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There's a time and a place for everything.
Barnes knocks back the last of his drink, but his glance never slants away from the man standing eight feet to his left, and so Steve's face flashes, blurs, and lights with refracted colour through the walls of the glass as it tips up, then down.
It's been running through his head for months, this mantra, like a train on a circular track. A time and a place for everything. He's not sure what it means, why it's there. He's not sure what he should be waiting for, or why it—why it matters.
"MY FRIENDS!" The roar vibrates through the air, off the walls, flutters down to the floor like star dust. Barnes shifts just slightly on his stool, and receives in exchange a just slightly better view than he'd had before. Thor stands with a grin on his face and his drink in a toast, and the air seems to shiver around him. Four more glasses rise to meet his in a series of loud, glassy chimes. Barnes goes back to his drink, finds it empty, and flags down the barman with a look. He avoids mirrors, as a rule, so he doesn't know what the look does to his face, but so far it hasn't failed to get a result.
"Friends," Steve agrees. Barnes can feel his voice spreading into the space the star dust had left, like golden light, like warmth. His toes seem to tingle with it. He hunches further in over his empty glass.
"Eh, that's a word," Tony allows. No need to look, this time. Tony's as predictable as the sun: there will be a shrug almost like a twitch, and the faintest hint of a wry smile, and then a flare of happy challenge in his eye when he turns to Steve, hoping for an argument. Subtlety has never been a Stark virtue, Barnes thinks.
Then he remembers that he's still waiting on a drink and that he has nothing to do with his hands and that he does have to look up, because he needs to see what Steve does next. Which is how he sees that Stark's small, wry smile is instead a grin, manic and giddy. Unexpected. An unexpected hit to Barnes's gut, too.
Steve doesn't answer. He wears the expression of a parent, amused and long-suffering, who knows the antics of his child too well to fall for them.
Perhaps that's just what he wants to see, Barnes thinks. Though he doesn't know why he would care how Steve feels about Tony. He can't read Steve like he once could.
Perhaps he never could read Steve at all. Even before, when they were children, when it should have been easy, Steve was always…inexplicable. Understanding just out of reach. Perhaps he will never catch up, no matter how many years Barnes chases after him. No matter how far.
Well, there's a time and a place for everything. After all, he'd only just met Steve four months ago.
The barman swaps his empty glass for a full and Barnes drinks it down and signs for another. The bottles of liquor, spread across the wall as high as the ceiling, glitter and sing on their shelves like a heavenly chorus. Barnes will crawl as deep into them as his pocket allows. Though he's tried it before, and knows for a fact that he will find each one of them empty.
The barman sets another glass down and then waits, significantly. Barnes shifts again, reaches into his pocket, pays up. There aren't many of the crinkled bills left. Drinking costs so much more than it used to.
Thor is making a speech. Barnes wraps his fingers around his drink, turns on his stool, watches. Romanoff has taken a seat at the bar. Her legs are crossed, one elbow rests on the counter, hand dangling elegantly in space, head tilted back. Her red curls hang away from her face and brush her neck and shoulders. The corner of her mouth twists indulgently. Once, someone would have slid up next to her, leaned in, said…something. He doesn't know what. It would have been him. Or Bucky Barnes, at least. He doesn't feel any compulsion to do it now—does that mean he's someone else?
He knocks back his fourth drink in one shot.
When he looks back up Steve is frowning at him, part worried, part disapproving. His expression says he wants Barnes to stop being antisocial and join the party. Barnes feels his lips press into a line, and shakes his head in reply.
Before he gets an answer, Thor's arm drapes itself heavily over Steve's shoulders and Steve turns his head, breaking eye contact. Barnes's breath leaves his chest, through his nose, in a silent whoosh.
Thor is sprinkling the contents of a small silver flask into Steve's drink. Barnes catches the words "…the shining halls of Asgard." Then someone flips the jukebox, and a tempest of computerised pop and screaming beat swallows the remainder of the god's sentence. Thor and Steve clink glasses and swallow the liquid down. Barnes watches Steve's throat work, as if from very far away. What passes for music in the twenty-first century is unpleasant, certainly, but not entirely unfamiliar. He's had noise in his head for seventy-five years.
Alcohol, Barnes has noticed, does as little for Steve as it does for Barnes—usually. But when Steve lowers his glass his face is flushed and his eyes are wet, and he shakes his head as if to clear it.
"That's like fire!" he tells Thor good-humouredly, and Barnes, having lost track of the fact that he's already finished his last drink, raises his glass and downs its contents without thinking.
It's nothing like fire. It's ice, burning its way down his throat, sending frost into his lungs and along his veins. He's been poisoned, somehow—he's smart enough to know that: he's been poisoned and he's dying. Who could possibly have—what had he drunk, how had it gotten into his glass, and how could someone possibly have gotten it there without him knowing? And most importantly, how long will it take to kill him? His fingers dig into the bar, trying to find purchase as his blood goes arctic, but bartops these days are made of plastic, and his nails slide right along the surface.
"Breathe," a low, silky voice suggests in his ear, with delicate irony, and every nerve tightens, every reflex hums. Shrapnel flies across his memory like a bomb exploding behind his eyes. His fingers leave the bartop and scramble for a weapon which isn't there. He looks up into pale eyes like clear blue water.
And then the liquid hits his stomach and roars back up through his body like a bonfire, thawing the ice it had left on its way down in a storm of heat. Fireworks explode inside his head. He drags in a breath and coughs.
"I don't know you," Barnes rasps finally.
A dark eyebrow quirks. "Do you not?" The voice is like honey, or wind, or snakes. Each word is perfect and each word is a laugh, sharp and soft all at once, holding an echoing depth. And then the depth vanishes and the tone turns dismissive. "You must be new."
Barnes is already on the defensive, because this man in front of him is deadly, his instincts tell him. And then the face in front of him—pale, lean, framed in dark hair—breaks into a wild smile, all teeth, and Barnes feels himself tip off balance. A hand is extended to him, and he stares at it for a moment and then watches his own reach out and shake it. He hasn't touched anyone in years. He hasn't touched anyone since he was at war. He's been at war for years. He's at war now. He's at war with something and he doesn't touch anyone. He releases the other man's hand.
"Loki," the man introduces himself, and his eyes are sharp flint. "Brother of Thor." His mouth twists the words up into an ouroboros. For a moment the golden bar light seems to move like a living thing across the shoulders of his wool coat, turning it from charcoal to green, and gold glints everywhere. Barnes realises his head is just barely swimming, gently, in a way he hasn't felt since the night before he left America for the first time.
He's drunk. He's drunk in a bar at one hundred years old with his best friend, three virtual strangers who spend their days as costumed superheroes, and not one but two Norse gods.
He should have stayed home and been a grocer. Failing that, he should have stayed dead.
"Another?" Loki asks, and lifts a small copper flask, twin to Thor's silver one. Barnes doesn't say yes, but doesn't move to stop him when Loki holds it over his cup and tips. Clear, like water or like vodka. It looks completely harmless. His thoughts can't quite catch up with the situation, and it's not a feeling he's used to. He raises the glass and drinks, a small sip this time, and feels it dance down his throat in ice and fire, to settle in his stomach with a warm glow like coals.
All at once his brain snaps back online.
"What is it?" he asks.
Loki's smile is not quite a sneer. "'Finest nectar, from the shining halls of Asgard,'" he quotes Thor. "Though in this case, not quite Asgard." He doesn't offer anything more, but raises the flask and a…Barnes decides it's only fair to call the gilded monstrosity a goblet—and where had he gotten that from?—and pours himself some, then rests an elbow against the bar and turns to watch the Avengers.
The archer is juggling empty glasses, and Steve is watching him, and Thor is shaking more of his Asgardian vodka or whatever it is into Steve's glass while Steve's not looking. Barnes watches Steve watch Clint, until movement at his elbow catches his attention. He turns to keep the entire group in his line of sight, and catches Loki raising his goblet to Thor in an ironic salute. Thor stares back at Loki with a frown.
What am I doing here? Barnes wonders. This is not him, not right. He has a purpose and it's not this.
He raises his own glass and has another drink.
"You, then," Loki says, and his eyes are once again fixed on Barnes, who stares back warily. "Who are you?" It is somehow a weightier question than it should be, and Loki lifts a delicate, long-fingered hand and drapes it over Barnes's wrist.
Gunshots, and Steve, and metal, and static, static, static. And a presence like bright gold and green moss. And then the bar, and Barnes's hand is shaking and he can't catch his breath, and Loki is sipping from his goblet.
"A contemporary of the Captain's," the god says. "How unexpected."
"We grew up…" Barnes trails off.
"And how you long for peace." Green and gold dance in Barnes's head, and he thinks of stones and moss and grass and sunlight and unmarked graves. "But how you would long for other things, if only you could remember how."
"What?"
Loki is somehow closer. The liquid in Barnes's glass is no longer as clear as it had seemed, when it had first been poured in. It glints blue and silver. Trick of the light, Barnes tells himself.
"Never fear." The tone is overly conciliatory, and it sets Barnes's teeth on edge. "I understand what it is, to want what should be yours. I know what it is to be passed over. To watch others take your rightful place." Loki glances toward the group again, significantly. Stark has sashayed closer to Steve, is speaking to him, their faces less than a foot apart. "To be forgotten," Loki says delicately.
The barb strikes home, yes, of course it does. But Barnes no longer knows where home is, so it doesn't sting as it should. He has no difficultly replying, whip-quick, "I don't need to be remembered."
"Do you not? Well." The copper flask makes a reappearance, and Barnes doesn't get his protest past the block in his throat before its contents are pouring, the silver-blue of fish scales, into his glass. The bar itself is brighter, its colours richer. "There is no reason then, is there, that you and I might not drink together."
It has a clear double-meaning.
"I don't drink," Barnes says flatly.
"You do nothing but drink," Loki replies. "And drown." His eyes catch Barnes's again. "And never die. Why not embrace immortality?"
"I don't."
"Perhaps this would be more to your taste?" The dark hair grows longer, the face gentler, the lips fuller. The charcoal coat covers a low-cut, black silk dress. Barnes shakes his head, and the lips quirk wickedly, and then the hair shortens, turns red and curly, the blue eyes go hazel. But Romanoff stares at him only for a moment before the hair shortens still more, drains from red to blond, and the jaw squares off and the eyes go as blue as the sea.
"Get out of his body," Barnes orders through clenched teeth, fighting a compulsion to reach forward and take Steve's face in his hands and hold him and hold him, and Loki throws back his head and laughs, hair black again, skin pale. His eyes, when Barnes sees them, are crystal and mocking.
"Have another drink," Loki orders. Barnes lifts his glass angrily and knocks it all back and feels his body freeze into a pillar of ice. It's wonderful, like death, like clarity. And then he opens his eyes to Loki's, right above him, standing in his space, and the alcohol roars back like a wildfire and Loki kisses him. One of his hands slides up Barnes's neck and his touch is frost against Barnes's flushed skin.
"Hey whoa!"
Loki breaks away because, Barnes sees, Thor has taken hold of his arm and dragged him backwards. Thor's grip leaves his knuckles white, but Loki doesn't seem to notice. He stares at Barnes for a moment, enigmatic, and then reaches his free arm for his goblet and takes a sip.
It was Steve who had protested. He stands several feet's distance, and he's staring too, face worried.
"Um," he says, when Barnes just looks back at him, wordlessly.
"Just an opinion," Romanoff says. Her voice is like dry red wine in the awkward stillness. "But making out with Loki? Doesn't seem like such a great idea."
Clint's face is granite.
"What did you give him?" Thor demands, releasing Loki's arm and tugging open his coat to rifle in the pockets. Loki goes from seemingly uncaring to alert in a second, but doesn't protest. Thor pulls out the copper flask, opens and sniffs it, and then holds it up in front of Loki's nose. "This," he says. "This could kill a mortal."
"As could that of your father's hall, but the Captain seems unharmed."
"I was…its strength was diluted, Loki, by their own drink," Thor protests, lamely. "This, you—"
The berating continues. Steve takes a cautious step forward. "Bucky, are—"
In a second Barnes is on his feet, and tugging the collar of his coat up. "That's not my name," he tells Steve, who frowns and puts a hand on Barnes's shoulder.
Barnes throws it off and heads for the door. He needs to leave. There are too many people. He doesn't know why he can bear Loki's touch without flinching. He doesn't know why he can't bear Steve's.
He can feel Steve's impatience, though, when he calls after him, "What, so that's it? I try to help and you're out the door again?"
Barnes pauses, looks back. "I didn't ask for help, not with this, not—" 'with anything' hangs in the space between them.
Anger flashes across Steve's eyes, and a thread of it laces his voice. "Fine, so you didn't need my help. But in the middle of a bar, Bucky? There's a time and a place, you know."
For a moment, Barnes hates him, and it's pure steel. His metal hand clenches into a fist.
He turns away.
"This isn't it," he says, and the door shuts behind him.