Archive of Our Own

“No, sir. Your number hasn’t been called yet.” It was impressive how the librarian managed to speak so quietly without actually whispering.

Steve pointed at the basket that had just been pulled out of the dumbwaiter. “But those are my books. I’m looking right at them.”

She glanced behind her and shook her head. “No, those are for someone else. Sorry.”

Steve checked the request slips in his hands, and then the ones in his pockets. Sure enough, he’d gotten mixed up. He knew he’d written those titles down, but it was in the next batch of five that he hadn’t yet requested. Now it made sense why his order had come so quickly. It was because it had been ordered long before.

“Seven hundred and fifty-four,” a smooth, indeterminately accented voice behind him said, a little too loudly to be polite.

The librarian handed the contested stack of books to a clean-cut guy with light brown hair and an argyle sweater. He looked good, though in a slightly off way that Steve only noticed because he was aware of how off he always felt, in this time and in these clothes. Consciously striving to look as normal as possible, but awkwardly ill-fitting all the same.

Steve’s books shot out of the dumbwaiter while he was still watching argyle sweater walk away. The librarian had to tap his arm to get his attention again.

This was the fifth time this had happened. The fifth time Steve had come to the big research library on 42nd Street and had his books scooped up by someone else. It was a big world, and a big library. One of the reliable little joys of the makeshift life he’d been building was the walk down the aisle between the long tables of the palatial reading room. There was always such a variety of interests on display—out of print novels, Buddhism, a survey of schooners, meteorology in the Mayan empire.

Sure, WWII and post-war world history were popular topics, but what were the odds someone else was interested in the same little niche he was? It took obsessive dedication to come up with the set of book requests that Steve had—dedication and months spent poring over footnotes and old newspaper articles.

The odds were low, and yet, every time he’d come in the past few weeks, someone had gotten there before him. What made it even more strange was the fact that they were always different people. Different hair color, skin tone, style. The first time had been what Steve had learned was called a ‘yuppie’. Then it was what looked like a banker on an extra-long lunch break. Once it was an expensively dressed college coed. Another time, it had been a stereotypically dusty professor. Textbook examples of a type—but always a different type.

So far, he’d only spotted them on his way out, as he walked back down the aisle and saw the books he’d been refused. Today was the first time he’d gotten here early enough to do something about it. He slid into a seat directly facing the man, who had rudely spread all of his belongings wide around him, blocking multiple possible seats. Steve gently pushed the papers and notebooks back into the man’s orbit.

“Hot topic, huh?” he whispered, gesturing at his own request slips for books likely to contain even the most oblique mentions of the SSR and Hydra.

No response except for a very slow, very deliberate, glance upwards.

“Do you mind passing them my way when you’re done?” Steve continued. “I was going to request those.”

The guy frowned at him, frowned further as his eyes cast over Steve’s neatly written request slips, and then back up at his face.

“All right,” was all he said.

He looked down again, but out of the corner of his eye, Steve caught him glancing his way a few times, with curiosity replacing the dismissiveness that appeared to be his resting expression.

Steve tucked into his own reading, jotting new insights down in the little notebook that also held ideas for 21st century things he’d gleaned might be nice to try.

Over the past seventy years, someone—or some larger body—had hushed up almost everything about Hydra, about the Cube, about Schmidt. Ever since getting himself halfway situated, Steve had been spending all of his free time digging for every remaining kernel, reading every footnote in every possible book. He had spent hours and hours over the past couple of months copying text from foreign microfiche of the period and retyping it into Google Translate on the free public computers nearby.

He needed to know what had happened to Hydra and to the major players. He needed to know why no one talked or wrote directly about it. And yes, he’d successfully escaped the prison they’d insisted was not a prison, but he needed to know more about the other group, too, the people who called themselves SHIELD but who had felt like Hydra. He wanted to know why they had spent what must have been considerable resources locating his plane only to keep him prisoner and point guns at him that first, failed, time that he’d tried to escape.

Steve had more than enough personal motivation to drive his research. What he didn’t understand was what motivation all these other people had. Why would anyone but him want to read the incoherent ramblings of a mostly senile member of the 107th—not anyone Steve had ever gotten to know, but who had been in that work camp with Bucky and the other Commandos. And yet, that was what argyle sweater was reading right now. Reading and twirling a pen around his thumb.

It was when the pen stopped flipping and began writing in the margins that Steve snapped to action. Before he knew what he was doing, he had reached out and grabbed the man’s forearm, hard.

A little too hard, unfortunately. Strangely, Steve’s wince of self-flagellation was infinitely more pained than the guy’s reaction. He should have screamed, shrank into himself, whimpered—anything other than the vaguely startled glance he gave the fingers on his arm.

“You shouldn’t write in the library books,” Steve said, hoping he could brazen through it and pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

But then, in a move that startled Steve, the man shook off his superhuman grasp as easily as that of a child.

“Shhhh,” he said, putting his index finger to his lips in a manner more lascivious than reprimanding.

Steve slumped back into his chair and stared, the way people had used to stare at him back in the war, back when he’d been able to use his new body to its fullest potential. How… how had this guy shaken him off? No one was able to shake him off.

The guy stared back, too, but with less open-mouthed shock and more calculation.

He eventually stood up, and it took Steve only a split-second to decide to follow him.

But by the time he’d made it out of the reading room and down the ornate marble staircase, Steve had lost him in a crowd of tourists.

“You feeling okay, son?” Joe asked that evening. “You’re looking kind of rattled.”

“Something strange happened.” Steve replied as he watched the head form on the draft he was pouring. “Actually, it’s been happening for awhile, but I only started paying attention today.”

Joe put down the keg he was carrying and leaned against the bar. “You mentioned once that there was some trouble at your back. Is this it?”

“No, nothing like that. I don’t think so, anyway.”

“Well, if you ever need anything, you know… Especially after all you’ve done for me.”

“Yeah, yeah, Joe. I know.”

Joe squeezed Steve’s arm and continued on with his errands, all the way to the back of the restaurant.

It was Wednesday, so the restaurant was pretty slow, leaving Steve plenty of time to think. He’d already had plenty of time for thinking on the long, long A train to Far Rockaway, but he hadn’t finished yet. He kept turning the incident over in his mind, looking at all the possibilities, but he came up with nothing. He must have imagined it, he told himself. He must not have grabbed the guy as hard as he’d thought.

It was the only explanation.

Steve watched Joe go about his errands. He watched the light hit Joe’s face at the particular angle that brought out the family resemblance. The angle of the cheekbones, the shape of his chin. It was all Bucky, or as near as Steve was ever going to get to his friend again. Joe Barnes was Bucky’s little sister’s kid—sixty-five and grizzled and as big a fan of Steve as the uncle he’d never met had been.

In a world that had become foreign, at least the Barnes family remained the same. Still taking Steve in when he had nowhere else to go, still giving him comforting shoulder squeezes. All without having any clue who he really was.

When he’d first gotten away from those SHIELD people, Steve hadn’t known what to do with himself. He’d squatted in an abandoned, but still habitable building, looking for odd jobs, and trying to figure out what to do next. He’d seen an ad for the Sandy Relief Effort and had signed up. Rockaway was among the areas hardest hit by the hurricane and needed the most volunteers. Helping the locals clear debris from the beach and rebuild their properties after the destruction had given Steve something to do and people to talk to for the first time since waking up.

He’d met Joe by coincidence, and had felt only mildly surprised to find out later on who he was. And when Joe, who’d taken to the strong volunteer leader like a son, had offered him a job and a room over his recently repaired restaurant, Steve couldn’t say no.

Most of the customers at Joe’s Bar Shack were local guys who came to watch the game over a few beers. There were also families looking for a low-key night out with kids. Neither group was very demanding, making Steve’s job as bartender pretty easy. Pour some cokes, mind the taps, shuttle orders to and from the kitchen for people who wanted to eat at the bar. Nothing fancy. Every so often some pimply teenage boys from the other end of Far Rockaway came in trying to see how much they could get away with. Steve had to gently let them down and direct them out. Sometimes on weekend afternoons, gaggles of twenty-something women draped themselves over the bar and complimented Steve on what had to be the world’s worst cocktails.

The teens and girls were rare enough, but the guy who came in today, all alone, was the rarest of all. His clothes were a little too pressed, a little too new-looking, as though he’d plucked them out of an imaginary catalog. A lot like Steve’s rival WWII buffs at the library, come to think of it. A type almost too textbook to look natural. But that wasn’t what got Steve’s attention. Neither was it his shoulder-length black hair, which wasn’t styled like that of the surfers and beach bums around here; someone as pale as this guy couldn’t have spent that much time on a beach in years.

No, it was the self-satisfied curiosity of a tourist surveying what he considers ‘quaint local fare’ that gave him away as not belonging. Tourists never came out this far. Steve actually liked that about this faraway edge of the city; Rockaway may have been in Queens, but it felt most like the Brooklyn he’d known than any other neighborhood these days.

The man balanced more gracefully on his barstool than the firefighter who had just vacated it. No slouching for him.

“Dinner tonight, or just drinks?” Steve asked.

“I’ve come too far to starve,” the man said. “What do you recommend?”

“The pulled pork sandwich is pretty popular.”

“No ice in my water, please,” the man said when he saw Steve moving to scoop some into a glass.

“Sure thing. So, where’d you come from that was so far away?”

“It depends on what time frame your question encompasses.”

Steve chuckled at the phrasing. “Today, for starters?”

“I’ve just gotten off a train from Midtown.”

“Funny. Me, too.”

The man nodded and smiled.

“What about longer ago than today?” Steve asked next.

“I came from farther away than is worth discussing,” was the short reply.

Maybe Steve wasn’t as good at being friendly with customers as he’d thought.

“So, what brings you to the city?” he tried next. “I can hear you’ve got an accent.”

“I was sent away from home. Quite forcibly.”

“How come, if you don’t mind me asking?” He doubted the man would have brought it up if the topic were entirely off-limits.

“I ruined…” He thought. “I suppose the closest equivalent would be the celebration of a promotion. A promotion that I had hoped to get. In the family company.”

It didn’t make a lot of sense to Steve, and he suspected there was a lot being left out. “But that doesn’t explain—”

“And thereupon I was banished. I mean,” the man quickly followed up, collecting himself after a brief snap, for which he seemed to be mentally hitting himself more than he should, given the nonsensical nature of this entire conversation. “I mean, and then I was sent away. To here. For character building.”

“Aren’t you a little old for that? At our age, I think a man’s character is pretty set. A few months of adventure in a foreign country isn’t going to do much.”

“I agree.” The man snorted, and then repeated softly, ironically, “‘At our age.’”

A crew of regulars came in a minute later to watch the Rangers game. Steve knew these guys. They had slowly been working on him over the past few weeks, cracking his shell with friendly teasing. They commanded all of Steve’s attention for next little while. The only time he could spare to talk to tall, pale and good-looking was to take his order for fries. He asked him if he wanted a drink, only to receive an order for Sprite.

“Liquor does nothing for me, and I can see from the cocktails those women are drinking that your hand is not proficient enough to make a tasty one.”

Steve would have been offended if the statement hadn’t been true. “You’re right about that. Joe’d kill me if he heard me saying this, but save your money. Funny thing though, liquor does nothing for me either.”

“I suspect we have more in common than one would expect,” the man said quietly as Steve made his way to the kitchen again.

He didn’t stay long that night—just long enough to eat his meal, share that he lived in Dumbo, and clarify that he’d only been in the city for a few months, too. They also exchanged names. Loki, he called himself, accompanied by a cold but caressing handshake, the pleasant pressure of which lingered on Steve’s palm for hours afterwards. No surname, but then again, Steve didn’t give one either.

They hadn’t even talked much. Loki had mostly watched Steve work, watched him shoot the shit with Joe and the other regulars, and smiled that mysterious little half-smile of his, like he was in on some joke the rest of the world wasn’t. He paid his check (with a very exactly appropriate tip) and left while Steve was using the john.

Steve would have forgotten all about him—Joe’s back went out again, and Steve volunteered to do all of his work and errands in addition to his own, leaving no time for trips to Manhattan or thinking about one-time customers—except for the fact that he came back a few days later. And after that, almost every night that Steve was on shift. The only way Loki could have known the schedule was if he’d asked one of the waitresses, but they all denied speaking to him when Steve asked.

It seemed a long way to come for nothing. Joe’s food was comforting, but it wasn’t nearly good enough to justify almost an hour’s subway ride. Steve couldn’t see what Loki kept coming for.

Well, no. He did, slowly, start to see. And even if he hadn’t, the teasing from the waitresses, and even a couple of regulars, would have tipped him off. He could see it in the way Loki’s eyes followed him around the bar, and the way his lip curled into his mouth sometimes as he watched Steve fumble his way around a cocktail. These weren’t the giggling puppy dog eyes of the teenage girls who wrapped their legs around the barstools. They also weren’t the covert glances he sometimes got from guys out with their very straight friends. There was want in Loki’s eyes, sure, but something else, too. It was as if Loki could see the little guy Steve had once been. Loki was the first person who looked at him the way he still often felt deep down, past the layers of this incognito life, and even past the old Captain America.

Now, whether it was because Loki actually saw Steve, the real one that lay beneath the experiment, or whether it was because he was a superior piece of shit who looked down on everyone, Steve could never quite tell. Probably a little bit of both.

Either way (well, preferably the first way), he liked it.

“Who is that?” Loki asked one night, pointing at the framed photograph that held pride of place on the center of one of the restaurant walls. “Is that the proprietor in his youth? If so, he has aged in a direction one might not have expected. He looks similar, but not as similar as he should.”

“No, that’s his uncle, from awhile before Joe was born. Bucky Barnes. WWII hero. One of the greatest. He’s Joe’s idol.”

“Yours, too?” Loki asked. There was more open wondering in his voice than usual, as though the photograph were a mystery he had been mulling over for much longer than this evening.

“Why do you ask?”

“Something in your tone when you said his name,” Loki said. “It sounded as though he means more to you than the uncle your employer never met should.”

“I just wish he’d had a chance to come home, is all,” Steve said slowly, evenly. “I wish he’d come home and that Joe had gotten to meet him.”

“I see,” Loki said, and even though he was too smart to have fallen for Steve’s truth, he sounded oddly satisfied by the answer. “And the fool next to him?”

“Fool?” Steve asked, bristling.

“Fool? Clown? Do they not mean the same thing?”

“That’s Captain America,” Steve said through pursed lips. “Another… another player in the war. Bucky’s best friend.”

“Did he have something to hide? Why does he keep his face covered, while Barnes does not?”

“They wanted him to be a symbol of the war effort more than an individual, I think,” Steve said, even though he knew. They’d explained as much to him when he’d complained about the first version of the cowl being too small.

“And what happened to him?”

“He disappeared,” Steve said. He wanted to say ‘died’. He should have said ‘died’. But it wasn’t true, so he didn’t. “In the Arctic, during the war. His plane went down. More like, he put it down.”

“A fall, then.”

“More of a crash.”

“I reserve the right to spin the tale to my own desires.”

“It isn’t your tale to spin,” Steve argued.

“What if I wanted to entwine it with another?”

“What? What does that mean?”

But Loki merely gestured down the bar at the men who had been struggling to capture Steve’s attention for the past five minutes.

Loki was strange. And fascinating. And bad for Steve’s productivity. The head waitress had to give him a talking to later.

“He comes here night in, night out, doesn’t seem to have any friends. He doesn’t even order that much. And it isn’t like he’s tipping over and above what’s normal. I don’t see what about him is worth ignoring other people for.”

Steve didn’t agree, but neither did he know how to explain. So all he said was, “It won’t happen again, Sue.”

Except that it happened again. And again. But Sue had a soft spot for him and Steve slowly learned how to balance work and his new friend. At least, Steve had come to think of Loki as a friend, even if he did sometimes also catch himself wishing for something more, in various spots around the restaurant, in the alley behind it, on the beach... A friend Steve knew very little about, despite many evenings spent together.

But he was hardly sharing a lot either, so he shrugged it off and told himself not to be picky. Aside from Joe, Loki was the closest thing to a friend he had.

“What are you writing? You’re always scribbling in that thing,” Loki complained, like a kid jealous for attention.

“Those guys who just left convinced me about this Wes Anderson character. I always write it down when people tell me something to try. There’s a lot I never have.”

“I’ve noticed,” Loki said. “There are many references that leave you flummoxed, though you try valiantly to hide it.”

“You, too. Don’t think I haven’t learned how to read that puzzled expression you try to pass off as disapproval.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Loki said flatly, but his eyes danced. He was in a good mood today, for him. His tongue was just as sharp, but not as jagged as it sometimes got.

“What’s gotten into you today?” Steve teased. “Where’s my bored hipster?”

“No, I am more of the brooding philosopher archetype, don’t you think?”

“I dunno. Is that a type? Is that what you’re going for?”

“It’s what I have settled on, in those moments when I am not ‘going for’ anything at all.”

“What about the other moments? Are you pretending to be different things?

“Often.”

“What about when you’re here?” With me, Steve wanted to say.

“I am myself. Inasmuch as I am anyone at all.”

“Well, I think you should be that all the time. You’re all right, just like this.”

Loki made exaggerated gagging noises, but Steve could tell he was pleased by the compliment.

“I feel bold today, bartender,” he said next, changing the subject. “I am in the mood to watch something more amusing than this soccer game. When you have finished this latest menial task of yours, why don’t you make me a mojito?”

“Aw, don’t be mean,” Steve complained. “You know that’s the hardest one.”

“I’m a monster,” Loki whispered sadly, inexplicably and suddenly falling from his previous high. “Meanness comes with the territory.”

As with almost everything Loki said, Steve spent the next few minutes trying to unpack both the meaning of the words along with the dishwasher.

“When does your shift end?” Loki finally asked one night, in a low voice that not even the people sitting two seats away could hear.

Steve felt his heart rate pick up, but he kept his voice even. “We stop serving at eleven, as usual. But it’s my turn to close. Why?”

“I would like to try something from your list together. Or perhaps a few things that are not on it.”

Steve had managed to stave off his usual awkwardness for the past couple of weeks, when he’d continued to tell himself they were just friends. He’d ignored the electricity he felt whenever his fingers brushed against Loki’s on the side of a water glass. But now… now his tongue went dry the way it always did in these situations.

Loki shook his head and snorted.

“Well, at least you understood my meaning that time. I’ve been asking myself if you are unfathomably dense—”

“Hey!”

“—or impossibly modest.”

“Try professional,” Steve choked out. Somehow, Loki starting a fight had gotten him over his temporary paralysis. If Loki kept it up like this, Steve might actually get somewhere.

“But time grows short, and I can no longer afford to play this slow, subtle game. So, I am asking directly.” Loki leaned even further over the bar, sky blue eyes tantalizingly close. “Yes or no?”

Steve gulped. It had been awhile. It had been almost never. And no, this wasn’t on his list, not the written one. But he wanted it more than any genre-shaking action flick or generation-defining novel.

“Yes.”

They stared at one another, full of anticipation. Then Steve forced himself to get back to work.

Later, after the kitchen had closed for the night and most of the wait staff had left, too, Loki made a show of saying goodnight. But Steve knew, through a silently communicated plan, to expect a knock on the side door. He pulled Loki in—into the kitchen, into his personal space, and into a kiss. Steve meant to take it slow, knowing that things would probably go faster later on, but Loki kissed like kissing was the dirtiest thing you could do, like he was shocked to be enjoying it so much, like he’d die if he stopped to breathe. He smiled into the kiss when his head thumped against the wall that Steve had gradually backed him into.

Steve could feel them both getting hard, and felt Loki jerk up against his thigh when he shifted to take his ear between his teeth. But it was when Loki moved his hands down and into the back of Steve’s jeans that he realized they needed to take a pause.

“Wait… I still have to clean up.”

“Skip it,” Loki whispered, and licked a wet stripe up Steve’s neck. “It never looks clean in here even when you’ve finished. No one would notice if you shirked this one time.”

“I’ll notice.”

Loki groaned, but let go. “Your pathologically inflated sense of duty is a vulnerability, you know. As well as an annoyance.”

“You’re not the first person to tell me so, and I doubt you’ll be the last. But I’m still going to finish what I started.”

The most gratifying testament to Loki's eagerness was the fact that he actually pulled on gloves and helped, making only a sort-of disgusted face while he wiped the bar down. Together, they finished the checklist in less than half the usual time (that extra bit saved by the fact that Steve skipped drying the mugs; Loki was right that he felt bound by duty, but he wasn’t a saint).

“What did you mean, ‘time grows short’?” Steve asked as they tiptoed through the upstairs apartment and past Joe’s bedroom door. “Are you going somewhere?”

Loki never did answer, and Steve was soon too distracted by some expert manhandling to persist. Loki was stronger than he looked, with the capacity for both gentle caresses and the vigorous, all-in thrusting that Steve had fantasized about but never in a million years thought he’d be able to feel. Loki had the sort of stamina that Steve knew shouldn’t be possible. He was too overwhelmed and too full in the moment to figure out the right way to ask how Loki was doing this without giving himself away. And then afterwards, he was too wiped out (yet another feeling he’d never again expected to experience). It was Loki who opened the window when Steve was too bone-tired to do it, and it was Loki who flopped against Steve’s side close enough to wrap an arm around.

“We should do something sometime,” Steve murmured into Loki’s mussed black hair. “Go somewhere together. Outside the restaurant.”

“What about a journey?” Loki asked.

Steve had been asking for a simple date. However, if Loki wanted to go on a little vacation with him, Steve wasn’t about to say no. He wouldn’t have slept with him if he hadn’t wanted that, too, and all the other trappings of something more.

“Where to?”

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”

“Good answer.” Steve kissed Loki’s shoulder and let his eyelids drift shut.

When Steve woke the next morning, the place where Loki had lain was still warm. There was a note on the pillow, written on a piece of paper torn from Steve's notebook.

Loki must have meant he’d be at the bar again that evening, but it still smarted. Steve let himself wallow in disappointment for exactly thirty seconds. When he was done, he dragged some clothes on and made his way down the hall. He stretched as he walked, but he was sore in muscles he’d never fully felt before.

Joe poked his head out of the kitchen when he heard Steve’s lumbering steps draw near. He waved a spatula.

“Your, uh, friend didn’t want to stay for breakfast.”

“He had to go.”

“He’s missing out on my famous pancakes.”

“But I’m not.” Steve rooted around in the fridge for the maple syrup. “I, uh, I realized we never set any ground rules about…”

“You’re a grown man, Steve. As long as nobody steals anything or busts up the place, I don’t care. You’ve probably guessed by now that I don’t mind a stray or two. Just didn’t know you swung that way, is all.”

“Goes to show you can’t judge a book by its cover.”

Joe shook his head. “Jesus, Steve, the hokey shit you say. I thought I was supposed to be the old coot around here.”

Steve smiled. As it spread over his face, he realized he must have modeled it on Loki’s own mysterious half-smile. “He seems like even more of a stray than me, to be honest. Like he needs someone to look out for him.”

“Paying it forward. I wouldn’t expect anything less from you,” Joe said, spooning scrambled eggs onto Steve’s plate. “What are your plans for today?”

“I said I’d help you clean out the gutters, didn’t I? Depending on when we finish that, I might head back to the library, if you can spare me. It’s been awhile.”

“You and the library.” Joe shook his head. “But yeah, I can spare you. Knock yourself out.”

The gutters ended up taking longer than expected, but Steve made it to the library by early afternoon. He picked up the four out of his five requested books and made his way down the aisle. Finals must have winded down since last he was here, because there were fewer students than usual in the mix.

And then he spotted him. Loki. Sitting at the end of one of the long tables with his shit spread wide like he owned the place. Sitting there and reading the fifth book that Steve had requested and been told was unavailable.

“You left,” Steve blurted out, even though there were many more important questions that needed to be asked. “Why?”

“I left a note. And, as I said, here we are. Seeing one another only a few hours later.”

Steve crouched down beside him. “But how? Did you follow me?”

Loki lifted a finger to his lips and winked. “Shhh,” he said, eerily like the strong, margin-writing asshole who had shushed Steve the last time he’d been here.

“You’re going to tell me right now what’s going on.”

“Reading. I had thought it obvious.”

Loki twirled his pen just as the guy that day had, and then lowered it to begin writing. At this point, neither of them were surprised when Steve grabbed his arm with full force, nor when Loki shook the grasp off like it was nothing.

“What are you...?” Steve asked. “How are you…”

Loki cocked his eyebrow and looked ready to make one of his habitually arch comebacks, but it never came. He shut his lips again, and in an instant, the archness disappeared, replaced by tiredness. He frowned, and sounded almost sad when he whispered, “I’m sorry, Steve.”

“For what?”

Loki was looking over his head. Steve turned around and saw a combat team pouring into the reading room. They were dressed similarly to the SHIELD soldiers he had escaped months ago. They entered silently, and only now, once fifteen of them had come in, hands on the weapons in their belts and fingers touching their earpieces, had the other patrons begun to notice the men in black. Heads began to bob up and whispers permeated the quiet.

“They’re together,” the leader said into his mouthpiece. “Repeat, visuals on both Captain Rogers and the extraterrestrial.”

Steve glanced back at Loki, furrowing his eyebrows in lieu of the obvious question.

Loki shrugged in answer. “It didn’t come up. Just as the fact that you are Captain America never did.”

“You knew?”

“Of course.”

Steve didn’t know what was going on, but they needed to get out of here. He and Loki could quiz each other later.

“I’ll cover for you,” Steve whispered, covering his mouth so that the cautiously approaching soldiers could neither see nor hear. “I’ll lead them in the other direction so you can get away.”

“You would put yourself at risk to ensure my safety?” Loki whispered back.

“Of course.”

There were a couple of potential escape routes: through the swinging doors that led to the art history room, after which Steve and Loki would have to navigate the narrow hallways and staff-only areas of the library. The other option was to smash their way through the wall-to-wall windows and land on the grass of Bryant Park three stories below. Steve knew he could handle the impact, but Loki, even with whatever mysterious strength he possessed, was a question mark.

He never got a chance to decide between the options, however, because Loki kicked him behind the knees, hard, causing him to fall onto the smooth tile of the floor.

The single second that Steve spent down and winded was all the soldiers needed to surround him with guns and clasp his hands behind his back with some kind of magnet. Steve looked reproachfully at Loki, who barreled his way through the window, taking option number two.

So, Steve thought as the soldiers shoved him to his feet, that’s what he’d been apologizing for.

As they led him out of the building, he could hear his captors discussing Loki on their headsets. They’d lost him.

“But we got Captain America,” one of them said. “This is still the world’s best anonymous tip.”

Steve could guess, as his heart sank into his stomach, who had called in that tip.

They put a black felt bag over his head so that he wouldn't see, but Steve could sense motion well enough to know that they first put him in a car, then trundled him onto an airplane, then off that and into a truck. They drove along a poorly paved road for what felt like hours. The soldiers talked amongst themselves, sharing nothing that helped Steve understand who they were and what they wanted from him. They didn’t interrogate him, and they didn’t jeer at him. Mostly, they ignored him, more interested in the basketball and baseball scores than anything else. In this way, they were little different from his regulars at the bar. One of them took the time to tuck bottles of water under Steve’s hood every so often, and fed him breadsticks, but other than that, no one paid him any attention.

Steve expected to be shoved into a cell shortly after exiting the truck, but instead, they walked him down an endless hallway full of echoes. Subterranean, by the sound of it. When they pulled the hood off, he found himself in a cavernous space full of scientific equipment. The glowing cube that he remembered from the war sat in a complicated holster at the far end.

Even beyond Schmidt’s precious cube, the place looked eerily like a Hydra lab, complete with a squadron of men and women armed to the teeth. If only Steve had his shield. If only he could get out of these magnetic cuffs… He’d end them, once and for all.

Steve recognized the man approaching him as Senator Stern.

“Even when we finally find you, you find new ways to go missing,” he said.

“What do you want?” Steve spat.

“Just some information. But you keep running away.”

“Keeping people prisoner is liable to make them do that.”

“You’re the only person living to have seen this before we fished it out of the ocean a few months ago. This was our real prize. You were simply a beacon, a bonus find.”

“You really know how to make a guy feel special.”

“You were the last person to see our great leader alive. I’ve always wondered,” Stern said, “How did you do it? How did you manage to kill someone so much greater than yourself?”

So, they are Hydra, Steve thought. All of them. Even the soldier three guys to the left of him, the only one who failed to maintain the utterly blank expression of the others. The hunches that had informed all of that library research had been correct. Hydra had survived, and now they had the cube again. Now they had him.

“I didn’t kill him,” he admitted. “He left. Used the cube and vanished from the airplane just before I had to put her down.”

“How?” Stern leaned in close. “Show us how he did it. Touch it.”

“Touch it yourself.”

“Certainly you know that isn’t possible. Not for a regular guy like me. We need you to do it. Activate it.”

“Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how.”

“Don't play dumb. It won't work. Everyone has a breaking point,” Stern said. “I know yours. I have yours.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Stern didn’t have a chance to explain, because the soldier three guys to the left—the one who’d been listening much more closely than the others—chose that moment to open fire. Ten soldiers were down before anyone figured out what was happening, and by the time they did, the room had somehow filled with more soldiers, even though all the doors were shut. They looked identical, distracting from the original defector. Steve threw himself to the ground to get out of the line of fire while he figured out what the hell was going on. Meanwhile, everyone was shooting at everyone else.

In the chaos, Steve felt the magnets on his wrists repel. He was free. He flipped himself over and saw the original shooter standing over him. A haze of golden light suffused his face, which morphed into a much more familiar one.

“Loki?”

“To the cube and then through the doors behind it. Now.”

Steve pieced it together while he ran. The various people in the library, the soldier who had kept him hydrated, the way Loki had escaped from the library earlier, the comment about extra-terrestrials… This was how Loki had gotten away, how he’d always gotten away.

Meanwhile, Steve’s hands changed color. He looked down and saw himself clad in the same combat gear as the Hydra soldiers. Whatever Loki was doing, and however it worked, he had changed Steve, too. They blended into the crowd so well that no one noticed them leaving it.

On his way to the doors, Loki—or, at least, the soldier Steve assumed was Loki—scooped up the cube. He unlocked the door with a wave of his hand and then locked it again behind them.

There was only one light in this new hallway-like room. It came from the far end, from a glass display case. In yet another blast from the past, Steve’s uniform was hanging inside, along with his shield.

“You’re welcome,” Loki said.

Steve ran to the case and kicked the glass to bits. He irrationally wiped his belonging as though he could wipe the invisible Hydra stain off them. Then he rounded on Loki.

“How long? For how long have you known who I am?”

“I was intrigued, that first day in the library when you touched me. Too strong for a mortal. And so I let you think you had failed to follow me in order to better follow you. That night, I gleaned from your interactions with me and with Joe that you felt as unmoored here as I did. But what made it certain was the way you kept staring at that photograph. You got far in your research, but I have had longer at this sort of practice. A thousand years longer. You thought there were no extant pictures of your face, but I found one in an old Slovakian diary in the rare manuscripts archives. I knew who wanted you and why. You are Hydra’s last link to its mysteries. To the cube.”

“Which you wanted, too.”

“Which I have heard about since my boyhood. Long did those who raised me search for it, and long did they fail. Finally, I succeed where they never could.” Getting to the truth had brought out some weird megalomaniacal, old-timey speech patterns in Loki, the same way mutual confessions of being from Brooklyn got people to slip more comfortably into old accents.

“So you gave me to them. Handed me right up on a platter.”

“I needed to learn where they kept it. That was the only piece of the puzzle I had been unable to discover on my own. I knew they would take you to it. I had only to follow them. It was a simple enough plan. It wasn’t personal.”

“You didn’t need to spend as much time with me as you did for a plan that simple. You talk a good game, but I know you, even if I don’t know anything about you. It was personal. It might not have started out that way, but it got personal. You know it did.”

“We don't have much time,” Loki said, looking away. “They are coming. Unless you want to remain in their clutches.”

Steve did a double take. He’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for Loki to start interrogating him, too. “Wait, this is a rescue?”

“Obviously. Did you think I was yet another kidnapper?” Loki had the gall to look offended.

“The thought did cross my mind,” Steve said.

“But I like you, as much as I like anyone,” Loki said, as though that made it all better.

The words didn’t, but the fragility in his voice almost did.

Steve knew they should run, but he was angry, keyed up, and in the mood for a fight—both this one and the one that threatened to bust through the door at any minute. “Why did you sleep with me? Was that part of your plan, too?”

“No. It was not.”

“Then why?”

“Because you were attractive and only minimally annoying,” Loki snapped. “Though I am currently reconsidering that last point. Because you are the only person I've met in this realm who could take it. Because I wanted to. Does that satisfy your petty curiosity?”

Steve was only moderately mollified, but the rudeness actually made Loki’s answer easier to believe. Something more polite would have been the more likely lie.

“And you’re an extra-terrestrial,” he questioned next.

“Does this bother you?”

“Is this what you look like?” Steve asked instead of answering. “For real?”

“It is the form I return to even unconsciously.”

“That’s not a straight answer.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“That bothers me more than the extra-terrestrial thing.”

“In time, you may learn to tolerate it, just as I may in time learn to tolerate your pig-headedness. But for now, I grow impatient. I like you, Steve Rogers, but I will not let myself be captured for you and I will not lose the cube for you. You can either come with me now or I can facilitate your escape, back to Far Rockaway or whatever poor excuse for a life you choose to lead.” Loki held out his hand. “There are not many I would honor with such a choice.”

“Come with you where?”

Loki patted the cube and smiled. “After meeting you, I started my own notebook of lists, though the contents differ wildly from yours. We can do anything and nothing. The universe is ours for the taking, or merely for enjoying. We can decide as we go.”

“The whole universe?” Steve asked, mostly to buy himself time to think, even though he knew in his bones what his answer would be.

He wasn’t stupid. He didn’t trust Loki farther than he could throw him. But he liked him right back, despite everything. And the choice between going back to a quiet life and keeping an eye on a morally ambivalent alien in possession of absolute power… Well, it wasn’t much of a choice. Even if he hadn’t already finished the hurricane relief, this was more like the kind of purpose Steve had always run towards.

And the way Loki was looking at him, still, with heat blazing underneath that cold exterior, promised a whole lot more of the personal in whatever partnership they would have going forward.

Loki had gotten to know Steve well enough to read the answer on his face. “We have a stop to make first.”

“Where?”

“Washington, DC. Hydra has a hidden facility underneath a bank in which they keep another very valuable, very dangerous weapon that I intend to acquire. One that I believe you would also like to see… let’s say ‘liberated’, from Hydra’s clutches. And then… And then our destination is, quite literally, anywhere. So, for the last time, Captain, are you ready, or must we fight the tiresome soldiers who are right now banging on the door?”

Steve stepped forward and took Loki’s hand. “Just as long as we stop to tell Joe he’ll need a new bartender.”

“That can be arranged.”

Loki closed his eyes and Steve watched as blue light enveloped them both.