Bucky was running through his physical therapy routine when the portal whooshed open in front of him. Before he could do more than take a defensive stance, it spat a body and a blue glowing cube thing onto the floor of his hut, then whooshed away again.
The body turned out to be a guy, not bad looking, still breathing but knocked out cold (probably due to using his head to break his fall). As for the cube thing...Bucky had no idea. After a minute or two, it did seem to be pinging something, way in the back of his mind--enough that he thought there might have been a directive of some sort in there before Shuri had taken all of that kind of thing out.
Whatever it was, there was no point in poking at it. If it had been a directive, she'd taken it out, which meant poking at it was as pointless as sticking your tongue into a place where you'd lost a tooth and expecting that to bring it back; if it hadn't, it was still more likely to come back to him the more he left it alone. Either way, he was better off not worrying about it.
There were more pressing concerns at the moment, anyway. Like the guy in a green robe on his floor. The one who was still breathing, but hadn't woken up yet. Being knocked out cold could be pretty serious. Bucky really didn't need anyone to die in here. He liked his hut, but there was no way he could stay in it if random people started dropping in just to die on him.
He called Shuri.
When he told her about the portal and the unconscious guy, she seemed concerned, but also interested. When he said "blue glowing cube thing," she went from concerned to...something pretty far up the concerned scale.
"Whatever you do, do not touch it," she said. "In fact, don't touch anything until I get there."
Her lab in the palace was ordinarily about thirty minutes away. Shuri was there in five, on one of the prototypes she'd shown Bucky the last time he'd gone up there. By then, the guy on Bucky's floor had started to groan, like he was thinking about waking up, but thought it was probably a bad idea.
"That," Shuri said, gesturing at the cube thing, "is the Tesseract. And that..." she bent down to look at the unconscious guy's face. "That is Loki."
The name sounded familiar. Not like someone Bucky had known--it was a different kind of familiar--but like someone he'd read about a while ago, or heard something about more recently. But before he could ask, Loki groaned again, and sat up, and said, "Yes. Yes, it is. Where am I?" He squinted at Shuri, at Bucky, but it couldn't have helped much; his pupils were different sizes, and his gaze was otherwise unfocused. "And what are you? If I didn't know better, I'd say you were humans."
"We are," Shuri said. "You are on Earth."
"What? I can't be on Midgard. My father will kill me." Loki smiled a little dreamily, like he couldn't think of anything better than pissing off his dad, and sank back down to the floor. "Oh, he'll be so wroth. And Thor...he'll die of envy when he hears of this."
*
They didn't get back to Shuri's lab for a while. Apparently brain injuries couldn't be a priority when there was something like the Tesseract sitting around. First, she had to get it safely into the box she'd brought with her; then she had to call T'Challa to let him know what was up; then, after about fifty Wakandan guards had shown up, the fifty-two of them escorted Loki to Shuri's lab.
That he had a concussion was fairly obvious. After Shuri had scanned his brain, she said, "It's a serious injury, but the damage is repairable. And it appears you may have amnesia."
"I know exactly who I am," Loki said, not seeming all that concerned about it.
"Mm. How old are you?"
"Eight-hundred and two. Why?"
On one of the screens in front of them was Loki's basic stats. Under Age, it said 1053.
Bucky and Shuri exchanged a glance.
"Who's the current King of Asgard?" Shuri asked.
Loki rolled his eyes, then grimaced, like rolling his eyes had hurt. "My father. Odin. Obviously."
Bucky didn't have to read the information that was scrolling up now to know why that was wrong. He'd heard a lot of talk about the transmissions that had been coming from space for the last few weeks. The Asgardians' old king had died, and then their world had been destroyed, and now they were on their way to Earth. They'd be here in just a few more weeks. In the meantime, whether or not to take them in was the main thing being discussed on talk shows. No one outside of Wakanda seemed to realize that King T'Challa had been quietly preparing for their arrival since about three minutes after the first transmission.
"What are you playing at?" Loki asked, going from eye-rolling to something else. "Explain yourselves. I am a Prince of Asgard, and I will not be denied."
But a second later, he seemed to forget about it, sinking back onto the exam table muttering about his headache. A few seconds later, he was asleep.
"Shouldn't we wake him up?" Bucky asked. He had a vague idea you were supposed to keep people awake when they had a concussion, if you didn't want something worse to happen.
"If we were in the field and he had these symptoms, yes," Shuri said. "But I think it will be easier for me to repair the damage if he is not talking."
*
With the Tesseract locked up and Loki's head injury (mostly) repaired, they had to decide what to do with him. At first, there was a strong chance of him being locked up in a Wakandan prison cell. The only thing against it was was that they weren't completely sure they could hold him. Shuri could try to make something that would corral his magic--which apparently he had, because apparently space god magic was a thing--but until then...
"I could keep an eye on him," Bucky offered, during the conference with T'Challa where they were talking options. It wasn't so much that he wanted to watch Loki as that it seemed like something he could do to pay back a little of the debt he owed. "You'd have to shore up the defenses on my hut a little, but he'd have a hard time getting by me. And it's away from the city, which is good."
In the end, no one was that happy about it, but no one had any better ideas, either. The only other real option was to contact someone outside of Wakanda for help, and they made it pretty clear they weren't going to do that, not unless they had to.
*
Shuri had repaired the major damage to Loki's brain, but she'd left him with a mild version of the concussion he'd started with. The idea wasn't to punish him, but to make a little more sure they could hold him until they could give him back to the Asgardians. If he spent most of his time sleeping and the rest of his time having to sit still, that would give Shuri more time to come up with a way to block his magic.
"I'm not staying here," Loki sneered when he saw the outside of Bucky's hut. Then they were inside, and he got a load of all the tech Bucky had been collecting since he'd gotten here. "...All right, this may be acceptable. Have you gotten word to my father yet?"
"We contacted your people, yeah," Bucky said. He had no idea how that conversation had gone; it was above his pay grade. "Your brother's on his way."
Loki scoffed. "My brother is in Vanaheim for a month."
"Oh." Well, at least he wasn't going to expect him right away. That was probably a good thing. Maybe he'd ask fewer questions that way. Everyone thought the fewer questions the better, like telling Loki he'd tried to conquer Earth that time would make him decide to try it again since he was here, or something.
"I was meant to go with him. Do you have any idea how dull Vanaheim is?"
"Nope."
"Well, it is. And there are to be ceremonies every night, which are even duller."
"You dodged a bullet there, huh?" Bucky said.
Loki squinted at him, a little more focused than he'd been in Shuri's lab, so that Bucky could clearly see the suspicion behind the look. "What is a bullet?"
"Something that'll kill you," Bucky said. Then he remembered all the times he'd been shot. "Or be a pain in the ass if it doesn't."
"Oh. In that case, yes. It seems I did."
Not too long after that, Loki fell asleep again. Of course, he managed to do it on the bed, leaving Bucky with the couch.
*
The next day, Shuri forwarded him Loki's file. There was...a lot there. Guy had done a lot of damage, and tried to do a lot more. And he'd had a rough few years himself, from the sound of it. Bucky wondered what it had been like for someone with that kind of lifespan to go through that much in just a few years. Then he got distracted by wondering how old Loki was, relatively speaking. He looked like he was in his thirties, but acted younger. Early twenties, maybe. But it was hard to say; trying to figure it out was like trying to calculate someone's age in dog years, except that regular people were the dogs of this equation.
Loki, meanwhile, didn't seem to be worried about it, or about much of anything. In-between naps, he stretched out on Bucky's couch with a book in front of him and his feet up. He spent the next day like that, too. And on the third day, he started to ask for things. A phone like Bucky's (which he got, though not before Shuri had made sure it couldn't access anything sensitive). A pad to write on (eagerly provided, though since Loki wrote in Asgardian, no one could read what he was writing anyway; and then, after they'd gotten ahold of his brother again with the scans, he said it appeared to be some sort of play, not to worry about it, and could they stop bothering him now because he had two hundred people to feed and no longer had a Loki to help him do it). A bowl of grapes (not like it could hurt, Bucky reasoned). Someone to fan him while he ate them (...what).
"Not happening," Bucky said, running up against his limit. "For one thing, I'm not your servant. For another thing, you can get your own grapes out of the fridge from now on, too."
Instead of looking annoyed, or trying to order him around some more--both of which Bucky had expected, since whatever else Loki had been two hundred years ago, he'd pretty clearly been spoiled to death--Loki perked up, giving Bucky a more overt version of the up-and-down he'd given him a few times a day since he'd gotten here. "Really? Perhaps we can have some fun, then."
"Uh. What kind of fun?"
"Well, it would have been crass of me to bed a servant, but if you're not..."
"That's not happening, either."
Bucky couldn't help but think about it a little, after that. It wasn't like Loki was bad looking. He got a little better looking every day, actually. On the other hand, he was a supervillain. Someone who had mostly chosen to be one, even if he didn't remember it right now. That part bothered him, too: Loki didn't remember a lot of his life right now. It wasn't the same thing Bucky had gone through, it didn't even feel like the same thing, but it did still matter. How much, Bucky wasn't sure, except that it did.
*
Maybe something would have happened eventually either way. It wasn't like the hut was huge or anything, even if it was technologically advanced. Bucky had always going to be constantly tripping over anyone who stayed with him. Eventually, you had to either sleep with or have a big blow up with someone you were always tripping over. It was a law of nature, or of apartment living.
The pressure hadn't built up quite that much by week two, though. But then something else happened.
Every day since Loki had been here, Bucky had still made sure to get outside for a while every day. Mostly because if he didn't go on a walk, by himself, every so often, he was going to start to feel trapped. Since he liked his hut and his life in Wakanda, he was invested in not feeling like he had to go to ground. So even if it was a little annoying to have to go through security just to get outside with the sun, he could deal with it.
On the sixth day, he and Loki seemed to be bumping into each other more than usual, and so Bucky went on his walk earlier than planned, in the morning instead of in the afternoon. When he got back, he was in a good mood...
But Loki really wasn't.
When Bucky found him, he was sitting on the couch, hunched over his phone. That by itself was a little weird, since Bucky hadn't seen him sit that way before. Then there was the tension in his shoulders, which was really weird for a guy who'd been lying around Bucky's house like the world's laziest housecat ever since he'd gotten here.
Bucky's bad feeling about this became worse when he remembered Loki bumping into him in the kitchen while he was making breakfast. How distracted had he been when the eggs started burning? He reached into his pocket for his phone and found out that the answer was 'way too distracted,' because the lockscreen was wrong, and his thumbprint wouldn't unlock it.
"What're you looking at, buddy?" Bucky said carefully, sitting down next to Loki and craning his neck to see. He didn't see all of it--Loki's hair was hanging down over his face, and he was bent so far forward anyway that he was blocking about half the screen--but what he could see was enough to know that Loki was looking at his own file.
Loki was gripping the phone so tightly it was a little surprising it was still in one piece. Guy was a space god, after all. About as strong as a supersoldier, from what Bucky had heard. Then again, they made things pretty durable in Wakanda.
Finally, Loki said, "Who's responsible for these lies?"
Everyone had been in agreement that they were better off not telling Loki anything about his past he didn't remember for himself. All they had to do was hold him, after all. Getting him all agitated wasn't exactly likely to help with that. But when Bucky had been asked if he'd be willing to out and out lie, if something happened, or if Loki started asking questions, he'd said he wouldn't, and meant it. If they wanted someone to lie to someone else about who they were or what they'd done, they'd need to stick Loki with someone who wasn't him.
"It's true," he said. "I'm sorry."
"Lies," Loki repeated. "You expect me to believe that I worked for the Mad Titan? That my mother--and according to this, this fable, she's not my mother at all? I'm supposedly a Jotun, one of those monsters?" He laughed, bitter and ragged; and when he looked up from the phone, his eyes were wild and his face was pale and sweaty, not all that different from some of the pictures of him from the last time he'd been on Earth. "I almost believed it, until I got to that part. You nearly had me. What I want to know now is why. Who would bring me here, and go out of their way to come up with this fiction--"
"Which was locked away on my phone, which you stole," Bucky pointed out...then, at the look on Loki's face, realized it might be better to switch tacks. "But yeah, sure. Parts of it could be made up, I guess." Those parts didn't necessarily have anything to do with Loki, since a lot of the file had been pulled from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s former files on him, but leaving things out was a different kind of lie than point-blank telling someone the last two few years of his life had been completely fine and uneventful. "Don't worry about it anymore for now, okay?"
Bucky had been a smooth talker, back in his old life. Not so much now, but maybe Loki had been looking for any kind of a life raft, because he sagged a little when Bucky said it, and when Bucky held his hand out, Loki handed the phone over without protest...
And then lunged at him. For the first split second, it could have been an attack; for a split second, Bucky was sure that was what it was, and got ready to counter whatever Loki was coming at him with (a knife, probably; the file had been pretty clear on how Loki felt about knives).
Then Loki kissed him, and it wasn't an attack after all. It was something else. A drowning man, maybe, grabbing for whatever was there in case it could save him. He pushed Bucky down on his back, and one hand went up under his shirt, and the other one was down the front of his pants, where Bucky's dick was already starting to pay attention even if the rest of him hadn't caught up enough to decide whether this was something that was going to happen or not.
"I thought you were," Bucky said, thinking back to the slow seduction Loki had spent the last couple days hinting at, and the stupid things he'd kept doing with grapes and his tongue, "going to suck my dick for," and Loki's hand wrapped around him and gave him one, two, three fast strokes, and yeah, this was going to happen, no matter how bad an idea it probably was, because he'd been low-key thinking about it for days, and even if he wasn't sure if this was going to help, he was pretty sure slowing things down would make everything worse, "at least an hour if I let you get me into bed."
"I'm a liar, too," Loki said. His hand went away, but only because he was getting his clothes off, and so Bucky did too, shoving his pants and underwear down far enough for them to be out of the way.
A minute later, Bucky had turned around, propping himself up on his forearms; behind him, Loki popped open the bottle of lube (apparently Bucky's phone wasn't the only thing he'd stolen at some point; that had been supposed to be in the bedroom), slicked himself up with it, then pushed into Bucky's body.
For the next few minutes, there wasn't any talking. There was just Loki, taking whatever it was he needed or thought he needed right now; and there was Bucky, jerking himself with his right hand, closer and closer to coming every time Loki fucked into him again, not letting himself think about the reason they were doing this because he wasn't going to be able to get off if he did, or if he started worrying about what Loki was going to do when they were done doing this.
It wasn't long before Loki came, shoving as deeply into Bucky as he could go before stiffening and making a low sound as he came. It could have been a groan, could have been a sob; Bucky very deliberately didn't look over his shoulder to try to find out which. Instead, he kept jerking himself as Loki's dick softened inside him, starting to think he wasn't going to be able to come at all. Then, finally, Loki seemed to notice, and reached around, and a minute later Bucky came after all.
*
Bucky hadn't been sure where they would go from there. The answer turned out to be into the bedroom for round two, followed by round three. Space gods had his kind of stamina, apparently. Bucky's dick was all for it, but the rest of him wasn't really sure what this was, if it was a good thing or actually the worst idea in the world.
He'd almost started to think they'd dropped the subject when Loki, who was looking a lot less pale and clammy than he had when he'd been reading about how he was adopted, said, calmly but strained underneath, "As diverting as this has been, I really must be going. Heimdall, bring me back."
Whatever he'd expected to happen, nothing did.
"Heimdall? Can you hear me? Hello?" Loki sighed, heavily. "I see how it is. I'm not Thor, so whatever I want can't possibly be urgent. Even if I've been missing for over a week."
He was obviously trying to sound casual, but there was a tension there that hadn't been before he'd taken Bucky's phone, and the suspicion beneath it was something uglier than any that had been there before.
Before Bucky could think of what to do or say to try to distract him again, Loki said, "What do you mean, you can't?"
They stood there for another minute, but whatever answer Loki had gotten, it didn't seem like he was about to get any more. He seemed to come to the same conclusion, and turned to Bucky, and said, "You heard me. I want to go home now. Don't mistake me: I'm not asking. If you humans won't help me, I'll find a way back on my own. I suggest you don't try to stop me. Anyone who does will wish they hadn't."
Maybe the present-day Loki would have seemed scarier, saying it, or maybe he just needed to be wearing clothes for it to come off right. Whatever it was, it sounded more like bravado to Bucky than anything else. He couldn't help but feel bad for the guy, even knowing it was probably a bad idea to have that kind of mindset around him.
"...What?" Loki demanded, when Bucky's face apparently didn't do whatever he'd expected it to. "Why are you looking at me like that?"
"About you going home," Bucky said. "There's something you should probably know. About that."
The destruction of Asgard hadn't been in the file Shuri had sent him. It hadn't been in the file, and so the thing Loki didn't know yet was that all that was where he thought his home was, was a blazing fire in the void of space, a fire that would never burn out, not even when the rest of the stars had, a few billion years from now.
Probably anyone else would say Bucky shouldn't have told Loki this one, last thing, and maybe he shouldn't have. But the thing was: He really wasn't that smooth anymore, and he wasn't going to lie. These were the options now, when Loki had seen whatever was on his face. And when it came down to it, no matter what anyone else thought, Bucky knew it was better to know what the bad thing was than to have to wonder, and maybe get hit in the face with it at the one time when you weren't bracing yourself. At least this way, Loki would get to know that his brother and a couple hundred of their people had made it out, and were on their way here.
Bucky talked for a while. Longer than he'd talking to Loki about anything else at one time. Longer than he'd talked to Loki before now, total. Maybe longer than any single conversation he'd had with anyone since before he'd been the Soldier.
He tried not to make it sound as bad as it was, but he wasn't a smooth talker anymore, and maybe there wasn't any way to actually soften a blow when you had to tell someone that not only had they done some really bad things, and not only were they not even the species they'd thought they were, but the home they remembered from a couple weeks ago had been gone for longer than that, and was never coming back.
"I know it's a lot to have to deal with," Bucky finished, somewhat lamely. "But your brother's on his way, so that's something."
Sometime in the middle of Bucky's story, Loki's expression had shuttered. Now, he sneered, and said, "Is it really? I suppose it must be, if I have you to tell me so."
"Hey, now, you don't have to be like that. I'm just trying to help."
"Are you?"
Bucky didn't really feel like being sneered at anymore...but he'd agree to this arrangement in large part because he could keep his head. So instead of answering back in kind, he reached for Loki's shoulder to try to comfort him a little...
And his hand went straight through him.
"Oops!" Loki said, his face twisting viciously, and disappeared.
"Fuck," Bucky said, with feeling.
*
It was hard to say how much of a head start he'd gotten. When was the last time before that that Bucky had actually touched him? Probably the third time they'd had sex. He had to have slipped away mid-way through their conversation.
The good news was that Bucky had a pretty good idea of where Loki would go. The bad news was that he was pretty sure the Wakandan guards weren't going to be able to stop him. The worse news was that the more he thought about it, the more he was a hundred percent certain they wouldn't.
It usually took about half an hour to get to Shuri's lab from his hut. Bucky made it there in ten minutes, pushing himself faster than he had since the last time he'd had someone after him.
Loki had made it there first: the guards who'd been posted outside were gagged and tied up on the floor. Bucky had half expected them to have their throats cut, so it was a relief to find that they were all still breathing.
The lab itself was empty, except for Loki, who was standing in front of a big locked box in the corner. If Bucky had been ninety-nine percent sure where Loki was headed, he was a thousand percent sure of what was in it.
"You don't want to mess with that," Bucky said, controlling his breathing, not letting it get any harsher even though he'd sprinted all the way here, because he had to sound calm, to be calm, had to fix this situation before it got even worse.
It got worse in the next second, when the box that would have taken Bucky an hour or two to break into popped its lock open, and its clasp, and opened for Loki without him so much as lifting a finger, casting a blue light that covered both of them.
"Don't I?" Loki said, his shoulders holding the same tension they'd had on the couch, what already seemed like a million years ago. "Do you think I don't know the Space Stone when I see it? Do you think I don't know how to use it?"
"I'm pretty sure you can't use it to change any of the things you're upset about," Bucky said. From what he'd heard about the Tesseract, it was mostly good for making weapons. Changing the past wasn't really in the equation. "You almost killed yourself the last time. I'd be willing to bet you knew more about it then."
Loki didn't seem to be listening. If he was, it didn't stop him: He reached for the Tesseract just as Bucky reached for him. Sidestepped Bucky's hands, brought the cube up in front of his face and said, "This is my will: Open a portal to take me home."
Nothing happened.
"Take me home," Loki said. "Take me to Asgard."
Still nothing.
"To Asgard, I said," and now Loki was turned slightly toward Bucky, and face was even more twisted than it had been before, and he was crying, tears of rage and whatever else, and there was no way to be sure when that had started. "This is my will: Take me home. I want to go home. I want to go home. Take me home. I want to--"
At this point, there came an explosion, a pulse of energy that sent them both flying. Bucky's back hit the closed door; Loki smacked into the opposite wall; and as for the Tesseract, it lay midway between them.
Bucky jumped up and went for it. Grabbed it with his left hand, got it back into its box, locked and closed it. It took about a second and a half, all of which he spent kind of expecting to die. But then the box was closed, and he was still around, and he looked at Loki, who still hadn't moved. Looked at him for a couple more seconds, and realized maybe he wasn't going to.
Either that, or it was a trap, or another illusion. But when Bucky got over there, he found that Loki had a big lump on his head; and when Bucky reached for him, he made contact, which was enough to make Loki open his eyes.
"You all right?" Bucky asked.
Loki looked at him. His pupils were different sizes again, but that didn't stop his response from being scathing. "What do you think?"
"I think you need to stop breaking your falls with your head," Bucky said. "And that you've had a lot of shocks today."
"Yes." Loki threw an arm over his eyes, sounding just as tired as he had upset a minute ago. "Evidently I have."
*
By the time everyone else caught up to them, no one was very happy. This time, there were about three times as many guards around...and Shuri had finished the bracelet that were supposed to curb Loki's magic. It didn't look like much, a strong of beads around his wrist, but if Shuri had made it, then it was tough, and it worked.
"How old are you?" Shuri asked Loki, the same way she had the week before...and in the same tone, despite the fact that it had taken Loki no apparent effort to break into her lab. She was tough, too.
"Never mind that," Loki said, as studiously casual as he'd been legitimately blase the last time they'd all been here. "When is the Statesman due to arrive?"
Bucky and Shuri exchanged a glance.
"Did you tell him the name of the Asgardian ship?"
"Nope," Bucky said. It hadn't been in the file she had sent, either, which had all been intel at least a year or two old.
"So you remember some things now," she said. "It should be in within the next two weeks, depending on how long it takes to refuel. Now: How old are you?"
Loki sighed, then answered correctly.
"Very good. Who's the current King of Asgard?"
Loki sighed much more dramatically, then said, "Thor."
"Your brother?"
Loki hesitated. A few different emotions crossed his face. Hard to say what they were; his face wasn't as open as it had been when he'd thought he was eight-hundred and two and that this was some kind of vacation. Finally, he said, "Close enough."
"Hmm." Shuri asked him a few more questions, then said, "Well, you're free to go." Loki looked pointedly at his bracelet, then pointedly back, though it was kind of ruined by the wince he gave, like moving his head had definitely been a bad idea. "As long as you remain with Sergeant Barnes, and do not tamper with the inhibitor."
"And what would happen if I did?"
"Either nothing, or it would explode. It would depend on how close you came to removing it. I would not try, if I were you."
*
If Loki had thought this was a vacation before he got his memories back, he didn't seem to think that anymore. He didn't bother reading anything, didn't write anything. He didn't even glance at his fancy phone, even though he'd had a pretty good streak going on a few stupid click games. He didn't really do much of anything except stare at the ceiling. It couldn't even be the concussion, since Shuri had healed the whole thing this time, on the theory that they didn't need him to have a constant headache now that he had the bracelet to keep him from doing magic.
"Hey," Bucky said, after three hours of waiting for Loki to say or do something, anything. "Are you okay?"
Loki didn't look at him. "I've spent the last six months on a battered, overcrowded ship, waiting to see if we would make it to our destination, or die trying. Then, I used an artifact that is mine by all rights--"
"Didn't you steal it?"
"--an artifact I had recently repossessed, after it was taken from me, to transport me somewhere else, so I could have an hour of peace and quiet before returning. Instead, it took me here, and damaged me so greatly I forgot the last two hundred years of my life. Earlier today, with no warning, I was forced to re-live all of the worst revelations of my life. And now, I'm back in my prison, and in chains."
"You're really not the stoic type, are you?" Bucky said. He had the feeling Loki wasn't the kind of guy you really wanted to hear sob stories from; he seemed like the kind who'd regret opening up later, and make sure you were the one who paid for it. On the other hand, he made Bucky a lot less nervous, now that he was whoever he was now, and didn't think he was someone he'd been a long time ago; and already, Bucky thought he liked him a lot better now. Maybe that was what made him say, "Hey, you left out the part where you got laid."
"...I was trying to forget," Loki said, but he glanced at Bucky when he said it, and as much as he was obviously trying not to show anything on his face, there was open appraisal there for a second or two, which looked pretty much the same as the up-and-down he'd given Bucky before.
"Don't worry, I already figured out I'm your type."
The corner of Loki's mouth quirked up, though he tamped it down quickly enough that Bucky would have missed it if he hadn't been watching as closely as he was. "Hardly."
"I bet you just don't think you can get it up for the fourth time in one day. Me, either. We can try again tomorrow, though. Unless you're still too busy moping by then."
Bucky hadn't meant to say most of that. Sleeping with Loki again was possibly, maybe, probably, almost definitely a terrible idea. An idea Bucky's dick really liked, and that seemed more appealing to the rest of him the more he thought about it.
"I don't think so," Loki said.
"You'll still be moping, huh? Or is it just that space gods take a while to get it up?" Apparently annoyed wasn't an expression Loki ever felt like masking. "Maybe you're worried you're not as good in the sack as you used to be. I'm sure it would be fine, though."
Really annoyed was also not an expression Loki felt like masking, apparently. "There have been improvements, I assure you."
"Looking forward to it."
There wasn't any more talking for a minute. Then, Loki said, more of that fake casual thing he was trying to do, "Did you have a name of some kind?"
"Yeah. It's Bucky," Bucky said. "Good to meet you."
Maybe it would have surprised anyone else, all things considered, but it really was good.