2012
Bucky had more or less expected the mission to go to shit. Partly because he'd been allowed to come in the first place--no way would Stark have let it happen if they hadn't been hard-up for warm bodies--but partly because he'd been someone else in 2012. Even if there was no chance of running into the Soldier, who'd been on ice for all of 2012 and 2013, he didn't like the idea of going back there.
He liked it less when Hydra showed up. Liked it even less than that when he saw Pierce was there, too. Had control of himself--his breathing didn't change, and his palm didn't get sweaty--but still: didn't like it.
Thankfully, unlike everyone else, he didn't have a specific job to do. He was supposed to stand there, unobtrusive and out of the way, waiting for something to happen, or for everyone else to be done. Outside of emergencies, he wasn't even supposed to move unless someone needed him...
But in the end, there was no time for anyone to call for backup.
While the younger Stark writhed on the ground, the older one walked away with the Tesseract. Then, unplanned chaos: the Hulk, smashing through the wall; the briefcase, landing on the floor and coming open; the Tesseract, landing at the feet of...
Bucky had been told not to move in unless someone called for him or the entire mission was about to go to hell. He saw it going that way now, and moved.
Wasn't fast enough to keep Loki from grabbing the Tesseract. Wasn't fast enough to smack it out of his hands, or stop him from activating it. In the end, all he managed to do was grab him by the elbow--
And then the tower was gone, and everyone and everything else with it. Pierce, Star, Lang...and Steve, however he was doing on his own part of the mission. All there was was Loki, and Bucky's grip on him. They were in a big empty room, some abandoned factory somewhere with all sorts of trashed machinery around them.
"I need that," Bucky said.
Loki looked at him, an expression that was easy to read even though he was still muzzled and Bucky had never met him before: it started out with 'fuck no' followed by 'who the fuck are you' all the way back to 'fuck no' again. He shook his head violently, tried to jerk his elbow away...but Bucky had him with his left hand, and there was no way he was going to let him go. He'd lose that arm before he lost Bucky.
That wasn't going to stop him from trying, though: Loki had barely stopped shaking his head when he activated another portal, and Bucky fell in after him. Literally falling, this time, since the portal had opened beneath them.
Loki landed first. Bucky landed right on top of him. The Tesseract went flying again. They both went for it...
And Bucky got there first, grabbing it with his left hand and jumping out of Loki's reach. He looked absolutely furious now, but chained and muzzled as he was, there was no way he was going to be able to catch up to Bucky.
Loki must have realized it, too; he lunged at Bucky twice before he stopped. When he did, Bucky stopped too, and looked down at the Tesseract. There weren't any helpful directions to show him how it worked. No buttons or levers, even. It was a shining blue cube, that was all. Just went to figure he'd get ahold of the Infinity Stone that could take anyone anywhere, and need to get somewhere right now, and not have the first idea of how to do that.
"I need this," he said again. He already knew what he he had to do, and pretending he didn't need help here wasn't going to do anything but waste more time. "And I need to get it back to New York. And I need you to help me."
*
"Who are you?" Loki asked a minute later.
Bucky had gotten the muzzle off, and then the chains. Then he'd given Loki a few more lunges to come to the conclusion that Bucky was A. faster than him, and B. didn't react to being stabbed by stopping, dropping things, or having any of the kind of reactions people with knives were usually looking for. Now they were in a standoff, Loki watching him for any sign of weakness, and Bucky watching Loki for any sign of...anything.
"Bucky Barnes," Bucky said.
"Who?"
There were a lot of answers Bucky could have given here. He went with the one that seemed to be the easiest for people to get. "I'm a friend of Captain America's."
"Oh. Him." Loki sounded thoughtful, then oddly pleased: "A friend of Captain Rogers, come from the future to stop me. I see."
If Bucky hadn't already decided not to be startled by anything Loki did or said, he would have startled for that. "How did you know I'm from the--you know what, it doesn't matter. I'm not here to stop you from anything."
"Why not?"
Was he actually offended? Whatever. Bucky didn't have the time to try to figure that one out. "Thanos won. Six years from now. He got the stones. Used them. Destroyed them so no one else could use them. So we came back to get them, so we can undo it."
Loki had been pale before. By the time Bucky finished talking, he was paler, and there was a little tremor in his hands. Maybe no one else would have noticed it. Bucky always noticed that particular thing in other people. One of his own hands was always steady, but the other one...no one who wasn't him ever seemed to notice when it wasn't, but he couldn't not.
"When we're done, we have to bring the stones back to the same moment in time we got them. So if you'll take me to New York, I'll only be gone for a second, and when I come back...well, I can give it back to you, if you want." Stark would shit if he heard Bucky saying any of this. Forget about him: Steve would hit the roof. There wasn't a single other person, on the team or not, who would be okay with this. But Bucky was the one who was here, and he had to do something, and the easiest thing to do was to make the offer and hope it worked out. "But I have to get back there first. And you're the only one who can help me."
"...Very well," Loki said.
Handing the Tesseract to Loki was probably the stupidest thing Bucky had ever done. Stupider even than anything Steve had ever done. Not a metric Bucky had ever managed to hit before, but what was flying a plane into the ocean with the Tesseract onboard compared to handing it over to the guy who'd just tried to use it to conquer the Earth? If you wanted to talk about suicidal...
At least Bucky knew better than to let go of the thing. He held onto the Tesseract with his left hand, and grabbed onto Loki with his right, and they flashed back to New York together, landing in an alley.
Bucky yanked the Tesseract away from Loki, poked his head out, saw and heard only chaos; and also saw the tower, a few blocks away.
"I'll be back," he said, and didn't have the time to stick around and find out if Loki believed him. He hit the pavement in a run, hoping like hell the others had made the rendezvous point, that he hadn't been gone for longer than he thought he had, that they didn't think they'd already failed.
*
2023
In the end, they won. Got everyone who'd vanished back, though not without a cost.
Bucky didn't have the same roots most of the others did, but he was still incredibly relieved, especially to see Shuri and T'Challa again. They'd sheltered and helped him when he'd most needed it; it was good to know he'd done his part to pay them back.
Steve was the one who volunteered to take the stones back to their original times. At first, he wasn't too keen on Bucky being the one to take the Tesseract back. At first, Bucky thought he might have figured out Bucky was up to something...but then he realized Steve might be planning something no one else knew about, too.
It didn't take too much jostling to get it out of him. Most likely Steve had been going to tell him before he went, anyway. In the end, Bucky wasn't surprised. The future had never really fit Steve in a lot of ways. They didn't talk about it much, but Bucky had figured out a long time ago that the thing Steve had been most set on here in the future was making sure Bucky would be safe, and okay. Now he was as safe and okay as he was likely to get, and as for Steve...
"You should go," Bucky said. "Kick Hydra's ass before they can even get started. Be with Carter. Save some other version of me, that lucky bastard. It'll be good for you. For everyone else, too."
"Thanks, Buck," Steve said. He seemed relieved, and thoughtful. A little while later, he said, "You know, you could come wi--"
"No. I couldn't," Bucky said.
Steve was the most stubborn person Bucky had ever known, but even he didn't try to argue about this. Even he could see it. For Steve, going back was getting to go home from the war, finally. For Bucky, it would have been...he couldn't go back. There was no going home from the war. Not for him. Once he got back from the past for a second time, going forward was all there could be.
*
2012
Many explanations later, Bucky still didn't get how taking the stones back was supposed to preserve the timeline. Hadn't Loki already changed it by escaping in the first place? It was a question he'd been able to ask without getting into the deal he'd made, but not one anyone had been able to answer in a way that made sense to him, or even in a way that didn't contradict what someone else had just said.
In the end, Bucky figured he didn't have to understand the mission. He just had to complete it. If no one else was that worried about Loki wandering around New York when he'd been supposed to be on his way to some other planet's jail, then maybe Bucky didn't have to worry too much about letting him have the Tesseract. It wasn't like he could do Thanos's kind of damage with just the one stone, anyway. There were even reasons him having it could be a good thing for everyone else.
So, three weeks and two seconds after he'd left Loki in the alley, Bucky walked back into it.
"That was quick," Loki said, with eyes only for the case in Bucky's hand. "Or did you forget something? Perhaps you've thought of some further conditions."
"No, I'm back. This is yours, if you still want it. It's yours now, if you don't want to wait."
"I don't," Loki said, and reached for the case; Bucky handed it over, and watched while Loki opened it to check the contents, then lifted the Tesseract out and did something with his hands to make it disappear into thin air.
"Well, I think we should talk before you run off with it. There are some things I know that you might want to know, too."
"...All right," Loki said.
They ended up at a diner a few blocks down that was somehow still open. God bless New York. Both for that and for people minding their own business; nobody looked closely enough at Loki to notice he was the same guy who'd been trying to take over the city half an hour ago. Since he'd ditched the robes and magicked himself into an all-black suit instead, maybe no one would.
"I'm going to tell you some stuff about the future," Bucky said. "Because I asked around a little, and it doesn't go well for you."
Or anyone else, but from everything else he'd gathered, Loki--or at least this version of him--was a lot more likely to care about what happened to himself.
Bucky had thought about dropping off the Tesseract and running. Except...if this really was an alternate reality, then people here were going to go through all the same things that had happened in his own reality. If that was was the case, then maybe someone should know about it before it did.
There were a lot of people he'd have preferred to talk to. Steve, Natasha, even Stark. But he didn't know where any of them were right now, and he didn't know if any of them would be willing to listen anyway. Even Steve was more likely to assume he was really Loki in disguise. And the more he stuck around, the more likely someone was to recognize him as the Winter Soldier. So Loki was who he had to work with. And besides, the guy had met a really bad end from everything Bucky had heard. Even if he'd done some shitty things, maybe he would do better with a second chance. Most people did, Bucky thought.
"Look," he said. "I'm not from the future. At least, not from a future you're ever going to see."
"Because this isn't your reality. Because you can't change your own past. Yes. I am aware of how time and dimension travel works."
"Good. That makes this easier," Bucky said, instead of objecting to Loki's know-it-all tone, which was probably what he wanted, considering everything Bucky had heard about the guy. "I've been trying to think of a way to be nice about any of this, but I don't think it's possible. I asked your brother about some things before I came back."
"I don't. Have. A brother."
"Your adoptive brother, whatever. Anyway: you died five years ago. Six years from now. It had something to do with that stone. Thor said you could never resist it. He said it got you and a lot of other people killed, in the end. Other Asgardians." Loki opened his mouth. "Yeah, you're not one of those, either. I've been briefed. Anyway, a lot of them we couldn't bring back. They died before Thanos did what he did. And so did you."
"And what...did Thanos do?" Loki asked. Not as if he didn't know. More as if he wished he didn't.
Bucky didn't say anything. He didn't have to. All he had to do was raise his hand, and make sure Loki was watching this. And snap his fingers.
"We undid it," he said, lowering his hand. "But it was a really delicate thing. I'm not sure it could happen the same way here. Maybe too much has changed already."
There it was. The number-one reason he was having this conversation, instead of dropping the Tesseract into this timeline and fucking off back to his own.
"I thought maybe, if I told you about it, things would turn out differently here."
"...I'm listening," Loki said.
So Bucky went over the broad strokes of what had happened when Thanos had decided to go hard for the stones, and what they'd had to do to change it. Loki wanted to know about a lot more of the details than Bucky had to give; most of what he knew had come to him second-hand, and he hadn't been around for most of the really sensitive discussions.
By the time Loki was done interrogating him, he looked just as frustrated as Bucky had started to feel.
"I don't see how any of this is supposed to be useful," he said.
Bucky shrugged. He felt exhausted, all of a sudden. Like he was not only feeling the effects of everything that had happened in the last few weeks, but the of everything that had happened in the last five years. If not the last eighty. "But you do know one thing now that you didn't before."
"Which is?"
"Whatever you do, you have to keep the Tesseract safe. Not because you want it. Not because you're jealous of anyone else having it. But because Thanos can't have it."
"How do you expect me to do that? If Thanos doesn't already know I have it, he will soon. He'll come for me, just like he did in your reality."
He sounded a little shrill, at that last part, and his face was paler and even more shiny than it had been earlier. He hadn't asked how he'd died, which was fine since Thor had spent too much time crying about it when Bucky asked him about it to really get into the specifics. But maybe Loki didn't need to ask. Maybe it was enough to know he'd already set his own death in motion.
"Yeah," Bucky said. "He will. So you've got to try to be where he's not, unless you come up with a better idea."
"...Try to be where he's not. That's what you intend to leave me with."
"It's what I've got."
"Is it?" Loki asked. "You come here with all your knowledge, but it's not the best of you."
Bucky had been warned Loki would try to work him, 'if' they ran into each other again. "Whatever you're trying to get at, it's not going to work."
"If you really cared so much about this reality, you would stay. Advise me. Help make it better yourself, instead of running back to your own." He sighed, so melodramatically it would have given him away even if Bucky hadn't been braced for something like this. "But I suppose you have too much to go back to to consider such a thing."
Something else Bucky'd been told: Loki was nothing if not good at fishing. He'd also had access to all sorts of Hydra intel in the time he'd had the mind stone. There was a really good chance he knew exactly what and where Bucky had been in 2012.
"I do, actually," Bucky said. It was the most blatant lie he'd ever told. Probably the most forceful, too. It had to be, because as much as he knew Loki was trying to work him, there was a part of him that believed every word; that believed if he was a good enough person, he would want to stay. It was just that that part wasn't going to win over the part of him that knew for sure he couldn't go back. Not for Steve. Not for half the people on Earth. Not even for half the people in the universe. Maybe someone who hadn't spent seventy years without a self would have had it in them to be that selfless. Bucky didn't. "And on that note, I'd better get going. Good luck with everything. You're going to need it."
*
2023
Later, Bucky wouldn't be sure exactly why he'd gone to New Asgard. Maybe it had been to ask Thor a little more about Loki, which was what he told himself at the time. Or maybe it had been to tell Thor about Loki, that he was the one hope another universe had. Anyone else would be horrified, but he thought Thor might end up being thrilled.
He'd heard something about how Thor was going to be leaving the planet. That was why he'd taken the trip up there right away, instead of giving things a few weeks or months to settle inside his own head.
What he hadn't expected, or thought he hadn't, was Thor's offer, which he gave almost as soon as he was done telling Bucky about his plans to travel with the Guardians of the Galaxy for a while. Maybe he saw something on Bucky's face, the toll the last week had taken on him in particular. Even finding out Steve's life had turned out all right one reality over hadn't done much to keep him from feeling drained. Or maybe it was just that Thor saw the question Bucky hadn't even realized he wanted to ask.
"Did you want to join us?" he said. "We have room for at least one more."
"We don't have room for any more!" hollered someone from the group standing by the ship's on-ramp.
"Don't listen to Quill, he's wrong," Thor said. "Come with us. Space is wonderful. You'll love it."
"Would you believe that's the third offer I've had this week?"
There were probably reasons Bucky should say no. He just couldn't think of any right now. Steve was gone, returned to the reality that had become his home. He'd gotten to know Natasha during the last five years, and she was even more permanently gone than Steve was. He'd always needed Wakanda more than it needed him, and as for the people he'd been closest to there...he was a distraction from all the rebuilding they had to do, and the years of work ahead. Work Bucky could help with, if he stayed, but in all honesty, did they really need him? He thought they probably didn't. And eventually, the governments of Earth were going to remember he was a fugitive. That was one more thing no one else should have to deal with.
He couldn't go back. Couldn't even manage to go sideways. But he could go forward. And, maybe, he could go up.
"Sure," he said. "What the hell. Let's go to space."
2037
It was Bucky's birthday, the twelfth or thirteenth he'd had out in space. Or something like that. He was a hundred and twenty years old now, technically. Subjectively, he didn't know. Mostly he didn't bother thinking about it anymore...and he was working today either way. No cake, no party, no keg; instead, there was just him, and the seemingly dead-in-the-water ship in the center of his viewscreen.
He'd been tracking the Spectre for a while now. If he hadn't found it today, on the dark side of a little moon that had been abandoned back in 2018 and been deemed too nutrient-poor later to bother re-settling five years later, he would have shrugged and taken a day or two for himself.
As it was, he grabbed the other ship in his tractor beam, maneuvering it so they could dock. Then, because ships that looked dead were sometimes pretending, and the guys he had to track down in this part of space because some other guy had gotten tired of being cheated tended to like their traps, he ran a full scan of the Spectre and its systems before boarding.
It turned out the ship really was dead, with the exception of the life support. No engine, no weapons, no scanners. Nothing was on-line; nothing was even in hibernation mode. And there was only one lifesign onboard, in the engine room.
None of this meant the situation was safe. What it did mean was that Bucky wasn't going to walk into an ambush, or have his ship fired on at close range. So he was able to cross over to the other ship, and head on down to the engine room.
When he got there, it was empty. Whoever had been there must have heard him coming, and beat it the other way. There were parts scattered all over the floor, including a few kind of vital ones that looked like they'd been fried. He could smell smoke, too, which was enough to make his balls try to climb back into his body; there wasn't much more terrifying than a fire onboard, out here where there was a billion-in-one chance anyone would be by to help you put it out if you couldn't do it for yourself.
Only one place this guy would have gone, once he heard Bucky coming. Bucky headed back to the seam where the two ships were docked. Somewhat surprisingly, there was no one there, either, even though no one with any sense would put themselves in a situation where Bucky could leave without them.
If he hadn't had a good strong passcode, Bucky would have thought maybe he had sneaked onboard the Home. But there was no way that could have happened. He left most things but steering wide open most of the time, but he always locked boarding down tight before docking with unfriendly vessels.
The air wasn't as still or as quiet as it should have been on the empty corridor of the dead ship, when all the movement there should have been was the steady, silent thrum coming from the Home. The slight movement of the air was all the warning Bucky really needed to turn and meet the blow coming for him before he could get stabbed in a kidney.
The first thing he noticed was that it wasn't even a plasma knife. Then he got a good look at the guy holding it, the one whose wrist he was about one twitch away from breaking, and did a double-take. "...Loki?"
Loki did his own double-take. "It's you."
"Uh, yeah. You need a lift?"
And that was how the confrontation Bucky had been expecting to have fizzled away, after all.
*
"How the hell are you here?" Bucky asked, when they were both onboard the Home. "I thought you were supposed to be in your own reality. Isn't that how it works?"
He'd come to learn all sorts of things about space and space ships. A little less about time travel and multiverse theory, which still made his head spin. Mostly because so much of it was still untested theory, and the people who theorized about it could never seem to agree on what the theory was from one day or even one conversation to the next.
"I was. But I seem to recall someone telling me to be where Thanos isn't. I eventually decided it was better advice than it seemed on the surface."
Bucky vaguely remembered having said something like that, and strongly remembered meaning something other than this when he'd said it. "Huh. I'm glad I ran into you, then. I'd hate to think of you coming all this way just to die out here." The Home and the Spectre were now synced enough for him to access Loki's systems remotely; he did so now, switching off the life support so there would be at least one system onboard not strained to the point of breaking by the time the repairs got started. "I guess I shouldn't be surprised you're this Silvertongue guy."
"Why is that?"
"Well, the guy who hired me said you had a big mouth."
Actually, he'd said they called him that so they'd know what part of him to nail to the wall as a trophy when they got finished with him. Loki'd cheated a lot of people in that system.
"...You're a bounty hunter." Usually, when people said that, they looked like they were going to turn and run, or turn and fight, but Loki just looked amused. It was a good look on him. A lot better than the pale, clammy, kind of terrified thing he'd had going on the last time they'd met.
"Not exactly," Bucky said.
*
In the first few years after he and Thor had hitched a ride with the Guardians only to split with them after less than a week, there'd been a lot of protection work available. The influx of twice the people into a universe that had been producing half as much food for the last five years had meant almost everyone went hungry. It had meant a lot of people died. All over the universe, people had come together in a way no one had seen before, or since...but there'd still been shortages. Every food shipment had been in danger of getting hit by the desperate, or by pirates looking to get rich from price gouging. Bucky's first jobs in space had all been about getting shipments to the planets they were intended for, no matter who tried to intercept them.
Bucky hadn't figured out what he actually wanted to do until later, when the universe's focus had started to be less on making sure nobody starved and more on reuniting people who'd been separated. Most of the people who'd come back had landed at more or less the same place they'd vanished from. A small percentage, though, had wound up in weird places, sometimes half the galaxy away from where they'd been when they vanished. Mostly seemed to be people who'd vanished from somewhere that didn't exist anymore, or was now deadly--cars that had crashed, spaceships that had had their hulls blown open, villages that had been in the path of a volcanic eruption or a tsunami or a new gaping chasm in some planet's surface. They'd all reappeared somewhere basically safe, with air they could breathe and so on, and that was good...but it meant a lot of people who should have been together weren't.
It had turned out Bucky was really, really good at finding people. And, even knowing he wouldn't have been half as good at it without everything Hydra had done to him, it had also turned out he liked doing it.
It had taken a while, but eventually someone had gotten up a central database of the still-missing, accessible to anyone just about anywhere in the galaxy. It had let people find each other more quickly and in much greater numbers than before...and had meant a lot of people in Bucky's line of work were out of a job.
Not Bucky, though. There were enough edge cases out there for him, people who hadn't signed into the database either because they didn't know about it, or because something else had prevented them. Sometimes, the reason why turned out to be tragic. Other times, it was complicated.
Sometimes, it turned out to have been tragic or complicated too many times in a row. That was when Bucky would take on a different kind of job for a breather. Like tracking down scumbags who'd been cheating other scumbags, and getting them to pay up. He was never invested in that kind of case. He never asked for payment up front, either, in case he decided the whole thing was bullshit and didn't feel like walking into an ambush on his way to give someone their money back. (He never asked for payment up front anyway. He'd found too many of the vanished who hadn't wanted to be found by their supposedly loving families to ever commit to anything other than that he'd find them, and ask them what they wanted to do when he did.)
He knew enough about Loki to know he'd almost certainly done everything Bucky had been told he had. He also knew there wasn't a chance he was going to turn him in. He almost never took it that far anyway, not unless the person he was chasing turned out to be an even bigger scumbag than expected. He wasn't even going to try to lean on Loki to get some of the money back. The second he'd recognized him, the job had been over as far as he was concerned.
*
"I can drop you off at the nearest space station," Bucky said, after they were out of the shadow of the abandoned moon and he'd more or less explained the rest.
"That won't work for me."
"Why not?"
"There's a warrant out for my arrest there."
"Why am I not surprised?" Bucky named another space station, a couple days farther out.
Loki sighed. "There's also a warrant out there."
Two more space stations, three moons, and five systems later, and Bucky was starting to get how Loki had let his maintenance work slide long enough to end up with a fire in the first place.
"Is there anywhere I can drop you where you're not going to get arrested the second someone recognizes your ship?"
Loki named a planet at least three weeks away.
"Fine," Bucky said. Sure, he could have done something else with those three weeks, but he'd allotted himself a month for this job. Anyway, if he was going to have company, there were worse people to look at. "But you're paying for whatever you eat out of my stores on the way there."
"Very well."
And that was when the ship shuddered, and a yellow glow came over the viewscreen. They were in someone's tractor beam. Bucky would have worried about it, except before he could get started, a booming voice came over the comm: "This is the Mjolnir, hailing the Home. I'm bringing you onboard."
"--Why is that ship called that?" Loki asked in a sharp, almost shrill tone. He didn't look or sound even remotely amused now.
Technically, the answer was 'because it's shaped like a giant hammer, which is how someone got roped into paying way too much for it,' but somehow that didn't seem like the answer Loki was looking for. "There's something you should probably know..."
*
"What do you mean, 'that's Thor's ship'?!"
"Well, it's my birthday today. Me and Thor figured out a long time ago that our birthdays are only three days apart. We always try to meet up on the week of to celebrate, if we can manage it. If we can't, we try to make it within a month or two. I didn't expect to run into him today, but we usually have an idea of each other's basic location, so I guess it's not that surprising."
Loki was looking at Bucky like he was nuts. Part of Bucky thought he had a point. Being birthday buddies with Thor had started out seeming pretty weird to him, too. Especially since they'd barely known each other when it had started, around year two of the five years. But it had been obvious that Thor was having a hard time, and good to be able to help someone else, even if their only real connection at the time had been through Steve.
Ever since they'd gone to space together, they'd gotten to know each other a lot better. Sometimes Bucky still felt like it was a little weird for this to be the tradition they had--birthdays didn't seem like they should have been much to either of them, considering Thor was well over a thousand years old and Bucky himself hadn't seemed to age at all over the last twenty or so years--but what he always ended up deciding was that it was really good to have a tradition in the first place.
Loki was still looking at him in disbelief. "...You're actually serious."
"Well, yeah."
The living areas of Thor's ship were only about twice as large as Bucky had, but his docking bay was big enough to fit five ships the size of Bucky's. Soon, the Home and the Spectre along with it had been deposited inside it. As soon as the bay doors closed, shuttering away the stars, a figure strode across the floor. By then, Bucky had left the cockpit to go meet him, with Loki trailing reluctantly behind.
"He can't know I'm here," Loki said. "I can't be here."
"Sure thing," Bucky said, and hit the button to open the ramp. "You can hide out in the storage bay, if you want. It's a mess, but it'll work. Thor won't go in there. I hardly even go in there."
But instead of taking Bucky's advice, Loki disappeared, leaving a tree in the place where he'd been.
"Uh, whatever, I guess. Well, try to play it cool, and you'll be fine."
"Barnes!" boomed Thor as soon as he saw Bucky. "How long has it been?"
"Five months, maybe six? Something like that," Bucky said, not glancing at the tree.
Thor noticed it anyway, the way he always noticed new things. "Ah, you've been decorating." He walked up to the tree, peered at it. "It's large, isn't it? It seems healthy, too."
"Just the way I like my trees," Bucky said, though if he'd ever put anything in that corner, it would definitely have been a lamp. "Where's the keg?"
"Waiting for us in my dining hall." Thor squinted at the tree some more. Bucky knew that look. He had a pretty good idea where this was going. "I saw the other ship, the one you're towing."
"What about it?"
"Well, what's wrong with it? Did you find anyone on board?"
"Nah. No bodies, either. I think someone must have pulled a rescue op. Probably a while ago. Anyway, it's fried. I took it for scrap."
Through all of this, Thor hadn't looked at Bucky once. He kept looking at the tree, instead. Now, he reached his hand out to tweak one of the leaves. "...Loki? Is that you?"
'Keep your cool,' Bucky mouthed from behind Thor's big shoulders.
Loki did not keep his cool. The tree disappeared, and he spat, "You told him!"
"Don't you think you'd have noticed me telling him, with you right here? He does this all the time. Why'd you think I told you to keep your cool?"
Thor really did ask inanimate objects about being Loki a lot. It had started back when Bucky had told him about meeting Loki in the past. He'd gone back and forth on it for a few years, not sure how Thor would react...but by that point, they'd traveled with each other and fought beside each other long enough for him to have to. Some things you couldn't keep from your friends, especially not friends you'd had a few of those quiet talks with--the kind guys stuck in foxholes together had, the kind that changed both of you at least a little. Far from upsetting Thor, the idea of his brother still being out there and wreaking havoc in some other universe had seemed to satisfy him. But it had also made him think he saw Loki around every corner.
Or maybe he'd only wanted to think it, judging by the look on his face. Thor may have been the god of thunder, but right now he was the one who looked thunderstruck.
"...It really is you," he said, in a wondering tone. "I can't believe it. We always thought you were in a different reality altogether, and yet here you are."
The wondering tone had turned into a wet one by the time he had finished, and his eyes had turned red.
Meanwhile, Loki's reaction was to squint at Thor and say, "What happened to you?"
He could have meant the crying, but more likely he meant everything else. Thor had been a big guy since Bucky had met him, but when they'd gone to space, he'd gotten even bigger. He was as wide as a couple regular guys now, and built, with arms and thighs like tree trunks, and definitely stronger. Troublemakers tended to take one look at him and decide to go make trouble somewhere else, especially ever since he'd figured out wearing an eyepatch impressed people out here a lot more than the fake eye ever had.
Thor, though, didn't answer the question, or even give a sign he'd heard it. Instead, he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Loki.
"I can't believe it," he said again, his voice muffled this time, probably due to his face being pressed into Loki's shoulder. "I've missed you so terribly, brother. And you've missed...so much."
In a strangled voice, with his arms hanging stiffly at his sides, Loki said, "You can tell me all about it when you're done crushing me."
"...Apologies, brother," Thor said, letting him go. "I don't always remember my strength." Then he turned to Bucky. "And you. You knew he was here. You must have known. Were you ever going to tell me?"
Something crackled in his eyes, and white static started to drift up and down his hands and arms.
"Don't do that," Bucky said. "You short my systems out again, you're paying for the repairs."
"You do your own repairs."
"Yeah, and you'd have to pay me for labor. Anyway, I only found him an hour before you caught up to us. Thought I'd give him some time to figure out what he wanted to do before I said anything. I was trying to be considerate."
This was more or less true, and Bucky figured it would more or less show on his face. Which it more or less must have, because Thor nodded, and the white crackle went away, and then he turned back to Loki. "Come aboard my ship," he said. "Let us sit together, and talk. We have so much catching up to do..."
"Certainly," Loki said, though unlike Thor, he didn't look excited about it. In fact, as they walked out of Bucky's ship together and made their way toward Thor's lounge, he looked like he thought he was going to his own funeral.
*
If that was what Loki thought, it turned out he wasn't all wrong.
"I still recall the times we fought together on Nornheim," Thor said. "Do you, brother?"
"Yes," Loki said. He caught Bucky's eye and grimaced and rolled his eyes.
The next half an hour or so involved Thor reminiscing about various campaigns, as well as times Loki had played tricks on him/stabbed him in the back/outright tried to kill him, and Loki warily agreeing he remembered those things, too.
Finally, though, Thor said, "But nothing compares to the time we fought side-by-side during the Battle of the Bifrost--"
"No," Loki said.
"No?"
"The only battle involving the Bifrost I remember is you and I against each other. It's almost as if I were a different person."
He sounded bitter when he said it. Like he hated it. Like he didn't expect Thor to get it, and didn't look forward to explaining.
The thing he didn't know was that Thor and Bucky had actually talked about this a lot: What it meant for there to be another Loki, in a universe one step to the left. They'd never expected him to show up here...but they'd talked about it. Thrown around some bullshit theories around about what would happen if he ever did.
"Then you remember nothing after your attempted conquest of Midgard," Thor said, softly. He sounded sad.
"Do I remember events that happened to someone else? Why would I? I hope that doesn't disappoint you."
"It doesn't," Thor said, starting to choke up. "Loki, it doesn't. Even if you don't--you're still you, and I'm still me. And you're here now, and that's wonderful."
Apparently, Loki wasn't about to let it go that easily: "I'm not still anything. I'm a different person, from a different universe. I only came here to get away from--to broaden my horizons."
"To get away from Thanos. I remember." Thor's face darkened, then brightened. "You used the Tesseract to do it, didn't you?"
"...Maybe," Loki said, guardedly. "Why?"
"But that's brilliant! By removing the Space Stone from the other timeline, you prevented Thanos from collecting the complete set of stones there. You saved billions of lives, brother. More than billions."
"...I. Yes. I did that," Loki said, visibly startled, but recovering quickly, and smugly. "That was my ultimate goal, of course. You know how selfless and heroic I've always been, in my heart of hearts."
"Very deep down, yes. I've always known it."
"I didn't even try to take the credit," Loki said, looking like he was going to call a space press conference on the subject as soon as he got the chance.
"We should celebrate. Come into my dining hall with me. We'll feast and drink in your honor. You'll tell me of your exploits, and I'll tell you of yours."
"That sounds dreadful. Let's do it."
As the fly on the wall for this conversation, it was pretty clear Bucky was also going to be the third wheel if Thor got around to inviting him--which he would, once he remembered Bucky was there. Considering how many times Loki had glanced in his direction while talking to Thor, it seemed like the two of them could use some private time to catch up.
"Have fun," Bucky said. "I'm due for my maintenance scans, so I'm going to head back and get those taken care of. We can catch up later."
"Oh, we shall," Thor said. When they dispersed, Loki and Thor going out one door while Bucky went out the opposite one, he made a series of gestures behind Loki's back that read: 'you, me, lots of drinking, later.'
Bucky gave this plan a thumbs up, then headed back to his ship and got back to work.
*
A few hours later, Bucky was running through some checks in the engine room when he heard a thumping sound from the hall. He poked his head out and he saw Loki standing by the closed door to the storage bay.
"Hey," Bucky said. "I didn't expect you back so soon."
"Thor wouldn't stop telling me about my other self's exploits. It grew tiresome."
"I'll bet," Bucky said. "Well, there's not much going on here. I'm heading to bed soon. I can fix you up the guest cabin before I--"
He'd meant to go into the storage bay, which was where all the extra blankets and pillows were. But on his way there, Loki pulled a knife. Bucky reacted to that in the usual way. A second later, he had Loki's wrist in his right hand, and had him slammed into the wall, with his left arm pressed against his throat.
"You must've forgotten about me and knives," he said. The knife-pulling on the Spectre had been one thing. Loki was the captain there, and that had been a potentially fraught situation. The Home was Bucky's ship, though, and that made this something else. "I guess I can't blame you. It's been a while, right? Fifteen years, or something like that."
"Twenty-five," Loki said, wheezing. Bucky let up on his throat, and kind of wished he hadn't when Loki leered at him. "I suppose you preferred the other one, too. What were you and he doing together fifteen years ago, I wonder?"
"Fifteen years ago was when I met you, asshole. Time travel, remember? I never even met the other Loki." Loki actually smiled at this, like he hadn't noticed the position he was in. Bucky went on: "What the hell are you trying to pull here? You'd better not be trying to steal my ship."
"I have no designs on your ship."
"That's not what I've heard," Bucky said. He'd been working off of five different descriptions of the Spectre, and it hadn't been because Loki redecorated every other week. "I bet you stabbed Thor on your way back over here."
"I didn't, actually--though I admit it was tempting."
Instead of struggling, which Bucky had expected, or coming up with a knife in his other hand, which he was already poised to block, Loki leaned forward and brushed his slightly cool lips against Bucky's.
Bucky hadn't heard seduction was one of Loki's methods, but somehow it didn't surprise him. "That's not going to get you what you want, either."
"Isn't it?" Loki kissed him again, and wiggled around between Bucky and the wall, which was more distracting than it should have been. "And what do I want?"
"My ship. Won't work. You could fuck me from here to the other side of the galaxy and it still wouldn't get you my pass codes."
"Oh, it'll work."
Loki kissed him again. This time, it was more than a brush of lips; this time, Bucky had to either back off or respond.
There was no way he was going to back off when that was clearly what Loki was hoping for. So he responded instead, kissing Loki back. The kiss deepened, Loki's mouth opening to his, their bodies pressing closer together. Already it was more action than Bucky had seen in ninety years or so. It was distracting, it was...
For a split second, Bucky forgot about the knife. Long enough for his grip on Loki's wrist to loosen, and for Loki to take advantage of it, moving the knife so that the point was pressed into Bucky's side, angled up at the soft spot below his ribcage.
"See?" Loki said...but he was a little out of breath, and he was hard. Bucky could feel him through layers of clothes, against his own growing hardness.
Instead of making an issue out of it, Bucky kissed Loki again. He kissed him like his life depended on it. He was starting to feel like it did, and it didn't have a thing to do with the prospect of getting slightly stabbed. It had been such a long time. He'd made a life for himself out here, and he loved it, but he still didn't get touched all that often, and never like this. There'd been plenty of times he could have gotten laid, if he'd gone for it...but somewhere along the way, he'd forgotten how. How to do this casually. How to do this at all. It was just one of the many things he'd had to let go from the person he'd been before.
Whatever this was, and whatever Loki was trying to do, there wasn't anything casual about it. The air between them was too charged. Part of it was the knife, probably. More of it was the fact that Loki was pretty clearly up to no good. But part of it was something else. Chemistry, maybe.
Bucky kissed Loki's neck, and Loki shivered. He kissed it again, and Loki tensed, like shivering had given away something his erection hadn't. So Bucky shoved their hips together, hardness pushing into hardness. Loki made a sound this time, low and unexpected and not quite a groan. So Bucky did that again, slower this time, but more firmly, still kissing Loki's neck. Then he did it a third time, since the first two times had been so successful.
He'd thought maybe he could get Loki to drop the knife. Hadn't decided how much it mattered, or if it would change anything; this hadn't been about disarming anyone for a minute now. But the eighth or ninth or tenth time Bucky rocked his hips into Loki's, Loki glanced down at the knife, like he had only just remembered he had it. Then he gave a little shrug and flicked it away. It clattered and spun on the tile before hitting a wall and going silent.
With both hands free, Loki ran his hands under the back of Bucky's shirt, a cool dry touch that made goosebumps rise all over his body, and made his dick throb. By the time Loki had pulled Bucky's shirt off, he'd also wrapped his leg around Bucky's thigh, and what Bucky was doing could be best described as humping him.
How long this went on, Bucky didn't know. Long enough for him to start worrying they might get walked in on. Long enough for him to start to realize neither of them was going to come like this.
They both broke in the same moment, pulling apart just far enough to get Loki's pants open, and Bucky's too. Then Bucky started moving again, and this time they were skin to skin. He pushed into the grip they made together, his warm hand and Loki's cool one, and Loki's length against his own, with nothing separating them. He kissed Loki's mouth a couple more times, and then his neck. Then he pulled back enough to look at Loki. He had his head tipped back against the wall, mouth gaping open, eyes closed and face flushed. It was a good look on him. Bucky had his number, though, and was pretty sure he'd hate the idea of ever looked like that.
"You like this, huh?" he said. "I wonder what you'd like more. Me getting on my knees, maybe."
He wasn't actually going to go there. At least not unless he had Loki naked and was pretty sure there were no more knives. What he wanted was to see Loki's reaction, to find out if it could get any better than this.
Turned out it could. As soon as Bucky said it, Loki made another of those not-quite groans and came, pulsing over both their hands. It made everything slicker, better; it made it so Bucky came, too, less than a minute later.
Panting, he leaned into Loki for a second, so he could catch his breath.
"Maybe next time," Loki managed, which didn't make sense for a second. Then Bucky remembered what he'd said before they'd gone over, and it did.
"You still can't have my ship," he said, pulling away and tucking himself back in. "But you can stay in my guest quarters. Let me grab you a blanket or two, and you'll be set."
Before Bucky could do more than take a step toward the storage bay, Loki said, "And if I'd prefer to pass the night in the captain's cabin?"
Well, there wasn't really a point in pretending that wasn't appealing. Not after all that. Still, there had to be a line.
"Okay, but only as long as you don't stab me or try to take over my ship."
"You have my word," Loki said.
*
A few minutes later, he said, "What has my brother told you about me?"
"A few things," Bucky said, which was hedging it more than a little; Thor talked about Loki all the time. The thing was that the Loki he talked about the most was the brave, self-sacrificing one this Loki wasn't (or wasn't yet, or would never be...or something in-between those two options. Who the hell knew how it worked). "Do we have to talk about Thor right now?"
Not that they were doing much of anything at the moment, given neither of them was hard again, or even trying to make anything else happen. But it had turned out Loki looked good, naked and stretched out over Bucky's bunk with his hands behind his head, close enough to feel his body heat. And he kept looking good even as he suddenly also looked annoyed.
"What's wrong now?"
"That's supposed to be my line."
"Oh," Bucky said, and shrugged. "Oh, well."
Maybe Loki had wanted Bucky to act like he felt bad about stealing his line, or maybe he just felt like moping. Either way, it took a minute before he said, "You didn't tell me everything."
"...About what?"
"When we met. In the past. You didn't tell me about Asgard's destruction. I thought I could take my alter-ego's place here, when he and Thanos were gone. I thought I could go home, if I decided I wished to."
It was pretty clear from his tone that he had in fact decided he wanted to, at some point.
"Sorry," Bucky said, feeling legitimately bad about this one. "I was less informed back then. I don't think I actually knew."
Thor had always said Loki held grudges like no one's business, but he waved Bucky's apology away. "It's not your fault," he said. "It's...it hasn't been what I expected, that's all. Nothing here has been. No one here even knows my name. Every time anyone says 'Loki,' it's always about him. It's unbearable."
There was what seemed like genuine misery in his tone, in the twist of his mouth as he said it. Bucky decided it would be a bad idea to tell him the reason the whole universe knew about the other Loki's exploits was that Thor had a habit of regaling people in bars, and then buying everyone a round in his dead brother's name. "Can't you go back if you're unhappy here? Or at least hop back and forth, if you're worried about the other universe's Thanos. It's not like you're stuck here." He saw the look on Loki's face. "Wait, are you?"
"...Functionally."
"What about the Tesseract? Don't you still have it?" For some reason, Bucky had been sure Loki must. Now, he wondered why he'd thought Loki would have been hanging out on a dead ship if he could have gone literally anywhere in the blink of an eye.
"I wished to come to this reality immediately," Loki said. "But the Tesseract wouldn't allow it. Not while there was an existing Space Stone in this reality. I was forced to wait, to hide until the stones were destroyed here. Only then could I cross over. And when I did, the stone within the Tesseract reacted to the loss of the other stones. Even as I appeared in this reality, it turned into--you can probably guess."
"...It turned into dust," Bucky said. He remembered that dust. It had been everywhere for a week or two, until it had vanished too. Every pile of it had once been a person; he'd breathed in some of it every time he inhaled, a reminder that stuck around in his nose and lungs and memories long after the dust itself had gone. It was still with him, the same way it was for everyone who'd been left to live through those years. From the sounds of it, it was probably still with Loki.
"Yes," Loki said. "So, here I am. And I've had no one with whom to discuss any of it, for all these years."
"Well, maybe you could talk about it with your brother, when you guys are caught up a little more."
Loki gave him an impatient look. That was probably fair. When you slept with a guy, you got to hear about his problems. Came with the territory. "Do we really have to talk about Thor, in our current position?"
"Hey, you got your line back. Good job." Bucky reached down for the covers, pulled them up. Really loaded conversation or not, pillow talk meant you got comfortable, and settled in. He might not have remembered much else about how this kind of thing was supposed to go, but he remembered that much. "So, what have you been doing, since you've been here? Besides cheating some people and avoiding other people, I mean."
*
Apparently, the answer to this question was 'not a lot.' So Bucky got to hear what Loki claimed were his best stories about people he'd screwed over. To be fair, they were really funny, and the other guys in the stories sounded like assholes, (which they probably had been, if the guy who'd hired Bucky to go after Loki in the first place was a representative example), and Loki had a good grasp of how to set up the dramatic parts. In all honesty, listening to Loki tell a story reminded Bucky a lot of listening to Thor tell stories about him. The main different was that Thor's stories all had a 'my brother, what a scamp' slant to them, while Loki's punchlines were all about how clever he was.
So Loki talked for a while, and Bucky talked a little about himself too. Somehow, he ended up telling a few stories about his and Thor's adventures, which Loki actually seemed interested in. He made a note to tell Thor he might want to tell more of that kind of story, and less of the kind that had send Loki fleeing back over here.
Eventually, being naked in a bed together had somewhat predictable results. Results that were a little more obvious for Loki than for Bucky, considering he was the one lying on his back.
They'd been naked together under the blanket for about an hour now, but they hadn't been touching. When Bucky slid his right hand under the blanket and down Loki's stomach, it was the first time they'd made contact since the thing out in the hallway. Loki's stomach muscles tensed under his fingers, and the bitten-back hiss he made when Bucky's hand wrapped around him was enough to make Bucky's dick finish standing at attention.
"So this is what you wanted to spend the night here for." Bucky pressed up against Loki's side, and slid his hand loosely up and down, nothing serious yet, but more than just teasing.
"Not exactly," Loki said, and then, at Bucky's quizzical look: "You said something about kneeling, before."
"Maybe I lied." Now, he was teasing. He kissed Loki's neck, cupped his balls in his hand. "Or maybe you'd rather fuck me. There's lube around here somewhere."
"...Maybe next time," Loki managed. He body was still tense against Bucky's. Not in a bad way. More in a 'wanting it' way. Maybe 'a wanting it now' kind of way. He really didn't seem like the patient type.
Bucky could have teased him for longer, but that felt like a 'maybe next time' kind of thing, too; besides, Loki wasn't the only one who didn't want to wait. So Bucky threw the blanket off, straddling Loki's body on his way off the bed, and liking the gleam in his eye when he did, like this was definitely a subject they could come back to later. Then he got on his knees on the floor, grabbed the base of Loki's dick with his right hand, laid his left hand flat on Loki's stomach, and leaned in. Loki tasted like skin and sweat, with a faint bitter taste beneath it that couldn't be anything but come.
God, it had been so long since he'd done this. At first he didn't try to take more than the first inch into his mouth, too worried he'd gag if he went too fast. Loki didn't seem to mind the awkwardness, if he noticed it at all; maybe he wouldn't even have minded a little gagging. Bucky would have, though, so when Loki tried to thrust up into his mouth, he thought, Nope, and held him down, metal hand still flat on Loki's stomach, the other one moving to hold down his hips.
It didn't last much longer than it had out in the corridor. By the time Bucky had found a decent rhythm, and figured out how much he could take in each time, Loki was breathing heavily, with his head tipped back against the pillow the same as it had been tipped against the wall before. His eyes were open this time, but that was really the only difference. It wasn't really surprising if he was the type who liked to watch. Bucky would have tried to make a show out of it if he hadn't been more focused on getting Loki off without embarrassing himself in the process.
Loki didn't bother to give any kind of a warning before he came, but when he closed his eyes, and grabbed the sheets with one hand and the back of Bucky's head with the other, Bucky figured something was about to happen. A second later, it did, a warm, already-familiar bitterness flooding his mouth. He managed to swallow it all down, still with no gagging, and then pulled off.
He took a second to catch his breath before crawling back into bed. When he got there, Loki was more considerate than he'd been a few seconds before; he wrapped his hand around Bucky and started stroking him right away. His grip was warm, and slick, and for a second Bucky wondered how he was using his come again when he'd wiped away the last batch and Bucky had swallowed this one. A second later, he realized Loki must have found the lube. A second after that, he started to realize how close he was. Much closer than he'd thought, when what he'd been the most focused on was making sure he didn't gag on or accidentally take a bite out of Loki's goods.
It was all catching up to him now. He could still taste Loki in his mouth. Would probably be able to for a while. He leaned in, figuring Loki was the kind of guy who'd like to taste himself. Turned out he was right; Loki met the kiss eagerly, deepened it. For some reason the little sound he made when he did was what set Bucky off; he came suddenly and explosively all over Loki's hand and stomach.
"Ugh," Bucky said, which wasn't any kind of commentary as much as it was the only thing that came to mind right then. He sagged back down, and if he'd been careful not to take too many liberties before, a little cuddling didn't seem like such a bad idea now. Or at least, burying his face in Loki's shoulder seemed more comfortable than any of the other options.
Loki didn't seem to mind, either, or at least didn't object. He reached up, stroked Bucky's hair for a minute, or the back of his neck--one or the other, could have been either or both since they were both there. It was nice.
He kept doing it for a minute, then grabbed ahold of the base of Bucky's skull, and said, "Sleep now."
"Not a chance," Bucky said. Or thought he said. Or meant to say.
Not that it mattered, because a second later, he was falling.
*
"WARNING: Ejection will occur in ten seconds."
Bucky startled awake to the sound of sirens, warning lights strobing red on the walls. By the time he remembered anything about what had happened, he'd gotten his boxers back on, and--
"WARNING: Ejection will occur in five seconds."
He didn't make it into the cockpit before it happened. Was too groggy to even make it to the door before everything jerked, and started spinning around him. He hit the ceiling with his back, the floor with his front, and a few more things with a few different things after that. It only took a few seconds for the ship to auto-stabilize, but it was a few seconds he got to feel like he was in a snowglobe someone was shaking.
When everything stopped, Bucky lay on his back on the floor, looking out the window at the stars...
And the Mjolnir, which, having forcibly ejected the Home from its docking bay, now streaked away, until it was nothing more than another spark of light, moving faster than all the other sparks of light, and then was gone.
That couldn't be good.
When Bucky finally made it out into the corridor, he heard a thumping sound. It was coming from the storage bay. He palmed the door open, and there, amid the chaos from everything that had been thrown around the room, none of which had been secured for an ejection, was...Thor. He had a big lump on his head, a gag in his mouth, and space tape (there was a more technical term for it, but Bucky could never remember it, so: space tape) tying his ankles together, and his arms and hands and even fingers to his body. Smart. No way he could call Stormbreaker, tied up like that. Not that he would have, when they were out here in space, but apparently Loki was cautious.
"Please tell me you haven't been in here this whole time," Bucky said.
He leaned down to take out the gag, and Thor said, "I have."
Well, hopefully he hadn't heard them going at it out in the hall, but Bucky didn't have time to fish around to find out. "Loki took your ship."
"As I suspected," Thor said, grimly...but then he grinned. "Same old Loki."
Bucky sorted through the junk on the floor, came up with a plasma knife he'd successfully used against space tape before, and started sawing through it. "You really weren't exaggerating in any of your stories, huh."
"Not at all. He's always been like this. Even when we were children, he--"
"WARNING: Life support failure in three minutes."
"...Same old Loki?"
Thor grinned even wider. "Same old Loki."
Bucky sawed through the last of the space tape. "You take engineering, I'll take the helm. Good?"
"Yes." Now free, Thor got up, brushed himself off. "But first, tell me: what are your rates like these days?"
"Oh, this one I'm doing for free."
And they headed out into the rest of the ship to see what the damage was.
*
In the end, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. More fiddly than fatal, intended to distract. Loki had wreaked havoc on every system he could access, which was almost everything except the steering. It was Bucky's own fault; he'd never liked the idea of no one else being able to do anything if something happened to him when he had passengers. Even the steering would have unlocked, if he'd stopped breathing at any point.
After four or five hours, everything seemed to be up again. Bucky was triple-checking things when he found the text file. It caught his eye mostly because he didn't bother generating many of them; he preferred to dictate notes, or if he really needed to write something down, to use a pad and pencil. Besides which, he would have had to generate this one while he'd been sleeping, based on the timestamp.
When he opened it, he half-expected it to do something bad, even though text files weren't connected to anything else. Nothing did, though. Inside was a single line of text: a date and a set of coordinates. The date was about six months in the future, and the coordinates...
"Where is this?" Bucky asked the computer.
The answer turned out to be a very fancy hotel halfway across the galaxy, in the capital city of a planet Bucky had never been to.
"Yeah, like that's happening." But he was already thinking about it. If they didn't catch up to Loki by then--which they probably would, since finding people was what he did best, he was even better at it when he teamed up with Thor, and Loki had probably only managed to hide so well for so long because no one had known he was around--a meetup would probably be a good idea. Thor could get his ship back. Bucky could get laid again, and then go exploring. He'd grown up in the best city on Earth, and made it a point to see the best cities on other planets whenever he was on vacation. This could be number twenty-three. It was enough to make him wonder if Loki had gotten into his itinerary while he was in here. A quick check showed he had.
Looking more closely at the text file, Bucky saw it had been deleted five times, and retrieved just as many times. Huh.
"Get me the video feed for these times," he said.
The feed came up on the viewscreen. There was Loki, sitting in Bucky's chair, fucking with the systems. He generated a new text file, entered the values Bucky had read. Then he got up and left the room...and came back a few seconds later, wiped the whole thing, and swooshed back out. Then he came back, and brought the file back to life, and swooshed out again. His expression each time was something different. The third time he came back to delete everything, he said, to himself but still audibly enough to be picked up, "He's friends with Thor." The fourth time he came back, he said, "This is humiliating. He won't even come." The fifth time, he didn't say anything, and looked even more aggravated, and like he was in much more of a hurry. Bucky had to wonder if he would have kept coming back indefinitely if not for the time crunch of wanting to get off the ship before Bucky or Thor came after him.
It was really something. Bucky couldn't help but grin, and tell the computer to put the whole thing into permanent storage so he could watch it a hundred more times, and grin some more.
Yeah. He was definitely getting laid again, six months from now if they didn't manage to track Loki down before that.
*
"There's one thing I don't understand," Thor said, about half an hour later. He'd shown up in the cockpit covered in grease over the space tape residue. They'd just gone over the systems checklist one last time to make sure sure nothing else was going to blow up when they put the ship into drive.
"What's that?"
"How did Loki incapacitate you? I expected you to find me much sooner. When you didn't, I suspected he'd injured you in some way."
"Uh. Well. He kind of." Bucky looked at the viewscreen, and the control panel, and the wall, and tried to think of a believable fib. "He stabbed me. In the kidney. Took me a few hours to recover. Sorry about that."
"Hmm. I don't see a scar," Thor said, which was probably a sign Bucky should have stopped long enough to put a shirt on at some point.
"Oh, right. I forgot. He made me go to sleep. That's what it was. Sorry again."
"That's not the kind of thing he can do to strangers. Not without the mind stone to help him." Thor was the one who was fishing now, squinting at Bucky with his good eye. "You'd have had to let him get terribly close..."
"Okay, fine. We slept together, all right? That what you wanted to hear?"
Apparently it was, because Thor's expression went from suspicious to absurdly delighted. "I knew it. This is wonderful!"
"Yeah, yeah."
Thor must've picked up on Bucky's skepticism, because he said, "No, really, it is. Loki's never liked one of my friends before. And my friends usually hate him, considering all the stabbing and attempted conquests and so on."
"Makes sense," Bucky said, as noncommittally as he could without giving Thor something else to squint at him about.
"Besides, if you and he are together...well, that makes us truly brothers now, doesn't it? You and I?"
"...I don't think it's that serious," Bucky said, but what he thought about next was Loki telling him funny stories between one set of orgasms and the next. The way he'd opened up, when it was probably true that he never did. The way he'd slept with Bucky more in an hour and a half than Bucky'd slept with anyone else in pretty close to a century. It had seemed good at the time. It still did, though that had to be at least partly because Bucky was still feeling pretty post-coital (and planned to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible, in case six months from now didn't work out and it ended up being another almost-century until the next time). The way he wanted to see Bucky again, even if he clearly thought it was as bad an idea as Bucky knew it would be on his end.
Then he thought about Thor and him, and him and Thor, and how even though they didn't always see each other a lot these days, they always fell right back together when they did. When it came down to it, Thor was the only war buddy Bucky had ever gotten to keep. He'd never thought that much about it before. He hadn't had to. He'd found out a long time ago that the things he had to think about the least often were the ones that were there all the time. "Anyway, we were brothers already, weren't we?"
"We were, yes," Thor agreed, in a suspiciously thick voice.
"See? Might not want to tell Loki that, though."
Thor laughed, and maybe some of it was amusement, but the rest of it was something else. Bucky remembered it from back in the old days, the first years he'd spent out here in space. It was the thrill of the hunt, when it was about to start. "Probably not, you're right."
Bucky pulled a lever. The engine thrummed beneath and around them, warming up, getting ready to go. Bucky could feel himself revving up, too. He always did for this part, no matter how mundane the trip...because he was about to get to go faster, go farther than he'd ever thought he'd get to, back when space ships were still just science fiction.
"Ready?" he asked.
"Yes."
"Did you want to get a drink or something first? We're not going to make any pit stops for a while. And we definitely aren't hitting any bars this week."
"No, I'm fine. Besides, our keg is still on the Mjolnir. Loki has it now."
"Figures." Bucky pulled another lever, and things on the control panel started to light up. He looked out the viewscreen at the stars and the blackness of space. "All right. Let's go get him."