydra training, the man looked ready to spend the rest of the evening at Loki’s feet without a single sign of discomfort. Occasionally, something would recalibrate in his arm, the whir of it a bare whisper in the quiet room caught by Loki's better-than-average hearing.

The light was shifting to a golden hue of evening when Barnes moved, his head turning, and his posture tensing minutely before relaxing. Loki heard it a moment later.

Cars on the road, then pulling into the parking spots below the windows. Doors slammed, voices rumbling disjointedly through the walls and from the rooms below. Loki’s sharp hearing caught snippets of Russian and English, the flow of conversation tense and unhappy.

The Russians were regrouping, and they were not happy.

“Time to go,” Loki whispered. There was no pursuit, the Avengers weren’t coming, and Loki needed to make some decisions. He pushed himself up off the bed and padded over to the doorless closet. It gaped, a pile of discarded spare clothes spilling out in a tangle. Loki dragged his hand through the mass, pulled out and then discarded a torn sweater, a pair of women’s jeans, a stained towel.

“Here, put these on,” Loki said, turning to Barnes with a tracksuit top and bottom in his hand. The white stripes on the top were a dull gray from use and washes, the pants ragged at the waistband, but it would do. Barnes had followed Loki to the closet; he took and pulled on the offered clothes.

The top fit, if barely. Loki considered a puffy coat he found on the bottom of the pile. The coat was large enough for Barnes, but the neon yellow and pink colors screamed for attention. It was probably what had condemned the ugly thing to this pile in the first place. Loki grabbed an oversized hoodie and a baseball cap instead, and handed them to Barnes.

“No, you need to hide that hair under the cap,” Loki said. The voices were moving below them in the house, and Barnes’ eyes followed the sound as if he could see through the floorboards. They needed to be gone soon. “Here. Come here, I’ll do it.”

Loki took the hat off as Barnes’s head. The man waited, still and obedient, as Loki pulled his hair up off his face and twisted the long dark strands up on top of his head to be held in place by the cap. Barnes’ hair was soft under Loki’s fingers.

Just one more violation among a countless pile of others.

Loki stepped back, grabbed his tan long coat off the bed and swept it over his shoulders. “Follow me. Do not be seen.”

With the house full again, they could not exit through either doors on the ground floor, and the window in the room Loki had claimed looked out on one of the roads. It was convenient for line of sight, but not so much for slipping away unnoticed. Loki slipped out into the second floor hallway and made his way to the last room at the back. The door creaked when he pulled it open, and he gestured Barnes inside - and just in time.

Further down the hall, Loki heard a heavy tread on the stair. Someone tired was ready to find a place to lie down and crash for the night.

Loki pressed the door shut, easing the doorknob so that it clicked closed almost soundlessly. On the other side of the room, the window was as he’d remembered, the screen pulled off and resting on the drawers under a pile of old hard drives and empty soda cans. The room itself was part temporary sleeping space - two cots were pushed against the wall - part storage, with boxes leaning on each other and a pile of printers, monitors, and obsolete equipment taking up most of the space.

The window frame creaked when Loki pushed it up, and he paused, listening for a second, before sliding the window fully open. The cool night air rushed in and Loki eased himself out onto the sloping roof under the window. This side of the house opened up onto the yard, and second floor windows of the neighbor’s house glowed faintly behind heavily shuttered blinds. Loki could see through the open windows of the neighbors first floor; an empty kitchen, old cracked tiles, a large chore chart hanging on the wall.

The neighbors were a couple who ran a halfway house for kids in trouble. The kids were in and out, based on what Dasha said, and the Russian mafia recruited heavily from the broken system and the angry kids it spawned. But now, the house across the yard was quiet, and no one was watching.

Loki slid down to the edge of the roof and eyed the drop. Behind him, Barnes moved like a shadow despite his large bulk. The roof creaked under their combined weight, and Loki slithered his body over the edge, hung from his fingertips and let go.

His feet hit the grass with a thump and a splinter of pain, like a warning shot: You’re breakable now, remember?

The spark of pain was gone by the time Barnes joined Loki and they ghosted across the yard to the crooked slats holding the side gate open. And then they were on the street.

“This is a stealth mission, soldier,” Loki told Barnes. “Walk with me, hide your metal arm, don’t be noticed, blend in.”

Loki didn’t have high expectations; there was only so much that one could do to disguise Barnes’ tightly controlled prowl, but the new clothes would help, as would Loki’s charm that Barnes still wore around his neck. Loki re-wrapped his own scarf around his neck as he watched Barnes put his metal hand in the large front pocket of the hoodie.

The light from the setting drenched Barnes in an orange glow, cast his face in hard shadows. Whether in the bright blaze of high noon sun in the park or the slanted lighting of the evening, Barnes looked like a killer and carried his weight like he could bulldoze a dozen innocents before breakfast.

Loki still didn’t know what Steve Rogers had seen in Barnes that convinced him Barnes was worth saving. He was starting to think he’d never know. Maybe it wasn’t about Barnes being worthy. Maybe it wasn’t about what was right about Barnes, but rather Loki being wrong on some fundamental level everyone could see.

Loki reached up and pulled Barnes’ hood up around his cap and face, plunging the man’s face even further into the gloom. The eyes seemed to gleam out of the dark, sharp, attentive, and completely empty.

“Time to get you home, soldier,” Loki said.

The afternoon rush of manic energy was gone, taking Loki’s wild schemes with it. Loki couldn’t seem to find the stamina to maintain that optimism, or the enthusiasm for another scheme that was doomed to fail. He’d walk Barnes far enough to confuse the trail, find them a traffic hub with plenty of pedestrians, and get Barnes into a cab. Stark would cover the cost of the ride when the taxi delivered their long lost soldier to the Avengers’ doorstep.

“Let’s go,” Loki said. Barnes followed Loki, walking a few paces behind.

Loki paid attention to his surroundings, picked the best routes to stay under the radar, but it was a testament to Loki’s scattered thoughts that it took him almost a mile to notice that something was very off about Barnes. They had left the residential streets and were making their way past storefronts and around pedestrians when Loki saw it.

Loki had ordered Barnes to blend in, but he had no real expectations that the man would be capable. Except, when he glanced back, over the course of the walk, Barnes had transformed his stalk into a slouching, rolling walk, his shoulders just hunched enough to radiate boredom, but not enough to look suspicious. He moved like a young man after a long day at some dead end job, with nowhere to be in particular.

On a hunch, Loki veered towards a hot dog stand. The owner gave them both a glare - he was in the middle of packing up - but traded the dollar bills Loki pulled from his pocket for two hot dogs. Loki handed one of the buns in its foil wrapping to Barnes and started walking again, his pace a casual stroll.

In the face of no additional orders from Loki, Barnes fell into step with Loki, and took a bite of the hot dog. His posture had changed too, body language shifting to something more open and easy. They were now two slightly mis-matched down-on-their-luck friends eating a snack on their way home.

It was...quite the transformation. Loki slowed to a full stop and had to step over to the side of the sidewalk to avoid a collision. Barnes mirrored him and leaned against the storefront window, propping up his leg against the wall behind him.

A terrible thought occurred to Loki, and refused to be shaken off.

Surely not.

Loki had assumed that Barnes’ obedient fugue state had been caused by Hydra. The Barnes Loki had seen on television had been awkward, nervous, tense, everything the public expected a recovering prisoner of war to be. Barnes had been infinitely more human than the automaton who took Loki’s orders and answered with rote phrases.

But this - this version of Barnes on a mission -

This version could have been any young man out on a stroll through the city, on his way to happy hour or on an errand to the market. Had the spell holding Barnes’ mind worn off while they were walking? But if so, where was the gun and the anger and the shouting?

“Soldier?” Loki murmured, his voice barely audible under the sounds of the city around them. Barnes heard him fine.

“I am ready to comply.”

So no, it had not worn off. The other possible answer to this mystery was an ugly one.

“Who did you obey before?” Loki asked. Barnes hesitated, seeming to struggle with the question, arm plates making a quiet whirring sound under the sleeve of the hoodie. Loki chose different words. “Who gave you orders? Soldier, who gave you orders before today?”

Barnes finally answered. "My handlers give me orders. I follow your orders."

"Who did you obey before you obeyed me or the operatives who found you today?"

Another hesitation. “Captain Steve Rogers.”

“Not in the war,” Loki said, his heart pounding. “Before today. Last week. Whose orders did you obey last week?”

“Captain Steve Rogers,” Barnes said, seemingly more comfortable saying the name this second time.

“Are you still following his orders?”

“No, I follow your orders.”

“Why?”

“You are my handler. Active operatives reset my mission parameters during the incursion on Captain Steve Rogers home,” Barnes said, still holding the hot dog in his flesh hand, and the two of them could have passed for two friends chatting on the sidewalk. It was also the longest sentence the man had spoken yet. Loki wanted to think that this meant the fugue state was wearing off. More likely, Loki was getting better at asking the right kind of questions.

“What were your mission parameters before the reset?”

“To comply as Captain Steve Rogers required.”

Loki felt his understanding of his world wobble again. The Avengers were supposed to be the heroes of Midgard, and the story of Steve Rogers reunion with his childhood friend Bucky Barnes was supposed to be the ultimate tale of forgiveness and redemption. It had become a kind of constant, like the sun rising every morning, or like Loki’s fury at Thor’s betrayal. What did one do when, in the battle of good and evil, the good guys were a lie too?

Loki remembered all the videos he’d scoured on the internet, searching for even one interview where Barnes would speak for himself. All he’d found was the Captain’s earnest entreaties and explanations, and Barnes’ sullen silence. Barnes didn’t speak in interviews, but his handler did.

Was the truth behind Steve and Bucky’s friendship truly this ugly?

“Do you want to go back?” Loki asked quietly, staring at Barnes. “To Captain Steve Rogers?”

Barnes’ answer did not surprise Loki. “I am ready to comply.”

Chapter Text

Loki wasn’t sure how long they stood there in the street among chatting passersby and the roll of passing car headlights. For what felt like the fifth or sixth time that day, Loki found his plans and expectations in shambles. He kept sneaking glances at Barnes, as if hoping that this time Loki would see a different man leaning against the storefront window. What Loki would give for a different, sunnier universe in which this was all a strange, practical joke.

Just walk away.

Loki could do that. He could still put Barnes in a cab. He could wash his hands of this entire ugly situation and reinvent himself in another city and damn his brother and his Avenger shield brothers to hell.

Instead, Loki took Barnes home.

Not to Loki’s rune-protected basement flat with its books and coffee table and television. No, Loki and his Winter Soldier shadow walked the side streets and back alleys to the apartment Loki kept as a just-in-case backup - a steep expense that he had almost given up to pay Mitchkin’s next installment. Now, Loki was glad he hadn’t.

The building was an old six story apartment building, bricks and cement and graffiti, among other similar buildings on the street. Loki bypassed the elevator - out of order since before Loki had first come by to sign the papers in March - and up three flights of stairs to the door with the peeling 306. Down the hall, the dull beat of a stereo system pulsed through the walls.

Carefully, Loki pulled the key out from one of the sleeves of his wallet. If he didn’t look, Barnes could have been a mere shadow in the dimly lit stairwell. Even Loki’s ears, finely tuned and much better than any mortals, had to work to hear the minute shifts of Barnes’ breathing.

The lock opened with a loud and unhappy thud, and Loki pushed the door open with the flat of his palm. It swung open on the dim shapes of furniture amid empty and undecorated stretches of space. The electricity worked when Loki flipped the switch to reveal the open concept living room and kitchen, a closed door that led to the bedroom, and a series of small windows covered with white blinds.

The apartment had come furnished - a couch, an armchair, the dining room table, and a smattering of kitchen items. At the time, it had seemed like an unnecessary luxury. Now, Loki was glad for it.

“Close the door behind you,” Loki said, moving through the space to check the bedroom. He did not actually believe there would be a gaggle of Avengers hiding behind the closed door, but the way his day was going, Loki couldn’t not check.

The bedroom opened on nothing - a bed, a shelf, a nightstand, and the smell of dust and stale air. The water ran in the attached bathroom when he tried it.

When Loki returned to the living room, Barnes was standing at the edge of the window, staring at the street below through the edge between the blinds and the glass.

“The window in the kitchen opens on a structurally questionable fire escape,” Loki said, pulling off his gloves one finger at a time. “Two of the neighboring buildings are of reasonable height for a leap from the roof. The door to the roof is locked but should break easily enough. Elevator doesn’t work, but if you get to the bottom of the stairwell, there is an entrance to an underground garage shared with a small hotel behind us. It is also connected to several of the other buildings around us.”

Loki would have preferred a top level or ground level apartment, but ultimately, the garage was the selling point for this specific building. The connections to the garage were not on the city plans, likely constructed as a belated and only semi-legal attempt by the hotel to earn some extra money from their neighbors by selling parking slots.

Loki’s voice echoed in the space, without the clutter of day-to-day life to muffle the bouncing sound, and Barnes largely ignored him once he understood that no orders were forthcoming. Loki left Barnes to his window vigil and went to explore the kitchen.

They would need food, Loki realized, as he plugged in the fridge and microwave. They would need a lot of things.

When was the last time Barnes ate? Or took care of his other needs?

Loki pushed aside the guilt, but he couldn’t stop his mind from tallying up the number of hours Barnes had spent at Loki’s heels like a patient hunting hound. Loki needed information, and he needed to stop hiding in the kitchen like a child.

Until he untangled this mess, Loki was responsible for Barnes.

***

Over the following twenty-four hours, Loki came to three conclusions.

One: After a frustrating and vaguely horrifying conversation, Loki had ordered Barnes to maintain optimal mission readiness and perform regular maintenance as needed. That got the silent soldier into the kitchen for a glass of water, and to the bathroom for two and a half minutes. It also landed the man at the dining room table where he had meticulously laid out his weapons - the gun he’d taken from Hydra, a loop of razor thin wire, and four knives, only one of which came from the apartment’s kitchen.

Optimal mission readiness, however, did not seem to include showers, change of clothes, or something to wipe the smear of dirt that had found its way onto Barnes' forehead sometime between sliding down the roof of Mitchkin’s place and arriving at Loki’s apartment. Loki had wavered, trying to feel out the boundaries of his new role as Barnes’ handler (there were no boundaries; Loki could do as he pleased) and eventually decided to leave it be. Barnes would wash his face or he wouldn’t; he was no doll for Loki to play dress up with.

Two: If Loki was to get out of this situation with all his bones unbroken and his freedom intact, he needed money and resources. Once nightfall had fully settled over the city, Loki told Barnes to stay in the apartment as he left to retrieve what he'd need. He returned several hours later with all his spare charms around his neck, a messenger bag with his laptop slung over his shoulder, and a bag of groceries in one hand. This one bag of groceries would not be nearly enough to feed a super soldier for any length of time, but it would do for now.

As the oven heated up and the smell of baked chicken crept out into the living room, Loki replaced the charm around Barnes’ neck with a fresh one and pulled open his computer to connect it to the intermittent but free wifi at the 24-hour diner on the ground floor next door.

Playing the stock market required just a few too many bits of identifiable information, but Loki could make as much from poker given time. He created several accounts soon after he’d escaped Thor and gotten a place to live, around the time he’d stolen his first laptop and connected to the internet. But the tediousness of play - and truly the tediousness of doing anything - had been too much.

Until Mitchkin’s demands and the drama surrounding the supersoldiers in Prospect Park had awakened a spark of interest in Loki, his life had settled into the unchanging rhythm of merely existing.

Now, though, the world felt sharper, things mattered. Loki wasn’t sure how long this latest burst of purpose would last, but in the meantime, he needed to make some money.

Three: There was a lot to be gained from his acquisition of Bucky Barnes, enough that the potential rewards outweighed the risks. If Barnes regained autonomy, Loki was well positioned as a valuable ally - a rescuer and savior. Indeed, a hero!

Barnes could be leverage, revenge, and ally, all rolled into one.

Of course, Loki knew that the logical thing would be to keep Barnes as he was. Fixing the soldier’s current state came with very real risks. If freed, Barnes could turn on Loki. Would likely choose to disappear the moment he awakened.

But keeping Barnes in his current state -

Loki couldn’t just -

Loki has always loved control - that heady thrill of crafting circumstances to his advantage, of watching events and people fall into place because he’d arranged things just so. He loved the smothered fury of the courtiers in Asgard’s court when they realized just how utterly Loki had outmaneuvered them, when they could do nothing but bow and murmur something pleasant. He loved the power of his magic, the heady thrill to bring an unruly horse into a well-controlled trot under his steady hand, the well organized plan falling into place. He loved being the smartest person in the room, teaching magic to hungry students who (always, always) thought they were more clever, right before their spells and pride imploded and they had to turn, penitent and chastened, to Loki.

If anyone had asked, all those many years ago, how Loki felt about the idea of owning a mindless thrall, Loki might have pontificated about the nature of free will...and then shrugged and said, why not? He had been a prince, after all. He was owed the obedience of others.

And yet, faced with the reality of owning a mindlessly obedient slave - first the hapless Clint Barton and the mortal scientist Erik Selvig, and now sergeant Bucky Barnes - Loki found himself at a loss. Barton and Selvig had been a means to an end, those years ago when Loki had come to Midgard with pain in his bones and the shroud of war draped over his mind. He had very few choices back then.

But this thing with Barnes -

This is a choice.

Keeping Barnes is a choice.

Barnes sat at the dining table, the chair pushed out and sideways, part of his weight on the ball of one foot, poised for easy movement if needed. Barnes’ hands stilled on the gun he was reassembling as Loki walked to him. Loki wavered, looming over Barnes, whose gaze stayed down, fixed on the shiny metal gleam of his hand and the dull metal of the gun barrel, and then crouched down to put himself on Barnes’ level. He was able to stay down for less than two seconds, half kneeling before this man in a chair, before - heart suddenly pounding, Loki found himself up and walking away, retreating to the kitchen.

Loki’s eyes went to the door of the microwave, and he watched Barnes’ shape in its reflection as he reached into the cupboard and grabbed a glass. The water from the sink splashed merrily as Loki poured himself a glass and let the icy cold water pour down his throat and remind him that he was here. In this moment. In a small apartment in the upstart city of New York on a backwater realm called Midgard.

He was light years from the darkness of the void and the throne and the -

He wasn’t there.

When he returned to the table, Barnes was waiting, hands folded together, the gun gone, vanished away amid the soldiers’ layers of clothes. Loki grabbed the other chair and dragged it around so he could sit in front of Barnes, their knees almost touching.

He cleared his throat. “Soldier.”

“Yes, sir,” Barnes said, raising his gray eyes in that thousand yard stare that gazed past Loki, and Loki did not have the heart to correct him in this. “Is there a mission?”

“You’re safe here,” Loki said instead. His fingers twitched, almost reaching for Barnes’ hands, before tangling together on his own lap instead. He kept his voice calm and steady. “Your enemies are distant, your presence here is hidden from their searching eyes. I will keep you free and safe until such a time that you can keep yourself free and safe.”

And it was all lies, each and every word that fell from his lips, but these were the words he’d have given anything to hear himself, once upon a time. From brother or enemy or stranger, it wouldn’t have mattered. He could give that to Barnes. 

Across from him, Barnes waited patiently for Loki’s orders.

“These bindings that hold you in their thrall ill suit you,” Loki explained. “I will untangle them, and your enemies and friends will rue the day they thought a wolf would be their hound.”

Loki’s words hung in the air between them for a moment, and then they were gone, and only Barnes’ blank, uncomprehending gaze remained.

“At ease soldier,” Loki sighed, pushing his chair back.

He was a fallen god whispering false promises to a broken toy soldier who could not hear them. Had he really expected a response?

***

Loki woke on the couch with morning light filtering through the window, a dull ache in his neck from the pillow, and the almost discombobulating realization that he was still a free man. Loki had stolen the Winter Soldier from Hydra, the Russians, and the Avengers and their law enforcement allies. Before, Loki had the kind of magic that would have made this kind of heist child’s play. Now, it seemed almost uncanny that Loki had just...walked away with Bucky Barnes.

Lady Luck was a two-faced hag, and Loki kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He could hear Barnes breathing in light puffs as the supersoldier - already awake - met the morning by doing pushups in the space he’d cleared in the living room. Optimal mission readiness, Loki mouthed and tried not to have any feelings about it.

In the silence of the early morning, Loki wondered how Clint Barton had managed with Barnes in this current, mind-controlled state. Perhaps Barnes' state explained the rumors that Barton no longer lived in the tower. Or perhaps tension on the team had been the thing to force the good captain to move himself and his brainwashed charge into their small, private apartment building in Brooklyn in the first place.

The day took a turn for the domestic. Loki served them fried eggs and sausage from a packet for breakfast, and Barnes dutifully ate what was put on his plate. Loki washed up and settled in for a morning of playing for money and planning their next steps; Barnes continued his obsessive review of his weapons at the dining room table. At noon, they ate lunch, and Barnes made the rounds of the apartment, his steps silent as he drifted around the periphery of Loki’s vision. Occasionally, a car would backfire or an ambulance would rush by. Each time, Loki tensed, knowing it was nonsense even as some hindbrain part of him perfectly certain that any moment now, the door would come crashing in as heavily armed mortals piled in to take Loki into custody.

Loki was so busy waiting for the other shoe to drop that he almost missed it when it did.

He felt it like the prickle of awareness running up his spine, the small hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. It took much longer than it should have for him to realize he could feel the draw of power from his charm - someone was concentrating their full attention on him.

Loki realized that it had been almost two hours since he'd heard any movement from Bucky Barnes.

He closed the laptop on his lap and slid it into the messenger bag at his feet (the laptop had too much information to be left during a quick escape) and turned to look for Barnes. The man was still sitting at the dining room table, but the intensity and intelligence in his grey eyes jolted Loki.

Barnes held himself perfectly still, but this was a kind of stillness that practically vibrated with suppressed violence. HIs expression was hard, his jaw was clenched tight, and he stared at Loki as if trying to see straight through the nothing-special-to-see-here glamor of the charm through sheer willpower.

Those eyes blazed. Bucky Barnes did not look ready to comply.

Loki could feel his own heart speed up as adrenaline set it racing. And if Loki had any doubts that the man was awake and aware, Barnes dispelled them when he spoke. 

"Who the hell are you?" 

Chapter Text

“Who the hell is that guy? Jarvis, play it again,” Tony said, his shoulders tight and arms rigid as he leaned on the table in the conference room. The security footage rolled again, starting when the man in the duster strolled down the park trail to the bench. Pigeons flocked around him, obscuring him for a second before they settled to mill about his feet. The man was tall, his face and short dark hair obscured by a cap and the scarf that nestled amid the popped collar of his worn, gray long coat.

“Pause.”

The image froze. 

“He’s a regular at the park, six foot one or two, best we can tell from the surveillance angle,” Natasha murmured into the silence. “Follows the same route to the park from the metro, gets on at different stops on his way there, but we’ve been unable to track him back beyond that. Keeps his face out of direct camera angle, but never so obviously to raise flags.”

“He’s clearly a professional. Jesus, how did we miss this?”

“The agents on the ground didn’t report him, and the video team assumed he was a regular.” Tony's voice was tight. “Jarvis was following up on anyone the ground team flagged. And also tracked tech usage, but our guy doesn’t even carry a cell phone. Who doesn’t carry a cell phone - ”

“Was he a regular?” Bruce asked before Tony could gather momentum.

“No, he started visiting Prospect Park shortly after Cap and Bucky moved in,” Natasha said. “We have a local who got into an altercation with him who confirms it. I have one of our people with her, putting together a facial sketch.”

“He knew what he was doing. I have my security people scouring the data.” Tony grabbed a mug of cold coffee and started pacing the room again, circling the table as if a different angle or just a bit more caffeine would shake loose a clue about the great mystery (and tragedy) of the disappearing Bucky Barnes. Bruce and Natasha remained seated at the table, like a funhouse mirror of opposites. The more time passed, the straighter Natasha's shoulders became, her posture perfect, her hands clasped loosely in front of her as if posing for a photo, her eyes on the screen. Across from her, Bruce slumped further down, his elbows on the table as he cleaned his glasses nervously. He seemed to shrink each time his eyes wandered over to Steve.

Clint sat in his usual seat, rolled all the way to the furthest corner of the room. He'd brought a second chair with him and used it to prop his leg up. This time, though, his ankle was in a brace, and there was a colorful bruise blooming across his face like a smear of purple. The closest Avenger to Prospect Park, he'd also been the last one to reply to the call to assemble when the Avengers finally figured out something was happening. Clint, when they'd finally all assembled, had said something about his apartment and a dog and a tracksuit mafia-

Natasha had stepped in, seeing how close Steve was to losing it in front of the strewn chaos of his and Bucky's now empty home. The team couldn't afford to fragment; she and Tony had gotten the full story from Clint later.

It wasn't relevant to Bucky's disappearance, except as a chilling example of how cleverly Hydra had set all up all their distractions. Clint had been busy shooting arrows at the Russian Mafia in Bushwick. Thor was off-world. Tony, Natasha and Steve had been raiding a Hydra base that became a trap. And the security people at Steve and Bucky's home had been entirely outmatched. It had taken a couple phone calls from concerned pedestrians to finally get through Hydra's temporary tech blackout to sound the alarms.

And now they had no leads. 

"Jarvis is scanning for the tracker. The moment it comes online for even a second, we'll know," Tony said. He was repeating himself, and his eyes darted over to Steve nervously. Just a month and a half ago, Tony and Steve had argued - not their usual back and forth discussions, but viciously, with an edge closer to the sharpness of some of their early conversations on the helicarrier when theyhad first met. Tony had wanted to put a tracker in Bucky's arm: the shiny new prosthetic was Tony's technology, Tony's responsibility. It would have made the tracking anklet obsolete. It was the responsible thing to do.

Steve wouldn't hear of it; Bucky was not some criminal or pet to track. He was not an experiment or a lost piece of equipment. 

Tony had brought up - 

Well, they both regretted a lot of what was said, and it had taken them more than a week and a earthquake rescue operation to stop circling around each other. Steve apologized, Tony agreed to leave Bucky's arm alone.

Yesterday night, after a full day of futile searching, Tony finally admitted that he'd lied. It wasn't pinging his systems right now, but he'd put a tracker into Bucky's arm anyway.

Steve had almost cried in relief.  

The tracker had gone dead when the van had been dumped, but the arm hadn't been dumped or destroyed at that location so it was still probably with Bucky. And the tracker was a small, subtle piece of technology, fully integrated with the arm and programmed to reset and restart itself at regular intervals. If Barnes still had his arm, it might still reactivate. 

It all came down to that: A cold trail, a silent tracker, and a facial sketch. 

It was also just a matter of time before this situation blew up in their faces in a big and public way. After all the work Pepper and Steve had done to reinvent the fearsome Winter Soldier assassin into the patriotic and tragic Bucky Barnes, they couldn't afford the morning's story to be how they'd lost him to a terrorist fascist underground. 

Natasha's phone buzzed gently under her hand. 

"This is the best I could get," said the text from Marley, and along with it, two attachment images. Marley had finished the sketch of what their mystery man looked at, according to the old woman at the park. Natasha tapped and waited for the images to load. They did so, slowly, rendering from the bottom up. A neck, a sharp chin with what looked like parallel scars running up it, thin bow-shaped top lip and -

Red eyes, hooked nose. And horns.

The second image loaded. A completely different set of facial features - sharp cheeks, slender nose, curling hair, all on a face with two holes where the eyes should be.

The phone buzzed again. "She said she scared the devil in our perp away, that's why he's so different in sketch two"

"I got her to talk me through drawing Benji"

"he was doing paperwork right in front of her" 

"she gave him a beard and dog ears"

Another buzz: "Sorry."

Natasha looked up. Across the table, Steve sat staring blankly at the map in front of him and Tony kept throwing glances her way, a question in his eyes. Quietly, she gave a small shake of her head and put her phone away.

Steve hadn't spoken during the last three watch-throughs and the seat next to him stood empty, like an accusation. The other people in the room avoided looking at it.

“What was he reading?” Steve finally asked, his voice flat. He was glaring at the paused frame of the man in the park.

“The Unauthorized Biography of the Real Bucky Barnes from 1976,” Natasha said, pretending she needed to check the notes. “An old copy the local library threw out during their summer purge. We’re scanning it for evidence and prints, but it doesn’t look good.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Steve swallow hard.

The silence settled heavily in the room. 

“I should have never agreed to move us back to Brooklyn,” Steve ground out.

No one knew what to say to that.

Bucky had insisted. They talked and had all agreed they couldn’t keep him in the tower when he wanted out. He deserved to have his choices respected; he had so little of that with Hydra. They decided they would be able to manage the risks.

They all looked at the paused and frozen image of Bucky’s kidnapper in silence. It was better than looking at the other open files - a still of the agent from the shootout covered in blood, Bucky’s blank expression from the surveillance inside the house as he let the Hydra agent slap him across the face, and a map of the roadways the van could have taken and the big red dot where the it had been dumped.

And none of it was any help in finding Bucky again. Every crime show cliché said the first 48 hours were critical for solving a case, and everyone in the room could feel time slipping through their fingers. Every cell inside them screamed for action. But in the hours that had already passed, the man in the park and whatever organization backed him could have already flown Bucky to the other side of the world. The chance that Bucky was still in New York was less than none.

The captured Hydra agents had been a dead end once they were revived, and the alphabet government agencies that Tony had hacked seemed equally clueless.

Until they had even a single lead...

Bruce lifted his hand and gave a small wave. The footage played.

They rewatched the man in the park place the book carefully on the bench beside him and rise. He brushed the wrinkles from his duster with a snap of his gloved hands and strolled towards the gun-fight. On a parallel screen to the right, Hydra was walking Bucky to their van, shooting at the agents crouched behind their car to cover their escape.

“He only moved when he saw Bucky come out. He was waiting for it,” Natasha said quietly. Beside her, Steve made a choked noise. “He took out Hydra first. He used Leanne’s icer so our people assumed he was back-up.”

“Until he shot them,” Clint said tightly from his corner.

“Until he shot them,” Natasha agreed and stood. This was all stuff they already knew. The video was still playing, but she had seen it more than two dozen times, and there was nothing new to be gained from another agonizing watch session. “I am going to reach out to my contacts again to see if I can find anything out about him. Vadim and Michkin’s men must know who he is. They’ve been watching Steve’s place like hawks.”

“Have we been able to recover any more of the footage of what happened inside?”

“No,” Tony said. “The system was out long enough that we got only that last bit when it restarted on the local server.”

The last bit being the Hydra agent hitting Bucky across the face and Bucky just taking it. Then, Hydra cut the tracking anklet off, shot something into the fleshy muscle between his shoulder and neck, and walked him out of the room, all without a single moment of struggle. 

Natasha’s skin crawled as she grabbed her jacket and keys.

Someone would pay. Dearly.

Chapter Text

"Who the hell are you?"

Bucky Barnes had apparently shaken off his mindless state like an inconvenient case of the flu. And now he was glaring at Loki, who was perched across the room on the couch, body half-turned as he stared back at Barnes. His thoughts were like a deck of cards, and Loki shuffled through the facts in front of him.

Fact: The man wanted answers. 

Unhelpful fact: Loki had miscalculated. He had made some sweeping assumptions about the state of Barnes’ brain.

Slightly more relevant: The light was only just now beginning to shift towards evening, creeping along the living room carpet. In an hour or so, neighbors would start making their way home from work. An altercation and escape now would be less noticed, but rush hour would provide better cover.

Also a fact: The gun Barnes had been cleaning so obsessively since they’d arrived in this apartment was lying on the plastic tabletop.

Fact: Bucky Barnes had his hand on it and he looked pissed.

Take control. 

No more than a breath had passed since Barnes’ spoke, and Loki checked his own posture and expression: Calm, alert, engaged.

“You’re back,” Loki said, buying time. The rush of adrenaline had burned through the dulled edges of his mind and he felt sharp again, like a honed blade. Options and opportunities unfurled in his mind like branches of a decision tree. He picked one. “My name is Misha. Independent contractor, occasional good Samaritan. I heard rumors of what was gonna go down and well,” Loki gave a small shrug. “You looked like you were in need of an assist.”

Barnes might have his gun and decades of violence, but Loki had his words and centuries of using them to win.

“An assist,” Barnes repeated, voice hard and contemptuous, and now his fingers tightened around the gun. “Just like that?”

“How much do you remember of the last two days?” Loki said instead from his seat on the couch. Turn it around. Take control. 

“Bits,” Barnes said, eyes flickered away from Loki to move warily over the sparsely furnished space. Then they dropped down as the man did a quick inventory of his own attire. The tracksuit pants remained, but Barnes’ original tank was hidden by the oversized hoodie Loki had taken from the Russian safehouse, and the glitter on the hoodie's cat print had certainly seen better days a couple hundred washes ago.

Finally, those eyes zeroed back in on Loki and he felt the hard gray gaze almost like a jolt. The difference between this man and the dull obedient creature that had followed Loki around the city was almost a physical weight in the air. 

“Hydra came after you,” Loki explained. If the man had some memories of the day before - of breakfast and lunch and being left alone and unmolested, Loki could use that. “I got you out. This is a safe house.”

“Where?” 

“We’re still in New York,” Loki said, and pushed himself up off the couch. Barnes twitched, his chest moving as the man took deep breaths, but the gun stayed down. Good. Loki drifted away from the couch and to the windows on the far side. Gently, he twisted the bar hanging down the side of the window and the blinds rotated, letting in the light and the sight of the brick siding of the building right outside. “Still in Brooklyn, matter of fact.”

Barnes did not look convinced. One brick building looked like another.

“But let me guess,” Barnes said, voice dropping into a growl. “It’s too dangerous for me to leave.”

Loki blinked, and looked at Barnes in surprise. 

“You’re free to go. The only reason you’re here instead of with your companions,” Loki said, with a light shrug. “Is because of the risk you posed to them. But now you are awake. The danger has passed.”

Barnes was too smart not to see the problem with that statement. He had been turned into a mindless doll once already. There was nothing to keep it from happening again. He had thought he was free, but then his masters reappeared to yank his chain. Undoubtedly, they would turn Barnes against his brothers-in-arms at first chance.

You are still dangerous. 

“Do they know where I am?”

“No,” Loki said, and he was ready to continue to diffuse the implications of that word, when he registered an almost minute shift in Barnes’ shoulders. Relief. The man was glad his shield-brothers had been left in the dark. Interesting. 

“What do you know?” Barnes said with an impatient gesture with his metal hand. “About all this?” 

Perfect. A question to put Loki in the position of power. Barnes wanted answers, and Loki had them. It took every ounce of Loki’s willpower not to smile and give away the game. 

“I know you are Bucky Barnes whose name ran in the newspaper for weeks straight. I know they tried to take you again,” Loki let his eyes and voice drop briefly before lifting with a shine of sincerity in their depths. “I am not...unfamiliar with their kind. They have your trail now though, and there is blood in the water. Hydra will try again, no matter how deep you bury yourself.”

You are too valuable to be let loose without a leash.

Barnes stared, but instead of the pissed off righteousness (or desperation) that Loki expected, the soldier’s eyes were narrowed in thought. 

“Hydra won’t stop looking, yeah, and neither will Steve. Or the rest of that circus that was parked under my window for the last month,” Barnes said. The mechanisms in his metal arms whirred as they recalibrated, then fell silent again. The man was reacting astoundingly well to coming to in a strange location with little memory of how he got there. Loki supposed it was not a new experience for the Winter Soldier. “You know what I think?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you want to use me too,” Barnes growled, rising, the movement smooth and predatory, gun in hand, ready for violence. “I think you’re going to tell me that you can keep me safe, if only I do what you tell me. What your masters tell you. Whose tune are you dancing to?”

Loki’s lip curled. “I had masters for a while, and a leash. It didn’t suit.”

“So what, you were just walking by when Hydra made their move?”

Loki forced himself forward and strolled to stand right in front of Barnes, his expression bold. He knew men like Barnes; they would search out any sign of weakness and, once they found it, like wolves, they’d go straight for the throat. He was counting on it. 

“Yeah, and lucky for you that I was,” Loki bluffed, practically daring Barnes to do something about the obvious lie. Barnes didn’t disappoint.

The man moved so fast that Loki didn’t have to fake the gasp when Barnes’ metal hand grabbed the front of Loki’s shirt, spun him around and slammed his back against a wall, the cold barrel of the gun pressing hard against Loki’s cheek. 

“Try again,” Barnes growled.

“All right, all right, fine, yes, cards on the table,” Loki stammered, his eyes wide, palms flat against the wall behind him. “I was watching for my own reasons, and stepped in when it looked like your security lost control.”

“What’s your game?”

“I was there for information. But now I rescued you, and you owe me, you and your friends” Loki said, and his voice shook just that perfect tiny amount. He sped up the words with just a hint of nerves when Barnes’ eyes hardened at his answer.  “Wait, wait, the control thing. The thing they did to you. I wasn’t lying when I said I know what that’s like. I know someone who can fix you. They helped me.”

There. A flash of something in Barnes’ expression, quickly locked down. Loki let his own eyes dart to the gun before he glared back at Barnes. “You owe me. You get this thing for me, and I tell you who to go to so Hydra can’t use you ever again. I’ll be just a little bit richer, and you will be safe at dinner parties.”

“What, just like that?” Barnes snorted. But his grip had loosened, and the gun moved away. Loki was able to straighten up and give his collared shirt a tug.

“Just like that. It worked for me,” Loki said. “You don’t want anything to do with this, you leave. Just walk out that door.”

Barnes’ gaze flickered towards the entry. 

Loki knew the calculation going through the man’s head: Barnes could leave and find his friends, or take the chance at freedom if Loki wasn’t lying.

“Fine, give me their name,” Barnes snapped. “And I won’t shoot you in the head.”

“I tell you, and you might still shoot me,” Loki pointed out, spreading his hands palm up. “No deal.”

“What, then?”

“You do my favor, I do yours.”

“I’d be better off knocking you out and calling the cops,” Barnes snorted. “Even assuming you’re not full of shit, whoever you are. I want proof. I want guarantees. No deal.”

There was mockery in his voice when he repeated Loki’s ‘no deal’ right back at him. 

“I saved your life,” Loki said, crossing his arms. It was a petulant gesture that fit perfectly with the whine he’d added to his voice and the persona he was playing up. “I’m the only reason you’re here in a nice apartment instead of some hole in the ground. This game of debt is already in my favor. Your turn to play.”

Loki let the moment rest between them as he waited for Barnes to speak, but the soldier stayed silent. Loki gave a small shrug, dropped his arms and moved around him and away from the wall. As if negotiating for a brainwashed soldier’s sanity after bringing said soldier home was something he did every day. As if Loki wasn’t several years into being a broken shell of who he’d once been.

Barnes’ metal hand snapped out and grabbed Loki’s wrist as he tried to move past, and Lady Luck was laughing at Loki because the cold, hard fingers tightened right around the always aching runes at Loki’s wrists under the shirt cuffs. Pain lanced through Loki’s arm as instinct took over and Loki tried to pull on his magic to protect himself - and failed. Loki twisted away with a startled yelp he couldn’t quite bite back.

“Let go ,” Loki snarled, yanking to get free.

And Barnes did, immediately, fingers going slack - so quickly that Loki stumbled away. He backed up a step, then another, wrist briefly cradled against his chest in pain before he forced it down, his shoulders straight, back stiff. But Barnes wasn’t following up on his advantage. The man stood perfectly still, eyes just a little bit wide and wild.

The moment stretched between them. A car honked on the street below. 

“Did you just… comply ?” It was a sign of how shaken Loki was that the words just slipped out before he could catch them as he backed away. The apartment was small, so there weren't many places to go.

Barnes’ expression went on lockdown, wiped clean of any emotions, except for his eyes which were wildly alive, furious, and just a little bit speculative.

Loki felt the couch behind him and sank into it, his mind racing.

“Come - “ Loki broke off and cleared his throat. “Come here and sit down in the armchair.”

Barnes wavered on his feet for a moment, and then stalked over to the armchair and sank into it, his grip tight around his gun, knuckles white. Oh.

“Did you- “ Loki’s voice caught again and he swallowed, feeling his way through his next question. “Did you just follow my orders? Answer my question.”

"Yes.” There was no ‘sir’ attached to that single syllable. Barnes’ lips were flat in a tight line as he glared at Loki.

“But you’re - “ Awake. Aware.  

Barnes just stared at Loki coldly. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Your previous orders stand.” Loki had to say it. He couldn’t not say it. There was a 90-year old assassin with a death count a mile long in his living room. “Do not harm me. Do not let me come to harm.”

Loki was expecting Barnes to just plain straighten his arm and shoot Loki in the head. If Barnes’ hard expression was anything to go by, the assassin was probably imagining it too.

“So what, your deal’s off the table?” Barnes said instead, an almost mocking twist to his words. His lips curled and it wasn’t a smile. “Now that you don’t need to deal. Was there ever really someone who could have fixed me?”

“N-no, I mean, yes, I could have.” The truth just tumbled out before Loki could catch the words. Loki had been following a script as he maneuvered Barnes to the correct conclusions - a slightly sketchy but useful mercenary strikes a deal with the traumatized assassin. And it had been working. 

Now it didn’t matter.

“Could have?”

“The best lies are wrapped in truth,” Loki murmured, but of course Barnes, with his super hearing, caught the words. The man’s shoulders and posture remained army straight, but something in his body language seemed to slump.

“You can’t fix what’s wrong with me,” Barnes concluded. Loki made a small shrug. There wasn’t much point to playing this game, not when Barnes was sitting pliable and obedient in an arm chair across from him. 

“Not on my own, no,” Loki said. “I need an object of power. The thing I would have had you procure for me. With that, protecting your mind from future interference would be a simple enough task.”

Another lie, wrapped in the truth, because Loki couldn’t help himself. Mind magic of this magnitude would never be simple. But it would have been straightforward , and that was almost as good.

"What's in it for you?"

"I get an object of power," Loki said, simply.

Loki and Barnes stared at each other in silence, and Loki knew that the same calculations were running through both their minds. Now that Loki had Barnes under his control, he had no reason to help the controlled man break the chains that bound Barnes to Loki. The once-upon-a-time Asgardian prince had all the power. 

“What will it take?” Barnes said. 

“Agreement made under duress is no agreement at all,” Loki whispered, more to himself than to Barnes, letting himself slump back into the couch. Any deal made with Barnes, however favorable, would end the moment Barnes regained his free will. For Loki to believe anything else would be the epitome of foolishness.

I can get my magic back. Loki could use Barnes to go where Loki could not, to murder and mayhem his way to the items of power that were beyond Loki’s reach. But an unwilling partner was almost worse than no partner at all. There was a sharpness in Barnes’ gaze, an intelligence that told Loki that it would be a deadly mistake to underestimate Barnes’ mind. Loki knew all about loopholes. He remembered New York. He knew a lot about the many ways an unwilling slave could sabotage even the most carefully crafted orders.

Loki tilted his head up again and forced himself to meet Barnes’ eyes. “It will take your cooperation. It appears I do not need it, but I would like it. For that, I shall trade on your freedom.”

The silence after Loki spoke was so long that Loki took it as an answer in and of itself. Barnes would fight him, every inch of the way. Would it even be worth it? Yes. To have my magic back, to be free. It would be worth every despicable moment of control. 

“Yes,” Barnes said, his voice sudden in the quiet room.

Loki stared. “What?”

“Yes, it’s a deal. I will...comply.” Again, that mocking, bitter edge in the words. “And in return, in exchange, you will fix the shit they put in my head.”

It had to be a lie. Barnes was too calm, too collected, too ready to -

But Loki didn’t know the man. He had no frame of reference, no interviews, no common acquaintances to ask about the cool way Barnes was bargaining with his captor. It felt wrong, but - 

“Deal,” Loki said, his voice a little too loud in the silent apartment and his eyes just a little bit too wide. He cleared his throat, and rose. The thought of continuing to sit across from each other as if two courtiers at evening tea became unbearable. “Do you - Do you want anything from the kitchen? To drink or eat or -”

“I’m fine.” Barnes didn’t move from his seat, his gun still on his lap like a favored pet and his gaze followed Loki as he beat a retreat around the bar counter and into the small kitchen. 

Loki poured himself a glass of water, set it down, and behind the low wall of the counter where Barnes’ sharp eyes couldn’t penetrate, let his hands shake. He wasn’t even quite sure why his heart was racing so badly; he had confronted this almost enemy in his house, he had made a deal, and he’d come out on top. 

Leftover adrenaline, it had to be. Loki had everything under control. 

This was good. 

It has to be a lie.

The thought refused to leave Loki alone, nudging at him. In what universe did Loki catch a lucky break like this one? In one fell and almost accidental swoop, Loki had gained himself a perfect and grudgingly willing slave and an easy path towards regaining his powers. 

Loki was the god of lies, and in this moment of quiet as he caught his breath and emotional balance, his very bones were telling him this: It has to be a lie. 

Midgardians crafted the most clever magic with their technology. Often simple and crude, it was occasionally breathtaking in the things it could do. When Loki last touched the mind of Bucky Barnes, he felt not even a hint of magic. It had all been technology and human cruelty that had bent and flattened Barnes’ thoughts into compliance. But now, Barnes was alive with personality. He formed thoughts and his eyes blazed with bitterness. The kind of magic that could preserve personality and the illusion of free will in such a way - well, Loki himself would have been hard pressed to craft something so intricate. Perhaps his mother could have, if she had any inclination to cruelty.

Now that Loki had time to think on it, the idea that midgardian technology could be so brutally elegant was...unlikely. 

Barnes had to be playing Loki. Or delusional. 

Loki’s hands steadied and he picked up the glass and returned to the living room. “Want a drink?”

“No.”

“So you have to obey my orders?”

Barnes’ eyebrow twitched and the man just glared at Loki from his armchair seat.

“Say it. Answer me,”  Loki said as he sat down, the laptop in the bag at his feet, perfect grabbing distance. The glass was cold against his palms, and he set it down on the flat arm of the couch.

“I have to obey your orders,” Barnes repeated, that same bitter edge to his voice; his face could have been carved from stone. And Loki’s sense of wrongness intensified. 

It’s a lie. It’s all a lie to entrap you.

Barnes wanted Loki to fix him, yes. All Barnes need to do was play along until the man could contact his Avenger companions. Then, at leisure, they could extract the solution from Michael Brodsky through whatever means necessary. And Loki’s cover and contact lenses would keep his identity secret for about two seconds before the Avengers realized who they’d actually captured. Then they would take him apart.

Loki’s best bet was to make up an excuse to leave, order Barnes to stay, and never look back.

Except. Loki had been wrong before. And about so many things. This ( this ) strange joke of a situation was truly his gamble at recovering his power and everything that made Loki the creature and mage that he was.

He had to know. 

“I...need to touch your mind. To see.” Loki wavered to his feet, dread heavy in his limbs. He would have rather done almost anything else than touch the worn down edges of Barnes’ mind again, but Loki had to know.

Loki reached his hand out to touch Barnes’ head, and Barnes caught him by the wrist again. This time, the motion was smooth and easy to follow, and Loki had a second to brace himself for the pain again. But the metal fingers clasped themselves loosely around Loki’s wrist, a warning without being a grip. 

Barnes had been ordered not to harm his handler, Loki remembered.

“See what?” Barnes said, and his eyes flicked to where the runes were well hidden under the shirt sleeve before meeting Loki’s in a challenging stare.

“The shape of your mind. The shape of the binding on your thoughts and nothing more,” Loki said. “I need to see, if I am to know if I can do anything about it.”

And that wasn’t even a lie.

Barnes didn't look convinced, but his metal hand let go and dropped back down to rest on the armrest. Loki took that as permission.

He reached out and brushed his fingers against the man’s temple at the edge of the dirt smudge (still there) on Barnes’ face.  And then, with a tight breath to brace himself, Loki reached.

The difference between the warm blanket of coercive compliance from earlier and this was uncanny. Barnes’ mind was like a bright jewel, the light of his thoughts spilling through cracks and facets, sharp and alert and wholly under his control. Loki snatched his hand from Barnes’ temple and backed away.

“You say you have to obey my orders,” Loki said tightly.

“You are my new handler,” Barnes drawled out. “See something in there that you didn’t like?”

“That’s not - “ Loki shook his head, glaring. Barnes was lying. His mind was many things, but twisted to Loki’s will it was not. Barnes had thought to use Loki, and had almost succeeded. Loki’s freedom had been so close , and the fury and pain of the thought loosened his tongue, made him more honest than was wise. He wanted to confront Barnes about this, consequences be damned. “It’s what I didn’t see. I didn’t see your mind battering itself to bits to escape whatever game it is that you are playing here.”

Barnes’ expression didn’t change, but Loki got the distinct impression that his intelligence was being judged and found wanting. It was not a feeling Loki appreciated, and he felt the pain and anger at his lost opportunity begin to smolder into fury. 

Fury was better than despair.

When Barnes spoke, it was slowly, as if to a child. “I have spent the last seventy years obeying orders. If I were inclined to batter myself to bits, as you put it, every time a handler wanted to paw at my face or braid my hair, there wouldn’t be a lot left of me, now would there?”

Loki bared his teeth in a smile that wasn’t. “Suppose I order you to shoot yourself?”

“Suppose you do,” Barnes repeated mildly, his eyes dark as they bore into Loki. Loki could feel the hair on the back of his neck beginning to stand on end.

Lip curling in a snarl, Loki called Barnes’ bluff:  “Well then, shoot yourself, soldier.”

There was no hesitation. Barnes raised his gun, wrist twisted inward, the weapon pointed at his chest -

“Stop!” 

The sound of Loki’s voice was lost in the sharp crack of the gun going off in a spray of red as Barnes shot himself point blank in the chest.

Chapter Text

The shot rang in Loki’s ears and time seemed to skip a beat. 

Loki found himself  in the hallway on shaky legs, then the door to the apartment, his shoulder throbbing in remembered pain from when the Widow’s bullet had torn its way through his flesh. Loki’s hand was on the handle to the apartment door, swinging it open, when he forced himself to a stop, his heart pounding a quick rhythm. Time felt wobbly as Loki froze.

His hearing was recovering quickly, and he strained his ears, his gaze jumping between the empty apartment stairwell beyond the door and the carpeted hallway that stretched behind him and to the living room where Bucky Barnes had just shot himself on Loki’s orders.

Loki felt his breath catch as his mind caught up with what had just happened, and the scene he’d just fled. As his hearing recovered from one second to the next, Loki could hear Barnes under the quiet murmur and bustle of traffic outside. The man was panting lightly, still in the living room and still alive. Loki’s mind skipped back to the scene, the tight spray of blood against the back of the armchair, the way Barnes had kept eye contact with Loki the entire time, like some brutal game of one-upmanship. 

Several landings down, Loki heard the door to the building creak open as one of the neighbors returned home. The heavy steps were the only sound in the otherwise empty stairwell. The doors to the right and left of Loki’s stayed shut. No one had heard the shot go off, or no one had cared to think any more of it than some car backfiring, a shelving unit crashing to the floor.

And Loki was still frozen at the door, static in his head. But his brain was re-engaging again. Somewhere below, a door unlocked with a rattle of keys, and then slammed shut. No more than a minute had passed since Barnes had shot himself.

Since Loki had Barnes shot.

Loki closed the apartment door with a quiet click and forced himself to turn around and pace back down the hall towards the sunlit stretch of carpet that marked the boundary from hall to living room. Loki could smell the blood. 

You owned Barnes, and you used that to kill him. 

Loki almost turned away again to flee. Except, even if Barnes was dying, Loki still had to go back. He couldn’t leave his laptop there, it was evidence. He had to take it with him when he fled. That thought forced him to take those final steps and face Barnes again. 

Pausing at the edge of where the shadow of the hall met the sunlight of the living room windows, Loki wavered as he took in the bloody scene before him. In the short time Loki had fled the room and found the nerve to return, Barnes had moved. The sergeant had made his way to the edge of the room with the best sightlines. The wall behind him was stained bright scarlet where he had slid down it. His metal arm was pressed to the chest wound, the metal servos in the forearm recalibrating every few seconds with a restless whirring noise. The entire back of the armchair where Barnes had sat was stained red.

The gun was lying on the carpet by Barnes’ legs and for one frantic second, Loki tried to remember if he had ordered Barnes to stay in the chair. 

No. Just to sit.

Barnes hadn’t disobeyed orders. He was still compliant to Loki’s will. He wouldn’t shoot Loki, no matter how much Loki deserved it.

The relief Loki felt at that thought was almost sharp enough to be shame.

There was so much blood. Barnes’ cat hoodie was soaked in it. A red streak crossed Barnes face where the man had wiped the blood from his lips, and his skin looked too white against the black strands of his shoulder-length hair. The man’s eyes were closed to slits as he watched Loki approach from his seat on the floor. Despite all the blood, he made no sound of pain. 

Loki knew that almost no real time had passed, but the moment felt stretched like taffy as he looked down at the bloody man in his living room. 

The blood, the injury, the entire mess was Loki’s fault. But he could fix it. He could salvage this. Whatever this was. 

“Don’t attack me. Don’t move,” Loki said and crouched down by Barnes’ side, voice hoarse. 

He hadn’t gotten any of the blood on him yet; he could still grab the laptop and leave. Barnes would never know Loki had magic, or was anything but a mercenary with more of a temper than sense. 

No one would ever need to know what had happened here. That Loki had, once again, destroyed something clever and wild with a thoughtless gesture.

Instead, he reached out. “Shift your hand.”

Barnes did. Suddenly and too soon for Loki to be ready for it, Loki’s right palm was pressed between Barnes’ metal hand and the wound, the blood hot against Loki’s cold fingers, the material of the hoodie squishy with liquid. Best Loki could tell, the bullet had missed the heart entirely, and cut cleanly through the left lung and out the other side. 

Barnes eyes, still hooded, watched him with the intent glint of a predator lying in wait, and Loki had to remind himself again (and again ) that the Winter Soldier could not harm him. Could not lash out with that deadly metal arm nor crush his throat. 

Loki wrapped his left hand around the chain of charms at his neck. He would need the extra power to staunch the bleeding and get the healing started.

Except.

The charm stones at Loki's were already almost completely drained.

Loki froze, thrown, a sick feeling of dread pressing against the bottom of his stomach. When did this happen?

And then he remembered Barnes grabbing him by the wrist, and Loki’s instinctive pull on his powers. He’d drained the stones, and now only echoes of their former magical charge remained. 

Barnes’ chest moved beneath Loki’s hand, shallow breaths, and his lips were just a few shared too pale. The man was a super soldier. Surely he could survive this. Loki could pretend; he could put on a show and let the man’s own body take care of this problem (or succumb to it as the case may be) and no one would be the wiser.

Loki was a master in many magics, but the healing arts had never been his forte. He knew the basics, had loved the intricate and delicate work that went into rebuilding veins and rallying the body’s defenses against infection. But by the time he’d started his studies of the healing arts, he had already gained a reputation. This made practical experience and practice tricky. His own self-healing was rooted in shape shifting. Meanwhile, Asgardians were a sturdy race and when the few true injuries occurred in the court, there were not many who’d trust Loki with his inexperience and penchant for mischief to work so intimately on their bodies. 

Of those few left, Thor never had the patience to sit through Loki’s painstakingly slow work, and Loki could never imagine offering his skills to the only person he knew who’d happily sit for his crafting. If his mother ( not his mother ) were ever to be injured, she would have had nothing but the best healers. Loki and his one-time family would have accepted nothing less.

He had tended animals for practice, but there was little glory in that. And Loki had quickly moved on to other, more useful forms of magic.

“You’ll be alright. I’ll fix this,” Loki soothed and felt Barnes snort, the movement causing a heave in the man’s ribs and another gush of blood under Loki’s hand. Barnes choked, fought a cough and shuddered. 

“Stay still and calm,” Loki said, before realizing that this too he had phrased as on order. 

“Another rescue for you to stage?” Barnes rasped. And Loki flinched at how close to the truth that was.

But in the end, Loki had no choice. Calling the human authorities for help was not an option, even if Loki were to have a phone on him, which he didn't. So, Loki could sit back, let the serum heal Bucky Barnes (or not), and say goodbye to any chance at any mutually beneficial deal with the man. Or he could take credit. He could put on a show, make Barnes believe that Loki was his sole reason for surviving this whole bloody mess, and perhaps salvage some pretense of a partnership with this man Loki controlled.

In the end, Loki would lie because that is what he did. 

Trusting the man to stay still as ordered, Loki breathed and reached for power. Carefully, he called forth the soft hum of magic from the charm at his chest, and it uncurled at his silent call like a small, warm cat from its place near a hearth. He coaxed it out in small green sparkles that shimmered in the air between Barnes and Loki like fireflies. They swirled, and followed the length of Loki’s arm to his hand where he kept pressure on the bullet wound. The metal on the Winter Soldier’s arm shimmered with tiny reflections of the green sparks.

Loki let each of the completely useless sparks die out as they reached the stained material of the hoodie where the red had almost completely obscured the cat print. Barnes barely breathed under Loki’s hand, body rigid, eyes just a bit wider now, the whites showing. 

There. Behold, Loki the all-powerful. Healer of the injured, charlatan of Midgard. 

As the last of the sparks reached Barnes and faded, the faint traces of leftover magic warmed the back of Loki’s hand, and - on instinct, almost before he realized what he was doing - Loki reached further. His wisps of magic touched the wound, tasted the physical damage and the man’s shredded, shivering aura. And before Loki realized what he was doing, he’d pulled on his personal stores of power to do something about it. 

Personal, nonexistent stores of power.

Almost immediately, the runes at Loki’s wrists flared into hot agony. Loki’s head throbbed in pain and he let go of the now-dead charm at his neck, and grabbed the one he’d hung on Barnes as if to a lifeline.

That small rune stone still hummed with power, thank the fates. Loki gulped down a large chunk of the charm’s store of power like a drowning man gasping for air. It was power he himself had set there, and returned to him easily. Loki forced himself to stop before he’d drained it completely, Barnes wound still bright and bloody in his mind. 

He could do something about that, Loki realized. If he were very careful with the small store of power in the charm. He couldn’t heal Barnes, but he could give the super-soldier’s body that extra advantage.

Carefully, so carefully, he pulled a thread of the spell as thin and light as a spider’s thread and tied it to the charm that still hung around Barnes’ neck. With this connection, it would pull on the small store of power in the charm to ease the pain and speed the body’s natural healing. The effort of using magic around and through both the bindings that smothered him and the runes that kept him invisible to Asgard’s all-seeing eye hit Loki like a train.

His head throbbed in warning, a sharp slash of pain that wrapped around his temples and stabbed hard behind his forehead. For a second, the pain in his head completely eclipsed the throbbing at his wrists, and Loki felt his consciousness waver.  

Distantly, Loki thought he heard words. Barnes was saying something. Had said something. Loki blinked his eyes open, swayed forward, dizzy and hot, and barely caught himself. 

No, that wasn’t quite true. Both Barnes’ hands gripped Loki’s upper arms, holding him steady and keeping him from face-planting onto the sergeant’s bloody chest. Loki blinked again, trying to clear the dark edges from his vision. Loki had expected to be surrounded by darkness. The daylight was bright, piercing, unexpected.

His forearms rested flat against the bloody, soggy mess of the hoodie at Barnes’ chest, and he was close enough to feel the puffs of Barnes’ breath on his forehead when Loki’s head dipped forward. He jolted it back. Barnes was watching him closely, his skin no longer so starkly white against the drying smears of blood on his face. The movement of his chest under Loki's hands was still shallow, but smooth.

The world was washed out and surreal - there was Loki, practically in the arms of the man he’d ordered shot. Loki felt like he had a fever, the room was too hot and the runes at his wrists burned, and he couldn’t tell if they too were hot, or just so brutally cold it felt like a burn. The distinction felt important, but Loki’s thoughts refused to focus on any one thing.

Someone was talking again. Loki felt time start to slip again. 

Blood everywhere. It streaked his hands, soaked his sleeves. And someone holding him upright with an implacable grip.

Hold it together.

He was unhurt, here in the Midgardian city of New York, far from the empty reaches of the void of space. The blood wasn’t his, he knew that. And Barnes was too close.

“Let go,” Loki managed, a hoarse snap in his voice, and Barnes’ grip fell away from Loki’s arms. The breath Loki took right then was almost a gasp. He shoving away and staggered to his feet. Amid the shadows and sparkles floating across his vision as his head spun, he could see Barnes staring up at him from the floor. Loki couldn’t make out the man’s expression. He couldn’t make out a lot of things.

“You need to sit dow- “

“Silence,” Loki snarled, swaying on his feet. The air felt hot and searing against his skin and pain pounded at his temples. “You know nothing of what I need, you pathetic and small-minded trophy of a bygone era. You know nothing - ”

The room was too exposed, too bright and open, and even with the new distance between them, Barnes was still too close. So Loki did the only thing he could.

Ingloriously, he fled the room.

He made it to the dark refuge of the bathroom before he collapsed.

Chapter Text

Loki woke slowly, with the kind of hangover that would have put Thor’s drinking to shame. He remembered drawing on his magic when he shouldn’t have. He remembered getting as far as the bathroom, the sound of the door slammed behind him, the slow collapse to the tiles that felt like cool balm on his feverish skin. Loki remembered drifting in and out, too tired to fully wake up, too hurt to stay under, the cold floor that Loki had sprawled out on the only escape from the burning heat that had been smothering him.

But the fever seemed to have gone, and Loki felt chilled and decrepit. When the aches of lying on the ground finally began to outweigh the pounding in his head, Loki pulled himself up. With the door closed and the lights out, the bathroom was enveloped in a tight darkness. The small line of light coming in under the door was sufficient for Loki’s sharp eyes to see the outlines of the space around him, but he could feel the press of the blackness against him almost like a physical weight. 

Slowly, legs wobbling like a newborn calf’s, Loki levered himself to his feet. With a shaky hand, he swiped at the wall until he found the light switch and the bathroom flared into bright, agonizing white light. 

Gods, his eyes hurt. 

But the light eased something inside him. Yes, it hurt. But even as the pain was nauseating and set the pounding in his head to an angrier, sharper beat, he couldn’t imagine turning off the light. 

He wondered how much time had passed. With his wrists so tender, Loki kept his watch in his coat. Which Loki had left folded over the back of a chair next to the dining table. Where Barnes (or his body) presumably was.

Barnes.

Once again, Loki had awakened, only to have the memories of the most recent disaster march across his inner vision like the scroll of movie credits. Sinking down to sit on the floor of the empty bathroom, long legs askew and back against the side of the tub, Loki ironed his face with his palms. 

So much for his resolution to do better after the disaster at the Stark warehouse. 

Was Barnes still sitting at the wall, obeying Loki’s last order to stay still? As long as Loki stayed on the cold tile floor of the bathroom, he didn’t have to go out there and see evidence of his latest disastrous attempt to craft a scheme. But the evidence had followed him, Loki realized, as he looked at his hands. They were stained red-brown, the cuffs and sleeves of his shirt stiff with dried blood. He closed his eyes and breathed and tried not to think about Barnes trapped in Loki’s thoughtless orders.

Finally, when Loki couldn’t stomach stewing along in his thoughts, he opened his eyes, and started the slow process of getting back up again. He was not a child. He would face the consequences of his actions.

Loki rinsed his hands and face and slowly made his way out of the bathroom. He moved through the small bedroom, and with a tight breath, stepped through the doorway into the living room.

Loki’s eyes went straight to Barnes -

- who was sitting in his preferred seat at the dining table, meticulously polishing a knife. He looked up as Loki entered, expression disinterested and blank. The man’s tank-top showed off his metal arm, and there was a large plate of chicken bones from the bird Loki had roasted the day before, right next to a bag of chips. For a few incredulous seconds, Loki almost wondered if he’d dreamed the whole argument, the command he’d given, the deafening blast of a gun. 

But no, the smell of old blood hung in the room. The tank top Barnes was wearing was clean but still damp, air drying from when the man must have washed it in the sink before Loki woke up. Loki could see the white of paper towels in the hole the bullet had torn in the black shirt. The cat hoodie was hung over a chair, dripping water in a small puddle on the floor.

Loki forced himself to look around, and had to fight back an instinctive flinch when his gaze landed on the living room. The armchair stood in the middle of the space, brown with drying blood, stuffing showing (also blood brown) where the bullet had ripped through it. The wall where Barnes had retreated after being shot looked like a scene from one of the horror dramas that humans liked so much. There was even a smeared hand-print of dried blood where Barnes had levered himself up.

The light from the window blinds illuminated the scene with merciless clarity. Based on the position of the sun, a little more than a full day had passed since Loki had given in to an instinct and healed Barnes - and then paid for it with a full collapse. Was still paying for it with his drained reserves, shaky stance and pounding headache. 

Some bits of the disaster were foggy in Loki’s memory, but he distinctly remembered his orders to Barnes. But it looked like the soldier had spent the day puttering about the apartment like a down-on-his-luck acquaintance crashing there for the weekend. 

The orders wear off.  

Barnes eyebrow quirked up, an almost imperceptible twitch at whatever expression was on Loki’s face. He nudged the bag of chips in Loki’s direction with the tip of the knife he was polishing. “Chips?”

If he were to use the Winter Soldier, Loki needed to understand the rules of this game, the boundaries of Barnes’ cage. Loki ignored Barnes’ offer as he made his way slowly into the room.

“The orders wear off. How long? How long do they last?” Loki said, trying to pretend that the bright light of the room weren’t making his eyes and head throb. “Answer this with the truth.”

Barnes stared. Then he seemed to come to a decision. “About a day.”

It felt like a lie. Everything Barnes’ said felt like a lie. And yet…

“Are you lying?” Loki said. He knew it was a foolish question, even as he asked it.

“No,” Barnes said, as casually as if they were discussing the weather. “You just ordered me to speak the truth.”

“And you have to follow my orders,” Loki said.

“You’re my handler.”

It all still felt like a lie. 

Unwillingly, Loki’s eyes drifted to the living room where the bloody armchair stood like a monument to Loki’s unwarranted paranoia. It was yet another reminder that Loki couldn’t trust his own instincts. Not anymore. 

“Seems like a terrible oversight, to have orders wear off,” Loki said instead.

“Mission parameters change,” Barnes said with a small shrug. 

It made sense, in an awful, clever way. Loki was almost impressed by Hydra’s foresight in crafting their weapon. Barnes had to obey and protect the Hydra handler assigned to him, but Hydra didn’t want their weapon trapped in old orders when circumstances changed and a mission needed some creative thinking.

“You will not tell anyone about me, and you will ensure that harm does not come to me that is in your power to prevent,” Loki spoke the rules slowly, feeling his way through the potential loopholes. He rifled in the pocket of the coat hanging over the back of the chair and glanced down at the watch face he found; he’d have to repeat these orders every morning.  “When you answer, you will be honest. You will not betray me to others.”

Loki hesitated, while Barnes looked on unimpressed.

“You done?” Barnes said, and Loki felt his face heat.

You could order him to silence.  

It was an unsettling thought, made worse by how tempting it was to lash out and punish the man for his insolence. Loki was a god and prince. He was a -

“These are mere necessary guarantees for my safety,” Loki said instead.

“And what guarantees do I get?”

It was a fair question, and in this situation where Loki had all the power and Barnes had none, Loki had nothing for the man.

“My word,” Loki said finally. “This will have to be enough to - “

“The word of the god of lies?” Barnes said mildly and Loki went still. 

Loki’s hand crept up to the dead charms hanging on a chain at his neck before he caught himself. Without that extra, tiny bit of glamour, his contact lenses would be clearly obvious, his facial features easy to trace and commit to memory. When had Barnes realized Loki’s identity?

“That’s who you are. You’ve changed your whole,” Barnes gestured with his metal hand and a mechanical part huffed on his upper arm. “Your whole hair and look thing. But you’re Loki. Thor’s brother and - “

“He’s not my brother,” Loki bit off, part in honest anger, part in a desperate attempt to buy enough time that he could think his way through the pounding in his head. 

“Yeah, heard that too,” Barnes agreed and Loki felt his temper spike again. 

“It would do you well to consider that I am the only person with the power to free you from this travesty of a binding,” Loki snapped. “Consider showing respect to the god in your presence.”

“You look like shit,” Barnes said. “How are you going to fix me if you’re fainting all over the place at the first sight of blood?”

Loki stared.

“That’s not - “ Loki sputtered. “That’s not what - I healed you. I used my magic to save your life and heal you.”

“My savior,” Barnes drawled. 

“I am a god, ” Loki hissed, stalking forward across the small space, the helplessness and anger coiling inside him like a living thing. “And I will not be mocked by the likes of you.”

Barnes stared up at him, body relaxed, one eyebrow raised in an almost lazy irony, as if he found this entire situation, and Loki too, both amusing and a complete waste of his time. But his eyes -

There was something blank and empty in the way those eyes watched Loki, and Loki felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck again. He remembered this - it was the same exact look that Barnes had when Loki ordered Barnes to shoot himself. And now, Barnes was pushing him again, as if to see what Loki would come up with next.

It was a game, and a test, and a line that Loki had crossed once already.

The last time, Barnes found out how far Loki would go. Now the man wanted to see what Loki would do to punish insolence. What the consequences of talking back were. One bit of explosive violence at a time, Barnes was taking his handler’s measure.

Loki felt his anger fall away, leaving him shaky and uncertain. He remembered this. He remembered disobeying and talking back in a frantic need to understand the limits and push them. Even when the result took flesh off skin and -

That’s not me anymore. That didn’t happen to me. 

Loki didn’t think about that anymore. 

Now Barnes was watching Loki curiously, head tilted. Loki cleared his throat.

In this room, Loki had all the power. And somehow, Barnes’ cool gray gaze made him feel like the man knew the secret truth: You don’t have control over any part of your life.

How do you expect to control me?

***

Loki watched a pot of water heat up on the stove. In the periphery, he heard Barnes moving around in the bathroom. When the man came out, he made his usual round of the perimeter of the small apartment, checking the locks, eyeing the street below from the side of the window, and settling back at the dining table. By silent agreement, they both ignored the mess in the living room. 

The water boiled and Loki carefully poured himself a cup. The apartment didn’t have tea, but the sides of the cup warmed Loki’s hands as he drifted to the window. He could hear Barnes shift as Loki stopped in front of the window, the blinds only half-closed so that Loki’s silhouette could be seen from the building across, or the city street. But Barnes settled without saying anything.

The bright light of the sun slanting through the blinds felt like sharp needles in Loki’s eyes and head, but he desperately needed the reminder of light after the last few days. The reminder that he was years away from the lightless void that made up the cracks in the universe. That he was standing free, light years away from the chains and cells of -

No, that was off limits. He didn’t think about that anymore. 

With his eyes closed and the sun warming his face, Loki could pretend that he was sitting on his bench at the park. The thought was soothing, and more than made up for the pain and discomfort of the light. 

The day was leaning towards evening. While Loki was out, Barnes had eaten his way through their limited supply of food, the bag of chips being the last hurrah from Loki’s last run to the market. They needed provisions. 

Especially if they were to stay in the apartment.

Loki breathed in the steam from his cup, and took another sip. Below, cars drove by, and a pedestrian ran across the street to duck into the neighboring building. The autumn weather was getting chillier.

They’d have to stay in the apartment, and the thought of it reminded Loki of the sharp bite of pain of the runes that kept Loki hidden from Asgard. He was playing a very dangerous game with his dregs of magic. But he couldn’t afford to reveal his real, protected home to Barnes. Not even with the guarantee of Barnes’ obedience. 

After all, Loki knew all about loopholes. He knew all about betrayal. 

Nor could Loki send Barnes out to purchase provisions. Loki had no doubt that Barnes was capable, but Loki wasn’t ready to test the man’s willingness to obey with such a complicated task. Loki would have to go.

Briefly, Loki considered the idea of bringing Barnes along, but - 

Loki shook off the thoughts. He made a circuit of the room, turning on the lights throughout the apartment as he did, before ending up at the dining room table. He placed the cup on the table with a clink. Barnes watched him steadily, hands stilling on the kitchen knife he had been inspecting.

“I am going out for food,” Loki said, pulling the coat from where it hung on the back of a chair. He swept it around his shoulders and straightened the sleeves around his wrists. The coat covered the dried brown blood on his shirt. “You are to stay here and draw no attention to yourself or your presence in this apartment. Do not contact anyone, and do not leave.”

In the expectant pause that followed, Barnes just kept looking at him. Loki cleared his throat, realizing Barnes wasn’t going to acknowledge the order, and Loki wasn’t prepared to order Barnes to say “yes, sir” and “no, sir” whenever Loki spoke. 

“I need to check the runestone,” Loki said, his hand reaching across the space between them so he could rest two fingers on the charm that hung around Barnes’ neck.

“What does it do?”

Loki started, not expecting Barnes to break the silence that had settled after their last almost-argument. 

“It’s - it’s to speed healing, to ease pain,” Loki said. His tone became more absent as he probed the charm with the aching edges of his mind. “It’s almost drained now. Maybe another few hours left on it.”

Loki had expected the charm to have been fully drained, but Barnes’ supersoldier constitution had clearly been enough to bring the man from death’s door, keeping the demand on the magic light. There was enough there for what Loki wanted to do next.

Carefully, Loki took a tiny, invisible spark of magic from the charm, a tiny spider-silk thin thread of magic unspooling as Loki drew it away and tied it off on one of the dead stones that still hung around Loki’s neck. Loki opened his eyes and stepped back, letting his hand drop.

There. He could still feel the thin line connecting him to Barnes’ charm. As long as the charm worked, Loki had an extra sense, telling him where Barnes was. This new trick of Loki’s would drain the stone much more quickly, but Loki did not plan to be out for more than an hour.

Plenty of time.

Loki took another step back, and he and Barnes just stared at each other.

“Stay in the apartment,” Loki said, gave a firm nod in Barnes’ direction, checked his pocket for his keys, and with sure and confident steps, left the apartment.

*** 

He would never admit it, but Loki ended up sitting for a few minutes at the bottom of the steps on the first floor of his apartment building, his heart pounding. Loki wanted to think it was from exertion, but there was also a shakiness to him that he couldn’t just write off as a magic drain. 

Finally, using the railings to pull himself up, Loki took the side door into the basement so he could exit through a neighboring building. Teleportation used to be his means of coming and going without leaving a single trace; these days, he had to use more mundane means of staying under the radar. 

Loki had to stop a few more times on the few blocks to the corner market, and then again on his way back. An overabundance of caution had Loki take the most indirect route back that he could. The market still hadn’t fixed their camera and the shop clerk did not bother looking up when he scanned Loki’s purchases. The sun was setting as he started making his way back, his path illuminated by street lights. Three plastic grocery bags weighed down one hand, leaving the other free - just in case.

With each step, Loki felt the lack of his usually don’t-look charms like a death weight around his neck. And so, despite the exhaustion that wrapped itself around him like a thousand-pound cloak, Loki did all the careful and smart things and tried not to wonder if Barnes was still there, in the apartment.

Of course Barnes would still be there. Loki’s orders were clear and unambiguous. The charm he’d linked to the one around Barnes neck was humming along, the tether reaching west across the neighborhood to where Barnes waited for his handler to return.

Loki was less than a block from his apartment building when it happened.

With no warning, the spell on Barnes’ charm cut off.  

The spidersilk-thin tether snapped and disappeared, leaving Loki standing in a dim alleyway, just 20 meters from his building, staring up at a silent and dark window of his third story apartment.

Chapter Text

Loki’s skin crawled and his head pounded. He had left a (somewhat) healthy Bucky Barnes in his apartment, all the lights turned on. Now, the charm had ceased functioning, and his apartment window was dark. If the spell had finished draining its reserves of magic, Loki would have felt the magic tether thinning and fading before it disappeared. This - the magic had just...cut off.

Did Hydra have a magic-user? Surely not.

Just walk away.

For all that Loki thrived on chaos, he did not enjoy uncertainty when it was not weighed in his favor. Whenever danger outweighed profit, Loki’s go-to move had always been to...just walk away. He cast illusions, he escaped to safety, he observed from a distance until he understood what he was facing and could skew the odds back in his favor. This strategy had always served him well in the past. And now, that same instinct screamed at Loki to turn around and just walk away from this entire awful mess. 

But Barnes was the key to Loki’s return to power. Loki couldn’t leave, not without knowing what happened.

From his space in the deep shadows between two buildings, Loki watched the street. He observed cars passing, pedestrians moving in a scattered flow amid the deepening night. A dog walker holding three leashes walked past at a swift pace. A bus pulled up, disgorged a gaggle of office workers, and pulled away. The windows to his apartment on the third floor stayed dark.

A quarter or an hour passed amid the bustle of a city settling into its nightly rhythms. Finally, Loki separated from the shadows of the alley and made his roundabout way into the garage basement through the run-down entrance on the other side of the street. 

He would be careful. He would be cautious. 

Loki needed answers. 

In the building, Loki left his grocery bags on the second floor landing and climbed the stairs the rest of the way in silence, his feet placed carefully and his movements soundless. The door to apartment 306 was closed, no scratches at the keyhole, no sign of forced entry. Loki strained his ears, but he heard nothing from inside - just an empty, lifeless silence. 

With each minute that passed that a threat failed to materialize, a new theory was coalescing in Loki’s tired mind: Barnes had left.

The soldier had somehow found a loophole in Loki’s orders, disabled the charm - perhaps even destroyed it - and slipped away into the night. The thought bothered Loki more than it should have; he had been so sure of his orders. But compared to the other scenarios spinning in Loki’s head, this theory was a hopeful one that ended with Barnes in the arms of his captain and an empty apartment just waiting for Loki to grab his things and disappear again. 

A millimeter at a time, Loki inched his key into the lock, and then, just as slowly, turned the key and handle. The lock made a barely audible snick and Loki eased the door open, his senses alert. 

Darkness.

Loki let the door swing closed behind him. His fingers found the light switch on the wall, and then he hesitated. The blackness pressed on him, along with memories of the thrice-cursed void, but whatever this game was, Loki was still swifter, stronger, and more adept in darkness than any mere mortal. For a little longer, the rush of adrenaline that had dulled the pain in his head would keep Loki’s nerves at bay.

Loki left the lights off and moved silently down the hallway. The old smell of blood still hung heavy in the apartment, concealing any other scents, and the blinds were, indeed, closed. The dull light of the streetlamps leaked around the edges of the blinds, washed the carpet beneath the windows in a dull, gray glow, and reached no further.

Loki’s eyes scanned the dark - and it was dark, he realized. The blinking numbers on the microwave were dark. Not a failure of mortal electricity: Loki could hear the hum of the fridge still. Loki’s skin crawled, and silently, soundlessly he mouthed a vicious curse at the fates that had placed him in this exact moment with no magic. He would have given so much to cast a spell to reveal the space or wrap himself in the safety of illusion.

And then Loki’s need for light broke through him like a wave, and he moved on light feet towards the bedroom door and the closest light switch.

He was almost to his goal when he heard it, a barely there exhale and a whisper of air. 

Loki dodged and felt something sharp graze his coat as it slashed past. Something heavy slammed into the side of Loki’s thigh. 

Loki rolled with the momentum of the hit, frantic to put some distance between him and the threat. Springing up with his back to the dining room table, he could see the silhouette of the attacker: a dark, silent shape between Loki and the barely-there illumination of the shuttered window. 

An ambush.

Whatever had gone down in the apartment, Barnes’ enemies had left someone behind to take care of any witnesses. Loki fought down the panic rising in his throat. Panic made his heart race, made it hard to focus on his surroundings. Panic would make him weak, and Loki felt his exhausted, scattered mind trying to catch up and deal with this latest danger and disaster. 

The air whispered again, and Loki recognized the sound of a knife, and his hand snapped out by instinct, catching his attacker’s wrist and using it as leverage to spin both of them around. With momentum on his side, Loki used his full strength to throw the attacker and put some space between them. The darkness grunted as it crashed into the dining table amid the clatter of broken wood.

The move had bought Loki time to grasp the back of a chair and swing it around like an awkwardly shaped club - and just in time to block his attacker’s rush. The impact was jarring and shattered the chair into pieces. Loki didn’t dare move for one of the light switches, not without risking- 

Loki dodged another flurry of movement, his mind racing and body moving on instinct honed from years of knife-fighting for survival, when something heavy and shaped like a boot slammed into his chest and threw him backwards. He crashed into the armchair in the living room, and over it. 

But this close to the window, more light crept through into the dark room, and Loki saw the shape of his attacker when it lunged for him. Still on the ground, Loki twisted and rose at the last second and slammed his hand up. The heel of his palm and caught the side of the man’s face with a resounding, numbing thud. 

And it was a man - a rasp of a bristle on his face scraped Loki’s hand when his blow connected. Loki caught the wrist of the hand with the knife and twisted, using the weight of the man to lever himself back to his feet. But Loki’s blow, which should have stunned a regular mortal, didn’t seem to phase the attacker. The man merely grunted from the hit and refused to drop the knife. A knee came up and only a last minute twist of Loki’s hips kept the blow from hitting Loki’s groin. 

Light glinted off of something else coming at Loki’s face, and Loki threw his free hand up in a desperate bid to intercept the second knife. Instead of the pain of a blade sinking into Loki’s palm, Loki gasped as his fingers were hit and shoved aside by a blow from a metal club -

No, not a club, Loki realized too late, as metal fingers wrapped around his throat.

Chapter Text

Solid metal fingers locked on Loki’s throat. Barnes slammed his weight into Loki, knocking the air out of Loki’s lungs in a choked gasp as they hit the carpet with a dull thud. The metal fingers tightened, and Loki couldn't draw breath. Loki threw his weight to the side, trying to roll them. But like the perfect partner in this silent, deadly dance, Barnes moved with Loki, keeping Loki pinned with his dense, heavily muscled body. The air Loki had lost in the fall had cost him. Bright sparks flashed across his vision, almost a welcome relief from the strangling darkness. 

Barnes had to follow orders. And Loki had no breath to give them, no leverage. Barnes’ metal hand tightened again with another whisper of overlapping joints.

With Loki pinned under him like a beached fish, Barnes could have ended it easily, snapped Loki’s neck or crushed his trachea. Instead, the man was slowly strangling Loki.

Was it revenge, Loki wondered distantly, or new orders from Hydra?  

Orders. 

With a final, panicked flare of strength, Loki slammed his fist into Barnes chest, right where the man had shot himself just a day ago. And, when Barnes jerked without letting up, threw another blow just as viciously into the crook of the elbow of Barnes’ metal arm - once, twice.  The arm buckled at the joint with a chittering of machinery. For a split second, the metal fingers loosened, and Loki’s lungs expanded in a frantic gasp of air. Then, with a furious whine, the metal grip locked back around his neck and slammed Loki’s head back against the floor. But that moment had been enough.

“Barnes, stand down!”

The hand and weight were suddenly gone, the shape of his attacker swallowed by the darkness again. Loki rolled to his knees, choking and coughing.

“Kakogo cherta - ” It was Barnes’ voice, breaking off with a snarl. 

Around his own shuddering gasps for air, Loki could hear ragged panting from the darkness, as if Barnes was making up for the long soundless minutes of his attack. Head spinning, Loki shoved himself back on his feet, and staggered clumsily across the room, the dark world swaying around him. His feet hit broken pieces of furniture and he almost fell when his shoulder made contact with a wall with a thud. Loki patted his way to the light switch and, bracing himself, turned on the light.

With a stab of pain through Loki’s eyes, the harsh light of the overhead lights revealed the scene with an almost malicious clarity. Loki was slumped against the wall by the bedroom door, still catching his breath. Barnes stood by the kitchen, wild-eyed and body rigid, his hand metal hand whirring and clenching convulsively. Between them, the bloody armchair had been toppled, one of its arms torn off. The dining room table and chair lay crushed and in splinters on the carpet. 

The charm Loki had hung around Barnes neck lay neatly on the raised bar counter that surrounded the open concept kitchen. The couch had escaped unscathed, Loki’s laptop sitting on it in its messenger bag, neat as can be. 

Barnes had tried to kill Loki.

Loki gaze dropped and slowly, carefully, he inspected the tears in his coat. Only Loki’s speed had saved him from Barnes’ knives. He’d seen Barnes sharpen them often enough. Just as carefully, Loki raised his aching hand and touched the tender skin around his neck where the metal hand had clamped down. His hip throbbed, and his body hurt with each breath.

With an exhale that rasped in his sore throat, Loki looked up and let his gaze drift around the destroyed room, avoiding the spot where Barnes had backed away to, a defensible position with his back pressed to a wall. Barnes had turned off all the lights, and then settled in to wait.

“A clever loophole,” Loki finally spoke, his voice a destroyed rasp, still leaning heavily against the wall. “You could not be sure it was me, and there were no orders stopping you from killing a stranger in the dark.”

“You came sneaking in,” Barnes snapped in Russian. “Was I supposed to throw a party instead?”

“You set it up, turned off the lights.” Loki shook his head and instantly regretted the movement as both his neck and head screamed with pain. Eyes clenched shut as he breathed through it, Loki almost admired the simplicity of Barnes’ plan. He should have seen this trap a mile away. But the last few days had shaken him, exhausted him - 

More excuses.

Loki was supposed to be smart . 

Thing was, he’d known all about the dangers of keeping a wild, deadly thing on a leash. When he found himself on Midgard with a scepter in his hand and bloody furrows of bindings in his mind, he too had found loopholes and revelled in the orders he’d twisted. 

How long had Barnes been planning this? Had he done this before to other handlers? Loki wasn’t sure if he preferred it to be a spur of the moment decision on the soldier’s part, or a well-thought out plan to remove the only person whose orders Barnes had to follow. 

And then Loki remembered that he didn’t have to wonder. His mind was indeed working too slowly that day.

“Tell the truth when you answer,” Loki said. “Did you orchestrate this with the intent to have me dead?”

“Nyet,” Barnes ground out. No. 

“How long did you - “ Loki broke off and opened his eyes again, startled. “You didn’t?”

Barnes just glared at him.

Oh. 

“Did you...do this so you could attack me?” Loki whispered, because speaking hurt. And because murder was not the only possibility. Revenge, injury, perhaps an attempt to do enough damage to make sure Loki could never speak again. Loki could not blame Barnes for trying after everything that - 

“Nyet,” Barnes said again.

Slowly, Loki felt along the wall to the couch and sank into it. It hurt to stay upright. Barnes just watched him, arms crossed across his chest, something deep in his metal arm whirring restlessly. Loki knew he’d landed some hard blows on Barnes in the scuffle, but he didn’t see blood and if Barnes was hurt, the soldier gave no sign. 

“Three bags of groceries on the floor below us,” Loki finally spoke. “Fetch them and return here promptly.”

Loki didn’t think it possible, but Barnes looked even more murderous. It was a shit move, but Loki wasn’t sure he could get up and they needed the food. Better to be seen as cruel than weak.  

For a moment, Loki thought Barnes would resist the order. The man’s hands clenched and he swayed once on his feet. But then Barnes spun around and stomped away towards the apartment entrance. For someone who could move like a ghost, the man certainly didn’t bother when it suited him. 

“Do not be seen,” Loki rasped after him from the couch. The sharp click of the entry door closing was his only response.

In the silence of the suddenly empty apartment, Loki wrapped his arms around himself, leaned forward, forehead to his knees, and allowed himself to shake. He had about twenty seconds of privacy - forty if Barnes took his time or had to hide from a passing neighbor.

Loki counted off the seconds in his head and tried to breathe through the shakes. He’d almost died, helpless and pinned in the dark, just like the -

No, no, no, he didn’t think about what happened to him before. 

With a shudder, Loki forced himself upright. In his lap, his hands trembled.

Loki curled his fingers into fists -  and just in time. Barnes was back.

The door clicked, the plastic bags rustled, Barnes glared. Loki jerked his head in a nod of acknowledgement. He didn’t thank Barnes; thanks was for favors done with free will, not for orders that could not be disobeyed. 

Stopping right across from Loki, Barnes opened his right hand and all three bags fell to the carpet with a rattle of cans and packaging. Loki let Barnes have this small bit of petty defiance.

Hands curled in his lap, there was just one thing Loki couldn’t figure out as Barnes drew him into another staring march. Show no weakness.

“Why did you you turn off the lights?” 

Barnes scowled. “Visibility.”

“The lights stay on,” Loki said. 

“Stupid risk.” Barnes said, still in Russian, impatience and a note of defensiveness in his voice. “Anyone can see movement through blinds.”

“The lights stay on,” Loki repeated, the rasp in his voice dulling the hard edge of his voice, if not his squinted glare in Barnes’ direction. “Not a negotiation.”

Barnes’ hands clenched into tight fists and Loki braced himself to order Barnes to back down. Instead, Barnes let out a frustrated huff and stalked past the couch and to the bedroom. It took a combination of Loki’s exhaustion and sheer willpower not to flinch when Barnes moved. 

Rattling sounds came from the bathroom. Barnes re-emerged, dragging the blue shower curtain behind him. With quick, swift movements, he doubled it up and attached the semi-opaque plastic over the window, hooking it on the mechanism that held up the blinds. Loki watched groggily from the couch.

“It’s see-through,” Loki muttered helpfully as his body decided that it was done for the evening, and slumped back into the cushions of the couch.

“It’s better than nothing,” Barnes snapped, shooting Loki an annoyed look.

Loki supposed Barnes was right. He couldn't think of any other alternatives for a makeshift curtain. There was a bed in the other room, but no linens or blankets. The apartment had come furnished, but it wasn’t a hotel. And Loki certainly wasn't giving up his coat for Barnes' paranoia. Loki blinked, and then again as he considered the window and Barnes’ makeshift blackout curtain. With each blink, it was getting harder and harder to keep his eyes open and he could feel the adrenaline crash and the last few days catching up with him.

Loki was going to say something, give some order. But when he opened his eyes next, Barnes was gone from the window. Loki himself was lying down, hands folded under his chin, knees folded so he could fit into the small space on the couch cushions. He must have slithered down to sleep. 

He didn’t remember that. 

The lights were still on, Loki was still alive, and the room was still an awful mess. There was a soft rattling sound coming from the kitchen. Loki turned his head to follow the sounds, and saw Barnes’ shoulders and head moving in the kitchen, the rest of the man’s body hidden by the counter and Loki’s angle. 

Barnes had put the hoodie back on, so enough time must have passed for it to be fully dry. 

Loki pushed himself upright, then regretted it as his vision swam and his body reminded him that he had just had an encounter in the dark with a supersoldier on top of a magic crash on top of -

Well, the last forty-eight hours hadn't been kind. He waited the swimming dark spots in his vision out, breathing through it. When he opened his eyes, Barnes was still in the kitchen, pretending not to have noticed Loki's return to consciousness.

Lying there, on the arm of the couch, just a few inches from where Loki had put down his head, was Barnes charm. It had been moved, from counter to couch, and Loki touched it with the tip of finger. It still held power, though the gossamer healing spell that Loki had woven and connected to Barnes had unraveled the moment the man had taken it off. Now only the leftover bits of the don't-look-at-me magic remained in the rune Loki had carved and enchanted.

“Why did you take it off?” Loki said, voice still scratchy and horse. “It was helping you.”

“Didn’t want to waste it,” Barnes said from the kitchen. He was speaking English again.

“Right,” Loki said. He had told Barnes that the runestones would eventually run out of power. The man had made the logical, reasonable deduction and taken off the charm to save its battery.

Loki was still so tired.

“You gonna put it on?” Barnes broke the silence, and Loki blinked at him, trying to gather his thoughts. Seeing Loki’s confusion, Barnes jerked his head at the charm by Loki’s hand.

“No,” Loki said. “It won’t work on me like that.”

And pulling power from it wouldn’t make enough of a difference to his new array of colorful bruises. He was lucky Barnes’ blows hadn’t broken any ribs. Loki hated broken ribs. 

The soft rattling sound stopped as Barnes took a pot of boiling water off the stove. Using his metal hand to brace half a dozen eggs from rolling out of the pot, Barnes poured the steaming water into the sink. Boiled eggs. Barnes had made himself a midnight snack. Or breakfast.

Lovely.

With the window covered, Loki wasn't sure how much time had passed.

“Are you going to clean this up?” Loki asked, staring around the destroyed room as the man came out of the kitchen, pot in hand and a glass of water in the other.

“No.” Barnes put the pot of boiled eggs on the couch seat next to Loki. “Eat something.”

Chapter Text

Loki found himself sitting on a couch, surrounded by the bloody and shattered remains of the apartment’s furniture, cradling a small pot of a half dozen hard boiled eggs. Carefully, he picked one up and rolled it in between his palms. It was still hot, and Loki pressed one against his sinuses. The heat felt good. 

Across the room, sitting cross-legged against the wall, Barnes watched this with no expression. 

Eventually, Loki decided he was hungry, and started peeling. The egg shells falling into the pot sounded like the lazy droplets of rain. 

Loki peeled, ate, drank some water, and then, more awake, started the slow process of pulling himself together. By the time he came out of the bathroom, his steps were once again steady. He paused in the doorway to the living room and took the scene in again with fresh eyes, from the curtained window to the bloody wall. His own clothes felt crunchy and dirty. 

Barnes too was starting to look even more scruffy, hair loose and stringy around his face, eyes shadowed, clothes rumpled and stained. 

Loki was in charge and he had to start making some decisions.

He sorted through the facts.

Fact: Barnes was still there. That was...something.

Fact: Barnes had made Loki breakfast. The man’s operant conditioning from Hydra might have forced Barnes to care about what happened to his handler. Or it might have been an apology for the ring of purpling bruises around Loki’s neck.

Fact: Barnes’ attack had been an accident. Loki ordering Barnes to shoot himself had been...accidental, but also not exactly an accident. The scales were not quite balanced between them. And the night before highlighted just how vulnerable Loki could be if Barnes decided to turn on him. Loki could not afford to have Barnes turn on him.

Fact: Barnes was a super soldier. Loki had watched enough Avengers interviews (for research , and because there was no avoiding the almost 24/7 Avengers news coverage and speculation when one lived in New York City) to know the basics of what that meant. He remembered Clint joking about how much food Steve and Thor could put away. At the time, Loki had quietly raged as Thor went on and on about Asgard’s feasts and the golden city on national television. But the tidbit about supersoldier metabolism stuck.

The idea of making Barnes a meal felt terribly derivative. Barnes had already made Loki food. But Loki was at a loss for what else to do. Perhaps the man would appreciate the symmetry and the return gesture. 

Loki didn’t need to make a peace offering, he knew that. Barnes was his to do as he pleased. But Loki was a magnanimous god. He could be gracious and do what was needed to soothe the ruffled feathers of his reluctant ally.

That settled, Loki pulled out the watch from his pocket to check the time. It would soon be morning.

Making his way to the kitchen, Loki put a pot of water on the stove and pulled an onion from the grocery bag. And then he discovered that all the knives were missing. Loki stared at the bottom of the empty knife drawer for a few seconds, contemplating his options, and then made his slow way out of the kitchen and over to Barnes. 

Apparently, the man was working his way through all five of the kitchen knives, sharpening and polishing them. They were laid out beside him on a wooden slat from the broken table, perfectly organized by length. 

Loki reached down for one - then froze, his hand outstretched. Barnes body language had shifted, channeling all the cold tension of a dog protecting a bone. It was nothing obvious - a tightness of muscles, a shift in breathing, a sudden stilling of the man’s fingers on the handle of the knife he had been in the middle of polishing. 

He can’t hurt you.

But the reminder didn’t help. 

“I’ll bring it back,” Loki said quietly, the words barely there in the silent apartment. 

The standoff lasted for almost thirty seconds - an eternity for Loki as he waited, his hand outstretched, and Barnes sitting cross-legged with his head down, hair like a ragged curtain around his face.

And then Barnes seemed to come to a decision. He reached for the middle knife in the lineup he’d created, picked it up by a blade and held it out to Loki, all without looking up. Loki plucked it carefully from Barnes’ loose grip and carefully backed away. He was unsure what had just happened, only knowing that it had.

In the kitchen, Loki made quick work of the onion, and then a few more veggies before dumping that and a pack of sausages into a pan to cook. 

As he waited for the food to cook, Loki pulled the receipt out of the grocery bag. Carefully, in English and with the cheap pen lying on the counter, Loki made a list on the blank back. 

Eventually, Loki had everything he needed. A plate of food, some utensils, the receipt in his coat’s pocket, and a knife in one hand. He stared at the offerings, considered how pathetic his life had become in just a few years, and steeled himself for the next confrontation with Barnes. Maybe this one would go just a bit more smoothly.

He walked over to where Barnes sat and put the plate of food on a chunk of the table top that had survived last night’s encounter, next to Barnes’ kitchen knife collection. The wood wobbled a little, then settled. Stiffly, Loki levered himself down, using the wall and feeling five times older than his nine centuries, until he was sitting awkwardly in front of Barnes.

The soldier watched Loki steadily, his expression blank. He didn’t seem interested in Loki’s own attempt at a breakfast peace offering. But he did watch as Loki carefully replaced the knife he had taken in Barnes’ lineup of blades. 

“Soldier,” Loki said, and though his own voice was raspy, he was pleased when speaking brought on no more than a dull spark of pain. He was still healing much much too slowly, but his throat was on the mend.

Barnes didn’t speak - he just waited. Loki cleared his throat. It was morning again. 

“Your orders are the same as yesterday’s. You will not tell anyone about me or betray me,” Loki repeated the rules quietly, trying to ignore Barnes unblinking stare and the heat rising in his cheeks with each word. Loki had  to protect himself. It was common sense . “You will ensure that harm does not come to me that is in your power to prevent. If you answer my questions, you will be honest. And -”

Loki hesitated and then cleared his throat. “And the lights stay on.”

No answer. Loki would have to trust that this would be enough for the next twenty-four hours.

Loki reached into his pocket and retrieved the receipt. He held it out and Barnes finally moved. With a whir of servos, Barnes reached out  with his metal hand and took the receipt, index finger and thumb closing with a clink on the paper. He looked down at it. 

“Tianjin, Idaho, Latveria,” Barnes read out loud, voice gravelly with disuse. “Sokovia, California, Cairo, Mexico City.”

Barnes glanced up and his eyebrow quirked - a barely there facial twitch that Loki chose to see as an improvement over the bland emptiness of before.

“Locations,” Loki explained. “These are the best leads for the objects of power I am pursuing. If acquired, I can wield any one of these to block Hydra’s influence from your mind.”

More silence as Barnes handed the piece of paper back. 

Loki cleared his throat and put the receipt back on the ground next to Barnes. “They’re in order of most to least reliable, based on the research I could pull. It’s mostly from all the, ah, Hydra files. The leaked ones when SHIELD went down. I can show them to you if you’d like.”

Barnes kept watching Loki, as if waiting for something. An apology? No, Barnes had attacked him. Loki didn’t owe him anything. Plus, he’d made Barnes real food and even shared information. That had to be more than enough.

But maybe...

“Do you...do you need mission orders?” Loki asked. 

Barnes snorted and went back to sharpening one of the kitchen knives. Loki waited a few seconds, then made a strategic retreat back to the kitchen. He hated the vague and uneasy feeling that wrapped around his gut that whispered that once again he had failed to pass a test he hadn’t even realized he’d been faced with. He owed Barnes nothing . 

Nothing at all.

Loki stood frozen in the kitchen for a long moment, trying to recapture the sense of purpose from just a day ago. He needed to make some decisions, take some actions, figure out their next steps. 

And yet he felt the deep exhaustion that had nothing to do with his injuries or magic settling around him, making it hard to plan. Loki knew that he needed to pull his laptop from the messenger bag and check in with his contacts, join a couple high stakes poker games for the extra cash, review the Hydra files for the locations he’d scrawled on the back of the receipt. Hell, even the thought of just ordering Barnes to start cleaning the apartment made Loki feel the sort of tired that sleep wouldn’t help.

He tried to recapture the bright energy he felt the days before when everything was shiny and fate had served him the Winter Soldier on a silver platter. It eluded him, like the memory of a complicated dream. 

Instead of doing any one of the many things that needed to be done, Loki poured himself a cup of hot water (still no tea, another thing to figure out) and wandered over to the living room window. It was becoming easier to ignore the dried blood and mess, and Loki stepped over the overturned items without thinking. It was not as easy to ignore the itchiness of the dried blood on his own sleeves under the coat, but the idea of washing up felt harder than just bearing it.

Loki felt the energy of the room shift as he reached for the window curtain. He looked back to find Barnes glaring at him from his corner, and his hand stilling on the knife. With a soft huff of air, Loki lowered his hand, stepped over to the side of the window, and eased the edge of the curtain away so that only a sliver of light came through. It was enough to let the bright morning sunshine slip in and land like a bar of light across Loki’s face. And far enough out of the sightlines, apparently, to appease the Winter Soldier.

When Loki glanced back at the soldier in the corner, the man had gone back to his compulsive fiddling with his weapons, seemingly satisfied that Loki wasn’t about to make himself into a target for wandering rooftop snipers.

Loki leaned against the wall and cradled the warm cup between his palms as he sipped at the water and watched the lazy crawl of life on the sidewalks and road below. It was early enough in the day that it should have been rush hour. Loki guessed from the lack of rushing that it must have been the weekend. Carefully, he counted back the days and dates to orient himself in the human calendar, and he let that distract him for a while. 

He was still there, about an hour later, nursing the now lukewarm water. Occasionally, Barnes would rise and make a circuit of the apartment, prowling the space as if to make sure that no enemies had popped up in the bathroom, or snuck their way into a closet. Loki allowed it.

Once, when Loki looked back, he saw that the plate of food he had dropped off with Barnes had gone missing. 

The bar of sunlight moved slowly across Loki’s face as the sun rose. He watched the street silently, letting his mind drift like it had during his afternoons in Prospect Park with the pigeons. Below, an elderly couple walking a small dog disappeared around the corner. A car drove past, music pounding through its closed windows, loud enough that Loki easily caught the chorus. The leaves from the scattered sidewalk trees fell slowly in autumn browns and yellows.

A large ice cream truck pulled around the corner, a large speaker system attached to its roof with large bands of metal and bolts. The van was colorful, its sides covered in illustrations of sundaes and popsicles. Loki watched it curiously as it rolled to a stop across from his building. Loki hadn’t seen a real life ice cream truck before, and was a little disappointed that it wasn’t playing the creepy bell music he’d seen it do on television. 

Humans were strange and clever beasties in their inventions and conveniences. They had to be, without magic.

The truck settled and Loki heard the hiss and quick squeal of the speakers as they turned on. And then the sound blasted out of them - 

“ Longing.”

The word was spoken in clean, slightly accented Russian. The sound cut through the neighborhood like a boom, startling the birds and passersby alike. One car swerved in surprise.

Behind Loki, Barnes made a choked sound.

“Rusted.”

Loki’s head whipped around to stare at Barnes. The man stared back, eyes wide with a kind of dazed horror. It was the look of a man who knew what was about to happen and could do nothing to stop it. 

“Seventeen.”

“Get out of here,” Barnes gasped.

Code words. Hydra.

Hydra was blasting the neighborhood with words to reset Barnes and prep him for another handler. For another mission.

“Daybreak.” 

Loki could never make it to the van in time to silence the words. He had no magic, no blast of power to send at the van, no long-range weapon powerful enough to make a difference.

Barnes crouched on the floor, hands pressed to his ears, his breaths coming out in harsh, broken pants. The gun he’d been inspecting was on the carpet next to his knee. 

Loki could run. 

Loki could shoot Barnes and end the threat. 

Loki could order Barnes to shoot himself before this went too far. 

“Furnace.”

How many words were there in total? Loki looked back down the street, mind racing frantically, just in time to see -

- just in time to see Captain America in civilian clothes come racing out of a building next door and chuck his shield with all his strength at the van. The giant metal frisbee slammed into the speakers on the roof of the car. It hung there, stuck, as the speakers spit sparks of electricity.

“Beni - “ The speakers died with a whimper.

In the sudden silence, Loki heard the approaching whine of the repulsor engines of Iron Man’s suit. 

The Avengers had arrived.

Chapter Text

Loki let out a vicious curse. Avengers were like rats. Where there was one, there would be others swarming soon enough. And somehow, out of the blue, both Hydra and the Avengers found Loki’s hiding place.

How the hell did everyone find them? 

“We have to go,” Loki snapped, spinning to Barnes, even as his mind spun through the possibilities. Barnes was no help, still kneeling on the ground, bent over, his breathing rough. “ Soldier! ”

The sharp order from his handler seemed to have done the trick because Barnes heaved in a huge gasp and struggled to his feet. Loki grabbed his messenger bag with its laptop off the couch and his eyes fell on the charm. The charm that Loki had imbued with runes of hiding and silence, and the charm that Barnes had taken off. Shit.

Loki grabbed the charm and crossed the room to Barnes. The man still looked dazed, as if not quite there, but seemed to be trying to pull himself together. He was upright now, swaying slightly. When Loki stepped into his space and lifted his hands, though, Barnes’ head snapped up and he caught Loki’s wrists in a death grip. 

“It’s me,” Loki hissed. Barnes’ fingers were digging into the runes and the pain made the world swim a little at the edges of Loki’s vision. “Trackers. On you. You need to put this on.”

Barnes blinked at him, then down at the chain and charm in Loki’s hands. Somewhere outside, the whine and blast of an adapted chitauri weapon slashed through the quiet, and Loki’s entire body jerked as adrenaline-edge panic ran through him. Memories pushed at him like a flock of invisible birds battering him with their wings.

They needed to get out.  

“Put it on,” Loki choked out. They didn’t have time for this. “ Now.”

That order seemed to snap Barnes out of it. His grip loosened. Barnes took the chain and pulled it over his head. Loki staggered away, grabbing Barnes by his arm and yanking the man after him. Hydra - even armed with cobbled-together alien-based energy blasters - wouldn’t keep the Avengers occupied for long.

And then Loki and Barnes were out of the apartment and on the landing. 

The Avengers’ strategy had always been predictable: Iron Man in the skies, the Hawk in position on a nearby building to play sniper, Captain America on the ground to tackle his way through any obstacles, and the Black Widow to slink through the shadows and stab unsuspecting targets. They wouldn’t have brought the Hulk with them. Too high a risk of civilian casualties if the green beast became angry. 

The roof was out of the question - they’d be easy pickings for Iron Man and the Hawk. Front entrance would spit them out straight into Hydra and Captain America’s waiting arms. The back exit, right into where the Widow was most likely to lurk.

Along the hallway, doors were beginning to open as neighbors poked their heads out, looking concerned. A few heads spotted Loki and Barnes, their ragged appearance, and the gun in the supersoldier’s hand (when had Barnes managed to grab it the gun?) and like dominos disappeared back into their apartments amid the slamming of doors and locks.  

Loki and Barnes were just a few steps down the stairs when they heard the bang of the entry doors slamming against the wall downstairs, and shouted orders below. Loki spun, but going up to the roof would trap them just as surely as heading down the stairs, and hiding in an apartment would just prolong the inevitable. Loki could order Barnes to - 

A sound like thunder rocked through the building, the floor shuddering beneath Loki’s feet. Thor. The thought pressed the air from Loki’s lungs in a panicked gasp before he got a hold of himself.

Not Thor. An explosion. Something exploded outside. 

Hydra must have brought reinforcements.

It was Barnes’ turn to drag Loki down the hallway to the dead end with the broken elevator.

“Wrong way,” Loki hissed. “The stairs are the fastest - “

Barnes reached the elevator, let go of Loki’s arm, and grabbed the edges of the closed doors. The finger of his metal arm dug into the crease between the doors with a grinding sound. Barnes braced his feet against the ground and his flesh arm against the wall. His back muscles rippled under the hoodie, and the arm gave a soft whine. Then, it whirred, recalibrating, and the left side of the elevator slammed open and buckled with a thud that echoed through the building like a shot.

Barnes looked down the shaft as Loki whirled, staring down the hall, his heart pounding. He could hear shouts and the sound of boots on the stairs - Hydra or a troop of the Avengers’ minions, it didn’t matter. 

“Grab on,” Barnes snapped, dragging Loki to the open shaft. Loki got a confusing impression of a huge, dark hole into nothingness before his front hit Barnes and the man’s arm clamped Loki to his chest. 

“We can’t - “ Loki gasped, even as instinct wrapped his arms around Barnes. 

But apparently they could. 

The man shoved them both into free fall into the shaft, even as he grabbed for the cabling with his metal arm. The cable unraveled for a few feet before locking and jerking both of them to a sudden, bone-jolting stop. 

They swung hard. Barnes caught the wall with the flat of his boot to keep them from crashing into the side of the narrow elevator shaft. The darkness wrapped around them, the light from the broken door above feeling flimsy and small, and Loki’s fingers dug tighter into the hoodie at Barnes’ back, his arms tight around the man’s neck and shoulder. 

Loki tried to catch his breath to say some kind of order. To say something that would get them out of the dark. But between the sound of the chitauri weapons, the thunder, and the empty blackness of the elevator shaft, Loki couldn’t manage a full thought.

For a split second, they hung there, their swinging stabilized. Then Barnes loosened his grip on the cable and they slid down, spark splitting where the rough metallic cabling rubbed against the plates of Barnes’ fingers and palm. 

Barnes braked them hard, and the jolt jerked Loki’s head forward, his skull slamming into Barnes’ chin with a dull thump. Loki heard Barnes’ teeth click hard from the impact.

They dropped a final few feet, and straight into ankle-deep standing water - cold, wet and fetid. Loki had been held in dark places before, and yet, in some strange twist, he realized he’d never been held anywhere that was both dark and wet. The incongruity of the slopping icy water around his feet snapped him out of his rising panic. That, more than Barnes impatient shove, had Loki unlock his grip and stagger back and away from Barnes, his arms flailing and hitting the wall. 

He felt his way over to where Barnes was pawing the wall, searching for the door seam, palms tracing the wall with the sound of scraping metal on metal. Within seconds, they found the seam, and levered the doors open to reveal the dull gray and dimly lit expanse of the underground garage. After the black of the elevator shaft, the cheap flickering fluorescent bulbs could have been starlight for the relief Loki felt. 

They were out - and just in time too. Loki heard shouts from the top of the elevator shaft. The echoes made it impossible to tell if the yells were the code words, or orders to shoot. They were out of the wet and onto the concrete of the garage before they could find out.

Loki took a second to orient himself; they were on the bottom of the two floors of the underground garage. It was the weekend and still early enough in the day that more than half of the car slots were filled by residents from the three neighboring buildings and the hotel that shared access. The doors to the staircase were to their immediate right, and Loki grabbed the handles and wrenched them around and twisted them together to block that entrance. Even that pathetic effort left him panting and his hands throbbing. The less power he had, the weaker he grew. The thought rested uneasily in his chest. 

Barnes was already moving when Loki turned back, slinking his way along the slope and past the rows of cars. The dim fluorescent lights glinted across the metal arm as he moved, as if off a fender of a car. Loki caught up with a few quick and loping steps, and thanked the fates that there wasn't anyone in the garage to hear them. They squished when they moved, their shoes making wets sounds with every step. It added a level of indignity to their escape that seemed to be testing Barnes’ mission focus.

"There," Loki hissed, directing Barnes' attention to the stairwell on the second parking level, well across the garage lot. "That will take us through the building to the west. Two alleys, lots of overhangs."

Barnes gave a sharp nod and they moved quickly in the new direction. Loki was weighing the advantages of moving in socks versus the liberal scattering of broken bottle and discarded cans on the concrete when they heard a new sound and froze. They first heard the footsteps - boots on asphalt - moving quickly and weighted down with equipment that rattled just so. Loki and Barnes dodged behind a row of cars as a group of half a dozen men dressed in all black and armed to the teeth burst out of the stairwell and started moving down the garage, circling around the vehicles and pointing their guns at dark, shadowy corners. The stairwell they'd come out of was also right between Barnes and Loki's hiding place, and their destination. The men were heading their way, and Barnes looked ready to rumble, expression set and furious. His metal arm made a whisper of a sound that Loki felt in a small vibration against his side where they crouched. 

Frantically, Loki looked around for other options. Any other options. If this were Hydra, they’d be armed with chitauri-modified weapons or those words that had almost felled Barnes upstairs. If these men were with the Avengers or some other shady government organization, who knew what they'd come armed with. Barnes might be able to take the seven men on, but Loki wasn't ready to lose the Winter Soldier, or to get shot again in the crossfire. 

Barnes shifted his weight, prepping to move. 

“Wait,” Loki hissed in his ear. Carefully, he picked up an empty can that someone had left in the parking lot. Thank the fates for littering. “Just wait.”

“What are you - “ Barnes looked at the can in Loki’s hand, followed the direction of Loki’s gaze, and his eyes widened. “No, don’t -”

He grabbed at Loki’s arm, but Loki had already made his move, tossing the can gently over the railing of the parking level to drop to the level below. It landed on a car below with a loud clatter.

The approaching group of men froze like hounds catching a scent. With quick movements, they reoriented their movements on the sound and, as one, jogged off down the ramp to investigate.

Barnes stared at their retreating backs through the tiny gap between the cars, his expression a mix of horror and disgust.

“See, it worked,” Loki said smugly. 

“Idiots,” Barnes breathed.

“Yes,” Loki agreed. “Now move.”

They did just that: Across the garage, through the heavy steel door, up the steps to the first floor of the western apartment building, a block away from the chaos, and through the door to the back alley between the buildings. 

The smoke and haze outside hit them like a wall. Loki choked on a breath (and a curse) and pressed his sleeve to his nose, eyes watering. Next to him, Barnes pulled his shirt up over his nose, and scanning the space. The sound of gunfire echoed among the buildings - apparently Hydra had enough reinforcements and tech to make the Avengers work for it. The smoke hung in the air, cloaking the surroundings in a haze of orange mist where it caught the sunlight. The smoke itself had to be Hydra. No matter how badly the Avengers and their government lackeys wanted the Winter Soldier back under their control, this was still a neighborhood full of civilians in the middle of New York City. 

"North," Loki coughed into his sleeve. He stumbled over a abandoned crate, and then was jerked up and forward. Barnes had his shirt in a tight grip with his flesh arm, and was stalking his way down the alley. A shadow loomed out of nowhere, a human figure, a gun in hand, and Barnes' metal hand lashed out and he fired point blank -

And then they were past, the smoke wrapping and winding itself around them again like a cat. Loki pulled himself free as they stepped out of the alley.

The visibility was better on the street, which wasn't saying much. There was the rhythmic clap of helicopter rotors in the distance, and a wail of approaching sirens. 

"Visibility is shit," Barnes said, sounding like he approved. Another explosion - smaller this time - sounded from the west. "Coordinates?"

Loki hesitated. "We keep heading north."

Barnes threw a look in his direction that clearly said what he thought about that answer.

"We go - " Loki couldn't just give him the address to his real apartment, and the storage locker he rented was hardly a safehouse. They'd could find a hotel, but in their ragged state, they'd be better off finding an abandoned underground metro tunnel to lay low in. 

Loki was saved from coming up with a destination by the sound of running footsteps. Barnes drew his gun in a smooth motion, stepping in front of Loki and pivoting towards the sound.

“Bucky!” 

The shout echoed down the haze-shrouded street.

"Bucky! Where are you?" came the voice again, then coughed heavily in the smoke before shouting again. "Bucky, can you hear me? Bucky!"

Captain America. 

At Loki's side, Barnes had gone rigid, a strange, frantic expression tearing across on his face. Loki tore his eyes from Barnes to the heavy haze the voice was coming from. Captain America was racing their way to rescue his best friend.

Loki was about to lose the Winter Soldier - and his own freedom.

They had run out time.

Chapter Text

The smoke hung heavy over the streets, wiping out any visibility. Captain America’s yells and the harsh sound of his running steps bounced off the buildings, mixing with the wail of sirens and the barking of a couple dogs. The civilians had long ago taken cover indoors, so the streets were almost completely deserted while somewhere around the corner, the captain was searching for his best friend and one true love.

In one bright, cinematic-style reel in his head, Loki could see it all playing out. Captain America would burst out of the smoke, shield in hand, eyes wide. Barnes and the Captain would see each other, and Barnes would sway in shock (or maybe collapse to his hand and knees) as the power of true love and brotherhood broke the control that Hydra had placed on him. Then they’d race to meet each other and fall in each other’s arms. And then Iron Man would sweep around the building in a blaze of repulsors, spot Loki, bundle him up in a net and fly him off to the tower for some family photo moments with Thor and swift imprisonment.

The entire vision came together like a flash in the dark, lighting up Loki’s brain. Loki needed to run, take his chances on his own. But he couldn’t make himself move: he was about to lose the Winter Soldier, and with him, the closest he’d gotten to a plan and a future. 

No.

Loki was not going back to prison. He was not losing the Winter Soldier.

“Soldier,” Loki hissed, turning to Barnes who still looked torn, hesitating, the whites of his eyes flashing as his head swiveled around, trying to pin point where Captain America was coming from. Barnes didn’t seem to hear Loki.

Loki grabbed Barnes, his fingers digging into the man’s flesh arm as he dragged him to the side of the street where an alley gaped. Captain America was coming, and Loki didn’t see any cover, but -

“Bucky, can you hear me?” Captain America’s voice was closer, muffled by a detour the man had taken into a side street, if Loki had to guess. “I’m here, it’s Steve!”

Loki pushed Barnes against the brick wall of a building and grabbed the charm at the man’s neck with one hand, the front of his hoodie with the other. Barnes seemed to be shaking off his shock, and tried to push Loki back and to step around him. 

Loki shoved him back again. 

“Stay still,” Loki hissed. “Don’t move, or he’ll see us.”

Barnes turned an incredulous expression on Loki, because they were on the sidewalk in an open street, the only thing between them and discovery was a thin veil of smoke that was already starting to dissipate.

“Bucky!” 

Loki was out of time. His fingers clenched and he threw everything he had into the don’t-look charm. The runes on his wrists throbbed and then ignited into agony, and his veins felt like fire was burning through him instead of blood. Under his hand, the charm blazed with power.

The world went white, then black.

***

Loki came too slowly, piece by piece. Unlike last time, he remembered everything, the memories of the scramble to escape the siege on his safehouse were bright and clear. He remembered grabbing Barnes, and he remembered throwing caution to the wind with a snarl and a pull on his non-existent magic reserves. Against all odds, he had survived that too.

The memories came quickly. The rest of the world, however, resolved slowly coming in and out of focus in flashes of heat and ice. First, he realized he was laying down on something soft and squishy that curved around him. Then, an indeterminable amount of time later, sound returned - the unfocused noises of the city - shouts and laughter, faint music, clatter and hont of passing vehicles. Then, smell: rotting waste, old urine, and a heavy hot smell of baking pizza. 

All his senses told him he was still somewhere in the city, free and unrestrained. But when Loki blinked his eyes open, the tall rise of brick buildings above him still felt like a revelation. Dusk was settling, the last rays of sunlight glinting off the edges of the metal fire escapes above.

He was still free. That knowledge alone was enough, and Loki closed his eyes and lost track of time again.

The next time he woke up, the world around him was filled with shadows, the buildings hidden in darkness, and the wash of one lone streetlamp reaching where he was lying. Loki twitched then bit back a groan as he tried to lever himself up. The world swayed around him, spinning when he moved.

The strap of the messenger bag with the laptop was still looped around him, over his shoulder and across his chest. His hand sank into something soft and squishy, covered in the crinkle of black plastic. 

Loki stared down at his makeshift bedding.

He was lying on a pile of giant trash bags. Beside him, a large rise of stacked crates and cardboard boxes shielded him from opening of an alleyway. Beyond the alley, people moved down the street - voices, smell of cheap food, cigarette smoke, music, cars. 

Wherever they were, it was far from Loki’s safehouse apartment.

Slowly, his head still spinning slightly from movement, Loki scanned the alleyway. It took him almost a minute to find Barnes - and when he did, it was only due to the red glow ember of the cigarette.

“Barnes,” Loki rasped. The man was sitting on a crate, his back to a wall, almost completely invisible in the dark. Something skittered along the wall and disappeared in a flash of brown fur and skinny tail.

Barnes took a deep pull on the cigarette and blew it out in a long plume. The smell hit Loki’s nose a second later and he coughed, throat still feeling raw from the smoke grenades from earlier.

“You smoke?” Loki asked, because with the slow way his brain was restarting, it was at least better than asking where the man found the cigarette. 

Barnes shrugged, the movement just a shift of shadows within more shadows.

“What happened?” Loki asked, finally managing to sit up. Because at some point, the Winter Soldier had decided it was a good idea to pick this back-alley and dump his handler on a pile of garbage bags. The surface beneath Loki shifted and made crunching and squishing sounds and he refused to think anything more about what exactly he was sitting on.

“You passed out,” Barnes finally spoke after another long moment. “Again. Then I got us out of there.”

That stung.

 "I got us out.” Loki glared up at Barnes from his pile of garbage bags. “I saved us with my magic."

"Your magic,” Barnes drawled.  “Sure seemed like you grabbed me in a panic and then toppled over in a dead faint. My mistake."

"I kept us from being seen!"

"What kept us from being seen,” Barnes snapped, seeming to finally lose patience. “Was the heavy smoke cover and me dragging your dead weight behind a dumpster. Your fainting is a strategic liability to the mission, and a risk."

Loki gaped at Barnes, completely at loss for words. 

“The mission.”

Barnes didn’t respond. He took a final drag of the cigarette, let the butt drop, where he ground it up with his shoe. Loki liked to imagine that the “mission” was keeping Loki safe, but his experience told him that would be just too much to hope for. More likely, it had something to do with Loki getting those damnable words out of Barnes’ brain.

“Do we have somewhere to go?” Barnes growled. The or do I need to figure that out too? went very loudly unspoken. 

Loki ignored the question as he tried to get to his feet. It took him several tries as Barnes watched. During the third attempt, the messenger bag, which was still looped around his neck and around his arm unbalanced him and landed him right back on the pile. Something large skittered over his hand.

See the great Loki, King of Cockroaches, on his throne of Midgardian Refuse.

And suddenly, Loki was done. 

He was done with the Avengers and Barnes’ attitude and this entire damn city . He didn’t want the Winter Soldier or all the star-cursed problems the man brought in his wake. His head hurt, his back hurt, his arms hurt, his soul where his magic usually lived hurt . 

Loki was officially done.

“I’m going home,” he snapped. The fourth attempt and a half sideways roll did the trick, and Loki was able to clamber to his feet on a sticky back alley pavement that swayed gently under his feet. He met Barnes’ steady stare with his own venomous glare. “You can go wherever the hell you want, revenant. I care not what master you find for your missions and orders.”

The drama of the moment was ruined by the wobble in his step and the stagger, but Loki caught the side of the building with his palm to steady himself, and then found enough momentum to walk out with his head held high.

It took him seven blocks to realize the Winter Soldier was shadowing him, just a few steps back and silent as a ghost.

“You don’t have to follow me,” Loki told him without looking back, voice tired.

“Understood,” Barnes said quietly from behind him. Then, a long pause. “Are you going to keep fainting?”

Loki stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to glare at Barnes. 

“Yes,” he bit out. “I expect I will.”

They walked the rest of the way home in silence.

***

By the time they got to Loki’s walk-down basement apartment, Loki was leaning more than a little against Barnes for support. Barnes seemed to take this in stride, arm steady as it took on more and more of Loki’s weight. At some point, Loki was sure he must have told Barnes the address, because the world had taken on a floaty aspect, occasionally going gray and sparkly around the edges. 

It was a relief to stumble down the steps to his door and fumble the keys from his coat pocket. Eventually, he got the door open and stepped over the threshold into his rune-protected home. 

The relief almost buckled Loki’s knees as he palmed the light switch. He could breathe again, and stand straighter now, the runes drawn on the walls and ceiling taking the brunt of protecting Loki from Asgard’s prying gaze. Loki dropped the messenger bag with the laptop and the coat off his shoulders - another relief.

When Loki had first moved into the apartment, he had painted runes for balance and silence over the windows and on the door and infused them with the pathetic, shredded remnants of his magic. Since then, Loki had added to the small protective sigils - sometimes in an obsessive panic when the nights stretched too long and the darkness felt too deep and looming. Sometimes idly, picking up a brush and his homemade inks. Sometimes using his fingers until the skin felt scraped and raw.

Now, almost half a year later, the walls were covered floor to ceiling with delicate scrollwork and runes, training across the white space like roots and branches of Yggdrasil. 

Barnes stepped away from Loki and eyed the walls. He moved into the space both as if he owned it, and as if he expected a Hydra agent to come leaping out of the small mini-fridge in the corner or come creeping out from under the coffee table. The man’s need to check the perimeter felt almost comforting in its familiarity.

Bucky paced through the apartment, stepping over a discarded pizza box and around a pile of books, inspecting everything with a blank expression.

Loki could feel heat traveling up his face as he took in what the apartment must look like to an outsider. A single, tiny open space, the compact kitchen separated with a small bartop counter with a lonely vine hanging over the edge of its small plant pot, and cracked linoleum underfoot. A television that had seen better days, and the couch with a coffee table that had been pieced together with a roll of duct tape after Loki had lost his temper and thrown it across the room. Resurrecting the glass top had been a lost cause, so Loki had attached a plastic slat he’d found to the top, but hadn’t gotten around to fixing the wobble.

Barnes made a thoughtful humming sound when got to the coffee table.

“I haven’t read this one yet,” Barnes said, picking a book up out of a pile: The Immortal Life and Love of James Buchanan Barnes . Right next to it lay Bucky Barnes: The Uncensored History of the Winter Soldier and beneath it, The Leashing of America: Captain Rogers, One Billionaire, and The Deep State.

“It’s for research,” Loki pronounced. 

A small shelf stood crookedly by the wall and held the pitifully small pile of Loki’s clothes. On the table and around the floor, books lay in stacks. Literature in several languages, history and politics, a few science textbooks, and more than a few biography books amid gossip magazine and newspapers. Barnes put down the book and Loki’s silent sigh of relief caught in his throat as both their eyes fell on the small action figures arrayed on the kitchenette counter.

Shit.

“They’re for planning,” Loki snapped. 

“You’re missing the Hulk,” Barnes pointed out, leaning over and inspecting the pieces. 

“He’s a sock,” Loki lied. There were a couple of green socks amid the sock pile on the shelf.  

“I’m not here either,” Barnes said, carefully picking the Captain America piece out of where it had been half-buried upside-down in the dirt in the small plant pot. The plant itself had not fared well during Loki’s absence and was looking a little yellow.

“You’re not an Avenger,” Loki lied again, careful not to make it a question. “And you are not a threat to me.”

Barnes turned to meet Loki’s eyes steadily and answered anyway. “I’m not.” 

Loki was too tired to try to figure out what that meant. In the small corner that served as a kitchen, he put some water on the stove and leaning heavily against the counter, watched the Winter Soldier continue to inspect the hovel that Loki pretended was home. The thought sat bitter in Loki’s chest.

“I’m making tea,” Loki pronounced into the air. “And then I’m going to sleep. Don’t kill me in my sleep.”

Barnes paused to take this in, then continued his circuit.

Loki pulled the box of cheap teas off the shelf, deciding that a shower and a change of clothes felt like a bit too ambitious at this point. So what if he smelled like phosphorous and back alleys. Barnes wasn’t complaining, and Loki was tired.

Loki opened the tea box just as the kettle started whistling, and paused.

Empty.

He closed his eyes, and considered whether he had enough energy for a meltdown.

No, he decided, feeling vague and floaty, he probably didn’t. 

Very deliberately, Loki closed the little paper box and turned off the kettle. Ignoring the Winter Soldier, Loki shuffled to the couch, picked up the small box he’d stolen from the Stark Warehouse weeks ago, and, arms wrapped tight around  its soft hum of ambient magic, promptly passed out.