Fandom: Thor movies/Chronicles of Narnia

Pairing: Bucky/Loki

Warnings/Tropes/Etc: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Crossover, Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers, Brainwashing, Memory Loss, Separations, Reunions, Five Times

Length: ~65,000 words

Description: This is the original draft of my 108k fic, The Song Remembered (AO3 version, currently cleaner than the one here, though I'll fix the Neocities one eventually). I think this kind of stuff can be really interesting, basically! For this one, the first and sixth chapter are very similar to their final version; chapter two kept some stuff, but moved around a bunch; chapter three got a fairly full overhaul; chapters four and five kept their first scenes for the most part I think, but were largely rewritten otherwise. Imo you can definitely see me struggling to figure out what this story is ABOUT starting from somewhere in chapter two; you can also sort of see me figuring it out at the VERY end, so that I was able to pull it together in the rewrite.

There are lots of lines in here I wish I'd found a way to keep. Some of them I meant to, but there was just no non-clunky place where they fit, lol.

I wrote this rough draft in a 2020-induced haze over the course of about six months. It was not, and still isn't, the way I'm used to writing chaptered longfic. Prior to this fic, I tended to go WIP style: write the first few chapters quickly, then put out the rest of the chapters more slowly, while taking progressively longer breaks to write other stuff in-between (this is, in fact, the way the final version of this story was written/posted!). This pattern didn't really change until the longfic after this one, the 200k+ Harry/Draco mpreg one I worked on very steadily as a public WIP, to the point where I've fully embraced the public WIP again after staying away from them my entire time in MCU fandom (minus one or two bad-idea first chapters of things that were swiftly deleted; and also minus the final version of this fic, I guess, which ended up a lot more WIP like than expected even though I HAD this entire rough draft when I started posting). I suspect the closest I'll get to writing 60k+ all at once again would be if I ever managed to do Nano.

1. An Empty House

There once was a boy named Bucky Barnes, who lived in the best city in the world. He had never been anywhere else, or ever really wanted to be, up until a sunny morning in late April. He was walking along the sidewalk minding his own business, when suddenly he was somewhere else. It was very dark and quiet there--so dark and so quiet that if you had tried to decide whether it was more dark than it was quiet or more quiet than it was dark, you would never have been able to make up your mind without changing it again a moment later.

For a minute, Bucky thought what anyone would have: That someone must have left open a manhole, and he had fallen into the sewer. The problems with this were obvious right away, though. He hadn't felt himself fall. There was no light coming from the street when he looked up. There wasn't even any answer when he called out for help. He also had the feeling that if he'd been in the sewer, his voice should have made an echo; but instead, although he shouted at the top of his lungs, the sound seemed to fade even more quickly than a whisper would have anywhere else.

Another boy might have panicked then--but Bucky was not prone to worry or stress, and certainly not to panic. He was the kind of boy who takes things as they come. And this did not seem to be a terrible thing at all, for since he hadn't fallen he wasn't hurt, and since he'd just eaten breakfast he was neither hungry nor thirsty, and since he was now somewhere else then no one could blame him for failing to arrive at Miss Miller's classroom (for of course he had been on his way to school before this). So instead of yelling, or crying, or beginning to run in a random direction so that he would end up tripping over some unseen object and fall to the ground in order to yell and cry some more, he took stock of his surroundings. 

Not being able to see anything at all or hear anything except himself didn't mean he couldn't explore. So he crouched down and felt the ground he was standing on. It wasn't concrete or dirt or asphalt or grass. Bucky wasn't sure what it was. For a moment the word 'clay' came into his mind, but it didn't seem to be that either, and so he forgot it right away. Then he stood up again and began to shuffle in a random direction, waving his hands in front of himself and taking very small, slow steps. He soon found that this was not a very satisfying way of exploring a place, for he had no idea where he was going, and even less of whether he was managing to go in a straight line. It was something like playing pinning the tail on the donkey, without the pin or the donkey being spun around by friends, and with the entire world as the blindfold.

For a while, Bucky wasn't even sure whether he had his eyes open or not. In reality he must have been straining his eyes all the while, for he saw the light the moment it winked into existence, some ways off. One second, it wasn't there; the next second it was. It looked to Bucky as if it were the flame of a candle, except that instead of being orange or yellow, it was green. It might have been a large flame very far away, or a small one much nearer; there was no way in the dark to tell the distance.

Bucky headed that way immediately. As all the ground up until now had been completely flat, he was confident enough to walk briskly, if not quite confident enough to run. Before long, he had come close enough to the flame to discover that it was a small flame nearby, and that it was being held by a boy about his own age.

"Who goes there? Announce yourself or face the wrath of Loki," said the boy, who was now holding a knife in his other hand. (This may not seem very welcoming unless you remember that while the boy, had made himself quite easy to see, he could see nothing out of that little circle of light for himself, and must have been imagining all manner of monsters tromping toward him in the darkness.)

"I'm Bucky," Bucky said, and within moment was close enough for the light from the flame to glance off his face when the other boy raised it above his head.

"Loki Odinson."

"Pleased to meet you," Bucky said, and made to shake hands, except for Loki stared at him like he was nuts and so they didn't.

"I am Loki Odinson," Loki repeated, still staring.

"I heard."

"I am a Prince of Asgard ." 

"Never heard of it," said Bucky, who wasn't unaware of the snotty tone in Loki's voice or the nasty way he was scowling, but had already figured being the only two people around was more important of a consideration. "But okay. Do you have any idea how we got here?"

"Of course," Loki said, brightening, and launched into an explanation. Bucky didn't get much out of it except that Loki had done something he shouldn't have, which he'd found out about in a book he had no business reading, which was only one of the things he'd stolen in order to do whatever the thing was. (This particular casting--for of course that was what Loki was talking about--had actually been a complete failure, but Loki would not begin to suspect as much for many years, after uncounted attempts to replicate the circumstances that had brought him here.)

"Okay," Bucky said, when Loki had slowed down enough for him to get a word in. "So, where are we?"

"I was attempting to make a determination when you interrupted my meditations," Loki said, stiffly enough for Bucky to (rightly) figure that he didn't know, either.

"Oh. Well, how do we get back?"

"--I have yet to begin that determination." This Loki said even more stiffly, eyeing Bucky as if concerned he might become angry at this answer.

But, as I have mentioned before, Bucky was not at all the kind of boy to overreact, even to news that would have merited it. So all he said to this was, "Okay," followed by, "So, how are you doing that thing?"

"What thing?"

"The one with the fire." As soon as he'd gotten close enough, Bucky had noticed that the green flame Loki had wasn't part of a candle, or part of anything. It was hovering above his palm all by itself. "It's neat."

"This? Any child can conjure flame," Loki said.

*

"I've never met anyone with such an ineptitude for magic," Loki said an hour or two later, when Bucky had spent a lot of time doing the exact steps Loki had told him to, only for nothing at all to happen.

"Thanks a lot," Bucky said, for all boys are prone to disappointment, and his at not being able to do Loki's trick was very great. "I appreciate you rubbing it in."

"That was not my intention," Loki said, stiffly again, though in a different way this time; for his part, he was not the sort of boy who was practiced at either feeling or expressing apologies. "I'm certain you have other qualities."

Really, he ought to have said he was certain Bucky had many other fine qualities. If his mother had been present, surely she would have corrected him. But she was not there, and Bucky really wasn't the sort of boy to wallow for very long, especially when it had turned out that there was such a thing as real magic in the world.

"Well, what else can you do?" he asked, having correctly guessed that anything Loki dismissed as not being very hard meant there must be something better in the wings.

Loki brightened, and went into another long-winded explanation of the different kinds of magic. Bucky understood some of it, whenever Loki slowed down long enough to explain things in words he knew. As for the rest, it didn't really matter, because Loki gave demonstrations of everything he could do--or at least everything that could be done in a place that contained nothing but darkness and the two of them.

He'd just gone through his paces on illusion magic when suddenly he stopped, and for a moment seemed to be listening to something else. "Do you feel that?"

"Feel what?"

"Surely you must feel something . It's calling both of us. You really feel nothing?"

Bucky shook his head.

"You're even more useless than I knew," Loki said, which was the sort of statement that could have raised even Bucky's hackles, had he said it in an even remotely offensive manner. In fact, he said it nearly off-handed, so intent was he on whatever it was he sensed. "It's a magical signature. All magical artifacts radiate an energy, of sorts. Whatever this is, it's very--loud."

"I can't hear anything," Bucky confirmed, since Loki had shot him a questioning look, as if to make sure this was still true.

"You wouldn't hear it, precisely. Not with your ears. Still no? Well, never mind. Come on."

So saying, Loki started walking. After a second, Bucky started following. "How far away do you think the--thing is?"

"There's no telling. We might be walking for ten minutes, or ten years."

"I hope it won't be that long," Bucky said. "I didn't bring anything to eat."

He'd had his lunch pail when he'd set out this morning, but had it no longer. Perhaps he'd dropped it when he'd fallen from one world into another. Whatever had happened, it had not come with him.

Loki didn't laugh. Loki seemed to be too busy muttering to himself to notice Bucky had said anything at all. 

Bucky would surely have said something else after a while, but as it turned out, he didn't have to. Just a few minutes after they'd begun walking, Loki said, "We're nearly there, I believe." He paused, in both his step and his words, then added, "I've never felt magic quite like this before."

"Is that bad?"

"It's different," Loki said. What he meant was that he hadn't the faintest idea; that, if he'd been at home, he surely would have gone to his mother to ask questions that weren't nearly as veiled as he'd intended them to be. But he wasn't the sort of boy who could admit to such things, and so instead of admitting to any of this, he added, "And it's--newer, I think, than the sort of magic I'm used to."

"Yeah, and?"

"It may mean this realm is new as well." Loki must have seen Bucky's puzzled look, for then he said, "Empty, rather than deserted. Like a new house no one has yet occupied."

As examples went, this turned out to be a very successful one. Not only was it completely accurate, it made Bucky feel as if he had more understanding, rather than less.

"Oh, okay," Bucky said, and spend the next few minutes thinking about that. If this was an empty house, did that mean someone would be moving in? How long had it been empty, anyway? Who had made it? How long would it be until something changed? Now, the silence and darkness seemed to hold something else. Something Bucky could feel, whether Loki could or couldn't. Possibilities, bigger and brighter than any he'd ever heard of before.

That was still the feeling he had when Loki said, "Here."

And, a few seconds later, something became visible in the light from the flame he still held. At first, it could have been anything--like their eyes were scrambled from not having seen an object for so long. But they walked a few feet more, and something settled, either the image of the object or the object itself. 

They stopped in front of it and stared.

It was a table, made of stone. It had strange writing all over it that Bucky couldn't read--partly because it was not in the only language he knew how to read, but partly because it was a different kind of writing that is called 'runes'. But he had a feeling that Loki could read it. Partly because Loki was squinting at it and moving his lips silently, but even more because of a feeling he had, like they really were standing in the middle of an empty house--and that it wasn't just any house.

"What's it say?" Bucky asked, minutes after he'd wanted to; up until then, he'd had the feeling that he wasn't supposed to interrupt. "Can you tell?"

"More or less," said Loki. He proceeded to read it aloud, though very slowly; not stumbling over the words, as an inept reader might have, but taking his time with them, as might a very good reader who has nonetheless picked up a book containing a number of words they were not previously familiar with. When he saw that Bucky understood not a word of the gibberish coming out of his mouth, he summarized: "It's meant to be a sort of protective magic. Or--preventative? It's meant to stop something from happening. I don't know what. But it hasn't been activated yet. It needs--oh, that will be easy to try."

"What will?" Bucky asked, not yet knowing Loki well enough to hear the sly note that had come into his voice, the one that said there was quite a lot he'd left out in his summary.

"Come closer," Loki said, so Bucky did. "Give me your hand. No, palm-up," so Bucky did that, too. Later, he was never sure quite what he'd thought Loki meant to do, or why he'd gone along with it without asking first.

What Loki actually did was grab Bucky's forearm in an iron grip with one hand, and brought out a small shining knife with the other, the green flame now floating between them, not needing to be carried at all. Then, before Bucky could do anything, he had slashed quite deeply into Bucky's palm.

"Ow!" Bucky said, followed by a few exclamations that would most certainly have gotten his mouth washed out with soap if his mother had been there to hear them. "What'd you do that for?"

But Loki hardly seemed to be listening. Instead he was holding Bucky's forearm so that his palm was now facing downward. He watched avidly as Bucky's blood dripped onto the table's surface, pooling in one place and slithering into the crevices of a rune in another. After a moment, his grip had eased, and Bucky could easily have fought his way free--but once again, he had the feeling he wasn't supposed to, no matter how much of a dirty trick it had been for Loki to cut him in the first place.

"Ahh," Loki said, when the writing on the table seemed, for a moment, to writhe and move in front of their eyes, before settling into a shape that Bucky wasn't then and would never be sure was the same shape it had had before. The blood pooled darkly again, some of it mingling with Bucky's own blood, the rest of it seeping into places that had not yet been stained.

"That can't be right," Loki said, as the letters seemed to swim again, and as Bucky tried to figure out whether he had seen them in that particular shape or order before.

"What can't?"

"It would seem I'm the traitor. But that makes no sense." Loki squinted at the table. "Is it because I stabbed Thor?"

"Who's Thor?" asked Bucky, thoroughly confused by this point.

"My brother," Loki said.

"Do you go around stabbing everyone all the time?"

Loki gave Bucky an annoyed look. Right then, Bucky thought it was because of what he'd said about the stabbing. It was only one of the other times that he'd figure out Loki had been annoyed because Bucky had asked about his brother. "I did not stab you?"

"Yeah? Then what am I bleeding for?"

"You're being such an infant about it," Loki said crossly, grabbing Bucky's hand again. This time, his hands glowed--green, like the fire that still floated above their heads--and when it was over, a second later, Bucky wasn't bleeding anymore. The cut on his palm had turned into a scar, like it was something that had happened years ago. "A bleeding is not a stabbing. There was a magical purpose to it."

Easygoing as he was, Bucky was suddenly of the impulse to hit Loki in his stupid face. The only thing that kept him from it was wanting to know exactly what Loki was talking about. All the other stuff he'd had to say about magic had been really interesting, and he had the sense already that he didn't want to miss out. So that was why he let Loki keep talking:

"In short, it desired the blood of a traitor and an innocent. Now, it will know the difference." (Privately, Loki thought there was a chance something had gone wrong--but having never dealt with a magic from outside of time before, he had no way of knowing how very far ahead such magic can look when making a determination.)

"The different for what?" Bucky asked, not that any of it had made sense to him so far.

"I hardly know," Loki said, flushing. "This particular artifact seems somewhat reticent."

"What?"

"It is not forthcoming with its secrets."

"Yeah, well, maybe you should stop asking, then," Bucky said, not particular wanting to get stabbed (or bled, or whatever) in his other hand next.

*

"So what's it like, having a brother?" Bucky asked a little while later. By then, Loki had healed himself too, and they'd discussed whether or not to leave the table, and if so, what direction they should go in. In the end, it had seemed easier to stay here, at least for a little while. So now they were sitting on the table, though on the other side from the one they'd bled all over, with their feet dangling in the air.

Loki sighed. "Tedious. I wouldn't recommend it."

"How come?"

Maybe Loki had been waiting for a chance to go off, or maybe he hadn't. But go off was what he did, a vent that was as passionately angry as he'd been passionate when talking about magic. Having a brother was awful. He got all of the attention, all of the praise, was always around, never left Loki alone when he wanted to be alone, and was always missing whenever Loki actually required him. But what was a cross for him to bear sounded like heaven to Bucky, who'd always sort of wanted a brother. So far, all he had was a sister, and she was still too little to be interesting. He'd already figured out that he wasn't going to get a brother around his own age, if he ever did get one, and while he was not a boy prone to moping, he had no idea he was to gain a brother after all, the week after school let out for the summer. So he listened eagerly, and, when Loki was finished, said, "That sounds swell."

"I feel you may not have been paying attention, if that's what you think," said Loki, though not as crossly as before. (It may be that he had never had a chance to vent fully about his brother before, for although Loki did have a habit of assuming the worst, he was not wrong to believe that Thor was favored over he.)

It was then that they heard the sound of footsteps somewhere nearby. If you have ever worn earplugs, you will understand how a sound that was actually very quiet seemed to them to be quite loud in that first moment, before their ears had become accustomed to the idea of there being another.

"Hello?" Bucky said.

"Who goes there?" Loki said, holding out his knife again.

There was no answer. The steps seemed to come closer. Whoever it was didn't seem to be wearing shoes. Their feet didn't make scraping sounds on the ground; it was more of a padding sound, like when your mother comes into your room to kiss your forehead before heading to bed for herself. Except maybe it wasn't quite like that, either, because there was nothing in this sound that made it seem as if the person who was making it wished to remain unheard. 

The steps came closer, and closer still. Bucky listened, and sometimes he thought it might have been two people. Other times, he thought it must not have been a person at all.

Loki seemed to agree. "Who knows what sort of beast might populate such a realm. It might never have had such a meal as us."

"Don't be stupid. Nothing's going to eat us." Bucky was, almost, entirely certain of this. He could not have said how, or what about the sound had given that impression. It was just something he knew, just as you know the sun will rise tomorrow, except for the part of you that knows someday the sun will burn out, and that if it can happen in the far future, then what is to stop it from doing so in the morning? There are things that are safe, and then there are things that are nearly safe, and he thought that this must be the latter.

"We should flee," Loki said. "Perhaps I can get us back--"

"You can't." Bucky knew this for sure, too, just as suddenly as he knew that Loki hadn't gotten either of them here in the first place. "We should wait."

Loki sighed, and rolled his eyes, and didn't go anyway, though Bucky had thought he might, and leave his new friend sitting alone in the dark.

It was a few moments or minutes or hours later when there came another sigh, from outside of the two of them, strong enough to ruffle their hair and clothing, and soft enough that they almost had to strain to hear it. And after the sigh, there came a voice:

"Boys, boys," it said, and it was the same thing as the sigh: a voice that made you shake, a little, while at the same time all of you turned toward it, desperate to hear what it would say next. "What are you doing here?"

"We," Loki said, and stopped. Where he'd looked so sure before, now he looked even more unsure, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open for a few seconds after he had apparently figured out he had nothing to say. If the moment hadn't been so strangely solemn, it might have seemed funny, coming from a guy who'd had a lot to say about how much he could run rings around other people.

"I don't know," Bucky said, because he'd found he was sure, or at least sure enough to answer. "I don't think Loki really does, either."

"Don't you know?" said the voice, and there was enough humor in it that forever after, Bucky thought that perhaps he did know, after all.

"We're sorry," Bucky said, and ignored Loki's harrumph from behind him--though when he had hopped off the table and stepped forward, he didn't know. In the darkness, there was nothing visible, but it was still as if he knew precisely where the voice had come from, even as it seemed to come from all around. "We didn't mean to hurt anything."

Now came a chuckle, deep and soft, low and loud, amused and sorrowful all at once. Then, into the light, which had somehow seemed to expand, taking up many feet more of space than it had before, stepped the person who had been speaking. Only it wasn't a person, exactly. It was a Lion, a much bigger and wilder one than Bucky had ever seen, the times he'd been to the zoo. 

"Boys," he said. "Isn't it time you returned home?"

"What, already?" said Loki, sounding so disappointed it surprised Bucky--for it wasn't as if there was very much to do, here in the dark. Either something had to happen or they had to go home at some point. It seemed like something that should have been obvious to both of them. He could not have known how rare it was for Loki to spend such an afternoon--in the presence of someone who neither knew nor cared much about his elder brother, and who was entirely happy to spend much of their time hearing about all the things that Loki could do.

"There will be other times," said the Lion, who was looking at them with an expression Bucky didn't understand at all--it was stern, as much be that of any person who has come to his home to discover that two boys have taken it upon themselves to rearrange things (even if the Lion might have intended for someone, eventually, to come and rearrange the things in question). But it was sad, too--a knowing sorrow that might have encompassed both everything that was to happen to either of them, and everything that was to happen to anyone else because of them. "This will not be your last visit to my land of Narnia. Now, go--"

And the word 'go' seemed to last a very long time indeed. And at the very end, there seemed to be something else behind it. For a moment, Bucky thought he was hearing a song, the most beautiful song he'd ever heard. But that was only for a moment, only for a note, and then he was standing on the sidewalk, lunchpail in his hand, exactly where he had been when he had fallen in the first place. For a minute, the light seemed too bright, and everything around too busy and too strange--then someone said, "Hey, kid, you just gonna stand there all day?"

It was enough to get Bucky moving, back in the direction he'd been headed in to start with. When he got to school, he didn't even have to give an apology or explanation for being late--because he wasn't late. In fact, he arrived at the same minute he usually would have (though he did spend much of the day staring into space, thinking about his hours in that dark other place, and thus missed the answer to several spelling and math problems he would ordinarily have had no problem with at all; and when he arrived home that afternoon, he went to bed on his own hours before dinner, feeling as tired as if he really had been up for hours and hours in the morning before school.

He wondered about it much of the time for several weeks, and often looked at the scar on his hand, the one that had never been there before, and that had no explanation from Brooklyn. But by the time a week had passed, he had much less time to wonder--for on the Saturday after his very first visit to Narnia, he came across a few bigger kids kicking the crap out of a kid who was a whole lot bigger on the outside than he was on the inside, and thereby gained a brother, and all the aggravation of having one that he'd been so sure Loki was exaggerating about. He had less time to wonder, and so spent very little time on it indeed, except at odd moments. There was enough in Brooklyn to keep him busy, and so it was only the occasional flash of someone's pocket knife, or a few nights that seemed queerly dark and quiet if only for the briefest moment, that he thought of the one time he'd been somewhere else, and wondered what Loki might be up to, wherever he was from.

2. King of Cold

[Rewrite the beginning to have Loki be part of the procession too. Loki then lies about being the prince from Terenbithia and Bucky being his manservant (who he pays, but not very much, for he's still a manservant in training). They're permitted anywhere except to the pool place, so of course they go there immediately.]

It was the sort of silvery night you get in the winter when the moon and stars are out, and no one's had the chance to shovel anything yet since the snow's only just finished falling. But the snow under Bucky's boots was hard and crunchy, more like standing on ice than on something you could bend down and pack into a snowball. The air was so cold it hurt going in. He'd pulled the flaps on his hat as far down as he could, and shoved his hands into the gloves he usually kept in his pockets, but his ears and fingers were still numb, to say nothing of his face. 

As he turned so that the wind would be behind him, he just hoped his nose wouldn't fall off. Ma was always going on about the dangers of frostbite, and if it hadn't been too likely in the slushy days of the last week or so at home, it seemed a lot more of a possibility wherever he was this time. Then, looking around at the trees and bushes, he hoped he would find shelter, or people, or a road, or something, because anything worse than his nose falling off could happen.

Out of those three things, he'd have preferred shelter. Somewhere covered and dry, with four walls and firewood stacked in the corner. So of course, sometime between when he'd gotten there and when he'd started looking, what he got was the other two.

He wouldn't have seen the road, not by itself. Later, he'd think it must've been narrower than that, a trail he never would have picked up on if he hadn't heard other people's boots crunching in the distance. But for now, he did hear it, and stopped, and looked, until he saw the shadows, slipping along in a line somewhere to the front of him. 

Bucky knew enough by now to be able to tell when someone or a group of someones was trying not to be seen. It was in the way they moved, caring more for being quiet than for getting to wherever they were going quickly. It was in the way, the closer he got to them, the more he could hear how none of them were talking, and how quickly the kids and babies who cried were being shushed. They were scared of something. He wondered what.

Bucky hadn't decided what to do before one of them saw him. The next second, all of them saw him, and most of them froze. Toward the back of the group were a group of figures with swords; a few of the figures had half-drawn theirs before the figure at the very back of the group lay a hand on the arm of the closest one and said, "Keep your peace. Do you not know a boy when you glimpse one?"

"A boy, or a spirit?" muttered the other, but he took his hand off the hilt of his sword, and so did the others, even though they were muttering, too, things like "Who can know what shapes the Witch might take, or cause her people to take?" and "Dare we take such a risk, my Queen?" (For the first figure to have spoken had had a woman's voice, higher and with an authority that could be argued with, but not disobeyed.)

Bucky had stopped in his tracks, knowing better than to walk up to a group of people with weapons, who weren't all that happy to see him for whatever reason. If he could have, he'd have put his hands in his pockets. People always seemed to worry about what you were going to do less when you had your hands in your pockets, unless you were in a store and they thought you might've pocketed something. Since he couldn't--he'd have had to take his gloves off, first, and it really was far too cold for anything like that--he tried to stand there and look harmless. 

Looking harmless was also something that had had different kinds of effects, lately. It wasn't so great with girls' mothers, just now, which was really inconvenient since girls had just gone from being barely noticeable to being incredibly interesting. But maybe the Queen wasn't a mother, because she walked closer to him, a couple steps, the swordsmen following her, and when she was close enough that they could see each other's faces, and he could see the graying in her hair, she said, "What is your name, child?"

"Bucky Barnes, ma'am," Bucky said, and there was something in the moment besides the cold and the swords that made him not even try to be cute, or charming--although he did say, in a habit of manners, "Pleased to meet you."

"And you, as well," she said. "Now, tell me, where are your people?"

Now it was Bucky who froze, once again unsure, this time of exactly what to say. The other times, there hadn't usually been a problem, saying he was from another world. But he had a feeling that it might not be the smartest thing to say here, if they were already talking about witches and things. 

Whatever the Queen saw in his face, hers hardened into [determination - better word]. "[Name and name], escort the others," she said. "[Name and name], with me. We must have a search."

"For what?" Bucky said, then realized. "Oh, my family's not here," he said, awkwardly. "I mean, you won't find them."

A look between the Queen and the swordsmen. The way they all looked at Bucky after that was something he would only later realize must have been pity for the orphan he'd pretty much just said he was. In the moment, though, he was just glad that they had stopped talking about splitting up (which was an idea that seemed to contain a certain frozen horror of its own), and instead escorted him back to the others.

It wasn't really any less cold, marching two-by-two through the icy woods, on a trail that was barely a trail, with someone almost slipping every few minutes. It was a lot scarier, even though Bucky wasn't sure what had everyone else so scared, and somehow knew he could not ask, not now. After a while, though, he saw the other shadows, the ones he hadn't seen before--a sleek long shape, slipping through the woods twenty yards away, followed by another on the right, then another on the left. Another, shorter and plumper for its relative size, jumping from tree to tree, causing snow to fall or cascade from branches that bent under its weight. A shadow passing over them. By watching, Bucky eventually identified them: Panthers and Squirrels and Owls. Others who were far enough away or that he saw less often, so that he couldn't quite be sure.

He had almost opened his mouth to ask about this, when a hand fell to his shoulder.

"So you've seen our escort," said the Queen, in a voice that should have carried, in that quiet, but somehow seemed as if Bucky might be the only one who heard it. "They'll bring us safely to the border, or die trying. We shall owe them a great debt."

That didn't answer Bucky's question about what was happening. He'd figured out they were running; now all he knew was that they were running to a specific place. But it didn't seem like he could ask why or where or what had happened, and so he just said, "Yes, ma'am," and put his head down against the wind, which was now blowing into their faces, and was only broken up so much by the person in front of him.

One foot in front of the other, they all kept walking.

*

Walking got harder an hour or two after that. At first Bucky thought it might be because of the cold, which had settled into him even deeper than he'd known it could--and he'd lain awake shivering plenty of nights in Brooklyn, and walked plenty of places he'd rather not have when it was cold and wet. The good thing about this walk was that it wasn't wet; maybe that was the only good thing that could be said about it. For a while, he thought it might actually have gotten colder, that the snow beneath their feet might have actually become ice. People did seem to be slipping a little more often, and a couple times someone even fell--an older woman, and then one of the little kids, and it seemed like kind of a miracle that none of them had broken anything, hard and fast as they'd gone down.

Then, around the time the silvery aspect of things started to turn lighter, Bucky looked around--he hadn't been looking anywhere except down for a while, wanting to make sure he didn't fall--and realized what it was. It was easier to see now, with the sky lightening on the right. Bucky's just assumed they were walking somewhere flat, but they weren't; they'd been going up, maybe for a while. 

It was around the time he realized this that he realized he could hear birds singing. There was something weird about it, and it took a minute or two for him to figure out that it was because it wasn't coming from all around, but only from up ahead. It was almost enough to make a guy feel warm--but only for a second, before he felt colder than ever, having to listen to that.

He'd just started feeling sorry for himself when one of their escorts, a golden Fox with black points at the end of his ears, came up to them and said, "My Queen, you must make haste. The Witch comes, not five miles back."

Bucky didn't really know what that meant, or why everyone else seemed so upset by it. He didn't have to know what it meant to feel a pit of dread in his stomach. He hadn't thought he could walk faster, hadn't thought he could keep going even this fast, but when the others picked up the pace, he did, too.

The sky kept brightening. Just a few minutes later, it was full morning...and there was a flash of green up ahead. The closer they got, the more Bucky could see what it was: more woods, just like these, except that it was summer there, somehow. It was the kind of thing he'd have questioned, at one point in his life. Even now, he wondered if maybe he wasn't started to hallucinate. He'd heard plenty of stories about what happened to you, if you went out in the winter without your coat and scarf and gloves; maybe he was really lying somewhere, half gone and dreaming. Maybe it said something about how miserable he was that this idea didn't bother him very much.

The green got closer, closer. Behind them came the sound of bells--and then of other, harsher sounds. Bucky had no idea what they were, and wouldn't until he turned around. But part of him knew that turning around would be the worst thing he could do right now. So, as the line of people in front of him picked up speed, he did too, not looking behind of him or to either side, but trotting, then running, and focusing on nothing but the ground in front of him, so that he wouldn't trip and fall and be left behind.

By some miracle, no one did trip or fall, though so many of them had been unsteady until now. Maybe it was because their fear kept them sure-footed; or maybe it was because the ground beneath their feet now seemed to be thawing, softer than it had been before. Whatever it was, the bells kept clanging louder and louder, and then Bucky burst into the green field that last at the end of the trail, and with everyone else turned around. And there there was the most terrifying sight: a tall, white sorceress on her sleigh, holding a wand in her hand. Her lips were pressed so tightly together that they might have been the cause of the paleness of her face, if it hadn't been so obvious that her face was always like that. Around the sleigh, (and Bucky did not know enough about sleighs to have realized that, had the trail been as soft for her as it had been for them, a sleigh never would have made it all that way), there stood terrifying creatures of various types--Wer-Wolves and Hags and Harpies and so on, which had come into Narnia with the Witch and proceeded to make of it their own.

"How dare you take my subjects from this land under the cover of night?" the Witch said, and if Bucky had been able to think past his terror--he had been in a few tight spots in Narnia, but never one that seemed as bad as this, and never without his friend from another world with him--he would have wondered why she was standing there talking when she could have been sending her creatures after them to tear them into pieces (or used her own wand to turn them all to stone--though Bucky had no way of knowing that object's purpose). "Return at once, and your death will be swift."

At this the Queen laughed, and if she had seemed like a regular person for the most part before, now there could be no doubt how much difference there was between herself and the Witch. "Your words are so small as to be meaningless. Beyond this border you may not pass."

"May I not?" said the Witch, and for a moment a wind seemed to pass under their feet, frosting the grass and completely negating the warmth of the sun, which had already begun to thaw out Bucky's face and fingers. "My power grows, yet. But fly, o so-called Queen, to the farthest corners of this world. Fly, and tremble, and wait for me. Dream of me, and fear."

Later, Bucky would have a good idea of what those sounds had been, the awful ones that had come with the sound of bells. He'd have a good idea why the footsteps that had stayed with them until near the end of their [walk] had stopped. For now, he just stood there, miserable, wishing there was something he could do. The other times he'd been here, there had always seemed to be something he could do.

Then the Queen said, "We shall continue to [Ardvard?]. Let us go. Pay no mind to the Witch."

*

They didn't make it all the way to the castle. They'd barely made it out of that first meadow (which was really more of a slightly open place between the trees) when they were met by a runner, who led them in a slightly different direction. Apparently, they'd been waiting for them, but had expected them to come by the main road.

They followed, and came out into a different meadow, which really was a meadow, open for enough space to hold a number of tents. There were other people there, some of whom rushed to hug people in Bucky's group, and some of whom started crying, and some of whom looked like they had already been crying for a while. They all seemed like they were lost in a different way than Bucky was lost--grieving, whereas he was just confused, and wishing he could do something.

He was saved figuring out just what that should be when another runner came up to him and said, "Bucky Barnes?"

"Uh, yeah?"

"Come with me."

Another mystery, but it was better than staying where he was, interrupting other people's [grief]. So Bucky followed, and somewhere along the long walk, took off his gloves and shoved them into his coat pockets, then took off his coat and draped it over one arm (for it was not only spring there, but the beginning of summer, and it was quite miserable to be wearing anything heavy). The trees fell away pretty quickly, leaving rolling grassy hills, and so although he saw the spire of the castle more quickly than he would have from a forest, it was still not quite as visible as it would have been had the land also been flat. 

Soon they came to the gate, which was opened, and the guards watching it barely gave them a glance at all. Then they were inside the castle, and went down one hall and then another. And then the runner stopped at a door, closed like most of the other doors they had passed, and said, "He's to be waiting for you within."

"Who is?" Bucky said, but the runner was already gone, off to do the next thing. So he shrugged, and knocked on the door, and when no one answered, knocked on it again. No one answered that time, either, and so he reached for the knob and opened it, not at all sure who or what he would find within.

The room was bigger than any Bucky had seen in any apartment in Brooklyn; but he knew that it probably wasn't that big or that fancy compared to the kinds of rooms really rich people were used to. Still, it was really nice, by the standards that counted; made to be and to look comfortable, so that it wouldn't take long for anyone staying in it to feel at home. There was a bed in one corner and a couch in the other, both of which made Bucky think he'd better not so much as sit on either, or he'd be finding out anything about who'd wanted him to come here tomorrow. 

On the bed, which had been slept in and left all mussed up, there was a green and black robe. That was enough to make Bucky suddenly pretty sure of whose room this was, however temporary. Then he got closer to the table beside the bed, and saw the hand mirror there, and saw the movement in it, and knew it for sure: because when he picked it up for a better look, it wasn't his own reflection he saw, but someone else's.

"It took you long enough," said Loki. "I've been here for nearly a week."

"Why," Bucky started, then decided that was a dumb question--with Loki there was always a why, but by the time you got to the bottom of it, either he'd led you around for hours and hours, or get was trying to get one over on you. "Where are you, anyway?"

"At the pool," Loki said, which made no sense whatsoever to Bucky, since they didn't have swimming pools here like they did in New York--but then he remembered that that word had another meaning here (and maybe in the country at home too, not that he'd ever know about it). "Come meet me."

That was Loki for you. Whenever Bucky had just gotten here, he almost never had the chance to figure out his bearings before Loki wanted him to be at his beck and call. Well, not this time. His bones still felt too frozen for that, and his patience had gone to wherever summer had, a mile or two south of here. "Nah. Think I'll take a nap, instead."

It was sounding more and more worth it, especially when Loki gave him an impatient look. 

"This is much more important than a night's sleep," he said.

"Not if you just spent hours hiking through the snow, it's not."

"You mortals complain so much whenever there's the slightest chill," Loki said, which was what he always said at times like this, because he apparently never felt the cold at all. "This is important."

"I dunno," Bucky said, carrying the mirror over to the bed, and dramatically dropping onto it on his back, while still holding the mirror so Loki could see him. "How important can it be if you won't even tell me what it's about?"

Loki made another impatient face, then said, "Fine. I've come across a pool--another magical artifact. I'm speaking to you from it now."

That made sense, more or less. Of all the crazy magical things Loki had done, he couldn't remember mirrors ever being involved before. Anyway--he did want to see him. Loki was his best friend here, same as Steve was his best friend at home. And you never knew how long you'd be in Narnia. People in the other stories they heard about sometimes, they got told when they were going to leave. But him and Loki, they dropped in and then dropped out again when they were done doing whatever it was they were apparently there to do. They never got a warning, never got a say. And while the things they were supposed to do always happened while they were together, a guy never knew which time might be the first time one of them would get it right alone.

Besides which, magic was always fun, or at least interesting.

"Okay," Bucky said. "How do I get there?"

*

"Don't let anyone see you coming," Loki had said. Before Bucky had said, 'Why's that?', he'd added, "They're...superstitious, when it comes to this place. They wouldn't be pleased we've been here."

"Wouldn't be pleased you've been here," Bucky had pointed out. But then he'd gone anyway, on foot because he still wasn't great with horses, possibly because the only times he was ever expected to ride them was in the middle of some big awful thing that was happening; he'd never had a lesson, didn't think he ever would at this point, and was okay with that. He was a New Yorker, born and bred. That made him an innate pedestrian. He came by it honestly, and it was all right with him.

Still, though, it meant that the walk took hours when riding would have been less--when even Loki riding to get him and then taking him back would probably have been less. By the time he arrived there, he was sweaty and hot, which was both better and more annoying than being frozen stiff had been--and his feet hurt like he'd been on two very long walks over uneven ground on the same day. It didn't help that it was the part of dusk where the only reason you couldn't call it night yet was that you knew from experience it still technically needed to get a shade or two darker.

Eventually, though, he came to the wall. Taller than him, and Loki had said it was green, though Bucky could hardly tell. When he touched it, it wasn't flat and hard like brick, but prickly and tickly--more like a hedge than a [word]. Then he came to the gate, which was closed.

"You'll have to climb it," Loki had said.

Well, Bucky didn't feel much like climbing. Still, though, it was either that or lie down in front of it--and so he took a grip on it, and steeled himself, and after about three tries finally managed to make it over. He hung on the other side for a few seconds, then managed to make himself let go, so that he hit the ground with a thud and an oof.

"Not your best efforts," said a voice from behind him, and Bucky turned to see it was Loki again, standing in the light of a green flame that was more familiar than anything else around here so far. By now it was full night, the dark coming on as quickly as it usually did--though it was still much less dark than it had been the first time they'd been here or somewhere like here, before there had been stars or a moon or anything other than a table and a lion and soft whisper of a voice. "It's good to see you."

One of the things Bucky had learned about Loki a while ago was that he was very good with manners when he didn't mean them, or wanted something from a stranger, a lot less good with them when he was sincere and didn't want anything from you. If he said hi to you, or that he'd missed you, he got all stiff and awkward. It was kind of funny, except you had to pretend you didn't notice, or else he got mad. So now Bucky did his best to roll with it and pretend it was all totally normal, exactly the way any guy would greet a friend he hadn't seen in about a year.

As for Bucky, he went up and gave Loki a hug, and a big pat on the back, and pretended he didn't notice the way Loki got even stiffer and more awkward for a minute before saying, "Here, I wanted to show you," and wandered away.

Bucky followed while Loki walked, and stopped when he stopped, and looked down. In front of them was a pool of still water, reflecting both of their faces back at them.

"It doesn't work quite as well at night," Loki said, somewhat apologetically. "I'll have to show you in the morning."

"So you can talk to people from it, huh?" said Bucky, who was not all that impressed by it. After all, there were telegrams and telephones, and as far as he knew, both of those worked in the dark.

"I can also see things," Loki said. "Anywhere I want--in this world, at least. "I'll show you tomorrow."

"All right. Just so long as you don't try to drown me in it," Bucky said, trying for cheerful--for he knew that you could give your friends a hard time sometimes, but if they were showing you something important to them, you'd better cut all that out if you wanted to keep on having friends--but coming up with nothing but a bone-deep weariness. "Do you have a cot or anything here?"

(If you have guessed where they were, you may wonder if there wasn't a hut there as well, in which they might have taken shelter; in fact, that hut had not been built yet, and wouldn't be for another generation.)

"Certainly not," said Loki, who could get prissy about sleeping outside. "I have a room at the palace."

"There's no way I'm getting all the way back there tonight," Bucky said. At the end it was sort of a mumble, so that even the most self-involved person could hardly have failed to identify it.

"We'll ride," Loki said. "I really don't have anything suitable here. You'll be a thousand times worse off tomorrow if you lay on the hard ground all night."

The last thing Bucky wanted to do was get up on a horse. Later, he would never remember how, exactly, he'd managed it. All he'd remember was when he was on it, and Loki's arms were around him, and the weird little twist his stomach gave, the same way it had when he'd seen Loki's face in the mirror, and seen him lighted in the dark. [seed this]

Then Loki said, "Don't you dare fall," and the horse started to move, and Bucky must have either leaned forward, across the horse's neck, or backward, against Loki, and he would never be sure exactly which one it was, since the next thing he remembered was being dropped onto something soft, just as comfortable as something he'd seen before, he couldn't remember exactly what, and then he was falling into the darkness, without anyone bothering him at all.

*

He woke up the next morning in the bed. For a second, maybe because part of him had assumed that if Loki was going to drop him on any of the furniture in his room, it was going to be on the couch, he couldn't remember where he was. Then he glanced over and saw Loki reclined on the sofa in a set of clothing that was different than what he'd worn yesterday. He was awake, apparently engrossed in a thick book. Bucky watched him for a second--stomach twisting again, because of how long Loki was, and the way the light from the window looked on him, thoughts he would only figure out later, and for now very firmly shoved down, just in time for Loki to see him or hear him or sense him, and look in his direction, and flash him one of his few genuine smiles, like he was so pleased to see him that he'd forgotten to get all twisted up about it in whatever way was on the menu today.

Well, Loki might not have been twisted up, this time, but for just one second, Bucky's stomach twisted so hard it made his chest hurt.

"You've slept for nearly sixteen hours," he said, going right back into doubtful. "I suppose you'll want to eat and relieve yourself before we go."

He said it like he couldn't think of anything ruder Bucky could have done, or wanted to do. So there was nothing for Bucky to say but, "Yeah, and I'm going to take a bath while I'm at it."

He hadn't really cared about getting cleaned up before he said it, but as soon as he did say it, he thought that it seemed like a good idea even outside of getting Loki riled up. If he'd been even a little less tired, there was no way he would have been able to get to sleep, as filthy as he was.

*

Baths and breakfasts in Archenland were much like baths and breakfasts in Narnia itself, Bucky soon learned; refreshing and fulfilling, enough to leave him utterly content when it came time to leave for Loki's magic pool again. He'd also managed to dress in clean clothes by then--Narnian-style clothes instead of his own, which had been laid on the bed waiting for him when he'd returned from his bath (he knew better than to ask Loki where they'd come from, but thought he knew all the same).

The ride back to the pool was better than the walk of the day before, and possibly better than the ride of last night, not that Bucky had any memory of the latter. They rode two astride again, this time with Loki in front and Bucky behind. If he had ever thought of it, he might have realized that he was a better rider than he'd once been, simply by virtue of the fact that he didn't have to hold onto Loki to keep his seat. But he was perhaps too busy wanting to hold onto Loki--to wrap his arms around his abdomen and press closely to him, an ache that seemed to grow the longer they rode--to take note of this aspect of the thing.

Finally, they were there, the closed and locked gates opening at a wave of Loki's hands. Before they'd even clanged shut, Bucky slid off the horse again, as desperate as anything to put some distance between himself and the radiating heat of Loki's back. Since the horse was still moving, and neither mounting nor dismounting were his strengths, Bucky ending up hitting the ground with more of a thud than he'd meant to.

"So we're going to, what, spy on the Witch?" Bucky asked. Loki'd had a lot to say about the Witch--having been here for a week, he'd seen the first frost come up over the land of Narnia, and seen the Narnians all flee. Though he hadn't had much to say about how they were doing now, in Archenland, when Bucky had asked; he'd acted as if that was a question he couldn't conceive of anyone caring about the answer to.

"Now that you're here, I may try to speak with her," Loki said.

"Um, what?"

"I thought it best not to attempt it without an anchor--it would require me to commit more of myself in than is strictly the best idea. This sort of magic isn't my strength, you know."

Most people aren't very thrilled to admit to their weaknesses; Loki's voice was so carefully casual about this that Bucky thought he should probably never point it out for himself, unless he really did want to get stabbed again. Besides, there was something a lot more relevant to himself to point out, which was: "What exactly do you need from me, if I'm going to anchor you or whatever?"

"Oh, hardly anything at all," Loki said. He'd dismounted already, and now was tying the horse to a [thing] by one side of the wall. "Just a willingness."

"A willingness to what?"

"To help," Loki said. "You're willing to help, are you not? You could hardly speak of anything else on our ride, save that you wished to help those who've been displaced by the Witch."

If it looked like a trap, walked like a trap, and quacked like a trap, Bucky figured, it was probably a trap. But he couldn't think of a way out of it that didn't involve saying that, no, he didn't really care about those people at all, and could they go have a real adventure now, and not one of those ones where Loki thought it was all about him? Besides, he did want to see this, whatever it was. 

"You're not really planning on drowning me, right?" he said, instead of any of the fighting words he might've said. You never did know with Loki.

""You won't even need to go in the water," Loki said. "Actually, that would ruin the entire spell, so please don't stick as much as a finger in it. And before you ask--it won't require your blood, either. Or any other aspect of your physical person."

"Okay," Bucky said. In the end, it was really all he could say. "Where do you need me?"

In the end, he and Loki ended up kneeling together in front of the pool, both leaning forward and looking in. The water was so clear that you could see the bottom of the pool, and so still that you almost thought you could reach out and touch it without causing any ripples in the water. But Bucky remembered what Loki had said, and slipped his hands into his pockets (this was a mistake, nearly causing him to tip forward into the pool after all before he managed to right himself).

"What now?" he asked, but already something was happening. He hadn't thought about the fact that their reflections weren't there in the water, the way they'd been in the mirror, and in this same pool last night; now, as the water took a shape of something else, it was all he could think of.

"You're going to meditate," Loki said. Bucky had just a moment to think about how stupid he'd feel, ooming and ahhming, when he added, "Meaning, in this context: you will remain where you are, and breathe slowly and deeply, and concentrate on nothing but your breathing, and what you see in the water."

"What if I don't see anything?"

"Then concentrate on your reflection, or mine. If the reflections should dissolve, the pool itself. The exercise requires your will be concentrated upon the water, no matter what you see or don't see. And whatever you see or don't see, you must remain calm."

"Now I know why you wanted me instead of anyone else here," Bucky said. "If you've been here for weeks and it's as important as all that."

Loki had commented, more than once, on how annoying it was when Bucky didn't get upset by things Loki (or Loki's brother, or Loki's brother's friends, or literally anyone in the magical city-country Loki lived in) would have been upset by. For Bucky's part, he thought Loki had a bad habit of seeing the worst in other people, and of thinking he was hitting back when he was actually hitting first. (Of the two perceptions, Bucky was correct more often, although there had also been times when an insult only Loki had perceived had been an insult in fact.) So it made sense that if he needed someone calm, that he would wait for Bucky, instead of going with someone he didn't know, who might also tell someone about him coming here.

"Who do they think you are, anyway?" Bucky asked, it having just occurred to him in that moment that it was strange that, with groups of Narnian refugees coming in all the time, that Loki would have been given such a big suite all to himself.

"I'm the prince of Terenbithia, of course," Loki said, as haughtily as if they'd ever been there, and not just heard enough about it to know it had princes.

"Oh, sure. Why not."

"I've no idea how I came to be here, alone--I set out from there months ago, there was a storm upon the sea. I was thrown from deck. The last thing I recall is hitting my head upon some stone near the shore."

"Uh-huh."

"They've fallen all over themselves to accommodate me--and, best of all, with the chaos to the north it may be months before they learn otherwise."

"Sounds like a great way to get in all sorts of trouble," Bucky said, which was about the most neutral thing even he could have said about a not terribly well-thought-out plan.

Still, though, Loki gave him a cross look before turning his attention back to the still water, and saying, "Commence the breathing now."

They hadn't done anything quite like this before--but the things they had done already had taught Bucky that following directions was the way to go. If he hadn't had to focus on the water, he would have closed his eyes. As it was, trying not to notice whatever Loki was doing off to the side--which didn't involve any muttering, but did involve some hand motions it was hard not to turn to look at, since watching Loki do magic had always been as interesting as anything else that was happening--took so much concentration that it was a minute before he could think about his breathing. Then his breathing took a minute or two, too, before he could really focus on what he was seeing in the water.

What was there in the water was still them, their reflections. Bucky couldn't turn his head to watch Loki's hands move, but he could see them moving in the water, long slim fingers speaking a language Bucky would never be able to speak himself, but loved to watch or listen to. There was something else there, too, but only fleetingly--a twisting of his stomach, painful but pleasant, like there was something Loki that he'd never noticed before, something new that he wanted, though he wasn't sure what it was--because whatever magic Loki was calling up, it wasn't about any other thing between them but this. The more Bucky watched their reflections, the more he saw only Loki's, and the more he became aware of Loki's presence beside him, too far away to feel, but felt anyway, too close to seem like there was a wall between them, but impossibly distant regardless. His breathing and Loki's breathing, they were the same things. Loki was moving and Bucky was still, but there wasn't really any difference.

The water changed, flickered. Later, Loki would say he hadn't really thought Bucky would be able to come along. Now, though, they were just there, him and Loki and the calm still water, their reflections fading away, and leaving the pool's bottom for only a few seconds before the reflection--

Snow, snow everywhere, so cold and biting in front of them that Bucky could feel it again, a knife's edge that would have had him shivering if he hadn't been so far down into the calm. And in the snow there was the Witch, tall and pale and surrounded by statues, waving her wand in front of herself. And wherever she waved it, walls grew where there had been none; and they had watched for only a minute before they saw what it was: A castle, rising above the snow. If you have ever been inside during the summer and found it to be hotter and more oppressive in the shade than it is outside in the sun, then you will understand what I saw when I tell you this was the opposite of that. No-one who would ever be inside the Witch's house would ever find shelter, from the cold or from anything else; and, watching it being built, wand slashing through the air like a sword, or a whip, Bucky felt, for a long moment, much colder than he had in the woods, on that long walk. He was so sold he shivered, violently enough that it was a lucky thing his tongue wasn't between his teeth, as it sometimes was when he concentrated very hard.

Maybe he shivered too hard, next to Loki, who didn't shiver at all. Or maybe the Witch always would have gone still and turned her head, looking in their direction as if she could see them, too. Her eyes seemed to meet Bucky's, and bore into them, and at the same time Bucky was somehow completely sure that she was looking deep into Loki's eyes at the very same time and in the very same way.

"What unworthy eyes seek to look upon Jadis, Empress of Charn, and now Queen of Narnia?" she demanded, and her voice was as old as anything yet, and, if Bucky had only known it, older than Narnia itself. "Reveal yourself, and perhaps we shall spare your life."

She didn't look or sound like she was likely to spare them even a thought once she was done killing them, or turning them into stone statues like the ones all around her. That was what Bucky thought, somewhere deep and far inside. But the same magic that had shown them the Witch had come about because of his own calm. He was so deep inside it that it only occurred to him that he could have spoken a long time after Loki said, "I am Loki Odinson, Prince of Asgard."

At this, the Witch laughed, a harsh, unhappy, wild sort of sound. "And where is this...Asgard? I have never heard of such a land."

"It is not a land," said Loki, sounding unruffled, somehow, in a way that seemed surprising, though Bucky couldn't remember, right now, why that should have been. "It is a realm, far outside of your reach and understanding. It is the greatest branch upon the World Tree, which stands very far from here indeed."

Loki often liked confusing people. Later, Bucky would figure that was what he'd been trying to do, talking about Asgard instead of Terenbithia, the world he'd come from instead of the world they were in. But if that was what he was trying to do, it must not have worked, because all that happened was that the Witch got a greedy kind of look in her eye, and said, "So you have come from outside of this world. Perhaps you have come by the way of the rings."

"Rings?" Loki said, and for a moment the way his voice sounded was something like the way the Witch looked (for he had in fact been searching for a way into Narnia for decades longer than Bucky had lived). "Tell me more about these rings."

"It is of no matter to us," the Witch said, changing as fast as her wand had whipped around before. "I can see now you do not have them. Tell us, then, how you have come here."

"I," Loki said, and seemed to falter, something Bucky noticed only distantly; it was the Witch who filled his vision, and thoughts, and everything, the same way a blizzard will fill your vision, until you can see nothing but the white. As distantly, Bucky knew that Loki was thinking of lying, trying to lie, to come up with something that would bring him out on top instead of where he was, wrong-footed and unsure, thinking he ought to break the connection and not at all sure he could.

"The truth, [insult the Witch would use]," said the Witch, half-raising her wand, which shouldn't have been as frightening as it was when they were miles and miles away from her.

"I don't know," Loki said. "I've been trying to--I haven't the slightest idea."

"Not of that, perhaps," the Witch said, and then her attention, which had seemed to be on Bucky all along, fell upon him in truth. "And you. What sort of creature might you be? The sorcerer is no son of Adam, but what of you?"

Bucky had been asked this question, a handful of times before. He knew what the answer was, and knew, as deep as his fears, that he should not act as if he knew it. But he also could not seem to lie. Instead, he said nothing, and did not know that, even deeper now, defenses he did not know were shoring up.

"Are you a Boy?" the Witch asked next, and where there had been greed in her voice when she's asked about rings, there was some dark twin of greed in her voice now. "Are you Human?"

It did not seem to Bucky that he could avoid the direct question, made out of a word he knew too well to even pretend to duck it. "Yeah," he said. "I am."

The Witch seemed to draw up taller, to tighten her grip on her want. Her voice was sharper and colder than it had been yet when she said, "And, human Boy, tell me: Have you any brothers or sisters?"

Bucky thought of Becca, and of Steve, and from somewhere far away heard himself say, "No. I'm an only child."

Why he could lie about that, but not the other thing, he didn't know. There was nothing in him to worry whether the Witch would believe him, and so there was nothing to feel relief when she dismissed him like he was nothing, and turned back to Loki. "However you have come here, I can see you are a great sorcerer. And I can see more than that."

Loki's voice, greedy against the great white calm: "What do you see?"

"You are a brother of the cold. You could be a master of the winter. A King, even, by my side. Together, we could bring Winter to all of this world. It need not take centuries, need not take years; together, we could do it in months, or even in weeks. We could take Archenland, Calormen, the Isles, all that lies beyond--within the year, our ice could be at the emperor's very doorstep, across an [icy] sea."

Even from that distance, even without looking at Loki straight-on, Bucky could tell something was wrong. That Loki knew it was wrong, that there was something messed up about this, even though it was hard to think of what that was. He figured there was something he ought to see, but across the chasm could not think of anything to say. Even saying a name took more thought and effort than it should have: "Loki..."

[something something. how does Bucky stop him? idk.]

*

There was nothing in the pool but their reflections now. Then there was nothing in the pool but Bucky's reflection and all of Loki, who hit the water with a splash. Bucky grabbed for him and dragged him out, and flipped him onto his back. He was pale, and cold--much colder than Bucky remembered him ever being--but he was breathing, big open-mouthed gasps. After a minute, his mouth closed, and he started breathing normally. No matter how much Bucky poked him, he wouldn't wake up, or do anything other than mutter. He wasn't really asleep, Bucky thought. More like passed out. Maybe this was something like the way Loki said his dad slept sometimes.

"Or maybe you just went too damn far this time around," Bucky said, and set about figuring out how to get back. They could stay here, but someone might find them, and then who knew how much trouble they'd be in. Probably a lot. Probably Loki would be in a lot more trouble than he would, all things considered. Or maybe not; maybe everyone would say he shouldn't have gone along, no matter whether he was working for Loki or not.

Either way, they couldn't stay here, and Bucky couldn't just leave him. So he hefted Loki up in his arms--and boy, was he heavy; he might be skinny, but he was tall, and it added weight like you wouldn't believe--and draped him over the back of the horse. There was no real hope of getting up there without Loki's help, so instead he figured he'd just lead it.

He'd just closed and latched the gate behind them when another horse came barreling past them. But Bucky had just turned toward the road, and it was starting to get orange out, a sure sign the sun was on its way to setting, and the other rider didn't stop. Maybe whoever it was didn't even look, or he would probably have slowed down long enough to make sure Bucky wasn't carting around a dead body. 

Whatever the reason, it didn't matter too much. With the gate closed behind them, Bucky wasn't too worried about getting caught. He wasn't sure what he'd say if someone asked, but he also didn't spend a lot of time worrying about it. It was usually a lot easier to handle things in the moment, anyway. No point in overthinking it before then.

For the next couple hours, the main thing he thought of was keeping Loki from sliding off the horse. He kept trying, but ultimately, Bucky managed to stop him each time. And then they were there, back at Castle Anvard, and Bucky handed off the horse to the nearest stableboy, and dragged Loki back to their room. That part was the hardest, without a horse to handle most of the weight, but since someone had been making a point by putting them close to the stables, it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

Once there, he dropped Loki onto the bed, and yanked his shoes off, then threw a blanket over him. Those all seemed like things a manservant would do. Beyond that, Bucky wasn't quite sure. He also wasn't sure he really cared about keeping up appearances when Loki wasn't awake to gripe about them. So in the end, with the room getting grayer and grayer and then dark with the setting sun, he lay down on the sofa across from the bed, and went to sleep.

*

Bucky's dreams were strange, the kind he'd had a lot a couple of years ago, but not too often recently. Shadows moving against each other--but instead of the shadow that wasn't him being very obviously a girl, this time it very obviously wasn't. This time, instead of just being a shadow, he was pretty sure he knew who it was, and somehow that made it even more exciting. It made no sense, and when he woke up he was achingly hard, and too confused to do anything about it, the way he usually would have. Instead, he lay there on the sofa for a minute, with part of him trying to work it out and another part refusing to even go near it, whatever it was. Then, when he couldn't stand anything that was going on inside his head anymore, and things had quieted down below the waist, he jumped up and started moving around. First he tore off yesterday's clothes, and dressed in the ones that had been left for him on top of the [dresser]. The shirt was a little big on him, but the pants fit just fine.

When he was completely decent, he went out into the hall, first looking for a bathroom, then looking for Loki. The thought of finding Loki made his mind glance off something he definitely wasn't going to think about right now, but it wasn't like he could do anything else. Loki off by himself was a Loki who was probably going to start some trouble (more trouble). Loki off by himself was a Loki who might be having an adventure without him, and that wasn't a thought Bucky could stand.

For a second, when he found Loki off in the hills, at the end of a little trail a few people had pointed him to when he'd asked about him, Bucky couldn't stand the sight of him, either. He was crouched down, his image wavering a little, the kind of illusion he went with when he didn't want other people to see him, but it was okay if Bucky did; one of his hand was making wave-y motions in the air, while the other was pressed into the grass, like he was feeling it. Bucky's stomach clenched tightly for a second, and he was even more confused than he'd been before he woke up.

"What are you doing?" he asked, because he wanted to know and because it was better than asking why Loki had to look like that (look like what?).

"Oh, there you are," Loki said. "You've arrived just in time."

"In time for what?" Bucky asked, and although he had been worrying over his dreams for roughly half an hour, he truly was not a boy prone to worrying overmuch when there was anything else at all to concern himself with; and so he put that certain worry over Loki away for now, in favor of whatever was going on now. "What are you doing?"

Loki made a dramatic motion with his hands--he was always much more dramatic than he needed to be for magic when he had an audience, Bucky had come to learn--and the grass beneath his fingers frosted into white, a little circle that spread, under the grass beneath Loki and then expanding to be beneath Bucky as well. He looked down, crouched down for himself and found that it was snow. Not a hard snow, like what they'd walked on to get here, but a light dusting, the kind you got a lot more often than the inches or feet that marked a winter.

"I thought you weren't good at weather magic," Bucky said, because that was what Loki had said a bunch of times, but especially the time they'd been stuck on that island, and it had been so hot, and Bucky had been sunburned and peeling horribly, and Loki had looked like he was about to have heatstroke.

"Apparently I hadn't tried it before," Loki said, and if the memory of the island had been any nearer, even Bucky might have decked him, or at least raised his voice. "It seems to be different here. Or perhaps it's merely--I haven't tried to make it snow before."

There was no point asking what he had tried before. Bucky knew all about his brother, who made storms happen when he wanted, and sometimes when he was just mad. Loki had always seemed a little grumpy talking about him, and it was obvious that this was one of the reasons why. 

"So, uh, what exactly are you trying to do here?" he asked instead. "Don't they have enough winter as it is?"

"That's just the thing. Didn't you hear what they were saying in the camp yesterday?"

"No." Because he'd been too busy [something hilarious happened but I have to rewrite that part first].

"The Witch's frost has started creeping north of the border," Loki said, as superior as if it wasn't his fault Bucky hadn't heard it the first time.

"Yeah, so?"

"So if I can make a frost of my own, perhaps I can counter hers. Or even reverse it."

"Oh," Bucky said. It was a good idea. It was the kind of idea he should have probably had, if he hadn't been too busy focusing on stuff he probably didn't need to be focusing on. "So, what do you need me to do?"

Sometimes, Loki liked Bucky to be there to watch whatever he was doing. Other times, he needed Bucky's help. When Bucky had gotten so good at immediately figuring out which was which, he couldn't recall. But he knew for sure this was one of the times when Loki needed help.

"You must ground me, as with the pool."

"Oh, so you just need me to tell you when you're being an idiot? Okay. I can do that."

"I must also have quiet ," Loki said.

"Sure. But we'd better not be going to call the witch again."

At Loki's motions, Bucky settled in beside him, crouching down just the way Loki did. At first there wasn't much to see. Loki made the grass frost, then made a little snow, then tried to take it back. But the taking back part seemed like it was harder for him. It was melting, sure enough, but it wasn't instant, and it was so warm out that it could easily have just been that. Meanwhile, Loki seemed to get more and more frustrated, and sent Bucky more and more angry glances, like it was Bucky's fault he was here watching Loki screw up.

Finally, Bucky said, "Maybe you're not doing it right."

"Clearly," Loki said, and brought out a knife, which slammed into the trunk of the nearest tree before Bucky had noticed it coming out in the first place. If Loki hadn't been so pissed, he might have asked him to do it again. Well, maybe later he would.

"No, I mean--maybe you shouldn't start with the making snow part. Maybe they're two different things. Maybe they're opposite things."

"...Perhaps," Loki said. "Cold and hot. Like light and dark."

"Yeah, exactly."

"And what would you suggest? If I'm to rid Narnia of the snow, I must have snow to practice with."

"Yeah, so let's go back," Bucky said.

"Back to Narnia."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "What's stopping us?"

It was a bad idea. It was a terrible idea. It was the kind of thing Bucky never would have floated to Steve, when they roamed around Brooklyn getting into trouble on weeknights and weekends and all summer long. But being here, with Loki, was always different than being at home. They were supposed to have adventures here. To do brave and dangerous things. It seemed like they always had to do something crazy or stupid or really hard to end up back home again. Loki knew how to use magic and knives, and Bucky was getting kind of okay with a sword, and better than that with a crossbow.

"All right," Loki said.

On their way back, Bucky made sure to pass by the tree where Loki had thrown the knife, so he could take it and shove it a pocket (being careful, of course, not to nick his skin--he'd learned the first time how sharp Loki's blades really were).

*

They found the border right where several distracted grownups had said it would be. They'd claimed to be asking so they'd know where not to go; if anyone had been paying attention, they probably would have noticed the lie, the way Bucky's ma always noticed fibs when she really looked in his face, and didn't if he made sure to ask when she was in the middle of something. But none of them were, and no one else seemed interested in being any closer than they had to be, so by the time Bucky and Loki came to the big tree by a little forest path, there was no one around to see or hear anything they did.

"I thought Narnia was just north of the tree," said Bucky, who had a good head for directions where Loki didn't (because he was too used to the kind of instant travel they had in the world he came from, which could take him just about anywhere in the blink of an eye).

"Isn't it?" Loki asked.

"If it is, we've got a problem," Bucky said. When Loki gave him a blank look, he said, "Look at the ground."

The big tree, the one on the Archenland side, was heavy with snow on its branches. If the wind had been blowing, the tree itself would have started dropping heaps of snow on the ground below--the ground that was already covered with snow on both sides.

"The winter is creeping into Archenland," Loki said, in a tone of sudden understanding. "She can do it herself--it's merely that she wanted me to make the process go more quickly."

He sounded offended at this last part, like it was bad for anyone to be able to do anything without his help. But there was no point worrying too much about him at a time like this.

Bucky said, "Yeah, so hopefully you really can reverse it."

"Of course I can," Loki muttered.

He crouched down again and got to work. Really to work this time, without all the bells and whistles that he usually went with. That was one of the things about Loki: he liked to act important, and to make sure other people were important, but give him a problem big enough, and he'd get too distracted for any of that stuff. There'd be no room for bullshit, or anything other than what he was trying to do. It didn't happen that often, but when it did, it was really something.

Or could be, anyway. Sometimes, it turned out there wasn't much to see, which was probably why he went with all the bells and whistles anyway--to make sure people noticed. 

This time, there wasn't much to see for a long time, either. Loki, crouched by the tree, The snow, staying where it was--or, actually, moving so slowly that it was a couple hours before Bucky looked down and realized he was standing on snow, where before he'd been standing on grass, here on the Archenland side of things. It was an hour after that that that he realized only half of what was under his feet was snow--the other half was grass again. The boundary seemed to be more solid now, a stark line where before it had been a fuzzy, delineated thing. 

"Give me your hand," Loki said after a while.

"What for?" Bucky asked, with no intention of doing it if he was going to get stuck with a knife again. Never mind that Loki had never tried to bleed him again after that first time; he still remembered it, and remembered other things Loki had done, too.

"I've looked deeply into this magic. There's nothing I can do about what's happening on the Narnian side." Now that had to be true; Loki never, ever seemed to admit to something he couldn't do unless he really couldn't do it, and it was really important. "But with a little of your blood, I think I can prevent it crossing outside the border for...years, I'd imagine. Decades, centuries. Perhaps forever."

None of that sounded right. The Witch had thought Loki was the one who could help her take over the world with her winter. She'd barely even noticed Bucky, after asking him that first question. It had been like he didn't matter at all. But maybe this was another one of those things that looked like they should be two halves of one thing, but were actually so completely different that there was no point in trying to figure out the one by doing the other.

"Why my blood?" Bucky asked. "Why not yours?"

Loki shrugged. "This realm is strange. I don't presume to know precisely how its rules are written."

There had been times when Loki did nothing but obsess over the whys and wherefores of the magic around here--but maybe this wasn't one of those times. Maybe he was too focused. Or maybe he had the feeling, too, the one that had grown in Bucky over the last few seconds--like this was something they were supposed to do. Maybe even the thing they were supposed to do.

"Do you have to do it, or can I?" he asked.

"It shouldn't matter."

"Okay. How much do you need?"

Loki shrugged again. "If it's not enough, I'll tell you."

Bucky took out the knife, the one he'd taken out of the tree. He held it to his hand. He pressed down. It was a sharp knife, and so it didn't take much for the first line of red to appear. But those first few drops weren't much, and there was something in Bucky that wouldn't let him press down harder. He didn't know why. He wondered if it had been that hard for Loki to cut himself, that time they'd been in the dark and the magic of the table had wanted their blood. Probably it had been. He hadn't shown it, though.

He pressed down harder--too hard, maybe, because there was suddenly a lot more blood, and the pain that came afterward was more than he remembered it being, the last time. But as it fell on the ground, the snow it fell on faded into green grass, and the snow on their side of the tree faded away, so quickly it was like it hadn't been there at all.

For a minute, Loki stayed crouched down, making wild hand motions and muttering under his breath (neither of which really counted as theatrics). Then he stood up, and said, "That should do it."

Then he looked at Bucky, who was cradling his hand to his chest, and would only later realize that what his shirt had been sticky with was blood, and his eyes widened.

"You should have let me do it," he said, motioning for Bucky to give him his hand. Didn't seem like he was too likely to bleed Bucky on top of him bleeding already, so Bucky let him see it without a fight. "You've cut far too deeply. You may have cut a tendon."

In fact, Bucky had come nowhere close to a tendon, though neither he nor Loki knew enough about anatomy to know that. Loki, though, knew something about medicine, and so he took Bucky's hand, and bound it tightly so as to stop the bleeding, and Bucky was feeling so lightheaded by the time he was done that it was only later that he'd think about Loki's firm grip on his forearm, the way his fingers had looked as he'd wrapped the bandage around and around his hand.

"Couldn't you just heal it the way you did the last time?" he asked on the walk back to Anvard, before Loki could start complaining that they were walking instead of riding, like it was Bucky's fault or something. Loki was only patient with taking a while to get somewhere if he could do it on the back of a horse. 

"The magics here were different then," Loki said, looking like he was torn between telling Bucky something he knew that Bucky didn't, which he liked, and admitting he couldn't do something, which he didn't. "It was the beginning of the world. A lot more is possible with the magics of creation than without."

"Oh."

Bucky thought of all the times he'd come close to getting hurt or even almost killed here. Every time, he'd thought it wouldn't have been such a big deal if he had, because he'd had Loki there to help him.

If he'd been a little older, even Bucky, who was a boy who didn't tend to dwell or worry, even he might have given a little thought to his own mortality. As it was, he chalked it up to something he knew now that he hadn't known before, and spend the rest of the day enjoying getting to be with a friend he didn't get to see all that often.

"I swear it's like no one's noticed our great victory," groused Loki, later that night, when he was laying in the bed, and Bucky on the couch (which was comfortable enough to have been a couple beds at home). "They should have feasted us, but instead we've yet to be congratulated."

"Well, maybe they didn't," Bucky said. It hadn't been like anyone else had been out there measuring snow. Everyone who wasn't them had been busy with the Narnian refugees, figuring out where they were going to sleep and what they were going to eat and what skills they all had. Whenever he and Loki had been anywhere near the action, they'd been in the way as far as anyone else could tell.

"Perhaps." Loki's tone suggested that this was unacceptable, in pretty much the same tone that Bucky's mom sometimes suggested the same thing to the butcher. "Tomorrow, we'll have to make certain they're all aware."

"Sure."

The next morning, Bucky was not really surprised to wake up in his own bed, in his own room, with his mom telling Becca to go get him for breakfast, and Becca deciding that what that meant was jumping up and down on top of him until he got up and went.

3. First/Last Morning

[In edits, maybe make Bucky grumpier/more worried about dying? He vents about it to Loki, which is what leads Loki to giving him the apple in the first place?

Also, they don't have sex. "I could," Loki said. Then Bucky thinks about it again in the scene at the end, and they go to explore the little island instead.]

It was beautiful there. Even though he couldn't see anything, Bucky knew that much right away. Part of it was that he'd been here before, but most of it was due to the thing that let him know he'd been here before, which was the music. He'd heard a note or two from it once, when he'd been a kid, during a dream that had turned out not to be a dream after all. Now, he knew it wasn't, that it was real, and that made the music even better.

It was good to be able to stand there and listen, knowing that since he'd just gotten there, he probably wasn't going to get whisked away again before the song was over. It was just as good to know that Loki was there, too; Bucky couldn't see him, he hadn't lit a flame this time, but still he knew it the way he knew where his feet were.

The song went on, and as it did, things started to happen. Stars lit up the sky, and then the sun joined them. Hills and mountains rose in front of them, and grew grass, and sprouted trees and bushes. Water began to flow through the channels that would be rivers, and filled the lakes. With the new light, the new day, the new world, Bucky felt like he could see much farther than he'd ever been able to see before. Maybe he could.

Eventually, the song stopped. As beautiful as it had been, Bucky somehow didn't feel sad that it had stopped. It felt, instead, like the beginning of something bright and new. It was the way a really good day felt when you woke up to it. Apparently it was also the way a really good place felt when it woke up to you.

"Wow," Bucky said, when the last notes had faded away, and he'd looked to his right to find Loki exactly where he'd known he would be. "That was really something."

"Yes, it was," Loki said.

*

They explored for what must have been hours. Bucky was never much of an outdoors person at home, unless by outdoors you meant something with a lot of concrete; but even if he hadn't been used to and fond of the Narnian landscape, he would have been completely fascinated by everything that was around them. It was the newness of it; it was that, even with the song gone, things were still growing. A grove of trees in this spot; a cave in the side of a mountain, and since the mountain was still moving and groaning itself, there was no way of telling where the opening would end up, whether it would stay at ground level or in the middle of a cliff.

"I wonder what we're meant to be doing," Loki said. Over the years, he'd become more concerned with their legacy than Bucky was; he was always wondering how the things they did fit into the larger whole of Narnian history. He also tended to get more (and more quietly) mad than he'd used to when no one ever seemed to recognize them, or know about any of the things they'd done.

"I'm sure we'll figure it out," Bucky said. Unlike Loki, he wasn't too concerned about it. Whatever they were supposed to be doing always seemed to find them. In the meantime, not worrying about it let him not worry about it.

Anyway, there were too many other things he could actually be worrying about right now, if he really set his mind to it.

Eventually, they ended up sitting with their backs to two trees that seemed more or less done moving, at the top of a hill that let them see a good long ways away. It wasn't so much that they needed a rest as that this much hiking and exploring felt like it called for one, whether or not they felt like they needed it. But where moving had let Bucky focus on what was going on around them, sitting made him think of the stuff he'd purposely not been thinking of as much as possible (which wasn't very, given the givens). 

"So, what's the news over in Asgard?" he asked, figuring if Loki was talking--or complaining--about his life, that would give him something else to think about for sure.

Feelings flashed over Loki's face at the question. Easy to see even though he was sitting on the dark side of the tree, but not as easy to interpret as they had been when they were kids. "Bad," he said. "Terrible. Catastrophic. My father has chosen Thor to rule Asgard after him."

"Oh," Bucky said. "Shit. I'm sorry."

It wasn't so much that he thought Thor was necessarily as bad as Loki always said he was. You had to take Loki with a grain of salt, or maybe a whole salt shaker. But this whole thing meant a lot to him, and always had. It had to be a huge disappointment.

"He's a fool," Loki said. "An idiot. His solution to all problems is to ram his big hammer into them. He'll bring Asgard to its knees."

"Well, maybe you could talk to him if he's about to do something stupid," Bucky said, which was real optimistic advice considering it never worked with Steve. "Convince him to do something else."

"Yes, and then he'll simply do something foolish again the next minute I'm not there," Loki said, and went off on a story about the international incident that had happened the last time they'd gone to Vanaheim.

Bucky listened, and was glad to be able to listen to this, and watch Loki's face light up and his hands move around the way they did when he was telling a story, instead of worrying about what was going on in his world right about now, and when Loki had finally winded down a bit from his hilarious story, he said, "I'm not sure it counts as Thor being stupid if you tricked him into it."

"Doesn't it?" Loki asked. "Doesn't the mere fact that he allows himself to be manipulated speak to an incompetence to serve as king?"

Bucky didn't know about that, a doubt which must have shown on his face, because then Loki said:

"He doesn't even know! He still thinks the Vanaheim prince deliberately insulted him."

As if anybody but Loki would dare, seemed to be the inclination.

At any other time, Bucky would probably have told Loki he was being an idiot, and that he should try to cool off about Thor being king before it happened. Today, though, he didn't really want to fight. He didn't need Loki being cold to him, or sniping at him all the way through their adventure. He just wanted to be able to be. So he let it slide. Many years later, he'd decide it wouldn't have made a difference either way; Loki had always been going to do what he was going to do, and nothing something from a, basically, dream world was going to convince him otherwise in the space of one morning.

"Sure," he said, instead of any of the other things he maybe should have said. "Well, hopefully it doesn't go as badly as you think."

Loki made a face that suggested it was definitely going to go worse than anything else that had ever happened, and then said, "And what of you? What transpires in your world?"

If Bucky had thought about whether he wanted to talk about it, he'd have thought he didn't. But as soon as Loki asked, he found that he did. So the whole story came flying out of him, from the beginning--the war over in Europe, how they hadn't been going to get involved, but now they were, and how he'd been drafted and was shipping out for basic training next week, and how crazy it drove him that Steve was twisting himself in knots about not being able to go, because Steve had so much to prove that it didn't seem to matter to him that if by some chance the Army actually took him he'd never make it home alive.

So he talked and talked and talked some more, and when he was done, Loki, with an even funnier look on his face, said, "So, you're going to war."

"Yeah," Bucky said. "Guess I am."

"That's just wonderful," Loki said, and the jealousy that flashed across his face was enough to make Bucky think, oh no. The last thing he needed was another Steve, mad that Bucky got to go put his life at stake while he had to stay home and safe.

"Not really. What are you mad about?"

May as well get it out in the open if he could. With Loki, that could be hard, but sometimes he'd talk if you just straight-up asked. He didn't have to know how hard Bucky had wanted to hit him in the face, just for a second. How hard he'd wanted to shake him, asking if he was crazy or maybe even insane. Who in their right might wanted to go to war?

"I'm not mad," Loki said, which, judging by whatever it was that flashed over his face, was definitely a lie. "Why should I be mad? I have friends aplenty in Asgard. I'll hardly be lacking with you gone."

Well, that wasn't exactly illuminating. "I'm not going to be any more gone there than I am right now," said Bucky, who had often wished he could go there to see Loki outside of Narnia, but had long since given up on genuinely hoping for. "I mean, unless I get killed. Guess I would be then."

They were words he hadn't dared to say to anyone else, mostly because everyone else with the exception of Steve was already thinking them. Becca, his ma, his aunts. Everyone in the neighborhood who wasn't already gone to the same place he was headed. 

Loki, not really surprisingly, didn't even seem to hear that part. "No, yes, I know. You're going to to war. You'll feast and drink with the other warriors after every battle. You'll sleep next to each other in your tents, perhaps even wench together. And when you come back from your campaign, you'll have little interest in anyone who wasn't there with you."

"That's the stupidest thing I ever heard," Bucky said, having in the last ten seconds found out that there actually was something even more annoying than Steve's reaction to the whole thing. "Where did you come up with all that?"

"It's not as if I mind," Loki said, and the thing his face flashed to then was so pained that it was clear exactly how and in what way this one was a lie. "I was getting tired of you anyway."

"Sure," Bucky said. "'Course you were. Why not."

He lunged up from where he'd been sitting, hurt even though he shouldn't have been, because there was no way Loki meant that, and started walking toward the nearest hill. The trees were still growing, but slowly, so that you wouldn't notice if you were only glancing at them, but would have to look closer in order to see. During the time they'd been sitting, the trees on these hills had grown enough for someone to hide in them, or at least be hidden from view. Once Bucky walked into a copse of them, he was truly in the shadows. Even that felt new, the first shadows of the world.

He didn't look back, but a minute later, he heard Loki beside him. Loki could walk pretty quietly, so it was on purpose, probably. Bucky told himself not to look, but glances over anyway. Loki was the kind of guy who usually looked pleased at himself when he got a reaction, even if it was a negative one. The stronger the reaction, the more pleased he'd look, but not this time; he was looking away from Bucky almost as firmly as Bucky had tried not to look at him. Then he glanced at Bucky, at the same time Bucky was glancing away, and for the second that they were looking at each other at the same time, he looked almost as miserable about something as Bucky felt about anything.

It was a stupid way to feel in the first hours of Narnia, the ones they should have been enjoying. Bucky should have shoved it back, said something friendly to Loki, done the work to make them both feel better. The thing was, he didn't feel like doing any work. He didn't feel like doing anything at all. Wandering, that was what he wanted to do. He wandered between two trees, and then another two, and then decided he wasn't feeling the shadows after all. So he headed for where the trees were thinner. When he came out of them, the sun was shining down on him, and he could see a long way, maybe even farther than he had when the trees had been a little shorter and the world had been a little newer.

"Where do you think?" Loki asked, sounding maybe as subdued as Loki could.

To one side there were easy slopes, hills one could stroll up and down. To the other side there were mountains, tall and icy at the top, which would be a lot of work, and maybe a lot of danger too.

"Let's go up," Bucky said, thinking that what he wanted, or needed, was a climb. Something hard, to take his mind off things.

"All right," Loki said, and they started out.

*

Bucky'd never tried mountain climbing before. If he had tried it in his own world, against a mountain such as this one, he would have failed badly, and come limping down the mountain with laughter in his heart for having tried something so extreme. This, though, was Narnia, where a person felt like two or three of their normal selves after just a few hours; more importantly, this was the very beginning of the world, where everything was growth. Bucky could feel it, taste it; the more they climbed, the stronger his muscles grew, and the nimbler his fingers. It helped that in most places there was a path, however slight it might have been; and where there was no path, there was always a handhold.

"I wonder if you're in your right mind," remarked Loki on more than one occasion. What it mattered to him, Bucky didn't know; he was cheating, magicing himself up the harder places ahead of Bucky, and often laughing at him from up high.

The laughter maybe should have bothered Bucky, but it didn't; Loki hadn't said he was sorry or admitted to not meaning what he had said, but the fact that he hadn't argued meant he at least felt bad about it. That was about the most you could really expect from him, so all Bucky said, when Loki made fun, was, "Haven't fallen to my death yet, have I?"

And in the end they came, not to the very top of the mountain, but to the other side, so that the path, what there was of it, was sloping downward, and they could see the valley below. It was as green as the tops of the mountains were white, with a lake bluer than the sky, and a hill that looked like a fine place to sit.

"Race you," Bucky said, for though he'd just spent hours climbing a mountain peak when he'd never so much as been out hiking before, he really felt as if he could run for hours and hours. So he started down the mountain, thinking in the back of his mind that if he wasn't careful he'd trip and break and ankle, and at the same time hoping that if he did, it would stay with him when he went back, so that the Army wouldn't take him, or at least not right now. But he thought it only for a moment, before Loki passed him. It had been inevitable, Loki being Asgardian and all, but as calm as Bucky could be at times, he could be competitive too, and in the next few minutes there was nothing for him to think but how much he wanted to catch up. He ran as fast as he'd ever run, as fast as Narnia would let him comfortably run, and then faster than that.

He never quite caught up. They also didn't quite make it to the lake, never mind the hill. Between the peak of the mountain and the lake, he stopped, panting, and leaned over and put his hands on his knees, whooping for breath.

When he looked up, Loki was watching him, not with the usual superiority, but with something a whole lot more guarded.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Why wouldn't I be?" Bucky asked, aware that Loki was looking at him the way he was when he was trying to see something, and that he, for once, had no idea what was there to see. "I'm fine. Just need a--breather."

His breather took a few more minutes that he wanted it to. By the time he was done huffing and puffing, Loki had put whatever that look was away, and was back to his usual self. "Perhaps we'll take a more measured approach the rest of the way there," he said--though since neither of them had said anything about where they were racing, it seemed kind of weird that he knew the place they were standing right now wasn't where Bucky had meant. Or, well, it would have been weird, if there had been any question in Bucky's mind that they both knew exactly where they were going.

"Maybe," Bucky said, and took off again.

The second half of the run was harder than the first--or maybe, Bucky would think later, it had been the last third of the run, because this was uphill where the rest had been downhill all the way. At the end of it, Bucky was hot-faced and heaving again, but at least he got to flop down on the green grass of the hill, which was just as soft as it had looked from miles away. Loki flopped beside him, also breathing heavily, though not anywhere near as winded. 

It was a good viewpoint. Somehow, even though they were surrounded by tall, snow-peaked mountains, it seemed like they could see farther than they had been able to before, when they were on the other side.

Bucky said as much, not really meaning to, just knowing that they'd finally gotten far enough (or close enough) that he could open his mouth and not say anything about the war, whether it was to say how much he wished he hadn't been drafted, or to call Loki an asshole for making it all about himself as usual. He didn't want to talk about it, even if he'd had to talk about it a little.

"The sun is setting," Loki remarked, which might have sounded like a disagreement to someone who didn't know how his disagreements usually sounded, or that he tried never to agree with anyone unless he could act like he didn't.

"Yeah, but still. I don't think I've ever seen this far in my life."

"From the way you've described your own realm, it seems you've never seen further than twenty feet in any direction," said Loki, who'd always seemed somewhat baffled by the concept of skyscrapers and city blocks even though the descriptions he'd given of Asgard sounded pretty city-ish to Bucky.

"I think it's magic," Bucky said. "The same kind of magic that's usually here, but more of it."

"Perhaps merely newer," Loki said, which was as good as agreement. "Do you hunger?"

Bucky glanced at him, and for a second he thought he could see Loki as clearly as he could see anything else, even though the way they were sitting meant that Loki was more of a silhouette than anything else, shadowed, with the sun behind him. "What?" he asked, mouth suddenly dry at how good even Loki's silhouette looked here, even when Bucky had been mad at him (almost mad at him, sort of mad at him, not really mad at him, mad at everything else and trying not to take it out on him for acting like himself).

For a second, he thought he saw incredibly clearly, and what he thought he saw was that by hunger Loki meant something else, and that he was about to lean across the small distance and--

"We've gone all day without eating, and we've traveled a long distance. You must be famished," Loki said, which threw a wrench into Bucky's head even more than what he'd thought he was about to do would have.

"I guess I could eat something," Bucky said, and in that moment became aware that he was starving, after all, just like you can sometimes stay up a good long while past your bedtime, and only realize how tired you are when you look up at the clock and realize you must be off to school or work in just a few hours' time. "I didn't bring anything, though."

"I did," Loki said, which wasn't too much of a surprise--his pocket dimension had an awful lot of stuff in it, all these years later. It seemed like every time they ended up back in Narnia, he'd added stuff they could have used one of the other times. Sometimes, he had exactly what they needed, while other times, nothing he had was helpful at all. "However, there's not much variety to be found. By which I mean, I hope you like apples."

"Apples are fine," Bucky said, expecting a small, hard, red apple like most of the ones he had eaten throughout his life.

In the time it took him to say it, Loki's hand had done the thing it did, and he held up an apple in the setting light. This apple was nothing like a Brooklyn apple. It was huge, and not so much yellow as golden.

"You didn't say you were going to give me a work of art for my dinner," Bucky said, taking it. Loki's fingers brushed against his coolly, but although he'd spent way too many visits to Narnia over the past decade or so obsessing over every accidental touch, this time what he was bound to obsess over was the apple itself. It was not so much yellow as it was golden, shining so brightly in the evening light that it could have been lit up like a candle. It was shaped perfectly, more like the idea of an apple than any other apple Bucky had ever seen. It was like the apple all other apples got compared to and found lacking of.

"Are you going to eat it, or merely admire it?" asked Loki, which was indication number one that something was off.

Instead of biting into it, which Bucky had been in the middle of deciding to do--because outside of all other considerations, the apple also smelled better than any other apple he'd ever had, smelled so good his mouth was watering to know how it tasted--Bucky set it down on the grass between them, more carefully than he'd ever set another piece of fruit, because it seemed like a good idea not to bruise something perfect even if it wasn't. "What's wrong with it?" he said.

"Nothing, of course."

"Yeah, right. If it's just a normal apple, how come you care so much if I eat it?"

A flicker, passing across Loki's eyes so quickly it was possible Bucky could have imagined it. "I took it from my mother's gardens. It's worth as much as any treasure we've ever come across together. I merely wish to see you make use of it before some misfortune can befall it."

It was snooty enough that it could have been true. And while you wouldn't think an apple was worth as much as fancy armor, incredible weapons, or intricate crowns, the sight and smell of that apple was enough to convince Bucky that what Loki was saying had to at least be mostly true.

"Okay, but you better not have done anything to it," Bucky said, because much as he was sure by now that Loki wouldn't poison him even if he had done what he'd done to the real prince of Terenbinthia that one time, that didn't mean he might not have done something else magical to it. Something that would turn Bucky into something, or make him act a certain way, or turn him pink for a few hours. You never could tell with Loki. 

"I have altered it in no way from what it was on my mother's tree," Loki said. 

He looked sincere. Sounded it too. Bucky was tired of trying to figure it out, either way, and he was really hungry. And, when it came down to it, Loki was his friend, his closest friend in Narnia just like Steve was his closest friend at home. If you couldn't trust your friends, who could you trust? So instead of arguing, or trying to pretend he wasn't hungry after all, or that he was allergic to apples, or that he'd found some other fruit, Narnian fruit that looked even better, and that they could share, he picked the apple back up, and lifted it to his mouth, and took a bite.

If it was a magical apple, biting into it seemed to break the spell, at least a little. For a second, it was the most delicious thing Bucky had ever tasted, beyond what he had ever imagined tasting. Then, instead of continuing on that way, the way most meals do when you're hungry indeed and have been in the out-of-doors at some exertion all day long, it became something a little less than what it had seemed like before. It was still amazing, just like every other meal Bucky had had (especially in Narnia) when he was this hungry and had been working this hard; but it didn't seem like something a step above anymore, and when he held it up to look at it again, it didn't look like anything other than a rather large, beautiful apple.

"Weird," he said.

"In what way?" asked Loki, who was sitting stiffly beside him, not-watching him take bites of the apple so carefully that it would have been obvious to anyone that an entire army could have marched by them without Loki noticing anything but how much apple Bucky had eaten.

"Well, it's just an apple," Bucky said.

"And?"

"It seemed like more than an apple, before."

"Hmm," said Loki, seeming to relax into the hillside. "Do finish it, however."

"Planning on it," said Bucky, who really was hungry. He ate the apple down to the core, then set it on the grass and licked his fingers clean. "Got anything else sitting around?"

Loki frowned, and did a thing with his hands, and came back with a big pouch. Inside it was some jerky, and a few little fruits that looked something like dates. They weren't as pretty as the apple had been before Bucky had bit into them, but by the time he and Loki were done sharing and there was nothing left but the pits, he felt full.

In the time they had taken to eat, the sun had fallen still lower, and the nearby trees had gotten even taller.

"I wonder what would happen," Bucky said.

"What do you mean?" asked Loki, who was rummaging around with his hands invisible again, this time for some sort of sleeping arrangement for them, since it didn't look like they were going to find any towns or beds. If there were anything like that here anyway, on the first day of the world.

"Got a shovel? Or, I dunno, a spade?"

"Why would I have digging instruments?" asked the guy who'd once had about half a ton of straw (which would actually have made a pretty good bedding out here in the open, even if it would have been a little bit itchy). 

"Thanks so much for your help," Bucky said, and pulled up some of the grass, and dug into the dirt with just his fingers. He's expected to meet more resistance, the kind you got when digging in the school yard--but the soil the grass grew in was dark and soft and moist, and it wasn't long before he had a decent-sized hole.

By the time he was done, it was full dark, and one of Loki's floating flames was floating above him, not so much so that he could see what he was doing as so that Loki could.

"--My mother's apples are proprietary," he said, as Bucky dropped the apple core in the hole, and started to cover it back up. "If she ever learned of this..."

"You'd be in even more trouble?"

"I am not going to be in any 'trouble.'"

"Then don't worry about it," Bucky said. "It probably won't even grow, anyway. Being from your world and all."

Together they stared at the messy spot, like they were waiting for something to start sprouting out of it. Nothing did, but after a minute, Loki said, "Normally, I would agree. But the magic here is--different. I cannot begin to predict whether it will grow or not."

"Well, it's not like it's going to hurt anything, either way," Bucky said.

"I suppose not," Loki said, and a couple sleeping rolls appeared in front of them. Bucky crawled into his gratefully. He hadn't been very tired a moment before, but just as he hadn't known he was famished until there was the prospect of food, he hadn't known he was exhausted until he lay his head down and was gone.

*

In the morning, Bucky woke up with his cheek against something rough and something sweet in his nose. He opened his eyes and saw bark. 

"Holy shit, it worked."

But before he could sit up, and crane his head back to see just how big his apple tree had gotten overnight, he heard a strained voice say, "Do not move."

If there was one thing you learned by adventuring in another world with a friend from a third one, it was when to jostle him and when to pay attention. From the tone of Loki's voice, this was a time to pay attention.

"What's wrong?" Bucky said.

"It's watching us. It's much too large for comfort," Loki said.

"What is?"

"Move, but do so very slowly."

Bucky rolled onto his back, then sat up, going as slowly as he had that time they'd decided to creep into a dragon's lair to steal treasure. (Loki had had another reason he'd used to sell Bucky on that venture, but really stealing treasure was what it had been about.) He looked to one side and then the other. Everything had changed on the top of the hill. They were in a garden, with more trees than just theirs. Speaking of their tree, apples were already hanging down from its branches--but they were silver instead of gold. It was a quieter, more solemn place than it had been the day before, and it was enclosed by a tall green hedge, which went all the way around and was knit together by a tall [iron] gate.

"Um," Bucky said. "What the hell kind of apple was that? Loki?"

"Look up. <i>Slowly</i>."

Bucky did. There, in the branches [of their tree/a different tree] was a bird. It was big. It was huge. Just as important, its beak and its talons were big, and looked like they were probably sharp. It didn't really look like a hawk, but it was watching them like one.

"What do you think that thing eats?" Bucky said, forgetting right away the impulse underneath the 'what the hell, Loki?' impulse--which was to stand and take one of those silver apples, and eat it. You could tell just by looking at them that they weren't the kind of apple that would stop being interesting once you bit into them.

"Creatures smaller than us, surely," Loki said. "It probably thinks we're a threat to its territory."

Bucky had definitely seen birds snatch up rabbits that were their size, comparatively speaking. The ratios seemed right. "Or maybe it thinks we're lunch. We'd be its first lunch ever, I bet. I know I couldn't pass it up."

"And you call me the pessimist."

"So it's my fault you're too good to get eaten, huh?"

"No, merely too clever."

"Uh-huh. Well, if you're that smart, why don't you think up a way for us to get out of here?"

"I am working on it," hissed Loki. In fact, they both had been hissing for most of the conversation, since the bird didn't seem to be responding to that particular way of speaking.

"Okay," Bucky said, instead of 'Well, work faster,' which was what he would have said if he'd actually been trying to piss Loki off, instead of just your general ragging. 

In the silence that followed, he took his own chance to look around the garden, knowing that it was easier to see opportunities once you were over the first shock of being somewhere you hadn't expected to be. And, sure enough, he saw one.

"Hey, Loki."

"What now?"

"Does your plan involving running?"

"That, and a wall of fire, thus far," Loki said. "Why?"

"Well, there's a gap in the hedge over there..."

Like everything else, the hedge was still growing, and must've been a foot taller by then than it had been the first time Bucky had looked around. But there was indeed a gap in the place he was looking at, which seemed both big enough for both of them to fit through, and was closed enough to the ground that they might not have to do too much climbing to get to it, as long as they went soon. (Bucky wasn't against climbing in general, but hedges are, as a rule, a bitch to get over if they're too tall to just jump over. They'd definitely have gotten eaten by the time they got over this one.)

"I see it," Loki said. "When?"

"How about now," Bucky said, and took off for it. He kept as low to the ground as possible while running as fast as possible, and weaving back and forth so he'd be less likely to get snatched up by those talons (assuming birds worked the same way arrows did when people were shooting at you). It must have made a stupid, desperate sight, but however stupid it was, Loki was right there, doing it with him. Then they were to the hedge, and then Loki was giving him a boost, and then he was crawling through a prickly, clinging hole, with Loki right behind him, complaining loudly enough that he must have forgotten all about the danger. Then he came to the other side, and jumped to the ground, and Loki followed suit, and then they were running, back in the direction they'd come from, or a different one, but who cared, because soon enough they were in another copse of trees a few hills over, and stopped not so much to catch their breath as to look behind and see if the bird had followed them. Bucky was ready to run again if he had to, a rabbit darting through trees, looking for a cave or a tunnel or anywhere to go to ground--but the sky behind them was clear.

"Do you think it went back, or do you think it didn't care about us in the first place?" Bucky asked, standing there, looking back. It was only later he'd realize they'd run a lot farther than they had before, but he wasn't panting, not even so much as breathing hard.

"Does it matter?" Loki asked, which meant he didn't know, and thought he should have.

"Guess not," Bucky said. "What now?"

"When do you leave?" Loki asked, like he hadn't heard the question, like their legacy here in Narnia was the furthest thing from his mind. "In your world, I mean."

"The day after tomorrow," Bucky said.

"So tomorrow will be the night," Loki said. "You'll sit up drinking all night with your friends. You'll sing bawdy songs, tell bawdier stories, and at the end of the night you'll find someone to warm your bed for that one last night."

"Here we go again," Bucky said, not about to admit that, yeah, a crazy night out was pretty much what he'd planned on, even if it wouldn't be anywhere near as crazy as anything that went on on Asgard. "Look, I really don't want to talk about it."

"Who said anything about talking? I merely want to ascertain that I have it right."

"You don't have it wrong," Bucky said. "What about it?"

There had been something in Loki's eyes, through this whole weird conversation. He didn't know what it was, didn't know if he liked it. He didn't know how Loki had gotten this much closer to him without him noticing. Close enough to feel Loki's breath on his face, close enough that it would only take another second to start feeling his body heat. Almost close enough to--

"Don't you dare forget me," Loki said, and then his cool lips brushed Bucky's.

It wasn't where Bucky had expected this to go. It wasn't what he'd expected the times he'd thought about this, either. For some reason, he's always thought Loki's lips would be as sharp as the rest of him. But they were as soft as anyone else's, instead. For a second, Bucky didn't react. Didn't know how to react. How he wanted to react.

Loki pulled away, his eyes not so much questioning as horrified. The expression on his face was the way Bucky had always known he himself would feel, if he tried the same thing and it turned out Loki not only didn't feel the same way, but was horrified that Bucky felt anything at all. In the end, that was what made Bucky decide how to react: he wasn't so much thinking as he was wanting Loki to stop looking like that for no good reason.

So instead of letting Loki pull away, Bucky grabbed him, and yanked him closer, and kissed him back.

After which, there was a lot more of that sort of thing, and Loki got to do most of the yanking and the pushing--he was bossy anyway, and Bucky didn't mind letting him do what he wanted, and certainly didn't mind being pushed up against the nearest tree and kissed within an inch of his life. And, after the first minute or two, more than kissed, Loki's cool hands shoving up under his shirt, running up and down his chest, his sides, his stomach. It was amazing, but maybe the most amazing thing about it was how little shame Bucky felt while it was happening.

Of course he'd figured out years ago why his stomach clenched when he was around Loki, why his chest sometimes hurt looking at him. Why he could look at him for hours, if Loki was asleep or concentrating, and that the only thing he'd mind about the view would be when it ended. He'd decided, sometime along the way, that nothing was ever going to happen. Maybe some boys did that kind of thing with their friends, but he never had. And he knew the kinds of things that got said about men who did this with other men. He liked girls just fine, so there had been no reason for him to explore this in his own world. Or, well, there had been a couple of possible reasons over the years, but one of them had been tall and dark-haired and way too nice, while the other had been almost snide and mean-spirited enough, but way too short and freckled. 

It had never been going to happen, but now it was happening, Loki's body lithe and lean under Bucky's hands, his mouth making Bucky melt against the tree behind him, only vaguely aware that if they kept this up long enough, his back was really going to feel it later. It could have gone on forever like that and he wouldn't have complained, but then Loki stopped kissing him, and was panting by his ear, and his hands were tracing the band of Bucky's trousers, and he said, "I could. If you like."

Bucky's face flashed with a new heat, one that flashed through the rest of his body, too. He'd been too overwhelmed before to notice his dick, but now he did. He was hard and throbbing. He thought of Loki's hands reaching down, wrapping around him, stroking him slowly--somehow he was sure it would be slowly, that Loki would make him suffer, make him beg for it before they got to where he wanted so badly to be--and couldn't manage to say anything. He hadn't been this excited since the first time, him and Sally Henderson in the back of his parents' car the year after school had ended. Maybe he hadn't been this excited even then, because as much as he'd liked her, and the other girls he'd gone out with sometimes, none of them had been Loki, here in their secret world.

"Well?" Loki said, and maybe he'd figured out why Bucky hadn't said anything, because instead of looking hurt, he kissed Bucky's neck, and nipped at him in a way that made him jump a little, goosebumps rising all over his arms, and slid a fingertip just under the band of Bucky's trousers. 

"Yeah," Bucky managed to croak. "Yeah, whatever--whatever you want."

He wanted Loki's hand more than anything while Loki laughed against his neck, and undid his fly. While they pushed his trousers and underwear down together. While Loki's hand wrapped around him, finally, and stroked him just as slowly as Bucky had imagined, once, twice, three times.

Then Loki let him go again. He started to sink downward, and by the time he was on his knees, Bucky had figured out that there was definitely something he wanted more than Loki's hand.

"Shit, Loki," he said as Loki's mouth wrapped around him, just the tip of his dick at first, languidly tasting him, sucking him lightly in a way that didn't seem like it should have been satisfying--there was so much more of him that he wanted Loki's mouth on--he'd never gotten this far in his fantasies before, had never got farther than maybe kissing Loki only to find out that Loki didn't want him to--it shouldn't have been satisfying--but somehow, he felt like he would be able to come from just this, if it went on long enough (and "long enough" wouldn't have to be very long at all, the way things were going). Then, like Loki was reading his mind--not that Bucky would put it past him, but it seemed like something he'd have done before now--he slid all the way down Bucky's dick in one smooth gulp, and it was all he could do not to come right then.

"I'm not gonna," Bucky said, meaning to say he wasn't going to make it much longer, except that then Loki pulled back, until all that was in his mouth was the tip again--and then, a second later, he was gulping Bucky back down. He did it two more times, three, and no matter how hard Bucky tried to hold back, to keep himself from coming--he'd never so badly wanted to come and at the same time wanted to stay right where he was forever--he found himself spurting into Loki's mouth, down Loki's throat, heedless of the kinds of sounds he was making, here in this brand-new world.

As soon as Loki's mouth left, Bucky found out that the rest of Loki must have been holding him upright. His legs, shaking, collapsed on him. He would have felt pretty stupid if he'd hit his head. As it was, he didn't hit anything too important on anything too hard, and as soon as he was down, Loki was lying on top of him, kissing him again, his mouth bitter with a taste Bucky had never even thought about before. Loki's dick was hard against Bucky's thigh, and there was suddenly nothing he wanted more than to slip his hand down the front of Loki's pants, and wrap around him, and--

Loki had other ideas.

"Let me have you," he said, breathlessly into Bucky's ear. He'd reached between Bucky's legs again, but further back this time, his fingertip starting to circle a part of Bucky that he had definitely never associated with a moment like this (you didn't get a lot of how-to pamphlets on this kind of thing in Brooklyn, so much as you got whispers about [word?] bachelors and who might be a pansy). 

Bucky's face got hot, and the rest of him too, and even though he'd never once even thought about taking it up the ass, suddenly he was thinking about Loki inside him--much more than a fingertip inside him, which Loki's was now, not waiting for the answer--and his dick, not able to get hard again this quick, nevertheless twitched, and he had to swallow once, twice before he could say, in a croak that came out sounding like nothing he'd ever said before, "Okay."

Loki kissed him again, groaning even though he was the one--even though his finger was slick with something now--even though he was the one pressing it further in--even though he added another one--even though both of them together pressed down onto something Bucky didn't know was there, so that he made a sound, he was never sure what it had been except that the next thing he knew, Loki's fingers were gone, and Loki was fumbling with the clasp on his trousers, and Bucky was helping him, or maybe he was just getting in the way, and then Bucky's leg was around Loki's waist, and Loki was above him, and his hands were clutching the back of Loki's shirt, and then he looked over Loki's shoulder, just a passing glance as Loki's hands moved between their legs again, guiding himself to where they both wanted him to be--

"What's that?" Bucky said.

"What do you think?" Loki said, a breathless laugh, pressing against Bucky's hole, about to press in.

"No, I mean, I saw something. A shadow. Moving."

"Later," muttered Loki, but held still. "We can investigate later."

"It looked like the Witch," Bucky said.

"The Witch? Which Witch?" But annoyed as Loki looked and sounded, he was pulling away now, willing to listen, willing to look. He turned around to where Bucky had pointed, pulling up his pants.

"How many Witches have we met?" Bucky asked. "The White Witch, obviously."

"Shit," Loki said, which would have been funny any other time, the way it always seemed funny when he swore the way Bucky swore instead of the way Asgardians swore. "Are you certain?"

Looking toward the garden, Bucky saw her again. Loki was looking too, now, and when their eyes met, neither of them was thinking about sex anymore. The color had drained from Loki's face.

"What is she doing here?" he asked, like Bucky had an answer to that.

"I don't know," he said. "What should we do?"

"Go in the opposite direction," Loki said--but then he passed Bucky a knife, one he hadn't had a second ago. Bucky took it, tried to remember what he'd learned about stabbing or, better yet, throwing knives. He'd gotten kind of good at target practice, the last few times. 

They crept through the trees, stopping every few feet, waiting to see what the Witch would do, and to be sure she wouldn't see them. She didn't, though a couple times she stopped, and seemed to listen. Once, she turned to look in their direction, and Bucky felt sure she would see them, until he looked down at his hands and saw that they didn't seem to be there--saw that Loki must have hidden them both. For a moment, it didn't seem like he'd hidden them well enough, for the Witch narrowed her eyes and said, "You there! Show yourself."

Bucky went even more still, if that was possible, and the Witch soon turned, and climbed over the hedge, which was now at least twice as tall as she was, and when she was gone, Bucky said, "Should we try to stop her?"

"Those apples," Loki said.

"--What about them?"

"They're for--they have magical properties. She shouldn't have them."

"So you're saying we should try to stop her."

"And die in the effort," Loki said. "I think we should leave it alone. What business is it of ours?"

And wasn't that a far cry from the guy who was always so worried about the impression they were leaving behind? "But this is before we met her before, right? So if we stop her now, maybe she won't do what she does later."

They didn't get a lot of history lessons when they were in Narnia--things were usually too busy for that, and when they weren't, they didn't usually have anyone to ask, if they happened to be wondering about it again--but they'd still managed to pick up something about how long and cold the Witch's winter had been, and how bad it had been for everyone. A lot of people had died, especially if you counted Talking Animals and trees and things as people, which you kind of had to if you'd ever talked to any. Bucky found himself swelling with the idea of stopping it--how it was the right thing to do, maybe the only right thing to do, all the pain and suffering they could stop. If he was going to go to Europe when he got back to Brooklyn, and be a part of a pain and suffering he might never know the outcome of, maybe he could go to Europe knowing that here, in another world, it had been prevented from happening in the first place.

"Or perhaps she'll kill us, and our deaths will somehow spur her to do everything she does later, only now and with greater strength," Loki said--but his face didn't look like he was about to run away. His face looked like he was resigned to whatever Bucky wanted to do. Bucky recognized it, not so much because Loki had worn it much, as because he was usually the one wearing it whenever they were doing whatever plan Loki wanted to do.

"Okay," Bucky said, eyes fixed on the garden, waiting for any movement that could be seen (which was none, as unfortunately the hole they'd come out of had by now closed, a peephole they would not be using). "We should probably make a plan."

The whispered argument about this had barely gotten started when a voice said, "Boys, boys. What are you doing?"

It wasn't the Witch's voice, not by far. It was the opposite, low and deep and powerful, and if you had ever heard the song that made the world, you knew the voice and the song had come from the same throat; and when they turned around to see who had spoken, there was a Lion standing there, somehow golden in the light even though all three of them were still in the shade. But they could only look for a moment, before Loki's hand brushed against Bucky's arm, and they both looked back toward the garden.

"Your instincts are good," said the Lion, "but you need not fear to have your back turned to the Witch when you are with me."

He sounded so sure about it, and it seemed so obviously, innately true that Bucky turned back to the Lion, and saw Loki had done the same.

"Aslan," Bucky said, because that was obviously who this was, even if they'd never met him. "What do you want us to do?"

"About the Witch?" Aslan seemed to growl, a low and thoughtful sound. "You need do nothing about the Witch. All will proceed as it is meant to; it already has."

"Oh. Okay," Bucky said, though this didn't make very much sense, and wouldn't for a very long time. "Is there anything else we're supposed to do?"

"Why do you think there is something you're supposed to do?" Aslan asked. It was hard to say if he was making fun or completely seriously--one moment Bucky thought he sounded one way, and the next he was certain there was a humor and fondness in Aslan's voice and face that he would never have expected to find there.

"Well, there usually--it usually seems like there's something we have to do. And when we're done doing it, we end up back home again."

"Usually?"

"Well, sometimes we're not sure what we did. Or if we did anything. Or if what we did ended up mattering."

"Everything anyone has ever done matters," Aslan said. "Whether it was done in my land of Narnia or in your own world. Never doubt it."

"Yeah, but sometimes it matters to a lot of people, and sometimes it doesn't," Bucky said, not sure if he meant to be arguing, or if he even was, if he was just trying to understand.

"Everything you have ever done matters to at least one person," Aslan said. "Meanwhile--what was that, there?"

Now he was speaking to Loki, who had indeed been muttering under his breath. Bucky would have been surprised at him mouthing off in this situation, except that Loki had spent a lot of time before now speculating on whether or not Aslan even existed, and seeming to think that if he did, he couldn't be any scarier than his actual dad, who was also a god, and was actually around most of the time (though Bucky was pretty sure, and was correct in being pretty sure, that Loki was a lot less bold about his dad when he wasn't entire worlds away).

Yet Loki, who hadn't minded spouting off when Bucky couldn't hear him and Aslan had pretended not to, paled at having been directly addressed. But instead of saying he hadn't said anything, he'd just coughed and Aslan had misunderstood, or any of the other backtracking he would have done with anyone else, he said, "How much can it possibly matter when no one knows it was us? Or that it was done in the first place?"

He seemed, in that moment, very brave to Bucky. Though this may have been because he was holding his hands very still and allowing his knees to shake instead, which is rather less obvious to most observers.

"That which does not bring you fame and glory may still matter a great deal to others," said the Lion. "Or have you yet told your friend what that apple was that you gave him?"

"I knew it," Bucky said, forgetting all about Aslan for a second. "I knew that was fishy. What did you do to it?"

"You were the one who feared you might perish in the battle," Loki said, which said a lot about how many of the details he'd picked up. "It's less likely now. Presuming it has the same effects here that it would have in Asgard."

"It does not," Aslan said. "For in Asgard, Bucky would have perished the moment he swallowed the apple's flesh. The fruit of your mother's garden was not meant for Adam's sons. Especially not when it was not taken by her leave."

At this, Loki made a small sound of disagreement, and opened his mouth. Then he shut it again.

Aslan said, fiercely and somehow gently, too, "Or does the lady Frigga know precisely what you have taken, and what use you will find for it?" Loki said nothing. "It was a wrong you committed, but I think you will find that if you confess all, forgiveness will come easily."

There was no way Loki was confessing a damn thing, but that didn't seem to be his main concern, because the next thing Loki said was, "Whatever it would have done in Asgard--what will it do here?"

He sounded worried. It took Bucky a second to remember that they were still, kind of, talking about him. It took him a whole lot longer than that to figure out exactly what any of it meant.

"The apple you gave your friend will not grant eternal life (though its reflections, grown from seeds planted in the fertile soil of the second day of my land of Narnia, will)." Though Aslan was still talking to Loki, he seemed to be talking at least as much to Bucky: "The golden apple of Asgard, eaten here, will grant a longer life, and give its owner the strength to survive blows that would kill any other Son of Adam."

"So you're saying I'll live through the war?" Bucky said, thinking he'd figured out at least that much, and wondering why it didn't seem like a relief. Even Loki wasn't smirking, or even smiling. The moment was too serious for that, somehow. 

Aslan turned to him, with eyes that seemed so much sadder than they should have--and yet the sadness seemed just right. "No one may ever be told what lies ahead of him--but there may come a day when Loki wishes he had never given you that apple, and Bucky that he had never eaten of it." The gloominess lasted for a few seconds after he said that, Bucky thinking about it, Loki opening his mouth again, and then shutting it (and he must have been impressed by Aslan after all, no matter what he'd thought, because usually you couldn't shut Loki up without slapping your hand over his mouth). But then Aslan shook his head, and the gloominess seemed to fly off his mane like dust, to settle somewhere else. "But that is far in the future, and cannot be changed; there is no need to worry overmuch about it today. The tree is planted, your task finished."

"Are you going to send us home now?" Bucky asked. That seemed to be what happened in the stories they'd heard, here and there--people came to Narnia, and then got sent back. Usually they got sent back by Aslan, though he and Loki had always seemed to just fall. 

"It will be many years in your world until you return to Narnia," said Aslan, which was enough to make Bucky thing later that he'd said an awful lot about the future he'd said they weren't allowed to know. "You may have one more day--far from here, so there will be no need to concern yourself with the Witch or any other evil."

So he said, and then he lowered his head, and seemed to growl, and in the growl there seemed to be a wind, a warm breeze, gentle but firm, and it seemed to sweep them away. Bucky closed his eyes against it, and when he opened them again, he was somewhere else. There was sand beneath his feet, whiter and finer than any he'd ever seen. White-frothed waves crashed against the shore, a low soothing sound that would come back to him in his sleep. A ways off there was a forest, and between the forest and the beach there was tall grass, waving gently in the breeze, almost exactly the same as the breeze that had carried them there.

And Loki was there with him, like Loki was always with him, when they were here; like Bucky wished he could be all the time (but so secretly and so quietly that he barely knew of the ache himself, for the man tended to dwell no more than the boy had).

"He wasn't nearly as frightening as people always say," Loki said, with the same superior look he always had when people were talking about Aslan. " My father--"

"Oh, would you stuff it?" Bucky said. The breeze smacked against his clothes, the world smelled like salt, and where they were standing no one else must have ever stood before. "We've got better things to do, don't we?"

"Like what? I've had my fill of exploration," Loki said.

"Me, too," Bucky said, because he'd had no intention of following the curve of the shore to see just what kind of island this was, or see any of the other things that might be worth seeing here. Instead, he reached down and pulled off his shoes, then his socks, so that he was standing with his bare feet on the sand. He wasn't too surprised, when he stood up again, to see that Loki had done the same thing. And maybe Loki wasn't too surprised when he reached for his hand, or when they walked into the tall grass together, or Bucky kissed him and drew him down, until they were lying next to each other, with the whole day left to finish what they'd started before, when they were somewhere else.

4. Innocents

Walking, not running, the Soldier walked away from the river. People ran past him. This one, that one, screaming. Maybe he should have run after all. Maybe it would have helped him blend in. But that wasn't what his training had said to do. A cover meant slow down, be innocuous. Don't look left and don't look right and never, ever, run. 

There had never been a cover that mattered as much as this one did. On any other mission, there would have been room for him to consider the consequences of a deviation. There would have been room to adapt the plan. But there was too much in his head now. Interference, so bright he could barely see what was in front of him, so loud he could barely hear what was going on around him for seconds as a time. Later he'd think he could have been walking in the woods for as long as ten or fifteen seconds before he noticed there were trees instead of buildings and a stream instead of the river. Later than that he'd think he couldn't have, because as soon as he noticed he was somewhere different, the interference stopped, too.

There was nothing in his training about the wilderness; even his most remote missions had rarely taken him far from the road. The interference was gone now, but so was everything else. The Soldier stood there, with no idea what to do.

Then there was a sound. Not a forest sound, but something more familiar. The Soldier followed it, boots splashing in the water of the stream. The sound came again, a familiar sound: that low groan of a target in pain, not wanting to be heard. The stream turned between two bushes. The Soldier passed through them, and saw that a few yard in front of him, in the stream, was a man. For a second, the Soldier was sure he was back on the riverbank after all, looking at the man he knew, who he had pulled out of the water. Then the picture changed. The man in the stream was paler, with darker hair. His bloody hands were pressed to his abdomen. The water around him was clouded, rushing away red.

 The Soldier stopped. A twig snapped underneath his boot.

The man's eyes squinted open, then widened. "...Bucky?"

Not again, the Soldier thought. Not another one.

"Who are you?" he said.

The man in the stream laughed, then coughed. A feral smile appeared on his face. Blood was flashed on his teeth, smeared around his lips. If he had been a target, the Soldier would have known the mission was all but complete. He would have known to be cautious--dying people sometimes came out with weapons, lashing out one last time, never enough to stop him but sometimes enough to slow him down--but would have known unless he'd been ordered otherwise that it was his choice whether to draw a weapon and finish it, or stand there and wait.

"That was not," the man said, still laughing, trying to, more red bubbling up from his throat, from somewhere deep, splashing his lips and chin, "one of your better jests."

If the man hadn't said the name, the same name as the man on the riverbank who had been the man on the bridge, the Soldier would have left. The man wasn't a target; it would have made no difference to him what happened. But the man had said the name, and as far as the Soldier knew, no one would connect them, his handlers had no reason to look for him here, in these woods, in the aftermath of whatever fight or ambush had caused this. No one knew to look for him here, wherever this was, where there were no crashing sounds and no traffic sounds and no bullet sounds. He could get answers here, if the man who wasn't the target were to live long enough.

So the Soldier did something he had never done for any target. He knelt down in the stream, barely noting the ice-cold water or the knife-sharp rocks on its bed, and reached beneath his armor for the med kit.

"You called me Bucky," he said, as he cut open the man's shirt, which was really more like armor, but still not a match for the scissors they sent with him on every mission, the ones that could cut through his own armor. "Why did you call me that?"

The man's smile faded. For a moment, the Soldier was sure his eyes would dull, that the wound he should not have been able to talk through had killed him, minutes after it should have. But then he smiled again, sharper this time, his eyes even more wild than they had been before, when he thought the Soldier was a friend. "Not a jest," he said. "Yet somehow the best I've heard lately." He laughed again, and this was a sharper sound than before, too. "You have no idea how bad some of the others have been, these last few years."

"Did you know me?" the Soldier asked. That was the one thing he'd figured out. That despite everything they had ever told him, there had been a before, and people had known him from it. Had known him as someone else. As Bucky, whoever that was. "You sound like you know me."

"Oh, yes," the man said, smile turning into a leer. By now the Soldier had bared the wound, discovered how deep it was, how wide, how impossible. The man shouldn't have been alive. Maybe he wouldn't be, in a minute. But the Soldier would have been. Maybe they were something alike. "We know each other very well."

He was paler now than he had been a minute ago. The gauze the Soldier attempted to pack the wound with was already soaked through. "Tell me what you know," he said. words he'd said a hundred times and never felt. Not like he did now, a panic rushing through his veins and beating in his chest like hummingbird's wings. "Be quick about it."

The man wasn't quick about it. He wasn't quick about anything. His eyes were glassy, his breathing slow. He was an opportunity the Soldier was sure he was losing, maybe the only opportunity he'd ever have.

"Bucky?" the man muttered a minute later, like he'd forgotten there was a question, and now he wanted to ask one. His eyes were closed, but now they shuttered open again, glassy and unfocused.

"What is it?" the Soldier asked.

"My mother died."

"I'm sorry," the Soldier said, but it didn't feel like he was the one saying it (and in a way, it wasn't).

"She wasn't my mother."

So saying, the man's eyes closed again, and his head lolled back, and, other than the slight movement of his chest as he breathed, was still.

*

The man could not be still alive. The Soldier could not waste time wondering about it. Instead, he fell back on his training, which had always been meant for him rather than other people, but could be adapted. He pulled the man out of the water, finished peeling off his shirt, bound his wound. There was no point in any of it--the only thing he could have done to make a difference was to put a knife across the man's throat or a bullet in his head--but he did it anyway, driven by something that wasn't his training (if he'd thought about it, he would have assumed it was the desire to know whatever the man knew. If he'd thought about it, he would have been wrong).

He had just finished binding the man's wound when a voice said, "You there!"

The Soldier looked up, suddenly aware of part of his training he had lost, somehow, in the last few minutes; part he must have lost, in order for anyone to get this close to him without him knowing it. For in front of him stood another man. This one had a sword, half-drawn from out of its sheath. He had a couple shadows too, big spotted cats that left his side as soon as the Soldier looked up, circling around so that he was surrounded on three sides. 

"What heinous act have you committed in these woods today?" said the king (somehow the Soldier, whose only previous interaction with kings had been from a mile or two away and through the scope of the rifle, knew right away that this was a king, even if he was taller and less bald than any of the ones that had been his targets). 

The Soldier's training was clear when it came to getting caught. Don't. If you got caught, eliminate the threat, complete the mission, return with a mission report. His training was clear, but even as his hand thought about grabbing the knife strapped to his left, or the pistol strapped to his right, there was something else welling up in him, asking to be heard. He knew what it was. It was instinct. He'd been warned against instinct often; getting rid of his instincts was what most of his training had been for. Instinct would get him killed every time. Instinct would endanger every little mission, and the great one in its turn. Instinct was a lie, his greatest enemy, no matter what it told him about his handlers or the doctors who worked on him.

Instead of reaching for a weapon, guaranteeing there'd be a fight, the Soldier opened his mouth and let instinct do the talking: "My friend's hurt. Help him."

The king muttered something to the spotted cats (leopards, some part of the Soldier's mind supplied, and if he hadn't been on the run it definitely would have been time to report malfunctions to his handler, to the doctors, to anyone who was in charge of him).

"But it could be a trap," said one of them, and somehow it didn't surprised the Soldier that the Leopard was talking.

"And if it's not?" the king said fiercely. "Did Aslan bid me give aid to my subjects only when my person is within the walls at Cair? No? I can see by your face that you know he did not. [Leopard1], fetch Fetterfoot. Make haste."

And so one of the Leopards sped away like a shadow, while the king stepped forward. As the other Leopard circled them, he knelt down on the other side of the man, and said, "What manner of injury has your friend sustained?"

"I don't know," the Soldier said. "I didn't see a weapon. Looked like he'd been stabbed, though."

"Injured so gravely, and yet no weapon within sight," the king said. "Would I be right in thinking--could you be more visitors from another world?"

The Soldier hadn't thought of it like that. He hadn't thought to wonder at all about how he'd come to be here, so far from where he'd been before. Instinct gave him the answer again: "We're not from around here."

Through all this, the king had reached down to the man, examining him carefully, with gentle hands. "If you have come for sanctuary, then you shall have it," he said. "For I am King Rilian of Narnia, and I know who must have sent you, and why. You are welcome here, for as long as necessary."

"I'm Bucky," the Soldier said, not questioning the instinct again, letting it flow through and from him even though he didn't know or couldn't remember where it had come from. "This is Loki."

*

A few minutes later, the second Leopard came back, with a Badger in tow. The Badger examined Loki, much as the king had, and announced, "He must be moved. Quickly, now, before it rains."

Bucky's reaction to this would have been to just pick Loki up, but it soon became clear that something else was suspected. Soon they had the supplies for a litter, and then Loki was in it, and the Badger with him. Bucky carrying one side and Rilian carrying the other. They carried it for half an hour, and had just gotten him through the doorway of a small building when the rain started coming down. They set the litter down in the middle of the floor--there was only one room, and no bed--and the Badger kept working, reaching into its little bag for this vial or that one.

"We've fifteen or sixteen of these houses in Narnia now," Rilian said. "They're meant to shelter weary travelers, should they lose their way--or be come upon by a sudden storm. They're meant for any Narnians, really, (other than Giants), but it's mostly the human ones who take advantage of them." He said it like he expected Bucky to follow (and some part of him seemed to, even if he didn't know what half the words were supposed to mean). "I'd have called for Lucy's Cordial, but I'm afraid it was lost--sometime while my father allowed people to search for me. He must have sent it out with one party or another. I would not have had a great treasure lost for my own sake, but no amount of searching for the cordial in its turn has turned it up."

"You talk a lot," was all Bucky could manage, mostly because Rilian did.  It didn't occur to him until later that he could have offended him, or that it might be a bad idea to offend a prince or a king. (And when it did occur to him, he was rather unconcerned about it--but that is another story, or perhaps a later part of this one.)

Rilian, though, didn't seem offended. He merely laughed and said, "So I've been told. I always reply that when one has lost one's tongue for ten years, one is never inclined to hold it afterwards."

"Did they sew it back on or what?" Bucky asked, another instinct. 

Rilian laughed louder at this one, then got more serious. "No. I was held captive under a Witch's enchantment for ten years, far (and not so far) from Narnia. Neither my mind nor my mouth were my own, save for an hour every night. I was delivered of my curse and my captivity by three friends nearly four years ago. It seems you and your friend must have been delivered from your own enchantment much more recently."

Bucky absorbed most of this, following without understanding, but stumbled over the last part.

Loki, still being worked on by the Badger, did more than stumble. "I have not ," he said, distantly, "been under an enchantment. Recently or otherwise."

It was the first anyone (except maybe the Badger, who had been grumbling at him while she worked) had heard him speak since Rilian had showed up to help. 

"Perhaps it is as you say," said Rilian, who had been brought up well enough not to contradict a guest, particularly a gravely injured one, without good reason. "The signs may not be as I see them. I am told I see too much of what isn't there--a queer side-effect of my own experiences, I fear. But tell me, friend Loki--is this man indeed your friend, and not he who injured you?"

"He could be both," Loki said, still distantly. Bucky didn't miss the look Rilian gave him, or the way his hand twitched toward his sword again. So he wasn't as trusting as he'd seemed, the last few minutes. Seemed like a good quality for a king not to be. Then Loki laughed, low and bitter, and broke the tension. "Or perhaps neither. He had nothing to do with it. We're not even from the same world."

"That is welcome news," Rilian said. "All is not always as it seems--but I am glad my impression of you over this last hour has held true."

How much of an impression he could have had when Rilian had done all the talking, Bucky didn't know. His training had always taught him that he wasn't supposed to be noticed. He was just supposed to be there. Ready for orders. Waiting to carry them out. He wasn't supposed to move until the point where he was supposed to be deadly.

"Glad to hear it," he said, letting instinct carry him again, at the point where Rilian's brow creased looking at him, like he'd waited too long to say something. People responded faster. He would have to remember that.

*

After the rain stopped, they carried Loki the rest of the way to the castle. He was looking a little better by then, either because of the Badger's tonics and potions, or because of some other reason. He didn't look like a breathing corpse anymore. He didn't look great, either, but definitely didn't look like he was as badly hurt as he was.

"The Narnian air does your friend good," Rilian said, as the gate came within view. "Rest will do more of the same."

"His magic might help, too," Bucky said.

Rilian, at the head of the litter, stopped walking, so that Bucky had to stop walking too. "Magic?" he said. "What do you mean, his magic?"

"Healing magic," Bucky said, knowing even as he said it that it was the wrong thing, however true his instinct said it was. "He's not as good as it in his world as he is here. It's probably why he's not, you know."

As the Soldier, he'd never balked at describing anything he needed to describe, in the most clinical words there were. Now, though, he didn't want to say it. It wasn't that he wouldn't so much as he couldn't. He'd eliminated so many targets, but he'd balked at killing the man from the bridge, and now he balked at thinking of anyone having successfully done what he hadn't to that man to this other one.

"So your friend is a sorceror," Rilian said very gravely, and it would have taken a person way more distracted than Bucky was to notice how the Leopards, who had been loping along behind them, now came in closer, the fur rising up on their backs. The Soldier hadn't known much about animals, but Bucky was sure it would take only a word, or maybe only a gesture, from Rilian for them to make a move. "It shouldn't matter, but I fear it does. Still--I have offered my protection to you and he, and no harm will come to you so long as you keep peace with me."

"'Course we will," Bucky said, the casual air coming like breathing, slipping into that other state as easily as he'd ever slipped into being deadly at the end of a pistol or a knife or a sniper rifle. "Whether he likes it or not."

He grinned at Rilian. Rilian didn't grin back. Maybe that instinct had been a bad one. Either way, they made their way into the castle, and then into the hospital room, quietly.

Rilian only stayed a few minutes, long enough to make sure Bucky had a cot to lay on, right next to the bed they put Loki in, and that someone would come by to feed them. The first meal came right as he was leaving, a bowl of some sort of stew. It wasn't the sort of thing he'd eaten during missions, or back at any of the bases he'd been kept at. Maybe it wasn't like anything he'd eaten before that, either--he felt like it wasn't, and at the same time felt like he'd eaten something like this many times.

He liked it, though. He couldn't remember the last time he'd savored his food, and at the same time that felt familiar, too. For that matter, so did lying down on the cot next to Loki, hours later, when the sun had gone down and the moon, huge and brighter than any moon he remembered seeing and yet somehow still an old friend, had come up. So did thinking he wasn't going to sleep, that he was just going to rest, and then finding himself waking up much later, when the sun was up and the Badger was back, checking Loki's bandages and making lots of encouraging sounds.

*

The King stayed away for a few days. Later, when they knew each other later, Bucky would figure he knew why: That the mention of Loki's magic had spooked him, just like the description of the chair he'd been tied to every night would rattle Bucky. During the days he was gone, Loki woke up sometimes, but mostly slept. Bucky had plenty of time to run recon. Knew he should have been running recon, not so he could come back and take out a target, but so he would know where the weapons and the exits were, and which places had more or less people around at which times. But something kept him there, in that room, leaving only for Loki's bodily functions or his own. He didn't help with Loki's dressing, didn't help feed him, or anything else; the only thing he did was get out of the way, and watch. But it felt like the only thing he could do. It was the same feeling he'd had when he'd pulled the other man ( Steve , he thought, more firmly every time he thought of him) out of the river.

Eventually, he stopped thinking about it. At no point did it really make him worry. Maybe it should have, but nothing could take away the fact that he was here, far away from anyone who might want to take him back there. He was here, and Loki, when he finally woke up for longer than five minutes, might have answers. Even if he didn't, he might have something else, though in those days Bucky couldn't have said what that was.

For the better part of a week, Loki slept, and Bucky, despite everything his training had taught him, rested.

*

Loki woke up for real on the same day Rilian came back.

"I apologize for my absence, which is unbefitting honored guests," he said. "I have been dealing with--concerns among my Council."

"Concerns such as?" asked Loki weakly from the bed, where he was sitting up, his upper half reclined against the headboard.

Rilian seemed to hesitate, then seemed to make up his mind. "Concerns of the two of you," he said. "Appearing from nowhere, not far from where my mother was slain and I taken."

Loki didn't suck in a breath, didn't close his eyes. Bucky had kind of expected both, especially considering he kept talking about his mother in his sleep.

"I will tell you my story, and perhaps it will be clearer in your minds," said Rilian. "But first: how have you fared? [Badger] tells me your body is mending, but she cannot know your mind, since you have not stated it."

"I've been sleeping," Loki said. "I'm not certain what you expected."

Bucky had expected something more than that--something sharper, or an evasion you wouldn't recognize until it was over and you realized he hadn't actually said anything you could use. But Loki had been deathly injured, and had to be tired.

But Rilian only nodded. "And you?" he asked, turning to Bucky. "I really ought to have returned to speak to you, at least several times before now. My apologies."

"I'm okay," Bucky said, not knowing if it was true or not, only that it was the first thing that came to his mind. "You said you were going to tell us a story?"

"Ah. Yes," said Rilian, and sat in the chair by the door, the one opposite the window. "It begins in the [season] of my [age] year, when [situation as described in TSC]."

He talked for a good long time. His mother's death, the lady in the green kirtle, how he'd been taken, how he'd been bound, how he'd been saved in the end. By the time he got to the part about the chair, the one he'd been tied to every time, Bucky could barely breathe. He had no way to know if the beginning part of Rilian's story was familiar--though he'd started to think there had to be a beginning of his own story, if Loki would only wake up and tell him what it was--but even though the way his chair worked had been different and his handler hadn't been a witch, he could see the connections to their stories the way he never would have been able to, maybe even a few days before. Listening to that story was like listening to a fairytale about himself.

"So you see, I know what it is to be under and enchantment--and I could swear, from the moment I first saw you, that you had been under one as well. Or perhaps were still under one--though now I do not think so. Now, I think you are merely in that place in which I resided, my first months home. Confused and wary, remembering not half so much as you claim to, or that you would like to."

"I don't remember anything," Bucky said. "Just--the things I did."

Rilian waited. It wouldn't be for a while that Bucky would realize that he'd been waiting for Bucky to tell his story, too. When he didn't, Rilian eventually stood, and said, "Well, I have other matters to attend to--you'll call for me if you need anything, of course? I am at your service, for if nothing else, your arrival here must be a sign."

"A sign of what?" Loki said, once Rilian had gone again. "He really is insufferable, isn't he?"

There wasn't as much bite in it as Bucky would have expected. When he looked at Loki, for the first time in an hour, there wasn't as much color in him as he would have expected, either. "Are you feeling okay?"

"I think it's time you tell me what you do remember," Loki said.

"That's real straightforward, for you," Bucky said. But then, haltingly, he told the story, which he hadn't realized until Loki asked could be a story. His earliest memories, of being trained, put through scenarios, punished. His first mission, his second, the third, not to mention the muzzy spaces in-between. Every mission he remembered being sent on was clear as anything, but sometimes he couldn't remember anything at all that had happened after one mission ended but before the next one began.

"It's all right," Loki said, the fourth or fifth time Bucky stopped after recalling one of his missions, and wasn't sure what to say about the in-between part. "It doesn't sound as if it's your fault."

Fault, not-fault; these weren't concepts the Soldier had thought of before, and now that he was Bucky, he wasn't sure what he thought of them now, either. Instead, he left them there, right where Loki had put them, and went on: The most recent mission. The man on the bridge, who'd known him, who was Steve. How the Soldier had known him as well, no matter what he had been told after failing. How in the end, the static had gotten to be too much, and he had dragged the man in the river out of it, and then run.

"And then I was here," he said. "And then I found you."

"Not in a river," Loki remarked. He looked the way he usually looked before he went back to sleep; tired and drawn, his injuries taking all the energy and a lot of the blood out of him.

"No, you were in a stream," Bucky said. "And now we're here. And I don't know."

"Don't know what?" Loki asked, head lolling on the pillow, his eyes closing for a second before struggling back open.

"My next mission," the Soldier said, words that were wrong, or maybe it was the meaning behind them that was wrong. "What happens next."

"I'm sure we'll be occupied soon enough. There's always something that desperately needs doing when we're here."

"I don't remember."

What missions could they have had in a place where animals were people? Where there were witches and magic? Bucky thought about if he had to shoot King Rilian, the way he'd shot so many other targets, and felt something roiling in his stomach, climbing hotly up his throat. He'd never felt like this on any of his missions. Thinking about them, or doing them, either. They had never felt like anything, yet somehow he now wondered if they should all have felt something like this.

While the Soldier (Bucky?) felt these things, he saw Loki's eyes open again and look at him sharply. "It's never like that," Loki said slowly, like he could see right into Bucky's head, all the connections there, the ones that felt jagged and torn off, like they couldn't meet up with anything, but that brought these new feelings and thoughts to him anyway. "We have no master here."

"Handler," the Soldier said, but Loki didn't seem to be listening to him, despite how much he'd heard before. "That's what I had."

"We've never been forced to give aid. I suppose we could refuse. You've never seemed to want to."

The way Loki said that was wry, and gave the impression that there was a lot he wasn't saying. Things that would have had meaning, if the Soldier had known just a little more. But he didn't, and suddenly he was tired, in a way he couldn't remember ever having been before. They'd made his body sleep so many times, but he'd never needed it the way he did now. Remembering was harder than any mission, and so much more confusing than any mission. It turned out not remembering was even worse.

"Hopefully they'll give us a little time before we must run off to fight dragons," Loki muttered, and maybe the Soldier's tiredness had reminded him that he was tired too, because his eyes were closed again, and where he'd seemed tense a minute before, now he seemed limp against the mattress.

"Did we ever fight a dragon?" the Soldier couldn't help but ask.

Loki's lips curled up in a smile, but he didn't answer, and a minute later was breathing the way people did when they were sleeping: softly and low, a sound that had always been satisfying before, because it meant the mission was easy, but that seemed satisfying now for a reason that didn't have anything to do with that one.

*

The next day, it was storming, and Loki was in a mood almost as black as the clouds outside.

"If I didn't know better, I'd believe he had followed us here," Loki said after the fifth or sixth time a clap of thunder had shaken the castle, which was also the fifth or sixth time Loki had winced.

"Who?" asked the Soldier.

"My brother. Don't ask me to explain Thor again; once was enough for a lifetime, I feel."

Distantly, the Soldier wondered what it would be like to have a brother; more distantly yet, he saw the man on the bridge, lying on the river's shore. He said, "Who's Thor?"

Loki groaned, and the next moment Bucky snatched a knife out of the air by his head. This motion made Loki's eyes widened, and he hauled himself into a sitting position against the headboard of the bed. "Your reflexes have certainly improved."

The Soldier considered the knife in his hand, the man in the bed, the trajectory he hadn't had the chance to even think about when it had been happening. In that moment, he saw that Loki had never intended to hit him with the knife; that he'd thrown it in a fit of pique. Because he was hurt, because he hadn't healed enough yet. Because he was in a bad mood, because Bucky wasn't doing what he wanted. Just a few days ago, the Soldier would have responded in a couple of ways. If Loki had been the mission, he would have ended it. If Loki had been anything else, he would have--nothing. He would have done nothing, because the worst thing he could do was defy his handler. 

All this passed through the Soldier's mind in a few seconds, all the things that made Loki different. It would be a while, weeks or months or more, until he thought about how different he was, too. For now, sure that there wasn't really any threat here, he pocketed the knife, absently, the way another person might have pocketed a pebble or a coin. When he did, he saw Loki see him do it, but didn't get anything out of the expression that flashed over Loki's face about it.

"Don't throw any more of those," he said. "I can't promise I won't..."

He wasn't really sure of what, but Loki seemed to be.

"Of course," he said smoothly, and though he kept flinching every time the storm got too close, he now seemed to be paying more attention to Bucky than anything else. It was a sharp, narrow look that made the Soldier edgier than a knife ever could have. "I don't suppose you recall what was done to you, to make you like this."

There was a tension there again, something the Soldier didn't recognize. It seemed like it would be easy to stumble on, especially if you were like him and had no idea what the roadblocks even were. He thought about it, back and back, back to the darkness that hung before his first missions. He had never really thought about before. He answered, "I don't remember. I think it might've been cold."

Cold in his veins, rushing through. He couldn't remember anything else, but he could remember that. Not the cold of his chamber, filling his lungs whether he wanted to breathe in the mist or not. Not the cold of the other thing (the fall? had there been a fall? he dreamed of it often, when he was encased in the cold), surrounding him, filling him, enough that it should have killed him and hadn't. Something else, something from before, solid ice injected into his veins.

"There was an injection, I think," he said. "They put something in me. I don't know what."

A couple things flashed across Loki's face. Later, Bucky would look back and think that one of the things had been hatred, not of him, and the other had been something like relief. "I don't suppose I know what the captors of your world could have done to make you like this," he said. "How strange. But I suppose you're glad to have survived it."

"I don't remember," the Soldier said, suddenly not very sure if he had survived, if there was much at all left of the person Steve or Loki had seen when they looked at him.

He hadn't seen the tension this time, or the carefulness until it was behind him, but he saw the flinch, a closed, small thing that shuddered across Loki's face the way the others had shuddered across his body.

"I don't suppose you do," Loki said. 

It was all he said, for the rest of the storm.

*

"I have been remiss," King Rilian said, the next time he came to visit, which was a couple days later. "I ought to have come to see my guests daily, at least. I extend my sincerest apologies."

Loki, who hadn't said much the other times Rilian had been by, said easily, "I suppose you have a number of duties to attend to. We can hardly be the most important."

Loki had spent the last day and a half griping and moaning about how they were being ignored by their host. Even though he hated him and also griped and moaned about everything to do with Rilian when he was here. Bucky had figured it meant he was feeling better, because he'd also complained about the food, the amount of light they got in their room, and the people (only some of whom were human) who had come by to see them. Some of them came to help--to change Loki's bandages, or take him to the bathroom--and others came to stare, but none of them had hurt anything, and it couldn't be their fault that they didn't remember any of the things Loki said he and Bucky had done the other times they were in Narnia. Bucky didn't remember, either. Sometimes he wondered if there really was anything to remember. Then he'd look at Loki, who'd be griping or complaining or sleeping testily, and he'd know there was something, regardless of whether Loki was telling the whole truth or not.

"You're visitors from another world, and thus important indeed," Rilian said. "No, it's merely that--I'm afraid I've been avoiding you, out of fear of what it might mean, that one such visitor might come to me with such grave injuries, and the other with a tale so like my own. I wondered if you might herald the return of the Witch, or of some enemy of Narnia even greater and subtler than she, and have spent the last day seeking portents."

"I didn't tell you," Bucky said, and would only later realize how embarrassed Rilian sound, or how much it must have taken for him to admit all of that.

"No, but one of my subjects heard much of your tale, and as for the rest--well, it is not so difficult to guess. Not for one who has been through the same," said Rilian. "I have been cowardly, but now I shall make it up to you both. I shall attend to you every day, and, when you have finished your recovery, shall endeavor to show you as much of the land of Narnia as I am able before you must go."

Rilian talked a lot, Bucky thought. A lot more than he or Loki did. Their conversations were always slow, awkward, hard; then Rilian showed up and spouted off whole paragraphs at them at a time. But he found he didn't mind listening; Loki would gripe about it later, but it wasn't like Loki's griping was all that bad to listen to either.

[something goes here]

*

Loki had been walking around for a few days when Rilian invited them on a day trip.

Loki griped about that, too, but didn't try to get out of it. As for Bucky, he'd felt safe in the castle now that he knew his way around the wing of it that they were in, and wasn't sure about leaving again. He might be in another world, but did he know for a fact that HYDRA couldn't follow him here? The more he thought about it, the more he thought that maybe they could. But he didn't tell anybody, mostly because it didn't occur to him.

Then they actually went, and by the time they'd crossed the courtyard, he was feeling better than he'd expected to. It was something about the sun, which was out, or the sky, which was the bluest sky he ever remembered seeing (of course, he didn't really remember ever having seen another; he'd never stopped to look at anything, when he was out on missions as the Soldier; and when he hadn't been on his missions, he'd spent much of his waking time in windowless rooms that no one would have wanted to look at particularly closely). It was something about the air, which was so much fresher than what came in through the window. Their room had been perfectly pleasant--wildly pleasant, in fact, beyond any dreams he ever would have had of any room he would ever be in, had he had the time to dream about staying anywhere before he'd gotten here--but there was something about the change in scenery.

At least, there was until they got to the stable. Bucky hadn't asked why they were headed that way, and only understood when he saw Rilian untie the first of the three horses that were tied there, and leap onto its back.

"You've gotta be kidding me," he said flatly, just as Loki coaxed the second horse where he wanted it, and jumped up on its back. He sat there looking at Bucky and looking like he'd been born up there.

"You've never liked riding," Loki said, though whether it was a statement of fact meant to help the Soldier or a reminder to himself was impossible to say. "Will the horse take two riders?"

This he said to Rilian, who nodded. "[S/he] has before, in more dire circumstances than these."

And so he tied the other horse to his own saddle, and Bucky jumped up being Loki, and then they were off. They didn't gallop, or even trot, or go much faster than a walk--it was just a serene sort of ride from the castle and into the forest, which came up very close to it, so that it didn't take more than three minutes before they were riding among the speckled shadows. There were trails there, and more than once they crossed a stream, which reminded Bucky of where he'd found Loki.

But mostly, what he was thinking of was how best to ride without hurting Loki. For his arms, were both around Loki's waist. Loki was still healing, and one of Bucky's arms was metal. He knew how to be careful with weapons, guns and knives and anything else he picked up but didn't want to bend or break. He had never had to be careful with a person; that had been the opposite of most of his missions, where even the ones where he was only supposed to extract intelligence without being seen involved eliminating anyone who was where they shouldn't have been to see what they shouldn't have seen. At the same time he was being careful, he had to balance himself well enough that he wouldn't have to suddenly grab Loki. in retrospect, he wished he'd jumped up in front of him--but since Loki was the one steering the horse, and they were about the same height, he wouldn't have been able to see without stretching.

It took Bucky probably fifteen minutes to be pretty sure he wasn't going to mess this up. It took another fifteen before he had the hand of it enough that he could afford to pay any more than the most basic attention to their surroundings or where they were going. It was around then that he noticed more than just that they were on a trail; it was around then that the green and the shadows and the day started to make an impression. The air was crisp, just on this side of cold; it was the first truly cold day of the season, come early enough that the trees had neither changed their clothes nor shed them altogether. They were still green, and the sun was bright and high in the sky, and everything had such a clear quality that for the rest of the ride, the static that always seemed to be in Bucky's vision or in his head was wiped away.

"I don't remember," he said to Loki's back, and then stopped, not so much because he didn't know what he was going to say, but because he couldn't see Loki's face to see what he'd think if Bucky were to say that he didn't remember ever enjoying being outside before.

"You could never ride in the first place, no matter how I tried to teach you," Loki said with something that might have been a little laugh, and then decided to show off by doing something with the reins, and something else with his legs, that made their horse run ahead of King Rilian's.

"Is that the way it is?" called Rilian, and the chase was on, down that trail and onto another. If Bucky had known anything about horses, he would have known that neither the King nor the Prince were truly pushing their steed. As it was, he simply felt that they were going a lot faster than he'd signed up for, and found himself holding onto Loki tighter than he'd meant to.

A few minutes later, they came out into a meadow, Rilian slightly ahead, and both of the horses slowed, and then came very nearly to a stop.

"It seems I have bested you in the race," said Rilian.

"It doesn't count," Loki said, sounding happier about being beaten than he'd sounded about anything that had happened up to now. (And truly he was; and if you have ever been confined to your house for any length of time due to injury or illness, you will know what a glorious thing it is the first time you are mostly well again have been allowed to go on even the most mundane errand or adventure.) "You should have beaten me by several lengths to account for the handicapping."

Rilian laughed. "'Tis true, two riders make a slower horse than one. As we did not discuss terms prior, mayhaps we may call it a draw."

"Fine," Loki said, sounding so smug he must have thought a draw meant the person who had asked for one had agreed to lose.

One of the other things Bucky hadn't noticed was that both horses were carrying a few bags. These turned out to hold a blanket, and pouches full of food: cheese and bread and little skins of wine. He noticed them now, as Rilian dismounted, and then he and Loki did as well, and started unpacking them. Pretty soon they were sitting together on the blanket in the sun.

"So what are we doing out here, anyway?" Bucky asked, a little while later, when most of the food was gone, and he was starting to get drowzy (another new feeling - he hadn't known you could get sleepy just from being outside, and full, and sun-touched).

"No need to interrogate our host," Loki said. "I'm sure he doesn't have an ulterior motive of any kind."

The way he said it made absolutely clear that he thought there was one. Then Rilian laughed again, this time a rueful laugh that all but confirmed so. 

"I confess I did not ask you to make this journey with me solely for the love of your company," he said. "But neither is there any evil in my request. It has been many years since I have ridden through Narnia for the sake of the ride itself--not since I was barely more than a boy."

"The day your mother died," said Loki, like he understood something Bucky didn't (and so he did, for of the three men who sat there, there were two who could remember their own mothers to miss them). 

"Yes," Rilian said. "And then came my enchantment--and I have not ridden out without a geas or an errand since. I did not realize how joyless an existence it had become until several nights past, when I was thinking upon what I might do to raise the spirits of my guests. It took me many hours to glean it--a distressing length of time, when once I would have had activity without count from which you might have chosen!"

"I suppose a magical cat appeared to you and told you to entertain us in the same place where your mother died," Loki said.

Even Bucky could tell how stupid (or rude, or both) of a comment that was, though Rilian's expression barely changed--

"Even Aslan would not expect me to revisit that place without steel bared," he said. "Or so I hope. As I hope I misunderstood whatever you might have meant by the rest of your remark. No, this meadow is another of the places we used to ride--one untainted by any memory worse than a time I twisted my ankle in the midst of some foolish feat, and was obliged to be carried homeward.

"Who's Aslan?" Bucky asked.

"He's--but you must know him," said Rilian. "I can see on both your faces that you must once have met him. In any case, our meal is gone, and so must we be, if we are to ride much farther before we must turn back again."

Bucky didn't remember ever meeting someone by that name, but he couldn't deny the way he felt, when Rilian said it. It was unlike any way he'd ever felt before--not so much safe as known. No matter who or what he remembered, or who other people remembered him being.

*

They rode for a while longer, Rilian calling out to the people and trees he knew (some of the trees seemed to be moving, or to be shaped not quite like trees; it was enough to make you wonder if they were people, too). Some of the Talking animals followed along for a while, talking to the King shyly or boldly, about a problem they were having or what their children were doing (or, if they were a child themselves, what they were doing that their parents might or might not have been aware of). No one who wasn't Rilian said much to Bucky or Loki, except to ask who they were; and always, Rilian said, "My friends, these esteemed visitors to our land of Narnia."

After another hour or so, they did turn around. At first, Bucky thought they were going the same way. Then the people they met all seemed to be different, and they passed through a couple little villages that they hadn't the first time, so he figured they must have gone by a different route. For the most part, he noticed a couple things: how solid and warm Loki was in front of him (and he hadn't hurt him at all, unless the time Loki had reached to move Bucky's hands down an inch meant he had been), and how relaxed Rilian seemed. He hadn't seemed tense, exactly, before, but there must have been a tension underneath the surface, because it had leeched away, making him look younger and, somehow, more kingly than he had before.

When they got back to the castle, they ate again, a big meal at Rilian's table, made up of all of the best foods. Then they went to their rooms--new ones for each of them, now that Loki was out of the woods. It was weird being alone in his room, but the Soldier barely had any time to think about it before he was asleep again.

*

After that, they went out every day, for longer and longer each day, always in a different direction than the day before. Sometimes they rode, but more and more as Loki's strength grew, they walked. The Soldier soon got the idea that the walks were a lot less about going further and further from the castle than they were about socializing--because no matter what direction they went in or what road they took, they got stopped all the time, if not by a Talking squirrel then by a Talking bird, if not by a Talking bird then by a Dwarf, if not by a Dwarf then by one of the people who lived in (were made out of) the trees or the water. Rilian would stop to talk with everyone who greeted them. He would seem to brighten, while Loki would roll his eyes--but Bucky had a feeling Loki could have done a whole lot worse if he'd really wanted to, so he eventually decided eye rolling was not worth worrying about.

After a while, Bucky started to know the many ways back to the castle on the ocean, even when they were going down a trail they hadn't been down before. It was a new feeling for him--before, whenever he'd broken through some of his conditioning (what Rilian called a "foul enchantment" and Loki called a "particularly inept attempt"), he'd sometimes tried to remember the ways they took him from one room to another. But every time he'd started getting somewhere with it, the hallways would change again, with different numbers of doors, headed to different places. Now, he figured those were the times they must have moved him while he'd been frozen (not asleep, never asleep--he didn't remember ever sleeping before Narnia, though he knew he must have, back when he was a person, if he'd ever been a person at all, the way Loki seemed to think and the way Steve had seemed to, and the way Bucky himself thought he might be, when he thought enough about it to let himself). So it was good, to be in one place for long enough to start to know the ways in and out. And it was good to know which nooks and crannies were good for ducking into, when Loki's eyerolling had stopped, and he'd gotten that look on his face like he was going to ruin Rilian's whole day, deliberately, while he was talking to a bear.

"C'mon," Bucky said, and grabbed Loki's elbow with his flesh hand, and they ducked between two huge trees, which were big enough and place the right way that when you stood between them, you couldn't see what the people standing by the road were doing, and they couldn't see you.

"What are you doing?" Loki grumbled, but he already looked happier, and definitely didn't look like he was about to wander back out there and piss off a bear.

"Taking a break. And so should you," Bucky said.

"All right."

The greatest litmus test of a large tree, is whether or not there is a good place to sit beneath it. Here there were two, and so they sat down together, and listened to the woods. Rilian's voice was muffled, with the trees between him and them--and he must also have been walking away, because his voice started to fade even more than that, until Bucky couldn't hear it at all. All he could hear was the sound of insects, the occasional call of a bird. They must not have been Talking trees, for they made no sound or objection to being sat under; if any Talking animals lived very near here, they must have been out, or napping, or not in much of a talking mood.

"What thought of yours required such seclusion?" Loki asked, sending Bucky a sideways look he couldn't read, though some part of him felt he must have seen it before, and some other part of him seemed to respond, a heat inside him that he hadn't felt before, and didn't recognize.

"You were about to cause trouble," Bucky said, because there was something about that heat that made him think he didn't want to talk about it, at least not until he knew for sure what it was, or what it meant.

Loki grinned at him, maybe the first time he'd done it. It only lasted for a second before he was serious, but it was how you could know everything he had to say after that was bullshit. "Trouble? Me? Whatever gave you that impression?"

"You almost stabbed a Talking leopard yesterday," Bucky pointed out.

"He was asinine," Loki said, waving it off. "Someone desperately needed to stab him. And if not me, then who?"

"I think maybe it's better not to stab most people."

For some reason, he kind of expected Loki to laugh at this. But all he did was look at Bucky, piercingly, and say, slowly, "You say that as if it's a revelation."

Bucky shrugged, because to do anything else was to admit that it kind of had been. But he didn't want to talk about it, either. The part of him that was starting to get how bad the things he'd done had been was also the part of him that didn't want to see what Loki would think of him for doing them.

"I don't think I'll ever get used to this," Loki said, and when he stopped speaking was when something happened.

A voice weaved through the darkness, so low they never would have heard it if it hadn't been so quiet in that particular spot. Anyone else's voice would have drowned it out. The scuffing of someone's boot in the dirt would have, or the trickling from a nearby stream. But it was quiet there, an oasis of calm in the dark of the woods, and so the voice came through clearly--

" I sssaw him, " it said. " If we go in thisss direction, we ssshall be able to fall upon him the moment he isss alone. "

" Yesss, " said another voice, only slightly different.

Then there came a low shuffling sound, from somewhere up above. Then there was a cracking sound, too, and a light branch came tumbling to the ground. Then they saw it, Bucky and Loki: a snake--no, two snakes--slithering down from a vantage point in the trees. Or maybe they should have been called something else, because all the snakes Bucky had seen--and he'd seen a few, usually on missions that were more remote than the last one--had been small, no more than a few feet long, the kind of thing you could pick up and throw if you wanted to. But these snakes were as wide around as his waist, and much longer than he was tall. And now he knew why their voices had seemed different--because they slithered when they talked just as much as they slithered instead of walking.

When the snakes were gone, Bucky looked at Loki. They'd both jumped up as soon as the snakes wouldn't notice them, and where Bucky had drawn his sword, Loki had a knife in his hand.

They looked at each other, and then Bucky said, "Rilian," at the same time Loki said, "Shit!"

Together, they ran, not after the snakes, but onto the road and after King Rilian. 

Bucky had never in his life run so fast. Even when he'd run during missions, that had only been because not running was going to hurt him more. Now he ran because he had an idea of what could happen if he didn't. Rilian had told him about the fight he'd had with a snake--and how he'd almost lost that fight. He'd had three friends with him, last time, and it had only been one snake.

For a second, he imagined he could hear the snakes, their scales scraping against leaves and bark, rustling against dirt and pine needles. Then he knew he couldn't have, because as fast as he and Loki were going, he wasn't likely to hear something that quiet beneath the sound of their labored breathing, their quickly beating hearts.

Then, he left Loki behind, pulling again. It was surprising enough that he almost turned back, the surprise in and of itself shocking enough that he nearly stumbled. Later he'd think that of course it made sense, because he was the way he was, and Loki was still healing. Later still he'd think that he had changed more than he'd ever thought, if he could outpace Loki even with a handicap like this one. In the moment, he shoved back the surprise and the shock, deep beneath the mission, what he would later also realize was the first mission he'd ever given himself. He shoved those things back, and he ran, and reached Rilian moments ahead of the serpents.

"My friend, what--" Rilian said, turning around on the path to gaze at him quizzically. But he only gazed for a second, because then Bucky drew his sword, the same one he'd been given and had no idea whatsoever how to use, and whirled around, looking for the snakes, which couldn't have been behind, and maybe shouldn't have been behind at all.

He barely noticed Rilian draw his sword too, except to move so that he was facing the opposite direction from Rilian, and neither of their backs was unprotected.

"Snakes," he said in the next moment, still scanning the trees around them, for an attack that could come from above or below, who knew. "Two of them, after you."

"Ah," said Rilian, and for once didn't go into a long explanation of why he sounded like he knew exactly what this was about, and wasn't even surprised, really.

They stood there, back to back, both looking, both waiting. The woods around had taken on a waiting quality, too--no bird calls, no sounds outside of their circle, a not particularly defensible area of trail. It couldn't have been more than fifteen seconds. It certainly was no more than twenty. It felt like much longer than that, felt like years, or decades. Maybe this was what time felt like when what you were doing mattered to you.

Then someone screamed. From the direction Bucky had come.

"Loki," he said, and found that this somehow mattered more than any of the other things that mattered right now. "I have to--"

He'd never be sure, exactly, what happened next, in what order. Whether Rilian said, "Yes," and broke in that direction before or after Bucky did. He'd never remember, exactly, how far they had to run before they got there. All he remembered was hearing that scream, and then breaking through a thick pack of underbrush to find one snake wrapped around Loki's torso, not seeming to care how much he kept stabbing it with the hand he had free.

Bucky had often been angry during his other missions. But maybe he'd never really been angry that he remembered, because he'd never been so angry that he couldn't think, couldn't plan, couldn't strategize. He'd never been so angry that he couldn't even think of the consequences at all. He was too angry here to do anything but take his sword, and start hitting the snake with it. He hit it and hit it, doing such damage to that blade that it would never be wielded again by anyone (though it had once been a fine blade indeed). He didn't think to aim for the head until Loki said, "Stop! Unless you mean to cleave me in two."

Then, finally, Bucky's vision cleared from whatever white haze had overtaken him, and he looked and saw that the snake that had been around Loki could be nothing but dead. It had been cut so terribly in the middle that there was less than an inch of it remaining between where Bucky's sword would have hit it next, and where Loki's abdomen began.

"Sorry," he said, though he wasn't sure he was, really. All he figured was that it was harder to look Loki in the eye than it should have been--like he'd seen something too personal, something the Soldier would have preferred to be able to sort through by himself first. 

"The King," Loki said sharply, and Bucky turned to see the second snake going for Rilian. Probably it had been for the whole time he'd been hacking away at the snake around Loki. It hadn't managed to wrap itself around Rilian yet--but its jaws were open, and venom dropped from its mouth when it moved its head, making the leaves sizzle when it fell onto them. 

Bucky stepped forward, and slashed out at the snake's head again and again with his now-ruined sword. It was enough to distract it, until Rilian's sword managed to connect with its neck, which dazed the snake enough for him to hit it again, and again. Before long, its head fell to the ground, its jaws still working, so that both Bucky and Rilian took several large steps back.

"I have told you the story of my captivity," Rilian said at last, when it was clear both snakes were dead, and Loki had managed to extricate himself from his and hobble over to where they were. "But there is an event even I did not recall until these last moments. Once, in the earliest days of those ten years, the Witch was visited by her sisters. These must be they, come to extract vengeance for their sister's death."

"What a waste," Loki muttered, at the same time Bucky said, "Huh."

*

The snakes were burned, instead of buried--for a Witch whose body lay buried might find a way to return to it (or at least that was what all the Narnians seemed to think). They ended up going back to Cair Paravel much later than they'd expected to when they started out. It was dark, and no one was really hungry, for the burning of any corpse is an unpleasant business, and the burning of a corpse that is also a snake imbued with any manner of dark magic is one of those experiences for which no description would be unpleasant enough.

It was on the way back to their rooms that Bucky chanced to glance over at Loki, who was moving much more stiffly than he had in any of the days since he had been well enough to go out again.

"You okay?" he asked.

"As ever," said Loki, and it was hard to say whether his face did look more tired or pained than he had most of the time. It was the first moment it occurred to Bucky to wonder if there had been something other than the obvious injuries going on all along.

Before he could ask, or even begin to come up with a way to ask, or put the pieces of their first few confusing hours here into a picture that made sense, he had followed Loki into his room. Either Loki wasn't very modest, or had gotten used to being half-dressed in front of people, because the door had no more closed before he had reached down and begun to pull off his shirt. But begun was all he managed, before stopping and letting out a harsh breath, and closing his eyes.

"Let me help," Bucky said, and did, something like the way the doctor had, except that maybe it was easier for him, being around Loki's height instead of getting cut off below the waist. He reached over and helped Loki pull the shirt off, slowly, slowly, so as not to hurt him. When it was off, he could see why Loki had been stiff; he wasn't bleeding, his previous wound now healed enough that it wasn't going to break open, but he was bruised, the sort of dark, mottled color that would be a deep purple in the morning.

"Looks nasty," he said, though some part of him just thought it didn't look fatal, and reached over to Loki's nightstand, where there was a plain, half-full bottle of medicine. "You should sit down."

"You don't have to do this," said Loki, who didn't seem like he was usually the type to demure. And, in fact, didn't make any kind of move to stop Bucky, but only sat down heavily on the bed, looking even more tired than he had before.

"I think we're both really going to regret it in the morning if I don't," Bucky said, twisting off the jar's lid, and taking out a big dab of the stuff. By the time he sat down next to Loki with the stuff on one hand and the jar in the other, he could already feel his fingers a little less than he had before--they weren't numb, exactly, but you could tell the ointment wasn't for eating or anything like that.

"You say that as if we're going to," Loki said, and gave a little gasp when Bucky connected with him, whether out of pain or because the stuff was cooler than his skin, "be here in the morning."

"What are you talking about?"

"The snakes. The assassination. We've foiled it. We've done what we were sent here to do. All that's left now is for us to go back home."

"I don't have a home," the Soldier said, feeling suddenly number than the cream as he spread it over Loki's abdomen, barely noticing the way the skin of Loki's stomach twitched beneath him as he thought, didn't think, about what that meant.

"That makes two of us," Loki said with a wry look at him. "I may yet return to what was mine, however."

"Oh yeah?"

But whatever Loki had planned for when he went back to his own world, he must not have been keen on sharing, for he said abruptly, "And where will you go?"

Bucky tried to think of where he'd been when he fell here. He couldn't remember much. He'd been in a hurry; he'd been full of static and noise where now he was full of quiet and nothing. "I don't know," he said, and thought abruptly of the sun, shining down on desert sands. He thought of it for just a moment and then it was gone, a memory or a mirage or a who-knew-what. "I guess I'll figure it out when I get there. If I get there."

He hadn't thought about it at all, while he was here in Narnia. He hadn't had to, in this land where the King decided what they were going to do everyday, where they were going to go, when what they were going to do and where they were going to go was never anything like what the Soldier had been used to.

"You'll find someplace safe," Loki said. "You'll find someplace to hide. In plain sight, perhaps."

"I don't know," Bucky said again, and kept massaging the stuff onto Loki until Loki said,

"That's enough."

Then, together, they wrapped bandages around his abdomen, and then he lay down under the covers, and just when Bucky was about to go out into the hallway and back to his own room, Loki said, sleepily, "Stay."

So Bucky did, not on the floor or on the couch, because there was no couch and he'd gotten used to mattresses, and anyway Loki didn't protest when he got under the covers next to him. Maybe he didn't mind, or maybe it was just that he didn't notice. Either way, it felt like something they had done before, something that was familiar even without the memory of it. And there was something else, some other, aching feeling when Bucky thought about how close they were lying to each other, how little room their was between them and how easy it would be to touch. How easy it would have been, but they didn't, the whole night, as far as he could tell. Like there was something there, though he couldn't figure out what it was.

All night, Bucky didn't sleep, waiting for the moment when this would all be gone. By the time the sun started coming up, he started to think that maybe Loki had been wrong on this one, no matter how sure he'd sounded. Then he closed his eyes, finally, and started to fall into sleep--something that was still dizzying, and maybe should have worried him, since it was still so new, and he still didn't remember having ever done it before, natural as it was to other people.

He fell, and in the next moment he landed somewhere. He hadn't opened his eyes, but found that he was looking anyway, at distant pink mountains underneath a clear blue sky that seemed to go on forever. The sun was beating down on his head. Something was gritty under his boots. As he looked around, he thought that maybe he should have been more panicked. This wasn't Narnia, but it also wasn't the city he'd left behind when he went. If there had ever been a riverbank here, it had been a very long time ago.

Maybe he should have been more panicked, but instead, all he felt was a kind of peace. Wherever he was was where he was supposed to be, at least for now. Wherever he was, there was no chance they'd know it, or catch him while he was getting his bearings. He'd been given not so much space as more time.

A mile or two away, there was a road, shimmering toward the mountains, a grey ribbon among the sand and the brush. On the other end, headed toward the mountain, there came a spark of light, piercing enough to make his eyes wince closed. A car, driving toward him. Bucky walked a little faster. He wondered if it would stop. It wouldn't be the first time he'd hitched a ride, if so; but it would be the first time he remembered that he didn't have to do something about the driver.

Whatever came next, it was going to be better.

5. Traitor

Bucky was out in front of his hut when he had the vision, or the dream, or maybe just the ghost. One second, there was no one around but his goats, butting his legs and nibbling his shirt, all worked up about the bucket of feed he had in his hand. The next second, there was someone else there with him. A young guy, maybe about twenty, dressed in the kind of outfit Bucky was pretty sure no one on Earth wore, now or at anytime in the past. He looked young, and determined, and scared to death. He looked like someone had given him a great big wallop in the mouth pretty recently.

And the second he appeared, he started to talk. The problem was that not a work of what he was saying made it to Bucky.

"I can't hear you," Bucky said, absentmindedly maneuvering the bucket out of the way of a particularly insistent goat, who had risen on his hind legs in order to stick his head over the lip of the bucket. "Can you mime it, or something?"

The guy shook his head, not like he'd heard Bucky, but like he hadn't. He said something else, or maybe the same thing, with slower, more exaggerated mouth movements than before, giving the impression he was talking not only more slowly, but more loudly as well. (In fact, he was.) But Bucky was no good at reading lips--was so bad at it in this moment that he figured he must never have been good at it--and so he didn't get a single word of whatever the ghost was trying to get across.

In the end, it didn't seem to matter. A minute after he'd shown up in the first place, just as he was starting to make gestures, like he couldn't read lips either but had come out on the side of miming for himself anyway, he disappeared. One second he was there, the next second he was gone, and the first second he was gone was when Bucky started to feel the tingle.

It started at the tips of his fingers, the ends of his toes. He dropped the feed bucket on the ground, dodging past excited goats on his way back into his hut. Between his sleeping mat and the window, there was a wooden chest, close enough that all he'd have to do to reach it in the middle of the night would be to sit up and reach over.

Nestled in the top drawer was his arm, the new one. Bucky snapped it on, then pulled out the drawer and reached further in. He strapped the crossbow to his back. Now the tingle had traveled up his arm and legs, to the center of him, the place where things happened. He fastened the swordbelt to his waist, then drew the sword to check its balance. Its blade gleamed in the light; it might have been an Earth sword, but it was a good one, easily the equal of any other sword or knife he could remember holding. Last, the sheath of arrows, and the tingle had become a pull.

Bucky couldn't resist it, and he didn't try. If he was right about what was happening, he'd had time to get everything he needed.

One second, the sun was still shining in through the door of his hut, full morning daylight from the east. The next second, he was standing in the dark, somewhere else. The blackness only seemed total for a second. Then his eyes started to adjust, until he could see the still trees all around him. Then something moved between one tree and another, a tall slender shadow, familiar as it was expected.

"Loki?" Bucky asked, not quite in a whisper. "That you?"

The shadow stilled, then turned to come toward Bucky, where before it had been moving away. "So you recall my name this time."

"Must've been a lucky guess," Bucky said. His hand had gone to his sword in case he was wrong. Now it fell away, as a wide grin that no one could see split across his face. "You been here long?"

"Mere moments. Did you also glimpse a vision, moments ago?"

"Sure did."

"He had a Narnian look to him, didn't he?"

"Yep. Anyone we know?"

"--No," Loki said after a short pause. It was the same short pause Bucky still got sometimes during conversations with Steve, when one or both of them had gotten so comfortable they'd forgotten how much he didn't remember. "But I don't recall meeting anyone here more than once."

"Good to know," Bucky said, because if the best thing when it came to Steve was to move on, that had to be even more true when it came to Loki. "Any idea where we are?"

The answer came, incautious and biting: "I would have hoped you might have retained that much."

"No," Bucky said, rolling his eyes, which was another thing besides grinning that wasn't going to get a lot of mileage, here in the dark. "I don't mean where we are. I mean where we are , now that we're here."

"How should I know?"

"Well, you're the one with the magic and stuff," Bucky pointed out, reasonably enough.

Loki didn't seem to agree that it was reasonable. He did a lot of grumbling instead, the gist of which seemed to be that he'd never devoted himself to navigating the woods in the middle of the night, since in civilized realms one could simply open a magic doorway to go places.

"Besides," he said, at the end of the all moaning and groaning, "I have things to do that don't involve any of this?"

"Like what?" Bucky asked. By now they'd been fumbling around in the woods for a few minutes, trying to find a road, or a stream, or anything worth following. (Though to call it fumbling isn't quite right; they'd each had been well-trained in the art of going smoothly and quietly through territory known and unknown. Only if you had been similarly trained would you have picked up on how off-balance they truly were.)

"I was headed to a council meeting," Loki said. "They'll do something foolish if I'm not there to talk them out of it."

"Who's they?"

"Thor. Heimdall. The Valkyrie. The Hulk. Any of them." A pause. "Well, perhaps not Heimdall. But any of the others."

Thor, now there was a name Bucky recognized. A couple of the others sounded vaguely familiar too. But mostly Thor. "Did you guys make up? You and your brother, I mean."

"...You could say that. A great deal has happened."

A lot must have happened the last time, too. Bucky could remember everything about his most recent trip to Narnia. Mostly, what he remembered was how little comfort he must have been. He hadn't been able to help it; he'd still been the Soldier then. He'd barely known enough to stick around while Loki healed, nevermind enough to ask what had happened to him, or even say he was sorry for his loss.

"Like what?" he asked, figuring late was better than never. He could listen this time, and find something to say. Even if it wasn't the right thing, it would have to be better than nothing at all.

Except before Loki could answer, they both saw something, in the same moment. A little pinprick of light, far off in the darkness. For a moment, Bucky almost remembered...something that had happened. But whatever the memory was, it was as elusive as any of the others, and went away completely as soon as he tried to think of what it had been.

"Let's go," he said instead.

As they started that way, Loki said, "Do you require a blade?"

There was something else familiar again, the same shape and feel as the last thing. This time, Bucky didn't chase it. He just went with the first thing that came into his head, even though he had a sword and a crossbow and at least four or five knives on him: "Sure."

The shadow who was Loki passed him a knife. Bucky's fingers wrapped around the hilt, which was engraved with a design his fingers couldn't quite make out. Make it was runes, spelling out the words of some spell; maybe it was some other design, meant to do the same, or meant to be nothing but pretty. Whatever it was, it felt right in his hand, and even more right when he stashed it away into one of his hiding spots that had been empty up until now.

Together, silent, they went toward the light.

*

The light, which was not so very far away as it had seemed in the beginning, turned out to be a fire, around which a number of figures sat. Despite not being far, it took Bucky and Loki the better part of an hour to finish their approach--for stealth is as much about quiet as it is about darkness, and as much darkness as they had been given, it is always possible in the woods that you will tread on a brittle branch or pile of dry leaves. If you can have no light of your own to show you your way, the best thing is then to take every single step with greatest care.

They were nearly close enough to hear what the people round the fire were saying when another voice came from out of the dark, at the same time, something sharp came to press against the side of Bucky's neck, just beneath and below his ear: "Halt where you stand, unless you would meet your death."

For of course there had been a sentry, and no matter how carefully they had both kept their eyes and ears open for such a person, they had somehow neither seen nor heard this one. Bucky halted at once, and Loki beside him, even before Bucky grabbed his arm to keep him from doing anything. He must have figured out what was going on on Bucky's side, for although he was tense beneath Bucky's hand, he did not try to lash out to stab the speaker.

"You got it," Bucky said. "Not going anywhere."

He looked to his left, the best he could. What he saw there wasn't as illuminating as it could been: it was a man, slimmer and shorter than either of them, standing in an even more total patch of darkness than they were. As expected, he was holding a sword to Bucky's throat, not the straight blade he would have expected, but something more curved. He looked to his right, the same way, and something about Loki's silhouette gave the impression that he was only holding himself back for now.

"Who are you, and from whence have you come?" asked the shadow. 

Once, Bucky had opened his mouth and said Loki's name, without knowing what it meant. Now he opened his mouth and said another name: "Aslan sent us."

The shadow was silent, but his breathing seemed suddenly harsher than it might have been, there in the dark. Then: "You don't serve Tashlan, then?"

You'd have had to be deaf or asleep to miss the loathing in the man's voice. But the blade didn't cut into Bucky's skin, or press in deeper at all; so it couldn't have been for them. 

"Who?" Loki said, at the same time Bucky opened his mouth and let his first instinct guide him again--

"We don't know who that is," he said. "We just got here." He didn't have to see the man's face to know there was some sort of battle going on there; the blade at his throat faltered, just a little, then pressed in, not enough to draw blood, but enough to show he wasn't believed, not yet. "We're here to help," he said, and it wasn't the first time he'd said it, he'd been taught to say anything he had to to get access to his targets when he was the Soldier, but it was the first time he could remember being in a position to say it and having it be true.

The blade fell away from his neck, and the second after it did, another shadow blew through the space they stood in like a hurricane. The next thing anyone knew, the sword had fallen to the ground, and Loki's hand was pressing something to the man's throat. Bucky didn't have to see what he was holding to know what it was.

"Loki," he said in a low voice (not a whisper, for a whisper will carry in the dark and quiet, more so than a low speaking voice will, and it was indeed quiet, even eerily so, in those woods that night). 

But before he could say anything else, several of the figures around the fire stood up. They were close enough to see that they were men in armor, wearing curved swords on their belts; they were close enough to see how quickly their hands went to the hilts of those swords.

"All is well, brothers," called the man, before anyone had even told him what kind of thing he ought to say. "I merely startled some dumb beast, and was startled in return."

Somehow, he managed to say it not like a guy who was currently being threatened by a sorcerer from another world, but from a guy who'd done something embarrassing, and was only admitting to as much as he had because what had actually happened was much more embarrassing.

It was the exact impression he'd given the other soldiers, too. One or two of them called things into the dark that Bucky couldn't make out, but that were clearly mocking; then they sat back down, and started talking about whatever they'd been talking about before the commotion.

"Now," Loki said in a low voice, "what shall we do with this Calormene?"

"Nothing stupid," Bucky said, not really seeing a way to get Loki to stand down at this very second, and not necessarily inclined to that idea even if he had (after all, the man had attacked them first, and while he wasn't as quick or as strong as either of them, surprise had made it not matter). He didn't think, in that moment or later, to question Loki's assessment; that the man before them was a Calormene seemed as obvious as that the sky was blue, even though it never would have occurred to Bucky until Loki had said it. "You obviously know the territory," he said to the Calormene. "Can you guide us out of here?"

"Certainly," said the man, or rather, the youth, because even in the dark Bucky had started to get the impression that he wasn't skinny because he was built that way, but because he was young--not a kid, exactly, or even a boy, and not not a man, but somewhere in the very beginning of learning to be a man. "Or perhaps I could lead you straight into a trap--for is it not said that a cornered dog will bite any hand?"

"Let him go," Bucky advised, with no idea whether or not Loki would do it, and knowing there wasn't a lot he could do about it if he didn't, other than bring the soldiers down on them. "Let's see what he does."

With a sound of discuss, and a toss of his head that could only mean he was rolling his eyes, Loki did--and spent the rest of the night hovering between Bucky and the stranger, in that casual way that meant he was trying really hard to make sure no one noticed (and so Bucky, of course, pretended not to, even if he was a hundred percent sure that he was stronger than Loki now, and at least as fast). 

"Lead us out of here," he said. "I don't have to have a blade at your throat to end you."

It was a ridiculous threat, the way most of Loki's were: the kind of thing that was so obvious it didn't need to be said, instead of the kind that was so ludicrous it shouldn't have been. 

"Come," the man said, or didn't; maybe it was the wave of his hand that said it instead, as he turned and began to make his way away from the fire. 

For the next several hours, none of them spoke. They understood clearly enough without it. When the man crept forward, they followed; when he halted, they did too, and listened. It was a fraught journey, especially since they had no idea how many other soldiers might be hanging around in the dark, and it wasn't safe to talk anymore than they already had. They were in enemy territory when they'd been supposed to be in Narnia; when Bucky was becoming more and more certain they were in Narnia. It wasn't something he could ask about, but he was more and more sure of it. Eventually, he realized he was becoming more sure of it every time he saw a glimpse of the stars. They weren't constellations he knew, but some part of him must still have recognized them.

Enemy territory, but in Narnia itself. So something really bad must have happened. But maybe that wasn't too surprised, considering how desperate the guy in the vision had looked. Bucky wondered where he was, and what he was doing. What he needed. He might not have had very clear memories of Narnia, but he knew enough to know that last time wasn't the only time they'd had work to do. There was always something they had to do. They just had to do it, whether they figured out what it was before then or not. 

After a few hours, they were far enough away from the campsite that they could no longer see the flicker of the campfire. It was around then that the sky started to lighten, though so barely no one who hadn't been squinting up at the stars would have noticed for another few minutes. It was around then that they got to the barn. They'd passed a burned-out stable on a hill a while back, which had been around the time the trees had disappeared, and become the trunks of trees instead. It was a sight that shouldn't have been as shocking as it was, except that maybe some part of Bucky knew it was more shocking here for some reason than it would have been on Earth. It hadn't made them walk any faster, but he'd gotten the idea around then that their guide was walking with more purpose. 

Now, he stopped.

"If you're to go on to meet with the Narnian King, you may wish to bring with you some of his subjects," he said. "They are within the barn, tied or hobbled or both."

What kind of subjects, Bucky could have asked, but by the time he heard the first whining yawn from inside, the man had already produced a key to the padlock in the door, and was already in the process of wrestling with it. By the time he had the thought that he could or maybe should ask, the chain had fallen from the doors, which had been thrown open. Loki produced a light, a green flame the floated about a foot in front of them and a few inches above them (this produced widened eyes from their companion, who was a [hardened] enough soldier to know better than to either gasp or falter). To either side, they could see horses in each stall, which shouldn't have been a terrible thing--but these horses, tired as they were and even more startled, had something in their faces that made it even more terrible to see them. Bucky had just started to work out which it was when the tallest of them, who was also the oldest, tossed its head and said, "If you have come to tell us we must begin our work hours' earlier--!"

The way its lip curled above its teeth as it spoke made it pretty clear there would be biting involved; the way it stamped its feet said there'd be some trampling too, if it had its way. But before it could say anything else, or any of them could answer, a different sound came from the largest stall, the one at the end: a cacophony of whines, and little woofs, and, "These ones smell different!" "Yes they do, yes they do, I do say they smells different!" "It might be a good smell, I say!" "Except there's a Calormene there too!" "Yes, I do say there's a Calormene! Could smell him from a mile away, I could!"

Somehow, Bucky wasn't at all surprised when the faces that appeared above that stall didn't belong to horses. They were, instead, doggie faces, one after the other. If you have ever arrived home and seen your dogs jumping up and down to see you from the window, then falling down out of view again, only to immediately jump back up that was something like this--except that these dogs had the same thing in their faces that the horses had had, so that you would have known they were different even before they spoke to you.

"We've come to help," said Bucky, for the second time that night. Behind him, Loki and the other man moved among the horses, speaking in low, calming voices, with the occasional rattle of a chain that said everything Bucky needed to know about what they were doing. Bucky was somehow sure he wasn't needed, because he was even more sure he didn't know anything about horses, and so he reached for the chain on the door of this last stall, and ripped it away, and then lifted the bar, and then before he could open the door it opened anyway, with the weight of six or seven big dogs pushing on it from the other end.

The Calormene had been right that they were tied--with big, heavy chains that made you wonder how they could stand to stand, nevermind jump up to put their heads above the stall door to see what was happening--and if you have ever tried to remove a chain from a dog's neck when there is not one dog but fifteen or so, and all of them are jumping to put their paws on your shoulders while whining or barking or saying variations on, "This one's not a Calormene! The nose knows!" then you may have cause to wonder how Bucky fared. The answer is that the first couple minutes were fraught, as the dogs kept saying, "Not a Calormene! Not not not! Welcome, friend!" while Bucky kept saying, "You guys need to calm down if you want me to get those chains off." But eventually, one or more of the dogs must have heard him, for the excited refrain became, "Chains off! Chains off! Calm down and we'll get our chains off!" And a minute or two after that, the meaning must have gotten through, because the dogs all sat down in the same kind of cacophony they'd jumped up with in the first place.

As a result of all this, even once Bucky had gotten the chains--as well as the collars, which were also made out of chain--off their necks, the dogs were still attached to one another, and had to be untangled one by one from their friends. It would have been an easier job if they hadn't all kept getting excited and jumping back up every time Bucky got one of them all the way free--but they were all so happy, and their happiness was so catching, that by the time he was halfway through, he was grinning, and by the time he'd gotten to the last dog, he was doing it so hard his face hurt like hell.

"There are no guards nearby, according to him," Loki said, when Bucky finally walked out of the stall, and closed the door on nothing but piles and piles of chains. "Nevertheless, they've raised such an uproar--"

"That we'd better be going, yeah," Bucky agreed. He looked around to see the dogs milling with the horses--who, unlike the non-talking type, stood there quietly and let them, instead of spooking. That was the nice thing about Talking horses, he figured; they were a lot less likely to break themselves or other people because of freaking put at every shadow. "Got it. Where are we headed now?"

In the light from Loki's floating flame, he could see the face of the Calormene. He wasn't quite as young as his frame in the dark had made Bucky think; he was definitely more man than boy, but maybe not that much more. There was a purpose in his face, set there the way it only can be when you're young and don't know how bad things could go for you (or if you do know, you don't care, because you've never had to face any such things), but there was also a hesitation there, an uncertainty you only get when you're stepping outside of where you're supposed to be for the first time. Bucky thought he might have had that look a lot, in the first few days after Hydra, both in Narnia and in his own world; it made him feel a lot of sympathy for the Calormene, whatever his name was.

Speaking of which--

"We haven't really introduced ourselves," he said. "I'm Bucky Barnes, and this is Loki."

He paused, waiting, not sure what he was waiting for until Loki said, "Yes," and he found himself curious about why Loki hadn't gone into what he was the Prince of.

"Emeth," said the Calormene, "[more stuff, look up in book]. But now we should move on--to the West."

And so they left the barn, some of the dogs and horses running ahead, and some behind, and all of them so loud, between the tramping of the horses's hooves and the woofs and other sounds from the dogs, that it seemed like they could have a conversation without worrying about it being the thing to give them away.

"Where are we headed to? Besides West," Bucky said. "What's been going on here?"

"Our forces routed the king of Narnia nearly a week past," said Emeth. "He was seen going west, and his eagle is oft seen flying over from that direction. Many times have we tried to shoot it down, but thus far it has flown its [reconnaissance] far above the range of our arrows."

It was a good thing they didn't have guns in Narnia, Bucky thought, but didn't say. "So you guys what, invaded? What did the Narnians ever do to you?"

"That is not for me to know, or to say," said Emeth somewhat stiffly. He was quiet for a few seconds, then added, in a lower, more confused voice, "It has not--it has not been what I thought it would be."

He didn't elaborate on what he'd thought it would be, and there was something about the way he said it that made Bucky think maybe he shouldn't push too hard. Maybe, if he did, Emeth would decide he didn't want to help them. Then they'd be stuck in the middle of enemy territory, with no guide and a lot of loud animals, none of whom seemed that bright, and about half of whom were loud and boisterous and didn't seem to have much sense at all.

"You thought you were coming for glory's sake," Loki said, when the conversation had seemed to everyone else to be over. "What you found was something infinitely more complex, not to mention--filthier."

That sounded about right. That was what war was like, for a lot of people. He didn't have the proof to back it up, but some part of that statement made Bucky think of Steve more than anyone else.

"Yes," Emeth said, and then one of the dogs, an older bitch with more sense than the rest, called out,

"I smell Calormenes, and Calormene horses."

"Where?" called another of the dogs.

"Where where where?" about half of the pack agreed.

"I smell them too," said another.

"Too too too," echoed more of them.

"To the east, the east, the east!"

"Maybe we could be quieter about it," said Bucky.

Loki's flame, which he had kept lit since the barn, seemingly having figured that if they could be heard for a ways off, then what did it matter if they could also be seen, dampened its light and then went out altogether. The two humans and Loki took a minute for their eyes to adjust to the light, then headed in the same direction they had been going before. They were still going fairly quickly, but now they were all trying for silence, with the dogs snuffling instead of shouting, and whining instead of barking.  Every few minutes, one of the more sensible dogs would double back, and come back to report how much closer the Calormenes seemed. For a while, they didn't seem closer at all, but as the night turned into morning and the blackness turned into the gray light of the pre-dawn, they started to advance.

"They mean to trap us there," Loki said, when they had word that the men behind them--at least thirty on as many horses, half carrying spears and the other half arrows, according to a dog who had gotten much closer to them than any of the rest, and had almost ended up with an arrow in his side for his troubles. 

By 'there,' what Loki meant was between the Calormenes and the cliff--for although the wood was thicker here, there were still open spaces they passed through where they could see what waited ahead. By now, they could hear it too: Water crashing down, somewhere ahead, a sound that was almost as unwelcoming as the occasional sight of the cliffs, which looked steep and unwelcoming. Maybe a goat could get up there, or a rock climber, but in the minutes before they reached the rock-face, Bucky kept wondering about the dogs, not to mention the poor horses.

Despite the fact that they'd known they were coming closer, it was still a surprise to break out of the trees in that place. In front of them was the waterfall, frothing white and violent, and nearly loud enough to start the kind of static in Bucky's head that he hadn't had in years. Behind them were the Calormenes, close enough now and for the last few minutes that Bucky could hear their shouts, the jingling of their armor, the snorts of their poor dumb (he hoped) horses. Around them were the horses and dogs they'd freed, and as ready as they looked to fight, they also looked weary, like they hadn't slept or eaten in too long--and they didn't have any armor, and they didn't have any weapons other than what the two humans and Loki carried.

"Backs to the water," Bucky said, not meaning to take charge but doing it anyway, the way he always had when he'd been the Soldier and had a team, the way he'd never once thought would be useful anywhere else. He had the sinking feeling it wasn't going to be enough. Maybe it would have been, other than the spears, and the arrows. "Let's try to have one horse for every few dogs--yeah, like that. We're going to try to take some of them out before they get here, so don't rush forward until you have to."

Then he jumped onto a large boulder, and aimed his crossbow at the shadows from which the sound of jingling came. He'd armed it while he was talking, taken out a second arrow before his feet hit the stone. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Loki, still on the ground, pulling out one throwing knife, then another, and another. Then his hand flashed, and one flew, and from the shadows there came a grunt, barely perceptible among all the other sounds. Then in the shadows Bucky finally saw motion, and shot his arrow, loaded the next, shot that one too. He shot and shot and shot again, counting each time he pulled an arrow from his back quiver.

"Fifteen," he muttered, as the first armor winked at him from a break in the forest, and he knew the sun was up.

"Twenty," he said, as one of the dogs, a young fellow with more courage than sense, broke from the others.

"Twenty-one," he said, as he shot an arrow through the throat of the Calormene who was aiming right for that particular dog.

"Twenty-four," he said as he shot the last, and dropped his crossbow, and drew his sword.

By the time he jumped down from the rock, he knew he'd done almost nothing. There just wasn't enough space between the edge of the water and the edge of the forest; there hadn't been the kind of visibility you needed when you were cutting down on the enemy's numbers. As the Calormenes broke through the last underbrush between them and the Narnians they'd rescued, Bucky could see that his arrows, while send hard and true and devastating, hadn't done the damage he had wanted them to do; for every horse that was coming without a rider, there were four or five riders with an arrow in their shoulder or abdomen--injuries that, even if they were bad later, wouldn't keep a hardened warrior from aiming his own spear or arrow for the next few minutes.

"Shit," said Bucky.

"I concur," said Loki.

From the Calormenes came a shout, as spears lowered, and horses were urged forward faster and more determined than before--

And then the war-cry became something else, as there came a whistling sound in the air, and another, and another, and objects flew into the Calormene mass from above. For a second, no one knew what was happening. In that second, roughly a third of the Calormenes had been unseated. Then the vision became clearer, as the second volley of arrows came whistling down. Now only four or five of the Calormenes remained seated on their horses--but it hardly mattered for them, for the horses whose riders had fallen were, if not panicking, then at least aimless without a rider to guide them. Some of the fallen rose to their feet, and one or two struggled to pull themselves out from beneath a downed horse, but by then Loki had rushed into the fray with his knives, closely followed by Bucky and the dogs (the horses, being rather more sensible than the dumb horses opposite them, wisely waited, looking for an opening in which they might enter the fight without tripping over a dead Calormene or a living one.

As with most hand-to-hand skirmishes between small forces, what happened next was nasty and quick, and I will spare you a close accounting thereof. It will suffice to say that the spears that would have been so devastating to the dogs and horses when wielded by men atop their own steeds, were not worth much in a close fight, when Bucky or Loki or a dog or three set upon the spear's owner. The dogs, perhaps, were even worse opponents than the others, for a vicious dog is a terrifying specter, and so twenty of them, when they know how and where and when to attack so as to keep you from escape, are a thousand times worse.

After a few minutes, the fighting stopped, leaving them surrounded by dead Calormenes. Their side had lost three dogs and a horse, and a few of the others were limping or bleeding, though none of the injured seemed at a glance to be severely injured.

"Friends," called a voice from above, just as Bucky had had a couple of seconds without fighting, which was enough for him to remember the arrows, and to look up at the top of the cliff. "(for it is quite clear which side of this thing you hail from)--won't you join us?"

At the top of the cliff stood a familiar-looking man and a unicorn, flanked by a number of archers with a crest upon their fronts that looked something like a cross (it was not, but as the history of Archenland has little bearing on this story, I will leave it there).

"There's our Narnian," Loki said, just as Bucky put his finger on why the man looked familiar.

"Wonder how long it's been since he asked us to come," he said, figuring it had to have been at least a few weeks--for although the man's beard had been carefully trimmed the last time they'd seen them, it must have been allowed to grow wildly since. His clothes didn't look too fresh either. Even the unicorn, once you looked at it for longer than it took you to stop thinking "oh my god, it's a unicorn," seemed to have a rougher mane and tail than you would have expected, with a coat that seemed dingier and grayer than it might have been under better circumstances.

From far behind them, there came a new sound, or maybe one that had been going on all this time, just one Bucky hadn't been able to hear until now. It sounded like drums. It didn't sound like friendly ones.

"We must away quickly," said the man, with a new urgency--maybe he had heard the drums, too.

"How do we get up there?" Bucky asked, because there was the problem again, of getting the dogs and the horses up.

"There's a trail!" called the man again. "Behind the waterfall! You'll see it!"

But they had scarcely started to approach it to look when a hand came out of the water, followed by an arm, followed by a girl. "<i>Boys</i>," she said. "They ought to know by now, no one will ever find it without a guide. Come on, then!"

So Bucky and Loki approached the waterfall, only to be stopped by one of the dogs, who yanked on Bucky's long shirt sleeve, and, when he looked down at it, said, "Him, over there."

For one, this wasn't picked up as a refrain by the rest of the dogs; they were all drooping, not in the way of a sad dog or frightened dog, but of a tired one. You may be certain that had it been safe, they would have all been curled next to or on top of one another in one great pile. As it was, they knew they couldn't, yet were too exhausted to do much more than look to see where they would be led to next.

They looked at where the dog's head had pointed, and saw Emeth, hanging back. In the fight, he'd been as fierce as any of them, and had cut down a few Calormenes of his own--but where he'd looked uncertain before, now he looked completely sure, though Bucky could not have said of what.

"Aren't you coming?" Bucky asked. "You brought us all this way."

"I shall not be going farther," Emeth said. "I will return to my people, to answer for my crimes."

"To die for them, you mean," Bucky said.

"Or to tell them who we are and where we've gone," Loki said, in a voice that made you think it was the sort of thing he would do.

"I have betrayed Tash, and every oath I ever swore," said Emeth, and even though he was young, there didn't seem to be any fear in him, even though he also wasn't denying what was sure to happen. There was no army in the world that did anything else to traitors. I do not believe I was wrong, and yet--there is no other true option for me. I do not regret it, and yet I can go no farther in my treachery."

When he was about halfway through his little speech, Bucky caught Loki's eye. He thought they were thinking the same thing. Then the speech ended, and Loki caught Emeth's left arm while Bucky caught his right.

"Nah," Bucky said as they started frog-marching him to the path behind the waterfall, where the others were waiting--or at least, where the boy and girl were, as they waved the dogs and horses on. "We can't let you do that. Right, Loki?"

"Of course not," said Loki. "For all we know, you might be a spy."

"Sure, you're on our side now, but you could change your mind."

"A double-cross."

"Maybe a double double-cross if you changed it again, but we'd be screwed by then."

"We simply can't have that," finished Loki.

By now they'd made it to the waterfall, and were ducking under the spray. It was colder than any of them must have expected; Loki hissed and Emeth swore and Bucky braced himself against the unexpected temperature, which was for all its qualities nowhere near as bad as other unexpected colds had been. It wasn't refreshing, exactly, but it wasn't terrible. Then they were on their way up, the three of them following the feet of the last few dogs. Bucky had thought whatever path was behind the waterfall must have been wide, easy to see if the Calormenes were to follow them; in fact, that path was narrow enough that he and Loki soon had to let go of Emeth (who had not struggled once he'd found himself in that unbreakable grip, and did not attempt to flee now; fleeing, after all, was a matter unbecoming a prisoner of war--if that in fact was what he was), or else all three of them wouldn't have been able to fit. It was not the sort of path you could really see, not without a light much more like the modern lights of our worlds than any dampened torch that could be lit in that place; it was a path you could follow only by chance, or luck, or by paying very close attention to the ones in front of you. It wound through the darkness for a little ways, and then wound up, so slightly that they scarcely knew what was happening until they had burst out into the daylight again.

They came out fifty feet behind the edge of the cliff. The Narnians who had been standing there before had since surged forward and into the crowd of four-legged Beasts, who now greeted them with woofs and whickers, and a joy that was evident in every one of their faces. It was the sort of sight you wanted to watch for as long as you could. Except that as long as they could ended as soon as the man in the center of it all looked up and spotted them. He went still, and serious, and everyone else took their cue from him and did the same.

"Friends," he said. "For friends you must be--I thought before that I must know you, and now that you stand before me I know I thought truly. For I saw you in a vision I had, some months past."

"It was yesterday for us," Bucky said. "Or maybe last night."

It was already hard to think too much about where he'd been, before all this. That had been a normal day, but nothing that happened in Narnia was ever normal. 

"Odd," said the boy, "It took us days to--"

"Later, Sir Eustace," said the man. "We must away--but first, I would know your names."

"I'm Bucky Barnes," said Bucky."

"Loki," said Loki. He didn't say anything else.

"Prince Loki," Bucky said, not so much because it mattered to him that these people know that, as because he was pretty sure it usually mattered to Loki. "From Ass...something."

"Asgard," Loki said, not even bothering to give Bucky a nasty look. "This Calormene is our prisoner, by the way. If anyone would like to take charge of him."

*

The Narnians might not have been that well-equipped for prisoners, but they were equipped with ropes, and seemed excited for something to do (but not the nasty sort of excited Bucky halfway expected). It was only about a minute before Emeth's hands were tied, and they were off. 

The camp was a few hours away, through a country of endless brown shrubbery unlike anything Bucky had come to associate with Narnia. They saw the occasional rabbit or [animal], and, once, a deer darting away from them. None of them gave the impression of a person, or anything that had ever even thought about speaking. A few of them ended up shot for dinner, and slung over the backs of the dumb packhorses that had been brought with them.

It was the kind of march during which there wasn't much room for talking, not because they had to be quiet, but because they were moving at a brisk pace. That is to say, the other humans didn't have much room for talking. Bucky could have managed some, if Loki had seemed like he wanted to, but every time Bucky asked a question, Loki shrugged, or made a smart-ass comment, and it was just easier, in the midst of all the displaced people, not to push it.

"Bed, or supper?" asked the King--for that was one of the things they'd gotten settled at the beginning of their march was that he was indeed King Tirian of Narnia. He was only talking to Bucky and Loki, for he'd made certain of pasture for the horses and meat for the dogs first thing. "We've enough meat to cook up a feast--but of course I will understand if you must need rest first."

Bucky was looking forward to sitting down with everyone, finding out more of the story than the bits and pieces they'd put together so far. He'd just opened his mouth to say so when Loki cut in:

"Bed," he said. "My friend and I are exhausted."

Bucky, who wasn't tired so much as interested, decided to go with it. "Yeah," he said. "Where's our tent?"

Tirian led them to a tent. It was a nice one, pretty clearly the one that was supposed to be his. Bucky wondered if the person he'd been before would have objected to that. The person he was now just wanted to get Loki alone, and so he waited until they were to say, "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing whatsoever," said Loki, who had immediately wriggled into one of the bedrolls, nevermind how dingy everything in the tent looked, like it had been used by multiple people, recently, and never washed over many years of service. "I would merely like to get some rest before I arrive back on the Statesman to attend the meeting I was headed in the direction of before I was called here."

That Loki sounded testy wasn't up for debate. Why he sounded testy was maybe a little moreso. But instead of pushing on the subject of Loki's feelings--not something he was likely to get a real answer to anyway--Bucky said, "You think we're done?"

Loki had already turned onto his side, so all Bucky could see of him was the back of his hair and the stiff way he was laying. "Of course we are. We succeeded in a rescue mission and fought in a battle. What else could there be?"

"I dunno," Bucky said. Not for the first time in the last couple years, he had that feeling--the one where you can believe two opposite things completely at the same time, without either truly seeming to be a contradiction of the other. On the one hand, it seemed impossible that he'd be back in Wakanda when he opened his eyes tomorrow. On the other hand, he couldn't imagine waking up next to Loki tomorrow. Being here seemed surreal. He wished he could remember whether it had always felt like this before, too. "Seems like they'd still be in a pretty bad position."

In all honesty, it seemed like an impossible position. There were less than fifteen humans, ten ragged-looking horses, a dozen or so starving dogs. They were out here in a barren wilderness without nearly enough food, right at the end of fall. It didn't matter that that trail behind the waterfall was hidden; when the army came for them, the trail from there to here had to be clear as day. However many miles around they had to go to get to the top of that cliff, they'd do it. It was only a matter of time.

Loki must have seen the same thing, because he didn't argue with Bucky, or ask him to explain what he meant. Instead, after a long moment, he said, "It's not as if we've ever had any control of it."

"Guess not," Bucky said. 

A minute later, Loki was asleep, or pretending to be. Bucky waited a minute after that, in case he was pretending and changed his mind. Then he went back outside, and went to see what was up.

*

"In truth, I've considered sending them west," said Tirian in a low voice, as he and Bucky walked together, a little ways from the campsite. "But I know not how long and arduous such a journey might be. I would not send my people to an unknowing death. But here, if the snows were to come early enough (and this far west, the snow is always far deeper than it is closer to the sea)--this valley ought to shield us from the worst of the winds, while shielding us as well from the Calormene advances (for they know nothing of such brutal cold winters in the south)."

"Sending them?" Bucky asked. "You wouldn't go?"

"I would not leave Narnia altogether until every one of my subjects were accounted for," Tirian said. "Dead or saved or traitor--I can see by your face you think I mean I would never go, in case there were any left to be saved. It is not so (though I not certain I recognize myself for saying thus). But it has been weeks, merely. There is no honor in giving up the fight so soon, when so many cower in their homes and burrows, waiting to learn the truth of things."

"Okay," Bucky said. He'd gotten the gist of that story too--the lie that had been told about Aslan, the things the people telling the lie had told the Narnians to do. How it had reached into a land that didn't know anything about that kind of thing and twisted, until some people would have believed it if they'd been told the sky was green and the grass under their feet was purple. He of all people knew how easy it was to get twisted around. 

He could have argued, but somehow he had the idea that he wasn't supposed to argue, at least not about it being okay for Tirian to abandon people who might still see the light or change their minds or join the war on their side. 

So instead, he said, "How many sentries do you have, and what kind of schedule do you have them on?"

If he couldn't argue Tirian out of the right thing to do, and he couldn't argue him into doing something that he had no evidence would be better for anyone, at least he could help make their position better here. If there was one thing he'd learned in the last seventy years, it was strategy. If he'd mostly been the one sneaking past sentries and armed guards and so on (unless speed was more important than stealth, or he was supposed to be sending messages along with bullets), well, it wasn't that hard to reverse engineer that kind of thing.

So he and Tirian worked on that for a while, and then they ate, and while they ate, Bucky got to know Jill and Eustace a little better--a little shyly, because Shuri was the closest person he knew to a kid at home, and Shuri was...Shuri. After everyone was done eating--a process which took a while, since no one was considered done until the horses had had their fill; and if everyone knows how long a horse's breakfast takes, a horse's dinner that is the first decent meal he'd had in weeks takes that much longer--everyone who knew stories about Narnia started to tell them. And although most of the people sitting around the campfire with them probably should have gone to sleep much earlier, in fact no one went until the sentries returned one by one to switch their shift to the next person. It was then that everyone whose shift wasn't until the morning scattered. Bucky went too, back to the tent where Loki had been sleeping this whole time, his belly and mind full, and with no ideas of anything he could do to fix this.

"Have they finished telling mournful stories of their country that's still right there ?" asked Loki peevishly, as Bucky pulled off his boots and climbed into the bedroll next to him.

Bucky, who often felt as if Steve were mourning the friend he'd used to have when he was right there, didn't know what to say to that other than, "If you've been pretending to sleep this whole time, you might want to get a move on with the real thing."

*

"I can't believe this," Loki said.

Bucky, just waking up, said, "What?"

"We're still here . I have things to do ."

Two opposite possibilities turned into one, so that waking up here in the Western Wild seemed like the obvious conclusion and waking up anywhere else, nevermind in Wakanda, seemed like a crazy dream. "Looks like it," Bucky agreed.

Loki shot him a nasty look.

"Sorry," he added.

"It's hardly your fault," said Loki, but in a grudging way that gave the impression that it might be, you never know. "I wonder what that blasted Lion wants from us now."

"Watch your language," Bucky said, one of the things that came out of his mouth sometimes that would probably make sense if he thought about it later, but that he didn't have the time to think about now. Then he told Loki about what he and Tirian had talked about last night. "I was thinking we could scout around today, see if there's any advice we could give them about long-term defense."

"I suppose," Loki said. "It's not as if I'm ever speaking of anything else these days."

Okay, that was enough hints, Bucky decided. "So what's been going on with you since the last time we saw each other?" he asked, since Loki was obviously dying to talk about it, and then remembered: "I'm really sorry about your mom, by the way. I didn't get to say that last time."

Loki, who'd been peevishly pulling his armor back on (Bucky hadn't noticed him taking it off, but maybe he'd done it between the time he'd been pretending to sleep and the time he'd actually started to), froze for a second. Maybe it had been the wrong thing to say. But then he said, "Thank you," a little stiffly, and then, "Quite a lot has happened since then. Especially...recently."

The sideways look he gave Bucky then definitely seemed like the kind of look people gave you when they wanted you to ask, so Bucky did: "Like what?"

"Well," Loki said, perking up; it must have been the right thing to say, because he loved talking about himself. "Shall I begin with the events of the last year, or should I begin from the last time we met?"

"If you want me to follow all of it, you might want to start from the time before that," Bucky said.

Loki seemed to take that in, more thoughtful than scheming. "Very well. It was the eve of Thor's coronation..."

The story that came next was kind of crazy, almost unbelievable. Loki finding out he wasn't the person or even the species he'd thought he was, around the same time he'd gotten his brother banished (for although a lot of his stories made it seem like he'd lied his way around Asgard, he'd always seemed to want Bucky to know exactly what he'd been up to--at least, as far as Bucky could remember). Then he'd fallen off a magic bridge, and landed somewhere else. The guy who lived there had made him go and try to conquer another realm a couple years later (it obviously hadn't been the exact same situation Bucky had been in as the Soldier, but what Loki would admit to sounded pretty bad, and the parts he didn't admit to couldn't have been any better), after which Loki's adoptive father had put him in jail. Then his mother had been killed, and he and his brother had avenged her death, and Loki had been wounded and left for dead, and that was how he'd wound up in Narnia right around the time the Soldier had found out that he was more than that.

Then, when Loki had gotten home, he'd decided it would serve his father right if he took over the throne. So he'd done that, and pretended to be king for a few years (he seemed very proud of this), and then his brother had come back and given him hell, and then they'd found out they had an older sister, and in order to get rid of her they'd had to set their entire country on fire and run away from it, and it was from the ship they'd been sailing on that Loki had come this time.

"So, you see, I'm much too busy to be here. I have responsibilities," said Loki, who had been a prince every time Bucky had met him, but had definitely never mentioned having responsibilities before, because if he had, he wouldn't have rolled his eyes at Bucky's disbelieving look and added, "Real ones. Involving other people. Mostly the peasants, but, well. People will die if I'm not there to keep Thor from rushing in to every inter-realm conflict we hear about during the journey."

"To the realm you tried to take over six years ago," Bucky said.

"...Yes. What of it?"

"Just wanted to make sure I had that right," Bucky said. "You know, if I were you, maybe I'd consider Narnia a vacation. It seems less chaotic."

"But I do so love chaos," said Loki, and then proceeded to sneer at their tent, and everyone else's tent, and the campfire, and breakfast, and the way none of the humans in the camp must have washed recently (there was a stream, but so close to winter the water was very cold, and very much not worth the bother), proving, Bucky thought, that he loved chaos when he was the one causing it, and maybe not so much otherwise.

*

They spent the rest of the day after breakfast walking around the valley, helping Tirian figure out where his sentries ought to be, and what kind of booby-traps they could set up. It was the sort of advice you give to somehow not because they're too foolish to think of it themselves, but because you had a slightly different perspective than they, and have come to the problem with a fresh mind. By the time they were done, the plans they'd drawn up were better than they had been, but still not perfect--for there weren't enough people in their camp to do everything they ought to have been able to do.

"It may be things will improve once more Narnians have joined with us," Tirian said. "We have one or two every few days--and surely there will be more, the farther into Narnia these Calormenes come."

"Shit," Bucky said. When both of the others looked at him, he said, "Some of these traps are going to be a bad idea for anyone new."

So then they had to make new plans for everything that had been potentially fatal, like the pits with the spikes at the bottom, and the noose tied to a tree in the wild boars' territory, and then, when they were done with that, had to make plans about what to do with any new Calormene prisoners--for to execute a helpless prisoner was murder, and to leave him to starve in a cage went past that, to cruelty.

"It would also be loud, if anyone came looking for him," said Loki, who tended not to dwell on moral questions, but was good for the practical side of schemes.

Then, when they were done making their plans, Tirian had to gather the others, who were closest to him--Jewel the unicorn, and [Poggle] the dwarf, and the children Eustace and Jill, who looked a lot more grown-up than Bucky had thought at first--and they had to talk it all out together. Every idea they'd had got questioned in one sense or another, and then the others had ideas which they had to question in turn. In the end, the whole of their plan was better than what they'd had before, but still not as good as anyone wanted it to be.

Then it was time for dinner, and more stories of Narnia as it had been, two months or two hundred years ago. Bucky might have stayed as long as he had the night before, until the sentry changed and everyone else dispersed, except that Loki got up in the middle of the third ballad (for many of the older stories, especially ones harking from the Golden Age of Narnia, came with music). Bucky followed him a minute later, and was only a little surprised when, instead of finding he was up to no good, found him with his boots and armor off inside their tent, pretty clearly on the way to bed.

"You all right?" he asked, because he'd planned to ask Loki to tell one of his stories (probably about one of his adventures with Thor when they were kids, or maybe one of the mythical stories of the long-ago days of Asgard) as soon as there was enough of a lull not to feel like he was interrupting something sacred. He had a feeling everyone would have liked that. Especially Loki. Maybe, especially, Bucky himself.

"Well enough," Loki said, but something flashed across his face, some kind of pain or [stress] or...something. "I'd say likely better than you--but you seem much more yourself than you did the last time."

"Yeah," Bucky said.

"Tell me of your adventures. Surely it will be a less asinine tale than the one being told out there."

"Okay," Bucky said, and told Loki about the running he'd done, and how he'd been framed, almost a year ago, and how Steve had found him, and fought for him, even though it had obviously been a bad idea. How he'd wound up in Wakanda, frozen again until Princess Shuri could fix everything that had been seeded in his brain. How he'd only been under for a few months, and now he'd been out for longer than he'd been down before, and it was like it was the first time he'd had a chance to breathe since the last time they'd been together in Narnia. 

The whole time he was talking, he kept a close eye on Loki's face. He'd seemed all right earlier, when telling Bucky about everything that had happened to him, and he'd seemed all right while they were talking through their plans, but now he just seemed tired. Weary. Like there was a load on his shoulders that hadn't been there the last time Bucky had seen him. He barely even seemed to be listening, and it couldn't have been more obvious that he'd asked about how Bucky was doing at least partially as a distraction.

"Good," he said, when Bucky was done talking. "I'm glad to hear the chaos of your world has subsided somewhat."

"Here's to hoping yours does, too," Bucky said.

"It seems unlikely it will ever end," Loki said, which was a sentiment Bucky had to agree was more realistic, from everything Loki had told him that morning. "Heimdall claims we have only another few weeks before our arrival--but it feels as if we've been traveling for a few millenia. Perhaps the rest of our journey will last another few."

Bucky could have said that it couldn't be that bad. Part of him was even tempted. But the rest of him knew damned well how bad things could get, and that things having been bad for a while was no promise they'd get better soon. So all he said was, "Hopefully not."

"Hopefully," Loki echoed, with another expression Bucky couldn't read. By now they were both on top of their bedrolls, Loki flat on his back with one knee raised and his other leg crossed over it, while Bucky was sitting cross-legged, and feeling a little weird about how his legs never fell asleep anymore when he sat like this.

Then Loki sat up--to get into his bedroll, or to head out to piss beforehand, Bucky thought, at least until Loki leaned toward him, and their lips touched.

Bucky's first thought was that he would have expected Loki's lips to be sharper than this, or something other than just soft and warm. Then he wondered why in any of his thoughts about Loki and Narnia, he'd never thought about this. The third thing he thought was less thinking than it was reacting to Loki pulling back, a second after the kiss started. And the way in which he reacted was to send one of his hands around to grab the back of Loki's neck (later he would realize it had been the metal one), and to grab him by the front of his shirt with the other, and pull him back, into another, more serious kiss. This kiss wasn't a question so much as it was an answer--not only to what Loki had wanted to know, but what Bucky had never realized there was to know. He hadn't wanted anyone since he'd been the Soldier; Steve sometimes mentioned the girls he'd used to step out with, back before the war, but that had never seemed like something current or relevant to Bucky. He was too busy learning everything else about himself to even think of this aspect. If he'd thought about it at all, he'd have assumed it was one of the things that wasn't true for him anymore. But he hadn't thought about it, and because he hadn't thought about it, had never thought to think about Loki through the lens of...

Kissing, and more, Loki surging forward as soon as he knew he was wanted, Loki in Bucky's lap and Loki pushing him down to the bedroll. 

"You seem much more yourself," he said, his breath warm against Bucky's lips, which was the thing that made Bucky wonder if they'd done this before.

But everything else was too distracting for Bucky to follow that thought, whatever it had been. Loki was on top of him, lithe and hot, his hands under Bucky's shirt, and Bucky was hard already, harder than any of his morning woods, and harder than any of the times he'd taken care of himself since he'd become Bucky again, all of which had simply been easier than waiting for his erection to go away on its own. He was aching, and somehow, as much as he ached, it didn't seem to matter that Loki didn't seem to be in a hurry. 

They kissed for a long time, until, if Bucky couldn't remember if they had done this before or how it had felt, he knew he would never forget how it felt now. Then, right when it started to matter how much he was aching and straining, Loki's hand, which had been tracing goosebumps across his stomach, fell to the waistband of Bucky's trousers.

"I could," he said, also against Bucky's lips, and there was something about the way he said it, something that seemed loaded, like there was something Bucky should say back, or something from way back he should remember. 

Whatever it was, Bucky wasn't going to get it right, was too dazed and too aroused to even try to get it right. So instead of saying anything, he reached down and grabbed Loki's hand (again with his own metal one, he would later realize), and guided Loki's hand into his trousers, and into his underwear, until Loki's fingers were around the part of him that had been screaming for them.

"Like this?" Loki muttered, against Bucky's ear this time, before nipping at the lobe (which was almost enough to make Bucky come then and there, and it was only willpower that kept him from it).

"Yeah," Bucky said, though it might have seemed a bit silly if he hadn't been being touched, because there wasn't that much room in there, and not that many options for how to stroke him. But it didn't matter. Loki was touching him, and every touch made something build in the base of Bucky's stomach, until it got to be so good that it was too good, until the goodness was almost painful--

And then, just a minute or two after Loki had started, he came, his dick jerking slowly in the grip of Loki's hand, Loki working him through it as Bucky groaned, his right hand clutching the bedroll beneath him, and the metal one gripping Loki by the--

Hair, Bucky realized, when his orgasm was over, and he would have apologized if Loki had looked anything other than eager. But he didn't, and, to Bucky's surprised, he didn't guide Bucky's hand over to the bulge in his own trousers. He didn't even pull his own hand out of Bucky's trousers. Instead, he said, in a voice that registered much lower than usual, "Spread your legs."

"What are you doing?" Bucky asked, but did it.

Then Loki's hand was moving again, with barely more room than it had had before--further into Bucky's underwear, past his balls, until he came to something else.

"Let me have you," he said, this time between kisses to the crook of Bucky's neck. His finger, wet with something, traced around the part of Bucky he seemed to want to have. "You'll like it."

"You mean you'll like it," Bucky said, suddenly, completely sure that they'd never done this before.

"I will," Loki said. "But I'll make it amazing for you."

"Big talk," Bucky said, but then Loki's finger stopped tracing, and then it went in. For a second, it was too weird for Bucky to know whether he liked it or not. Then Loki was kissing his neck again, and pulling his pants down with one hand while his finger stroked inside of Bucky, and it was still weird, but not a bad weird. "That's, um. That's--I don't know."

"But I do," Loki said, and changed what he was doing with his finger.

He changed it a few times, and part of Bucky wanted to be turned on by it, and part of him was annoyed that Loki wasn't letting him get used to one thing--but then, the fourth or fifth time Loki changed it, he found what he must have been searching for, and pressed down on--something that was undeniably good, and that made Bucky groan at the unexpectedness of it.

"That's why you're going to like it," Loki said, pressing down on that spot again, and again, rhythmic and unrelenting. "When I am within you, I will brush against this same spot with each stroke. Every stroke in, and every stroke out. Think about it."

Bucky had been hard before. Now he was half-hard again, and felt hot all over, just from hearing Loki talk like that. He liked to hear Loki talk, thought he must always have liked to hear Loki talk, but as much as he'd usually have rolled his eyes at Loki's boasting, this was something new.

"Well, hurry up about it then," he said.

"All right."

Loki's finger slipped out of him, and Bucky missed it, and wanted him--but even more, he wanted to kiss him, and so he did, catching Loki's mouth with his own before they could move apart. 

"Loki," he said, and they were pressed together, Loki still mostly dressed, and Bucky still mostly naked.

"Yes?"

"Are you gonna fuck me or what?"

Then they let each other go, just long enough for their pants to come off, and Bucky had a glimpse, just a glimpse of Loki's hard flushed dick, and then they were kissing again, and as they kissed Loki grabbed Bucky's thighs and pulled them to be around his waist, and then he reached between their legs, and then something big was pressing behind Bucky's balls, and then it slid back and forth over his entrance, and then it pressed in, and it was so much bigger than a finger that for a second all Bucky could do was gasp, open-mouthed, not feeling or knowing anything else other than this, as Loki slid in, one slow inch at a time.

"All right?" Loki asked, when he'd stopped moving, when he was pressed as far in as he was going to go.

Bucky was still breathing, open-mouthed. He probably looked like an idiot. But when he looked at Loki, Loki was flushed, redder than Bucky had ever seen him, and his eyes were glassy, and his hair was mussed up, and he was incredibly beautiful, how had Bucky not remembered that he was beautiful?

"All right?" Loki asked, and the muscles in his thighs were trembling, Bucky could feel them against his calves.

"Yeah. I just--it's different," Bucky said, not knowing for sure until he said it, but then being completely sure that if he'd never done this with Loki, he'd never done it with anyone else either. He had memories of other men--in the army, maybe--but his memories were other other things, using their hands and mouths on each other, and he was suddenly sure there hadn't been anything else. "It's new."

"Is it," Loki said, and the emotion that jumped across his face was something pleased, almost happy. " Do you like it?"

Bucky, who was starting to like it more and more, and who was starting to get hard again (he had gotten soft during the slow, steady entering, not because it was bad but because it was strange), said, "Wouldn't you like to know."

Loki grinned, and then he moved. He pulled out, maybe halfway, then pushed back in, then didn't wait at all before doing it again. His eyes went far away for a few seconds, the same look that had been in his eyes when he'd been looking for--

"There," Bucky said, when his fifth or sixth stroke was at the right place, the place that made Bucky feel-- "It's right there."

The slow, thoughtful fucking got more serious in a hurry after that. The burn that had been behind the strangeness at first came back, and it was delicious and exciting in a way it hadn't been when this was totally new, now that it was mixing with the pleasure from that one place. Now it was Loki's mouth that was open, his eyes unfocused. His hair fell in front of his forehead, and Bucky would have brushed it back behind his ears if he hadn't had to hold on for dear life, feeling like if he didn't have a grip on Loki's upper arms, Loki might do something really dumb, like stop.

"Don't stop," he said, as soon as the idea occurred to him.

"Why would I do that?" Loki asked, a few strokes later, when the question must have gotten past his ears to his brain. "That would be--"

Then he started to make a choking sound, and his thrusts became erratic, not hitting that place anymore, but it didn't matter, because Bucky knew what was happening, and he got to see it, the way Loki's face seized up as he pressed deep inside of Bucky and came--the way Loki was going for what he wanted instead of walking on eggshells around Bucky, like what he wanted somehow mattered more. It didn't take more than a couple seconds. It seemed to take a lot longer than that. Then Loki fell on top of Bucky, breathing hard, in gasps bigger and louder than Bucky remembered hearing from him before.

"--You didn't come," Loki said a minute later, when he'd caught his breath and caught on to the fact that he was laying right on top of Bucky's still-hard dick.

"Maybe you should do something about it," Bucky said, but instead of reaching for his dick, Loki's hand went around back again. It slipped back in, feeling smaller than it had been before, but sparking much more welcome, too.

"Give me a minute, and I'll make you come without being touched," Loki said, and slipped another finger in beside the first one. It was a good feeling, a delicious feeling, a slick, filthy feeling, and in a few minutes it would have been enough--

"Maybe I want to be touched," Bucky said, because he wanted both things, wanted the candle to burn at both ends, wanted everything Loki wanted to give him for however long he could have it, new memories that would blaze even when the rest were hidden in the shadows.

Instead of refusing, or complaining, Loki continued to stroke him inside, fingers pressing, stroking--but also got onto his knees, and slithered down, and grabbed the base of Bucky's dick with one hand. Then, he stuck his tongue out and licked the tip of it, warm wet pressure. Bucky groaned, and then his entire dick was engulfed. Loki's mouth moved at the same rate as Loki's fingers, and this was what Bucky had wanted, and it was too much, and when he came he wasn't sure which thing had set him off, in the end.

After, they crawled into their separate bedrolls--it got cold here at nights, and there was no way to put them together--and Bucky was almost asleep when he heard Loki said, " Do you regret it?"

It was a loaded question. Bucky had had a lot of those from Steve, too. It wasn't loaded because it was a trick, but because it was about something he didn't remember. He could ask what that was, but knowing Loki, he wouldn't want to explain. If he did explain, it would just be awkward. So the best thing to do was the thing Loki always did when it was Steve, and when he thought keeping the moment good was more important than sorting out whatever was going on in someone else's head that they didn't want to be upfront about to start with.

"Nah, this was nice," he said, and maybe it was wrong to pretend he'd misunderstood instead of making a decision about it. But the last thing he remembered before falling asleep was Loki's hand running lightly down his arm. That really was a memory worth keeping.

*

They'd been going to help build the traps they'd planned the next day, but that was before a couple of their spies came back, in pretty bad shape. The Fox had been grazed by an arrow--but it had been a flaming arrow, and the poor thing's fur was gone, and some of the flesh of its back burned. The Deer that had been with him had been shot in the muscle of her hind leg, and came back into the camp on three legs.

"Who are we to send now?" Tirian asked. "Other than Eustace and Jill--I have told you before, I will not allow harm to come to you while there are yet other options."

"I feel like we might be other options," said Bucky, grinning in Loki's direction. He'd been grinning all morning, and every time he flashed a smile at Loki, it was like Loki couldn't help but smile back.

"I expect we are," Loki said, and to Tirian: "We'll go, your Highness. We don't know the lay of the land as well as your people, but we have our own unique methods of concealment."

"Ha!" said a voice from a tent about twenty feet away. In retrospect, maybe they shouldn't have had this conversation so close to the tent where Emeth was being kept.

"--Which we were not using upon our arrival, but would now," Loki continued smoothly, though Bucky didn't miss the flash of irritation, or the way his fingers rubbed together, the way they did when it was a bad idea to start throwing knives, but he really wanted to anyway.

*

"What methods are those, anyway?" Bucky asked a couple of hours later, when they were packed down with dried jerky and hardtack to last for days, and were a few miles away from the camp. There wasn't exactly a trail, so it was slow going, to make sure they didn't miss any of the landmarks between here and the waterfall. That was where they were headed first, to see if the Calormene bodies had been found yet, or if anyone had realized where they must have gone after the battle.

"Let's duck behind here," Loki said, and disappeared around an outcropping of stone, sticking up from the ground. Bucky followed him, and when he was there, Loki looked around them again, and looked up, and then pulled out something from that magic pocket of his. It was blue, and shaped like a cube. It was glowing.

"There's nothing hidable about that thing," Bucky said. "What is it?

"This is the Tesseract," said Loki.

"The thing you stole from Midwhatsit?"

"From Midgard, yes. And it was subsequently stolen from me, and placed in Asgard's vault. Then, when Asgard burned, I paid the vault a visit, and took it back." Bucky was about to ask what it was for, but Loki launched into that on his own: "Its primary purpose is to open portals to anywhere in the universe. We could be from here to the waterful in a moment, from there to Cair Paravel in another. We could go to the end of the Eastern sea, or to the house of the Tisroc down in Calormen."

That was all very well and good, but if that thing was as conspicuous any of those places as it was here, Bucky didn't see how that was going to do any good, and said as much: "How's it going to help us with the sneaking and the spying?"

"We could simply go," Loki said. "To your home. To mine."

He said it so casually, or tried to. But Loki's real feelings always flashed across his face, and what flashed across his face while he was talking was longing. Bucky had thought he didn't want to be here because of the way Bucky had been the last time [seed this?], but maybe it was just because he really did want to be home.

"We can do that," Bucky said, because the flash of longing--the idea that he could go to Loki's world, and they could be together somewhere where they wouldn't get pulled away from each other randomly--was stronger than anything he'd felt last night. He hadn't realized that Loki was a separate thing from Narnia inside his head until that moment; it had not occurred to him before, and maybe it never had, that it was a possibility. "But first, we need to do what we said we'd do."

"Let me show you," Loki said. "We won't go through, if you insist--"

"I definitely do."

"--but I can show you the ship. You'll like it."

Bucky was pretty sure he'd been on a ship with Loki at least once before. For a second, there was a flash of memory--there was salt in his nose and wind in his hair, and the sun glanced off of the water all around; beneath him there were sturdy wooden plans, from behind there the metallic sounds of swords clashing, and beside him there was a hell of a lot younger Loki, saying, "You can't seriously believe we're going to take it with us"--and then he grinned and said, "Sure. But only for a minute. Then we need to get back to work."

Loki held the cube up. It didn't look like he was doing anything, but a lot of his magic didn't look like he was doing anything; a lot of it was just thinking at it, Bucky guessed, and the difference between Loki and everyone else was that thinking at things sometimes made impossible stuff happen. 

It kept not looking why he was doing anything, until he said, "--It's not working. I don't know why."

"Can you try to make it look somewhere else?" Bucky asked.

"I have. Other locations in my world, but they're all--dark. It's like trying to find your reflection in a mirror painted over."

"Try my world," Bucky said. "Look for a whole bunch of goats."

"I already did. Months ago, when I once again came into possession of the Tesseract. It was as dark for me then as it is now."

"No, you didn't," said Bucky. The truth had passed over Loki's face, the way it always did, and the truth this time had been pretty damned cagey looking.

"Yes. I did."

"Nah." Even if it hadn't been for that look, Bucky would have known it. He'd been right all along; maybe Loki hadn't been eager to be here because he had responsibilities now, but he also hadn't been eager because he hadn't wanted to see the Soldier again. Maybe he hadn't even wanted to see Bucky, to some extent. "I get it."

And, he did. It wasn't that it didn't hurt, but the way he'd been, when he was the Soldier--no one who wasn't crazy wanted to deal with that, and Loki's crazy had always been a lot different than Steve's. All this was, was confirmation that Steve was a stubborn asshole, and that Loki had a sense of self-preservation.

"It's okay," Bucky said, and for him it really was; there was enough of a separation between him and the Soldier now that he wasn't about to take it personally. But still, he was starting to feel heartsick, and couldn't put his finger on the reason why. "But why don't you try it now, anyway."

Loki nodded shortly, then looked like he wasn't doing much of anything for another couple minutes. Finally, he said, "Nothing."

"Maybe your cube doesn't work here. You're always saying magic is different in Narnia."

"Perhaps," Loki said distractedly--

And then something happened, finally. A portal whooshed open in front of them. For a second it was dark and fluid, like some kind of person-sized gel floating in the air. Then, a picture appeared in it. There were soldiers everywhere, wearing curved swords, carrying long spears. There was the sound of drums, beating and beating. And underneath that, there was the sound of rushing water.

"Where is this?" Bucky said.

"Just above the waterfall."

"Can they see us?"

"Not unless we step through."

"Shit," Bucky said, with feeling. "What should we do?"

"I could try to find the Statesman again," Loki said. Bucky didn't even have to say anything to that; as soon as he made a face, Loki said, "I know, I know, we promised. Well, I suppose we should go back and tell the king, then. Not that telling kings you possess an artifact such as this and haven't bothered to tell them about it is necessarily an intelligent decision."

That didn't sound like something Loki was really that worried about anyway, so Bucky said, "There has to be something we can do to stop them."

"We can't fight them," Loki said. "We'd be overwhelmed by the numbers."

That was true. There had to have been at least two hundred men there, and more were probably coming--by now, they knew about the Calormene drums, and how knowing where the drummers were wasn't exactly likely to make up enough for them to beat the numbers when the rest of the army made it there. They were both stronger and faster than most people, but that didn't make them immortal.

"You got anything else in your bag of tricks?" Bucky asked, not so much because he was really hoping as because he wanted to count all the bases before they took the bad news back to camp.

"--Perhaps," Loki said.

*

They whooshed through the portal, which felt a lot like whooshing through space. It was both brighter and darker than Bucky had expected, and even though it only took a second to take them through, it took him a few more seconds to adjust to his surroundings when they landed. Dirt under his feet, scraggly bushes all around--and a few miles forward, the sound of drums, which seemed as inevitable as the stars had seemed bright and dark. 

"Can you do it from here, or should be be closer?" Bucky asked.

"Closer," Loki said. Nothing seemed to pass over his face when he said it--probably because he'd looked unhappy ever since they came up with this plan, and since he really was, had no reason to try to pretend something else. 

"Okay."

So they crept forward, from shrub to shrub and rock to rock, spending as little time in the open air as possible. They had no idea if the Calormenes had sent scouts; if they had, they needed to see them first, before they were seen, and take care of them without alerting the rest of the army. 

"How close do we want to be?" Bucky asked, about half an hour into this endeavor, which had not taken them so far that they couldn't have looked back and seen the place where they'd come from.

"I'm uncertain of its range. But we should contrive to be seen by as many of them as possible, to [brush up] the greatest amount of terror."

"Makes sense."

So they kept creeping, Loki leading mostly so that Bucky could keep an eye on him. He hadn't been weird about this idea, so much as flat; Bucky thought he'd probably go through with it, but you could never be totally sure when it came to Loki. If he decided to run, or do something else stupid, Bucky needed to be able to grab him.

But although he looked like he wanted to, he didn't, and they kept creeping. It seemed to go on for forever, but Bucky wasn't bored, or impatient. You couldn't have been either, if you were as intent as he on his surroundings. There was a place he could go where nothing seemed to matter but what was happening now. It was a place he'd been able to go even before he'd been the Soldier. It had started at least when he'd been a sniper, covering Steve during their missions. An endless patience, where what you were doing was waiting, and you didn't really mind if what you were waiting for took a while to happen.

A flurry of activity, a few bushes away: Bucky turned his head slowly, carefully, and saw a mouse running from a fox. Half an hour later, a falcon dove to the ground, and rose with a rabbit in its talons. Half an hour after that, there came a crunch of a stepped-on branch, of stones moving around under someone's treads, and right into their line of sight came a Calormene scout. 

You might have thought Bucky or Loki would have reacted at once. Instead, they froze, waiting to see if the scout was alone. In the end it turned out to be good that they'd waited, because a minute later, another scout appeared. They were both young, with scrawny beards and serious faces; they were taking their duty seriously, even though men who had grown up in the desert didn't have any idea how to sneak around in a forest.

After another couple minutes, it was clear there wasn't anyone else with them. Bucky and Loki exchanged a look, and a couple of subtle hand gestures. Bucky went around one way, and Loki the other. When it was over--there wasn't even a struggle--they left the bodies under the widest, thickest bush they could.

Killing people in the battle hadn't bothered Bucky. This didn't, either, he thought--he'd killed people this quietly and with this little warning in the Army, before he was ever the Soldier, so it wasn't like there was anything new here--and it wasn't like they didn't deserve it, either, after the way they'd invaded Narnia without being provoked, knowing that they'd kill everyone if they made it to the campsite--but he found himself feeling surprisingly cold about it. He couldn't remember everything they'd ever done in Narnia--he was pretty sure he couldn't remember the vast majority of their time in Narnia--but he was suddenly, completely, sure that they'd never done anything like this in Narnia before. That any other kills they'd had had also been in the heat of battle. They'd changed, and maybe Narnia had, too.

*

The Calormene army was easy to spot, in the end. They weren't moving fast, but there was still the sound of their boots breaking sticks and moving rocks, and the murmur of their voices above it all. They were at least two hundred men and they weren't even trying to hide, and so Bucky and Loki knew exactly where they were long before they could be noticed themselves.

"Figured out how close we want to be yet?" Bucky asked.

"Close enough to see them," Loki said shortly.

They could have walked faster, but creeping seemed to be a better idea, in case there were any more scouts. Bucky found himself hoping there weren't, though usually he would have wanted to keep his mind clearer than that for this kind of work. He found himself hoping there weren't, and so he was a little surprised when Loki put his hand up and said, "Here."

They'd come to a little hill. Over it they could see dust, which had been put into the air by boots on dirt. When they came to the top of it, they looked down and saw the army. It would only be a second or two before they were seen, but Loki seemed to hesitate.

"Loki, come on," Bucky said.

"I don't know," Loki said. "Perhaps there's--another way."

"Not really. But it's okay," Bucky said. "Do it."

Then Loki nodded, reached somewhere Bucky couldn't see, and brought out something else. For a second, Bucky thought it was the same blue cube as before. Then he saw it had handles, and that Loki's hands were on them. Then, Loki's fingers turned blue, and the blue started to swallow him, just like he'd said it would. And a stream of ice and cold streamed from it, toward the Calormen army.

The plan had been to freeze the army, to encase them in ice. Loki had done it before, he'd said. They couldn't survive it, he'd said. No mortal could. And when the army was gone, they could go to Cair Paravel and use the Tesseract to show everyone there what they'd done. Maybe they'd have to freeze the other Calormenes too, or maybe they'd have sense and stand down and sail away. 

But that didn't seem to be what was happening. Instead of the stream hitting the men, it went over them; and when it went over them, the ground underneath them turned white in some places and clear in others, a field of snow and ice. What the stream did beyond them, there was no telling, but Bucky could see that it went all the way to the horizon.

"What are you doing?" he asked Loki, who was all the way blue now, and whose eyes were red, and whose skin was covered in lines, which might or might not have meant anything. "What's going on?"

But before Loki could answer, the Calormenes started screaming, and pointing.

"The Witch!" they said. "It's the Witch!"

And then, one group of them after another, they turned around, and started running away. Some of them fell on the slippery parts of the ground, while others managed to skip the ice and made a lot better time. A couple minutes after they'd started. the whole army was gone, leaving nothing but trampled snow behind.

"Well, that was different," Bucky said, and found he was relieved. In the moment of living it, he had had no preference as to whether any of them died or not; but now that he was out of it again, he thought it was better that he hadn't. 

"I can't stop it," Loki said through gritted teeth. "I can't even slow it, or put it down."

The stream was still going, aimed east. Who knew how far it was going. Past the waterfall? Deep into Narnia? To Cair Paravel, on the eastern shore? Further? There was no way to know.

More importantly, though, there was Loki. He was blue, and didn't look to happy, but other than that, he looked basically okay.

"How are you feeling?" Bucky asked. "That thing's not draining you or anything, is it?"

"--Not as far as I can tell," Loki said through gritted teeth. "Stop looking at me."

"Why, 'cause you think you're so scary?" Bucky asked--but looked off into the distance anyway, the white spreading as far as he could see and farther. There were things he wouldn't have wanted people to see, either. So he could respect what Loki wanted here, and only look at him out of the corner of his eye, in case he started to fall down or something, and someone needed to catch him.

A minute later, it was still going, and Bucky couldn't help it. He wasn't looking at Loki, but he didn't have to be to feel his misery, or to hear his labored breathing over the sound of the stream, which wasn't nearly as loud as it should have been. If he'd had a clear picture of what the thing would do before Loki had started it up, he'd have assumed it would sound like a firehose. But it was very quiet, instead. As quiet as winter, as quiet as the frost. Faster than either of those things.

So Bucky reached over and laid his hand on Loki's arm. It was probably something he'd done before. It came too easily to be something new. 

Beneath his hand, Loki tensed even more, which was apparently possible. His skin was freezing under Bucky's hand--cold as frostbite, as Antartica, as something you really should have known better than to lick on a dare. But Bucky had dealt with a lot colder, so he didn't mind.

A few seconds later, the stream cut off all at once. Somehow, even though it hadn't made any noise, everything seemed quieter without it. Then Loki jerked his arm away, at the same time the Casket disappeared again. He faded back into himself as quickly as he'd gone blue in the first place. 

Bucky thought about saying it was okay, that he didn't mind. But the same look on Loki's face that made him think maybe he should also made him think he definitely, absolutely shouldn't talk about it unless Loki did first. 

"What next?" he said instead, getting back to business. "Should we follow them, go back to camp, what?"

"What do you think?" Loki asked.

"Back to camp," Bucky said. "Figure out if anyone knows why they ran like that."

"I should think that much was obvious. But very well."

*

So they went back, going through the portal far enough away from camp that no one would put an arrow into them on sight, but close enough that getting back took less than five minutes.

It was the middle of the day, so everyone was busy. They eventually found Tirian a little ways out of camp, chopping up firewood. Trees big enough to chop were few and far between up here, but every day or two he went to find one and take his frustrations out on it. He was so focused on it, and on the person he was talking to (and, occasionally, laughing with) while he chopped--somehow, they'd managed to find two trees, together--that when Bucky cleared his throat, Tirian jumped, and turned toward them with his axe raised for an attack.

"Whoa there," said Bucky, raising his hands. He didn't see what Loki did.

"Apologies, friends," said Tirian, lowering the axe. "I did not expect you back for some days. But what has transpired, for you to return so soon? Are the Calormenes upon us?"

"Doubtful," said his companion, who Bucky now recognized as Emeth--not tied up anymore, and not spouting off about Tash or what he owed to the Calormen army or whether the Narnians owed him a trial by combat or a warrior's death or any of that. That seemed like a lot of change for the amount of time they'd been away, or at least it did until Bucky remembered that he'd seen Tirian hanging around Emeth's tent, a few nights. [seed this] Who knew what had happened between the two of them? He had just enough time to think about it and decide that he was glad that the man who'd helped them and the dogs and the horses had been brought around to feeling less bad about the whole thing. "I do not believe them to be as organized as all that."

Emeth then looked stricken for a moment, before Tirian laid a hand on his shoulder, and said, "We do not expect you to say more than you believe honorable about your former brethren. Now, tell me, Bucky Barnes and Loki of Asgard: What have you come to tell me?"

Loki, for all that he sometimes seemed to want to be back on his ship telling his brother the king how to run things, didn't look like he wanted to explain any of this. So Bucky told it, starting with the Tesseract and the portal--he left out the part about how they couldn't use it to go to either of their worlds, and didn't miss Tirian's frown at the implication that Loki had had the thing all along; it was definitely possible that Loki knew more about the way kings thought than Bucky did, even if no king he remembered meeting had ever been as much of a dick as Loki claimed his father (his adoptive father) was--and moving along to the Casket--skipping the part about what it did to Loki, since that wasn't anyone else's business and Loki would probably have stabbed him for bringing it up--and then to the army, and how quickly they'd freaked out and run away when the stream of ice and snow had come down from the rise they'd been standing on.

Tirian listened solemnly, interrupting only to clarify things. When Bucky was done, he didn't gloat, though you could have expected almost anyone to gloat. Instead, he said, "I have heard it told that the Calormenes are terrified of witchcraft. It has been well over a thousand years since the White Witch reigned in Narnia, but the first Calormene traders only began coming to our land of Narnia since my grandfather's time (though they have always, of course, been willing to trade with us upon the Lone [?] Islands, and so on). It may be that this fear still lies very shallowly beneath the surface, and that, upon seeing the snow spreading beneath their feet like spreading water, their hearts were so filled with terror they could not but fly."

Through this all, Emeth was nodding; when the Witch was mentioned, he even seemed to go a little pale. "It is so, and has always been so," he said. "I would not have agreed, were we speaking of a plan you were planning for the future; but there seems to be no harm in admitting it now. For do the [prophets] not say, [wise saying about how this is fine, actually]."

For Bucky's part, he thought conversations with Emeth would get annoying quick, if he was always like that about everything he said. (He wasn't, but, having been keeping Tirian's company for the better part of a morning, he was understandably jittery about his intentions, which truly were not treasonous at all despite his actual, documented treason, being misunderstood. This would pass, and he would then return to skipping the explanation of what he would or would not have done were such and such not the case, and return to spouting off Calormen sayings. They have a saying for everything, and Emeth's treasure trove of advice was a deep well from which he would always be able to draw another.)

There wasn't much conversation after that, or at least not much more that was thoughtful. Tirian, who moments before had been chopping trees and talking about any manner of unimportant manners, immediately swept into a mode Bucky recognized. It was the gathering everybody up for a mission, then getting it done mode. Tirian was good at it, too, (for despite his youth, he had been in the wars, and done such things many more times than one, even if the stakes had never before been so high) and it wasn't long before they had back every scout and every gatherer, everyone who'd been doing anything away from the camp. Once he had everybody together, he started giving out orders.

*

An hour later, the portal opened. When it closed again, everyone was on the other side of it, except for [Farsight] the Eagle and the three most sensible Dogs, who had all been sent through the portal an hour ago to scout out the land. The dogs were sitting there waiting (except for one, who was so fascinating by the snow he had kept running about in it, dipping his nose in it, biting it, then calming down for a minute or two before repeating the process all over again; he was a more sensible Dog than most, but even the most sensible of Dogs is not very), while the Eagle circled overhead.

"There were Calormenes here before," said one of the other Dogs (who had several times been encouraged by the first Dog to frolic, and, despite herself, had given in). "There's no doubt of that, but they're not here now."

"No, they're not here now," said the other of the other dogs.

"There's only snow here now!" said the first Dog, having noticed the arrival of their company several seconds after the others. "It's Wet, and Cold."

The Eagle landed on a nearby boulder, inclined its head toward Tirian. "It's true, sire. I saw no Calormene on this side of the waterfall--and those few I saw to the East still appeared to be in flight."

"You have my thanks," Tirian said, and then moved on, announcing what they were going to be doing. Basically, they were going to walk from here to Cair Paravel, picking up Calormene prisoners along the way (or killing Calormene soldiers in honorable battle). More importantly, they'd be talking to all the Narnians they could find, along the way. As important as routing the Calormene invasion out was speaking honestly to his subjects, making sure they understood what had happened and what was going to happen now. Making sure they knew that the winter that had come so early (and they could all see now that the snow, which should have been melting in mid-September, was not; and that it was cold enough within the range of the snow that it was likely it would not, or at least not today) had no nefarious source, but had instead been brought to the benefit of all Narnia. Loki had offered to use the portal to take them everywhere they needed to go, but this was the reason Tirian had declined, and as far as Bucky could see, it was a good one.

*

It had been [late morning] when Bucky and Loki had arrived back at camp. By the time they had packed everything up and were on their way, it was mid-afternoon. The hours left were more than they would have had if it really had been winter--and it was strange to everyone who was used to having winter (which was everyone except Loki) how long the sun stayed out, lighting their way over the endless several-inch deep snow--and they managed to get beyond the waterfall and decently into Narnia itself before the light began to dim and Tirian gave orders to set up camp.

In truth, they could have gone on, in the silvery light from the moon and the snow; but as eager as everyone was, it was no good rushing, not when Narnians were more likely to come talk to them if they stayed still for a while, and definitely not when there was probably going to be a fight tomorrow, and the day after, and every day until it was over.

For several hours, they were embroiled in the job of setting up tents, and making fires (little ones, shielded from view where possible, so that you would have to come quite close to know in the first place that the camp was there), then in making and eating dinner. Everyone was hungry, and there wasn't anywhere near enough food to go around. Then, when no one showed up for an explanation of the truth by the time dinner was over, most everyone went to bed, looking for the most part dejected. But Bucky thought it made sense that people wouldn't necessarily want to come over on the first day, and said as much.

"Perhaps you are right," Tirian said, but still, even when everyone else in the camp had gone to bed, the seven of them--Bucky and Loki and Tirian, Jewel, Eustace, and Jill, and even Emeth, who no one was all that worried about now, even though it would have been easier than ever for him to sneak off--stayed by the fire. For a while, they spoke in very low voices, making plans for the next day, if one thing were to happen, or if something else were to happen instead. Contingency plans for contingency plans, with enough leeway for all of them for people to be able to change what they were doing if something unexpected were to happen instead of any of the planned possibilities.

After a while, the planning was done and the talking died off. They still sat there, no one making their excuses. Bucky thought, a couple times, that it would be good to have Loki by himself again, even if they just slept instead of talking or...other stuff. But although he told himself, a couple of times, that he was about to say he was headed to bed, and then get up and go, he didn't. After a while, it started to feel like he was waiting, though he couldn't figure out for what. Looking at the others, they looked like they were waiting, too. Bucky couldn't say why he thought so, but he was completely sure about that. 

The fire, already small, faded to embers. Then the embers faded, too. The moon was high in the sky, its light shining off of every snow-covered surface. Maybe that was why Bucky could see Him so clearly. He never did remember turning his head, but he must have. because instead of looking across at Tirian and Jewel and the kids, he was looking to his left, where the woods began. There, in what should have been the darkest, hardest to see place, he saw that there stood Someone. For a second, Bucky didn't know him, couldn't even have said what kind of Animal he was appearing as even if he'd tried. The next second he did know him--or maybe it's more accurate to say that he knew this Other knew him .

"Aslan," he said, and later he was pretty sure he wasn't the only one. That they'd all said it, in the same moment and in the same low voice.

"Oh, Aslan," said Jill, in a voice that wasn't much louder, but much more full of tears. "You haven't come to send us home already?"

"You really can't," said Eustace, then Aslan looked at him and he seemed to quail. "Well, all right, you can, but--you won't, will you?"

Aslan looked at them, so solemn no one else dared interrupt. Then he said, in a voice that was fond and firm, but not as stern as everyone had been expecting, "You may both have gone home without guilt or shame, knowing the good work you have done. Because of this work, you may stay as well to see the end of it." Then he turned his gaze to Tirian, "To you, O King of Narnia, I will speak at your castle of Cair Paravel."

"Do you mean our march will succeed?" Tirian asked, his tired countenance leaping into something both more joyful and more terrible.

"None may know what their future holds," Aslan said sternly (though everyone felt, and quite rightly, that he had let a little bit of it slip, a second ago). "I have come for the others (not you, Jewel, nor you, Emeth--no, you do not need to be surprised that I know your name, for I will come to you at another time).

So that was how Bucky and Loki knew to get up, and walk towards Aslan, leaving the others behind.

*

They walked for a while, Bucky on Aslan's right, and Loki on his left. Other than the crunching of their boots in the snow, it was as quiet as it could be. Even Aslan's footsteps didn't make a sound, even though anything else his size surely would have made a great deal of noise. The more they walked, the blanker Bucky's mind got, even though he knew there were questions he should be asking.

Maybe they'd only walked for a few minutes, or maybe for half an hour, when Aslan said, "You need not fear to speak."

Maybe it had been fear in the blankness, because as soon as he said it, Bucky felt a little warmer, even here, at night, with the quiet wind blowing in his face, and the crunching snow beneath his feet. He said, "Did it work? I know you can't tell us the future, but--did we do what we were supposed to do?"

"You have always done what I meant you to do for my land of Narnia," Aslan said. "You bled upon the table and you planted the tree. You saved the daughter and defended the sisters. You freed the Dogs and the Horses; you freed Narnia itself, in a winter that in any other context would have been more chains."

"We did more than that," Loki said. "And yet, no one ever seems to know anything about us when we come back again."

"Must others know of your deeds for them to have done great good?" asked Aslan. "Must others know the way you have helped to shape my land of Narnia in order to have been changed?"

"It would help," Loki muttered, but he looked pleased.

"And what of you, Bucky Barnes?" Aslan asked. "Are you satisfied with the things you have done here?"

"I don't remember most of them," Bucky answered honestly, and thought of the Dogs, and their joy when he'd been disentangling them in the barn. And he thought of the faces of Tirian and the others when they'd heard of the army's retreat, and of the way everyone had looked when Aslan had showed up, the way most of them had been horrified that it might be the end of the story when they weren't nearly done yet. And he remembered the last time, when he'd found Loki bloody in the stream and hadn't known him; and what they'd stopped Rilian from doing, a few days later. And he remembered the various flashes he'd had, and how even though most of them hadn't come with a larger story, there had always seemed to be something important going on. "But what I do remember is pretty good."

"They have been very good. But now the time has come for you to return home."

"And?" Loki said. In any other conversation, Bucky would have shot him a dirty look, or told him to shut up, or kicked him, or something. But in this one, though he didn't think Loki should be saying this, he knew for a fact he didn't have the right to interrupt.

"And, what?"

"The last time you came to us, it was to tell us how terrible our lives would be, going forward. Have you come to tell us the same this time? Perhaps Bucky will find his mind is not as much his own as it ought to be. Perhaps some great misfortune will fall upon the Statesman . Will you be allowing us to know the details this time, or are we walk into the dark once again?"

"All creatures must go into the dark," Aslan said. "But in every life spend grasping, there will come moments of light. One such awaits you. But no, I have not come with no such dire tidings today."

"What are you here to tell us, then?" Bucky said, because he'd gotten the gist of what Loki was saying: that Aslan had told them something last time. Something bad. He'd have to ask what that had been, the next time they had a chance to talk.

"You have done enough," Aslan said. It was the kind of sentiment that could have gone a lot of different ways; but the way you felt when He said it was as if, no matter how many mistakes you'd made, you'd done at least one thing so right that it made everything else, if not right, then forgiven. It wasn't a feeling that would last Bucky very long, but there would be many future days, when things were bad for one reason or another, and he'd look back and remember what Aslan had said and how it had made him feel, and would feel very much better. "And because you have done enough, I will not bring you into my land of Narnia again."

" What ?" Loki said. He'd gone so pale it would have been enough to make Bucky wonder if he'd been hurt at some point--except that there was no trail in the snow except that of their footprints. "You can't be serious."

Bucky had a feeling Aslan wasn't the kind of person you ignored so you could talk to someone else. But the way Loki looked right now... "I need to talk to Loki for a minute," he said. "If that's okay with you."

Aslan didn't say anything--but turned away from them and began to walk. Not far enough away that they couldn't see him, definitely not far enough away that he couldn't hear them, but far enough to give the impression that he

"It'll be okay," Bucky said, knowing right away why Loki looked so gutted. Maybe he wouldn't have been so sure, if Aslan hadn't been right there, but he was, and for some reason that made Bucky know that he and Loki were both thinking the same thing. "You have your other cube...thing. You can find me."

But Loki didn't look any less gutted. "I couldn't find either of our worlds from this one. Who's to say the Tesseract is capable of taking me to another world entirely? It may restrict its holder to the world in which it currently resides."

"You could ask Aslan," Bucky said, because he was as sure as he was of anything else that Aslan would know the answer. "I bet he'd know."

"Do you?" Loki asked.

"The Tesseract will not ordinarily open a doorway between one world and another," Aslan said. "If you and Bucky hailed from different worlds, neither the Tesseract nor any other magical object would allow either of you to leave your world for the other's."

Bucky didn't look at Loki's face. He couldn't. He was too busy--later he would think it felt like drowning. Because if they could never come to Narnia, and could never come to each other's world, that meant this was the end. 

He may not have remembered everything about their other trips to Narnia, but he knew for sure they'd never really had to say goodbye.

"Shit," he said. "Loki."

"I'll try," Loki said, in a low voice, almost a hiss. His eyes shone in the darkness. "I'll try anyway. I'll try as I didn't before. There must be some way."

"I think maybe you shouldn't," Bucky said, because what Aslan had said had seemed so final, and because he couldn't imagine much worse than Loki wasting his life on that, when he was never going to get anywhere.

They stood there in that silvery light for a while. What they said to each other, Bucky would never forget--and I would not share even if I knew. For those few minutes, even Aslan may have closed his ears, and turned his eyes away, so that none would see or hear what was meant for only these two.

Afterward, and much too soon, Aslan said, "Come, Bucky Barnes."

So Bucky went, and tried not to think about the way Loki looked, as he did.

He and Aslan walked together, and this time instead of being a blank, his mind and heart were so full and so empty that he still had no idea what he wanted to say.

"Take heart," Aslan said. "Things are not nearly so terrible as you fear. Did I not say there is a great light awaiting you? It is not so far away now. But there is one more matter on your mind, I think."

Some people say 'I think' as a way to tell you they actually 'know' something about you. The way Aslan said it was different. It was like he did know, but were allowing you to decide whether or not it mattered enough to bring it up with Him. 

Bucky didn't need to save face here. He had an idea that if he had, they would have been having a much different conversation. What he did need was space. To think, and to decide what he wanted to say, for himself.

"Can I ask for something?" he said. He meant to go on, to say that Aslan had said he and Loki had done a lot for Narnia, and that even if they'd already gotten something back in return--they'd gotten to have all those adventures, and they'd gotten to know each other--and most of all, they'd gotten to know how it had turned out for each other, and that it was going to be okay--and maybe Aslan hadn't exactly promised that, but the way he'd been talking, you got the feeling that everything was going to turn out all right--none of that had been, strictly speaking, a reward. It had been more a side-effect of being here, a silver lining on an already pretty silver cloud.

"You may ask," said Aslan. 

He didn't say anything about whether it would be allowed or not. But Bucky felt like he already knew the kinds of things that weren't allowed; and more than felt, he knew that if sending him back with Loki or Loki back with him had been possible or allowed, Aslan would have said so, or pointed them in that direction. Ge felt like it would have been impossible to ask for anything he already knew Aslan would frown on, and so all that was left was the question he didn't know one way or the other.

"Could you help me to remember?" he asked. "I mean, I remember some things--enough to know Loki, and Steve, and why they're important to me. But I'm missing so much. And if I can't ever see Loki again, it's--too much."

"Whoever said you would never see him again? No one has yet spoken of the chances of that," Aslan said, which was enough to make Bucky jerk with a shocked joy--but before he could get more details on this, or on what he could do to make sure it happened, Aslan said, "Yes, your memories may be returned to you. But will you be willing to take them all, no matter how dark or how terrible?"

It was such a solemn question that Bucky couldn't, in that moment, think about anything else. Instead, he thought about what he remembered, and what he didn't, and what he'd done and who he'd been, just that he'd known about. And he thought, most of all, of everything he was missing and everything he didn't know he was missing. A lot of it had to do with Loki and a lot of it had to do with everything else, and in the end it was for himself and himself alone that he said, "Yeah. I'd take everything. If there's bad stuff in there, I want to know. And anyway, it can't be worse than some of the things I already remember doing when I was the Soldier."

"It is well said," said the Lion. He shook his mane. "It will be done. Your memories will be returned to you soon-- soon --SOOOOOOOOON."

And as he said it, there seemed to come a warm breeze, blowing at Bucky's back. It lifted him into the air, so that by the time Aslan said soon twice, he was above the treetops. By the time of the third soon, he was among the stars. Then it all faded, Aslan's voice and the Narnian sky and the blanket of snow spread out over the whole country. Just a second or two after Bucky had been somewhere else, he came back into his own world, a little at a time, and found himself standing by his trunk in his hut. He'd lost some arrows from his quiver, but other than that, he had everything he'd had when he left, just a little dirtier.

He stood there, for a long minute, listening to the sounds from outside, of his goats eating their own food, and trying to eat someone else's food, and objecting to someone else trying to eat their food, or to someone else not letting them eat someone else's food. Then he took off his sword and his crossbow and his arm, and set them down on the ground by his trunk. He knew he needed to clean them before he packed them away. That was going to have to be later. For now, he stood there, and found the one thing he hadn't had when he'd left, and held it in his hand: a little, crooked knife with what looked like an emerald in the handle. It was easy to hold, felt like it would be easy to throw, and do some nasty damage when it went into someone. Bucky couldn't remember where all the other knives Loki had given him had gone, or even what any of them had looked like. This one, he held for a while, then tucked in against his calf. It wasn't too likely he was going to need it, here in Wakanda. It definitely wasn't any more likely that he was going to tuck it away somewhere.

By the time he made it out to his goats, he still hadn't remembered anything, and the goats had stopped tussling over the actual feed, which was all gone, and were now thinking about doing it over little specks on the ground that might or might not have been feed. Mostly, they weren't fighting, because for all the arguments, they'd also all had plenty. 

Well, Aslan hadn't said he'd get his memories back instantly. And in the meantime, Bucky had a life to live. He decided he may as well get to it.

6. The Song Remembered

 Bucky picked up the now-empty feed bucket, which was also looking a little chewed-on around the lip. He tried to remember what his plans had been, a week or two and just a few minutes ago. It was a sunny, bright day in Wakanda, and he didn't see any of the kids around. So it was probably a schoolday, and he'd probably been planning on an outing. Maybe he'd meant to go swimming in the nearby lake. That seemed to ping something in the back of his mind, but instead of going with that, Bucky abruptly found that he didn't want to. Swimming would let him work out some of his nervous energy, but somehow it wasn't the kind of workout he really wanted.

Instead, he decided to take the goats up the mountain. There was a meadow there where they could graze and act like idiots, and he could watch them and make sure they didn't get eaten by anything. His mind couldn't drift off up there the way it could when it was only him in the water. He had to stay alert, pay attention. It would be better for him than dwelling, which was what he was going to do if he didn't stop himself. It would be better for him than wondering when his memories would come back, or trying to make them; he'd figured out years ago that he was a lot more likely to suddenly remember something when he was in the middle of something else. 

It would be a hell of a lot better than wondering what Loki was doing right now, or wondering how high the chances Aslan had mentioned were, or, even if they were really good chances, how long it would take. Loki was a thousand years old. Bucky was a hundred and one, technically, and didn't seem to be aging at all that he could tell (and, according to Shuri, his cells were aging so slowly that, if they didn't decide to speed up for themselves at some point, he was going to live...a long, long time). Sure, he'd been frozen for a lot of that and barely remembered the rest, but he had a sense most people probably didn't of how long a century was. And, however much he might think he had a sense of how much he had left to go, he knew he didn't. And who knew how long it would be.

And he needed to think about something, anything else. And so, a hike it was.

*

The good thing about taking the goats up the mountain was that it was hard, and took all morning. By the time they'd gotten there, Bucky was exhausted, and his favorite tree was looking really good. He plopped down under it, almost wishing he could take a nap. He couldn't, though. He'd never seen anything up here, but he spotted tracks sometimes. Big ones, like a housecat that weighed a few hundred pounds. He'd asked around and been told lions were unlikely, but leopards were possible. He'd done his research, and hoped he never had to deal with one. So far, so good, but you never knew. So he didn't nap. He just sat there, watching the goats, keeping a tally in his mind of where each one was. Sometimes, he got up to convince one or three goats they didn't really want to wander off into the woods. Mostly, they could be distracted. Mostly, they were good at distracting him.

Still, though, Bucky could feel it coming. He didn't exactly spend a lot of time sitting around feeling sorry for himself. That didn't do anyone any good. Even if there was nothing he could do to make up for the things he'd done, he could at least add something to the world. It was okay if it was something small. It almost had to be something small; with even Captain America on the run, no one was going to accept the other kinds of things the former Winter Soldier could have been doing. It was okay if it was something like taking care of the village's surplus goats, so that they'd have more baby goats next spring than they would have if they'd had to sell all of Bucky's. That wasn't life or death, but it was still something. And someday they might need him for something more. If they did, they'd know just where to find him, taking care of his goats.

He tried not to spend a lot of time dwelling, but he knew that the second he stopped moving, when the goats were back in their pen tonight and he was sleeping alone for the first time in weeks, that the dwelling would start for sure. He had a feeling it was going to be a long, hard night, the longest and hardest in a while. He'd get through it, but knowing that didn't make it any better. He'd been through much, much worse, and that didn't help, either.

They stayed in the meadow until it was far enough through the day that it would be dusk before they got back. Then, Bucky knew they really should head back. There might or might not be leopards, but if they were, he didn't want to meet one in the dark.

He was just getting up when he heard a scream. He got up a lot faster then. By the time he was on his feet, he also had Loki's knife in his hand. Lot of good that would be against a leopard. 

Then the scream came again, and there was no way that was a leopard, or any other kind of cat. Still, it wasn't good.

It was coming from north of the meadow. There were a few hundred feet of trees there, then a lake beside a huge tree that had to be from whatever forest had been here a thousand years ago. Bucky had never swam in that lake, since he was never up here without the goats. He didn't usually even go over there, but he did now, hoping the goats wouldn't scatter too much by the time he got back.

He crept through the tree, not unlike he'd crept through the Western Wild earlier today. When he was close enough to see the screamer, what he saw was a tall, dark-haired person, facing away from him. His hands were down by his side and clenched into fists, and he was breathing so hard Bucky could see him doing it from all the way over here. He'd screamed a few more times while Bucky crept; now he did it again, and kicked the big tree, probably not for the first time. Then, probably also not for the first time, he made a muffled curse and shook his foot, since clearly kicking trees that were practically fossilized was a great way to keep from breaking things.

Dangerous? Who knew. Annoying? Absolutely. Something else to thing about? Yeah. That was how Bucky decided to say something, instead of just creeping away again.

"Hey, you," he said, stepped out from behind the current tree, which was a lot smaller than the big tree up ahead, but just big enough to hide him. "You're scaring my goats."

The figure stopped, then turned, slowly. There was an air of disbelief in every line of his body. Bucky understood it a second later, when he said, "--Bucky?"

Because it was Loki standing there. It was him, and for a second Bucky couldn't believe it. "You can't be here," he said, even though he'd known, even though he'd been told-- "Did Aslan send you here?"

"I--no. But how are you here?"

"I live here. I mean, sort of. A couple hours that way."

"You can't live here . This is Midgard," said Loki, rude and dismissively, except that at some point Bucky had started smiling so hard that his face hurt, and it must have been so hard to affect Loki, because he was starting to grin, too. "You can't have--always--what?"

"What's Midgard?" Bucky asked, because of everything he didn't remember, he remembered a lot about where Loki was from, and there had been nothing about any of it that had made him think Midgard was anywhere he had ever been. "I mean, it's--a country, isn't it? Or some kind of island?"

Now Loki stared at him. "It's neither. It's a realm ."

"You said you fell off a bridge," Bucky said. "And then you, washed up somewhere. And then you were on a ship..."

He didn't understand this. Some part of him felt like he needed to understand this for Loki to be here.

"A ship," Loki said, and waved at the sky. "A realm," he said, and spread his arms like he meant everything around them.

Bucky stared blankly. For a second, it was too much for him to understand, much less comprehend. 

Then Loki spread his arms even farther. "A world ," he said.

And Bucky got it. Here he'd always thought Loki was talking oceans, when what he'd meant was stars. That he'd always thought that was something he knew for sure. It didn't matter that he couldn't remember their old conversations about it. There were some things you just knew. He knew this.

"And here you claimed there was no magic in your world," Loki said. "You could have saved us both so much trouble."

"Well, you could've told me you were a space alien. That would've helped, too."

"Hardly," Loki said, like he was ignoring the fact that anyone from space automatically had to be a space alien. "But you. You're a Midgardian . Unbelievable."

Loki didn't look unhappy about it, though. He didn't look disgusted. If he had, Bucky would have had to roll his eyes and...smack him, probably. Maybe they'd have ended up rolling around in the dirt, hitting each other. It seemed like it was a familiar thought, if not something that had happened before. For now, he let it go, because what Loki looked was as shocked and happy and surprised as Bucky felt. 

"How'd you get here, anyway?" he asked, stepping closer to Loki, still in disbelief. "That blue cube thing?"

"The Tesseract," Loki agreed. "When I arrived back on the Statesman (which is a space vessel, by the way, currently three and a half months from its destination--which is here, by the way, or close enough as to make no difference), I was due at a meeting. A very long one. I went to it, lest my brother tear down my door upon my absence. Then I returned to my quarters, where I took out the Tesseract and demanded it take me to you. Instead of doing so, it showed me this lake, and this tree, which I somehow knew were on Midgard. I didn't want to be on Midgard, so I closed the portal and demanded again that it take me to you. But it merely showed me the same lake and tree, no matter how many times I ordered it otherwise. Finally, a knock came at my door--my brother, perhaps, for by then it was time for the evening feast, and he'd been giving me concerned looks all through our council meeting--and I knew I couldn't stand to face anyone else when the only person I wished to face was you. So I came through the portal, simply to avoid him. And it turned out you were here after all."

Bucky could see it. Loki, working himself up, getting more and more upset, and madder and madder. So mad he'd cried, at least a little--there were tear tracks on his face, which had been really red when he'd turned around. Loki, coming here in order to scream about it. Loki, who was probably at least a little embarrassed about it, since he'd started to turn pink again toward the end of that story. Loki, who was here, when Bucky hadn't known to expect him so soon, or whether there was any point in expecting him at all.

"I'm glad I'm here," Bucky said. "I'm glad you're here," and he stepped closer to Loki, and closer still, and then Loki was coming toward him, too, and then they were embracing, and it was so quick and so chaotic that they'd never really be sure who had kissed the other first. All Bucky knew was that they were both grasping for each other, so much more wildly than they'd been able to in their tent (and quite a bit more loudly here, for there was no one around to overhear them). 

Then his back was against something rough and hard--the bark of the tree, though he didn't remember turning around, or the three or four large steps it would have taken to reach it--and he and Loki were tearing his pants down. When he had one leg all the way out, they started on the front of Loki's trousers, and then Bucky's free leg wrapped around his waist, and Loki's hand got slick with something, and he ran it over his dick. Then he moved, and his body pressed Bucky to the tree as he pushed inside.

"I'm glad, as well," he said, breath hot against Bucky's ear. He was already moving, one hand pressed to the tree above their heads, the slick one wrapping around Bucky's dick, pulling at the same fast hard pace with which he was fucking into Bucky, then even faster and harder than that. "I've never been--so glad--of anything. Never, in all my--" He grimaced, open-mouthed, looking like he was about to come. It was such a good luck--here, in Bucky's world, where they'd never thought they would be--that Bucky did come, and cried out as he did, his dick jerking slowly within Loki's grip. Loki worked him through it, and almost the second Bucky had finished, cried out himself, and pressed into Bucky and stayed there, and kept crying out until he was finished, too, and pressed his head into Bucky's still-clothed shoulder. "In all my life," he finished.

"Me neither," Bucky said, and when Loki looked up, kissed him again. They kept kissing, hands moving under each other's shirts, or above them, clutching the fabric, until his dick and leg, exposed to the elements, started to get cold. It was around that time that he realized the light was a little less than it had been before, too. " Shit ."

"What it is?" Loki said, when Bucky pushed him off, and stepped into his pantleg, and reached down to pull it up.

"My goats!" Bucky said.

*

"This is the most asinine endeavor I have ever been party too," Loki said.

"You say that like you've done anything," said Bucky. "Instead of just complaining about everything I've had to do.

It had started with, 'locate all the goats.' Then it had been, 'get all the goats grouped together.' By then twilight had already come, so that by now it was full dark, and the goal was, 'get all the goats down a narrow mountain path without permanently losing anyone.' The only help Loki had been was to say, occasionally, 'I think we have one fewer than we did before,' which always meant Bucky had to stop and backtrack, or side-track, and find the goat wherever the hell it had gotten to.

Eventually, though, they got there, and Bucky got the goats locked up. No need to feed them again; they'd gotten plenty of grazing time in, so they'd be fine until morning.

Loki didn't help with that either, but when they got to Bucky's hut, he was still there. Somehow, Bucky hadn't really expected him to be. 

"They're not going to miss you, on your ship?" he asked. No one had ever missed them before, but they were living in actual time now.

"They will, but I hardly care," Loki said, and Bucky wasn't about to argue with him.

Bucky ducked in, followed by Loki and his light, a greenish-yellow flame that followed them inside and lit up everything in Bucky's hut. Mostly it was the walls, and the sleeping pad and blankets on the floor; the trunk, and the things piled in front of it that Bucky still hadn't cleaned or put away. 

"This is where you live?" Loki said, in the appalled tone he hadn't used about the small, dirty tents back in Narnia.

"I told you, I'm a goat herder now," Bucky said. "Anyway, these are really good accommodations, believe it or not."

"I do not believe it," Loki said. 

Bucky decided not to show him the way the southern wall lit up when you waved your hand at it just so. Maybe he'd get to see it in the morning.

"What do we want to do now?" Bucky asked, grinning.

Loki must have missed all of the innuendo somehow, because all he said was, "Whatever you usually do is fine."

Wasn't too much to do after dark here. Sometimes Bucky sat up, watching silly things. Sometimes he stayed up learning things--not the depressing, make you think that maybe you hadn't been the worst thing about the second half of the twentieth century after all kind of thing, but the kind of thing that made you think humanity was going somewhere, after all. The good things people had accomplished, or had done for each other. 

He wasn't sure what he'd have done if Loki hadn't shown up. Sit up alone with his thoughts, no matter how many things there were for him to look up. It would have been a bad night no matter what, because he'd have been alone. That had always been okay before--in fact alone had always been good, because it meant he wasn't being watched by doctors and soldiers and his handlers--but not tonight.

"Let's go to bed," he said, and paid no attention at all to Loki's objections about sleeping on the ground as he dragged him there.

*

"Wait a minute," Bucky said a little while later. Or maybe it was just a while later--it was starting to get gray outside, and by the time they'd both stopped starting something every time they meant to go to sleep, the stars had all still been out. He sat up bolt upright. "Um, Loki?"

" What ?" said Loki, who had never not been an asshole when he got woken up before he wanted to be--even, apparently, when they'd spent half the night having sex, and Bucky could have been wanting more for all he knew.

"You told me you tried to conquer Midgard." Bucky remembered back when he'd thought that was a country. Not great, but not a place he'd ever been to, so it had been a little easier to swallow. "Were you trying to say you tried to take over Earth?"

"--Essentially."

"And when you said you tried to blow up that other realm, what you meant was that you tried to blow up an entire planet ?"

"More or less," Loki said. He didn't look proud of himself. Mostly he looked irritated (and, maybe, a little worried). "What does it matter? That was years ago."

"That's practically yesterday, for you," Bucky said. "Wow. Wait."

Because now he was remembering something else. One of the things he'd glanced at, then decided he was better off not reading up on. In that case it hadn't been because it was one of the things that made you despair about people, as because Steve had been involved in stopping it somehow, and things that involve Steve throwing himself head-long into danger weren't exactly fun to read up on. He knew how Steve had been as a kid, even though he didn't have that many separate incidents to pull from. The only thing that could have made it worse would have been if he hadn't known for a fact that he'd been on ice then--that they'd panicked and sent him into cryo about two seconds after they found Steve's plane.

"'Wait,' what?"

"The alien attack on New York, a couple years ago--that was you ?"

"--Possibly," Loki said. Now he just plain looked embarrassed.

Bucky was definitely going to have to look into this now. Nevermind how edgy he always felt watching clips of Steve being Captain America. "This is nuts," he said. "Is there anything else I should know about you?"

"Not as far as I know," Loki said immediately, like he'd been waiting for Bucky to ask something like that this whole time.

Bucky didn't believe it for a second. "Okay then," he said anyway.

"'Okay'?"

"Yeah."

"You're saying this doesn't matter to you," Loki said.

That wasn't it. It was just, the more Bucky sat with it, the more he thought he could live with it. He didn't know if the person he'd been before could have. The person he was now had been the Winter Soldier, and even if that hadn't been his choice, it still wasn't something he could ever hope to erase. "It changes some things," he said, because how could it not. "It doesn't make that much of a difference, between us."

Loki seemed to relax. He'd been sitting up straight, like Bucky, but now relaxed back against his pillow (Bucky had two of them, the height of luxury). "What sort of changes might these be."

"Well, now we're both wanted criminals, instead of just me," Bucky said, though he suspected they might want Loki a little more. Maybe a lot more. Probably a lot more. He really needed to look into this. "Also, I think you might have met my best friend, Steve."

"--I haven't come across any 'five foot shrimps,' in my travels," Loki said. "Besides, shouldn't he be dead by now?"

"I think you might have met my best friend, Captain America."

" What ?"

*

It took them a while to get all that sorted out. Loki was a lot more worked up by the Steve thing than Bucky was about his mass murdering. Probably it helped that he knew Loki had been at least a little under someone else's influence for at least some of it. Bucky didn't actually remember for which part. It was all starting to bleed together.

"I'll put in a good word for you," he said, for probably about the fifteenth time.

Loki was probably about to say something about how much good that would do--

Except that was when the music started. A long, carrying note from nowhere on Earth. It came in the hut through the window, or through the ground, or through the roof. Or maybe it was through all three. It was beautiful. It was haunting. It had a meaning as clear as if it had talked for an hour, when it had only played for a few seconds. It was like a note of a song you'd once heard, so beautiful you'd always wished you could hear it again, and so old you'd carried it with you all your life.

"The horn," Loki said when it was over.

Bucky stared at him. "The what?"

"The queen's horn," Loki said. "We've heard of it, but never seen it nor heard it blown. We're being called." 

"I had that part figured out," Bucky said, for there really had been no mistaking it. 

The horn sounded again. This time it seemed to come from inside--from Bucky's fingers and toes, from his head and his stomach, from the very core of him outward. But for all there, there was no pull like there'd been the last time. There was nothing inevitable about it, except maybe--

"We can't go ," Loki said. "He said we couldn't go back."

The horn sounded again. This time, it came from everywhere at once. This time, it opened a floodgate, but only for Bucky. It was the kind of thing that would have been much too much, if it hadn't been for the music lifting him, keeping his head above the water.

"Did he say that?" Bucky asked, a long moment later, when the sound of the horn still seemed to be echoing, the way it maybe always would. "Aslan told me he wouldn't bring us. But did he say we couldn't go?"

Loki looked at him. Somehow, he didn't see what was happening. "How would would you suggest we do that?"

"That blue cube of yours. Aslan said something about it working between worlds sometimes. Didn't he?"

"I don't remember," Loki said.

But Bucky did. "Try it."

So Loki brought it out, and opened the portal, and through it they saw into another world. There was a girl there, standing on a tall hill. She must have been in a fight recently, was holding a bloodied sword. More blood was trickling down from a slash on her shoulder. There were two Leopards with her, one of them licking a limp front paw, while the other looked around, alert and ready for...well, who really knew what was going on over there?

"Well?" Loki said. "What do you think?"

But it was had to be more of a rhetorical question than anything else, because Loki didn't look surprised when Bucky reached over for his sword and crossbow.

"I think, let's go," he said. "But, wait a second."

The floodgate had opened, but now the things that had come through it were becoming more clear. And of all the things that were clear, there was one at the front, that seemed the most important. Bucky remembered now. He remembered Loki in so many ways. But there were moments that stood out, an understanding he hadn't had before.

"What is it?" Loki asked.

"I remember now," Bucky said. 

"Remember what?"

"A lot of things. Everything. Loki, I remember the apple."

How it had crunched under his teeth. How the juice had flowed down his face. How Loki had looked at him with barely-disguised eagerness he hadn't understood. Later, how he'd understood some of it, and been disconcerted by the understanding; how it hadn't been anything to the understanding he had later, when he survived something he shouldn't have survived and half-wished he hadn't. Then he'd fallen, and survived that, and he hadn't understood at all, hadn't remembered. He hadn't remembered when Loki asked if he knew how the Soldier had lived through it. All he'd remembered was what had happened after he had. What he'd done to people who hadn't deserved it, who had for the most part never seen him coming for them.

The Loki who was here with him now heard this, and went pale. Bone-pale. Snow-pale. He hadn't cared this much about whether Bucky knew about what he'd try to do on Earth, or what he'd tried to do to the planet he'd been born on. But Bucky knowing this--this scared him shitless.

But Bucky remembered other things, too. Things that weren't new to him even if they had happened since the apple, which was. The look on Steve's face whenever he came to visit. The swing of his new arm, so much lighter than the old one, and not at all painful to move. Loki, lying in the stream, covered in blood and on his way out, with no one else around to help him. Everyone else he'd helped. The Witch's sisters and the dogs and horses in the barn. The faces of everyone who'd heard about winter coming early, this time. Loki, in the dark and in their tent, in the woods and on a hill and kicking a tree. Loki, here in Bucky's hut, not a perfect prince but one who'd messed up or was as messed up as Bucky was. And it was because of the apple that any of it had happened, and that Bucky was here.

Loki still hadn't said anything. He was too busy standing there, looking gutted.

"Loki, hey," Bucky said. "You remember what you asked me, about that apple? And what you said, when I didn't know what you were talking about?"

"Yes," Loki said. That was all.

Bucky remembered it, too. 'Do you regret it?' Loki had asked. And maybe he should. If he hadn't eaten the apple, he would have died a long time ago. None of the bad would have happened, but a lot of the good wouldn't have, either. And he wouldn't be here now.

Bucky hadn't had an answer, then. But Loki had had one, way before Bucky even knew what they were talking about.

And he had one now, too.

"Me neither," he said, just as firmly as Loki had said it then. "Now, are we gonna get going, or what?"

"Of course," Loki said, and opened the portal a little wider, wide enough for two people to step through together.

And so then, of course, they did.