It happened every other day or so. Difficult to say the exact interval, or even make judgements considering the consistency of the thing. Perhaps it was every third day sometimes, twice a week other times, several times in a day at yet other times. Time in that cell seemed to have less meaning than it had before; or perhaps Loki had simply never realized how little meaning it had always had, back when he'd been a prince in Asgard.
Regardless of how often it happened, these things remained true: every so often, and never at an interval so long that Loki dared to hope it had ended, they came to retrieve him from his cell. The first few times, they came in number, a brute force to drag him away to that other little room. After the sixth or eighth time, they must have lost enough of their witless soldiers not to desire to lose anymore. That was when the gas began, floating down vomit-yellow from the long vent by the ceiling. No matter how he tried to hold his breath, eventually he'd get a lungful of it. No matter how he tried to keep from falling, the world would spin and spin some more, so that he never remembered the moment he must have crumpled to the floor.
When he woke up, he'd find himself strapped to that metal table, in that other room. It must have been cold; he hardly knew, since by then they'd always given him the injection, the one that made him flush the even colder color of his birth. Cuffs around his wrists, which were stretched out so far in front of him there was no give at all. Ankles cuffed, too, down by the floor, far enough apart to leave him exposed, tightly enough that there would be no breaking free.
By the time he'd gasped awake, the wooziness banished enough for him to know where he was and what was happening: by then, they'd brought in the other. The Asset, their true witless soldier, who always wore a stupid sort of sulkiness on his face. He, like Loki, was always naked. He, unlike Loki, was never bound. He'd stand in the middle of the room, flanked by several of the men in white. They'd tell him what to do, and he would do it. Hand on that hideous cock of it, pumping it within his fist, until it went from its flaccid starting place, and stood up against his belly, flushed and rigid and ready.
More instructions, and he'd approach the table. Stand between Loki's legs. Reach for his buttocks, one hand as cold as the steel table, the other so warm Loki had to gird himself or he'd vomit, and have to lie in it until the rest of this farce had finished. Spread them, then one hand would leave, usually the cold one. The tip of his cock would be there then, shoving against Loki's entrance, then shoving in, an intrusion that was never any less mortifying than it had been the time before.
It always took forever. Half an hour or longer, the worst times. Sometimes it went on for so long that Loki felt as if he were no longer present; as if he were merely watching, from somewhere other than here. Mostly, he had no such luxury, and was forced to endure it. That awful slapping sound, skin on skin. The nauseating contrast of the hands on his thighs, which seemed worse somehow than if they had both been the same thing. The pain, the raw places inside broken open again every time they might have started to heal. But worst of all was the way the Asset never seemed to care. He fucked Loki as if he were flogging a piece of meat. Even at the end, when his hips began to stutter, and he filled Loki with his revolting seed, his only response was a single low grunt, which always sounded more like effort than pleasure.
When it was over, more gas, or an injection that had the same result. Loki would wake up in his cell, in his own pink skin again but filthy as ever, seed and dried blood coating the inside of his thighs. Even when he washed the former away, the latter would keep on in its trickle, never quite stopping, slowing only until the next time he woke up bound to that table. He'd spend the next few hours or days or half a week deciding on all the ways he'd kill them, if and when he was given an opening. He was long past caring if there was any elegance to it; he'd tear them apart limb by limb, and never mind how much more brutal and oafish and, well, Asgardian it was than his usual preference.
Then, one day, the visits to the other little room ceased. The gassing didn't, only this time, it always seemed to come at longer intervals than before; and when Loki woke up, he was strapped to a different table in a different room. Face-up, this time, with his ankles strapped above the table's surface instead of below. They never waited for him to wake up here; he often came to with a white-robed man between his legs already, shoving into him with the hard rod he held in his hand. This never seemed to be meant as a fucking so much as it did an exploration; he'd move it around, this way and that, while looking at a computer screen that was always turned away.
Sometimes, this would be the end of it. Other times, another man would come in with a needle, which would be pressed deep into Loki's abdomen to draw out a strange clear fluid. Still other times, they'd do other things, less painful but no less mortifying. Always, at the end, gas or an injection, and Loki would wake up in his cell again, feeling somehow no less filthy than he had been the times before.
One day, something changed, and with quite a few bangs. From somewhere outside Loki's cell came a series of brief, loud sounds, which after a moment he recognized as Midgardian gunfire. This went on for a while, accompanied by the occasional scream, and the even more occasional scuttling sound in the hallway outside. When the other sounds had ceased, there came a voice from outside of Loki's cell:
"Hey, can you hear me in there? You've gotta stand away from the door, okay?"
It was, almost certainly, a trick of some kind. Loki walked right up to the door, and said, "All right."
Another sound, this one a crash, right next to his ear. The door shuddered. Loki decided it would be better to back hastily into the far corner, actually.
Another crash, and the door seemed to crumble in on itself.
A third crash, and it came off its hinges, only failing to fly across the room at him by virtue of the person who'd smashed it throwing it into the hall, instead.
For a moment, Loki almost didn't recognize his supposed rescuer. His long hair was in his face, which wore a grim sort of stubbornness; he was wearing a hard black armor, and bristled over with weapons, from a machine gun strapped to his back to daggers everywhere Loki looked. He had contrasting hands, one made of flesh and the other of metal.
Loki had backed into the corner; now he cringed into it, never thinking of how mortifying a response that was until much later.
"Don't," he said, though it had never before made a difference what he said, any more than it had mattered if he fought. "Don't touch me."
The Asset raised his hands, which were empty. "I'm not going to hurt you."
"Don't touch me, I said."
"Not gonna do that either." His voice wasn't what Loki had imagined it would be if he were anything other than a dull no-one. Brutish as he was, his tone was mild, and his eyes filled with something neither possessive nor lewd, but quite a bit softer than either. "I just want to get you out of here."
"...Fine," Loki said. 'Why' was a question for much later. 'What's the catch' was a question for at least a few minutes from now. "I'll require a weapon, however."
The Asset nodded, as if he'd expected this. He began to reach for the machine gun at his back.
"Not a firearm," Loki said, thinking quickly: a gun might provide protection from white-robed men in the distance, but would would provide very little from the Asset at close quarters. "I'd prefer a dagger, or five."
"All right."
The Asset handed over blades until Loki had finished holding his hand out for them. He'd have taken all of them, except that he was still just as naked as he'd been all along, and his magic had been missing for some time, a casualty of the food or one of the injections they gave him periodically (probably not the food, as none of the early hunger strikes had elicited a response from either an inward or outward direction). As it was, he ended up with two for each hand, ugly mass-produced things that would nevertheless cut through skin and sinew and even bone, if he wanted them to.
"Lead the way," Loki said.
It ought to have felt pathetic, following along with his many-times rapist to who knew where; but it felt like something powerful, instead, with those blades in his hands, stepping over body after body. It helped that what the Asset had done to them was just as bloody, just as brutal as any of Loki's fantasies.
They stopped in a nearby closet, which was filled with racks hung with clothes, all kinds from more lab coats to armor to street clothes. Loki gravitated to the armor first, of course, though all of it was ugly and far too stiff-looking, not a single piece of it made out of Asgardian leather. He wondered, with a brief startling twinge, just what had happened to his own armor.
"I don't think any of those are gonna fit you," said the Asset.
Loki bristled, but a glance down at himself proved the point. "Very well," he said, and went for the softer things: pants that stretched, a shirt that, being several sizes too large, would drape. The positive side of this choice was that it made dressing quicker; the downside of it was that even clothed he didn't really feel any less bared.
They left in a van with black-tinted windows. The Asset drove. They stopped only for gas, and, once, at a warehouse. The Asset went in alone. More staccato gunfire from inside; a few minutes later, he returned with several large duffle bags flung over his shoulder, and a number of further firearms tucked under his arm.
The duffle bags proved to be full of stacks of green paper. When Loki enquired, the Asset said, "Thought we'd need some cash. Easier to hide when you have money. You don't have to sleep under any bridges that way."
He said this knowingly enough for Loki to wonder: "Have you slept under very many bridges before?"
"Last time," said the Asset. "And the time before that. Dunno about before then."
Loki worked his way through the implications of this, the looming fact that if there had been other times, the other times must have resulted in his capture. "Ah. What, then, makes this time different?"
"Didn't have anyone with me, the other times," the Asset said, long after Loki had decided he wasn't going to answer. "Hard to keep ahold of things, like that. To remember why they matter."
They drove west, and drove for days. Literal days, not guessed-about ones; the sun came up, and went down, and came back up twice more before they finally stopped somewhere where they could load up on neither gas nor donuts nor Icees, nor even that waxy brown stuff which was allegedly some form of chocolate. They'd been driving farther and farther into the wilderness, the roads growing ever more narrow as the trees went on ever longer. Finally, they stopped at a small building made out of logs, with a wrinkled sign in the window stating rates and vacancies. The Asset went inside. When he came back out, he handed Loki a small rusted key.
They drove down more and yet narrower roads, until they came to what could best be described as a trail. It was barred by a chain, which the Asset got out of the van to move, then back out of the van to drape across the trail again once they'd driven past it. Then they drove up the trail, winding around and around, this way and that, tires kicking up a cloud of dust all the way, until they came to a tiny cabin.
"You can stay here," said the Asset. "It's safe."
"I'll be the judge of that," said Loki, though he'd little doubt of it; he'd noticed how careful the Asset was, how aware. How he remained alert at all times, always seeking to notice if they'd been picked out by anyone who would be dangerous to them. It should not have made him feel as safe as he did, but considering he was no longer celled, it was rather difficult to feel anything else.
Loki got out of the car, unlocked the cabin, poked around. Two rooms, it was hideously small, with none of the rustic charm of even the worst Asgardian hunting cabin. It was much larger than the passenger seat of the car, and felt like it might as well have contained an entire realm when compared to his cell.
"It'll do," he said when the inspection was through, and nevermind if he was near to certain he'd seen a rodent of some kind scutter under a cabinet when the light had turned on. In Asgard, it might have mattered. Would have. Here, it was one of a great multitude of things that didn't.
"Good," said the Asset, relaxing--minutely enough, but also startling to see, since it was the first time he'd seemed to do any such thing. "I have to dump the van. It might be a few days, if I have to come back on foot." He hesitated. "I also don't have to--you don't have to see me, if you don't want to. I can leave supplies on the doorstep. If you want."
"I," Loki said, startled not because it didn't make sense, but because he'd only spent the first few hours in the car with one hand hovering next to one blade or another. Now that it had been brought up again, however obliquely, he couldn't remember precisely when the Asset had stopped seeming like the nightmare that might recur at any moment. "No. You can come back."
"Okay. If you want."
"I do. In fact, I'd almost prefer it."
"Oh, yeah?"
"Yes," said Loki. "After all, Icees left on the doorstep are likely to melt in this heat, are they not?"
"Okay," said the Asset again. "I'll try not to come back on foot either, then."
"See that you don't." Then, the questions Loki had forgotten about until reminded came back up, so quickly and so fiercely that he had no chance to demur giving voice to it: "Before you go--tell me why."
The Asset's brow furrowed, eyes growing confused. "Why what?"
"Why did you come for me?" There hadn't been time, between one thing and the other, naps in the car and fueling stops and the occasional pee break, to spend much time pondering the matter previously. Now, though. Now, Loki thought he might go crazy trying to decipher an answer, if he let the Asset leave him here without one. "I'm a stranger to you. It would have been easier for you to go it alone. Why go to all this trouble?"
The confusion lifted, replaced by more of that grim stubbornness. "When I found out what they were doing. When I, I don't know, woke up. I just couldn't. I couldn't let it happen. I couldn't let them hurt you anymore, when I'd already--when I'd already hurt you so much. And, I couldn't let them have the baby. Couldn't let them do the same things to it that they did to me--or to you. To us. That's not going to happen."
"Oh," Loki said. Just that.
The Asset went back out to the van, started it, backed away. Stricken, Loki listened to the engine growing softer and softer, until there was nothing left to listen to but the birds and insects outside the door.
Loki had known they'd done something. Put something in him. He hadn't thought about it very much outside of that basic knowledge. There hadn't seemed to be a point on dwelling on the changes in his body. The vomiting, which had gone on for months, at all times of day, sometimes sparked by what he'd eaten and sometimes by what he'd smelled and sometimes by nothing at all. The new softness on his abdomen, which had given way to something firm and round and insistent. The sensitivity of his nipples. The dizziness. Even the movement, that seeming shifting inside--
There had been no point in worrying about it, or even in wondering about it. It would have been a distraction, when what he'd needed was to be ready for if and when his moment came. Well, it had come, if in the form of an unexpected ally, and now--
There was a mirror in the corner, small and dirty and positioned haphazardly above a somewhat rickety-looking toilet. But he didn't need to see himself in profile to look at himself. All he had to do was lift up that billowing shirt. There it was, an abdomen extended so far that his belly button, which had always before pointed inward, now pointed out. Livid red lines strained this way and that across his stretched skin. As he looked, it happened again, the shifting. Before, he'd thought--he didn't know what he'd thought. He'd gone out of his way to avoid thinking anything. Certainly not that they were using him an incubator for another witless soldier. Not that he'd soon be pushing out some half-Jotun thing--
The shifting happened again, and that stretched skin rippled in response, and it had not, it had never once occurred to Loki that he could be pregnant. That to HYDRA, he'd been the heifer, and the Asset the prized bull. He'd known that Jotun males could conceive where Asgardian males could not, and yet he'd never made the connection until it had been made for him.
He made a sound without knowing he made it, a low despairing moan. He drew one of his daggers, pressed the blade against the taut skin, ready to carve it out at the next movement. If the thing had kicked, or rolled over, or anything else in the next half hour, he might even have done it. But it didn't move again until nearly dusk, and by then it had occurred to Loki that, whatever else was true, cutting it out of him would likely have results he'd very little time to regret.
The Asset returned four days later, just when Loki's magic was returning in earnest. He arrived in a dirty station wagon, bearing a large disposable cup.
No less horrified at his discovery that he had been on the first day, Loki nonetheless found it very difficult to care too much about anything but the contents of that cup. They'd stopped for Icees no less than eleven times during their drive; he'd dreamt of them all three nights he spent alone. Now, he snatched this one from the Asset as soon as it was within arms reach, slurped down its contents until the time came to use the little spoon at the end of the straw to begin scooping out the more solid parts of the Icee.
"Thank you," he managed, when the need had subsided into a satisfaction that was likely to become need again no earlier than two hours from now.
"You're welcome," said the Asset, and returned to the station wagon to haul yet more supplies into the cabin, more of them in cans and boxes than the sorts of things that could be purchased at gas stations. Once he was done with that, he pulled out a greenish-brown tarp from the backseat, and draped it over the station wagon.
"Clever," said Loki, because it was; now anyone who came looking for the cabin wouldn't notice any glint of metal to guide them here.
"Sure." The Asset looked at him, straight-on and somehow more coherent than he had been even a few days ago. "I didn't ask your name, before. Didn't think of it. Sorry."
"You haven't asked it yet."
The Asset smiled--just a little one, but it gave his face an entirely different and very nearly sweet countenance. "So what is it?"
"Loki. And yours?"
The sweet countenance fell. "I don't remember."
Of course he didn't. He wouldn't. That was the entire point of him, as seen in mind after mind, so long ago, and in another life. But Loki had seen him, in mind after mind; and he'd made sure to keep what he'd seen committed to memory starting from the moment the Asset had become personally relevant to him.
"James Buchanan Barnes," said Loki. "I saw--I heard something about it, I think. I'm nearly certain that's right."
"James Buchanan Barnes," the Asset repeated, face twisting like it was a very strange thing to have in his mouth.
"Your friends called you something different. A nickname. Jimmy, perhaps?"
"Ew," said the Asset.
"Or," Loki said, trying to remember, trying to think, with no idea of why this suddenly seemed so important. "Perhaps it was a play on the middle part? Bucket, could it be?"
"Bucket?!"
"Or, perhaps," straining, so close to it, it almost had to be-- "Bucky?"
Wait. No. That was a ridiculous name, which couldn't possibly fit any version of the Asset. Only, the moment Loki said it, he seemed to light up with so much more of that sweetness.
"Bucky," said the Asset, seeming to roll it around on his tongue. "Bucky."
"So that is it?" Loki asked, still skeptical as he slurped down the parts of his Icee that had started to melt since they'd embarked on this inane introduction. "Are you sure?"
"I don't remember enough to be sure. I like it, though."
"That makes one of us, I suppose."
Being in the cabin alone had been unsettling. Having his former rapist with him in such close quarters ought to have been even moreso--yet, now that Loki was no longer compartmentalizing his physical state, it seemed very easy to compartmentalize the Asset vs. Bucky, instead. And why shouldn't it have been? They were different people, after all. The Asset was the one who had harmed him, and even he had only done it on his masters' say-so; and it was becoming increasingly obvious that there was no chance Bucky would ever do any such thing. Bucky was the one who'd gotten him away. Bucky was the one who gamely went to retrieve Icees for him at any hour of the day or night (always blue ones, much as Loki felt he ought to have imprinted on literally any other color). Bucky was the one who asked how he was doing umpteen times a day. Bucky was the one who ohh'd and ahh'd when Loki's magic came rushing back, when he could make daggers and other things disappear into thin air, or make a dozen mirror images of himself in and around the cabin.
Now, Bucky was the one Loki found himself looking for when he woke, the one he couldn't quite manage to sleep without having recently seen--but for what might have seemed to be different reasons, had he cared to look more closely at them.
They'd been there together for nearly a month when something else happened. Loki had more or less expected the next stage of pregnancy to involve pushing a screaming infant out from between his thighs. What he got was...
He woke up one morning, and for the first time in what might have been as long as a year, he found he'd woken up hard. Aching. Bucky was nowhere in sight, but the tarp-covered car was still in front of the cabin, which meant he must be patrolling. It meant Loki had time. How much of it was uncertain, and so he pumped his cock as roughly as he could, bringing himself to a quick and filthy climax.
It should have been enough. It ought to have ended it. But it satisfied him for only half an hour, which was as long as it took for Bucky to return.
The moment he walked back into the cabin, something clenched, low in Loki's groin. His spent cock twitched, and immediately grew half-hard again. In the following few hours, he did everything he could think of to banish it. He reminded himself of every session in that little white room, when he'd been clamped to a table, unable to so much as struggle against the intrusion--
Sickeningly, he'd gotten hard about a third of the time, when it was the Asset forcing his way inside him. The arousal then had been involuntary, unwanted. It was now, too, yet every time he reminded himself, every time he thought back on it, he got a little harder.
"Could you," he gasped out, when he didn't think he could stand it a moment longer. "Please--"
"What?" asked Bucky in some alarm, having missed Loki's growing distress (likely because Loki had been hiding behind a glamour the entire time).
"An Icee," said Loki, though they'd abruptly become disgusting to him days ago. "Now. Please."
Bucky rushed off in the station wagon. Loki took himself in hand again. For a moment, he simply held himself, thinking of that room--
He couldn't do this and think of that room, no matter what kind of physical response he'd had to the memories before now.
He thought instead of Bucky's laugh. The sweetness of his smile. The way he looked at Loki, so careful and so willing. Who knew how far that willingness went? Not as far as Loki was imagining, surely--surely Bucky, too, felt sickened when he thought on the past; and he had no interloper within him to change things, besides--but it took only moments of wondering how Bucky's left hand would feel, cool fingers curling around--
Loki came with such gusto that he was left gasping for a few minutes.
When Bucky came back and handed him his Icee, his metal hand brushed Loki's, causing the satisfaction he'd been under up until that point to melt a thousand times faster than ice on a ninety-degree July day.
Loki had it under control. All he had to do, he found, was ask Bucky to make a round of the nearby woods, or drive to fetch him something. Bucky was always willing, and once he was gone, Loki could take care of his aching cock. If Bucky noticed the errands growing more frequent, he didn't complain, or even say anything. It was the perfect system, or at least as close as it was going to get while this lasted.
At least, that was the way it went for nearly a week.
In the end, it was just that Loki hadn't counted on adding dreams to the mix.
Bucky was inside him, fucking him. Bucky's mouth was around him, sucking him. Bucky was in front of him, on his hands and knees as Loki drove into his tight heat. Bucky was--
Talking.
"Loki?" he said. "Hey, are you okay?"
Loki came to, and for a moment thought he must be back there--back on the table, secured there so that the Asset could fuck him. For a moment, he cringed away, not really from Bucky's visage before him, but from the dull-eyed, slack-faced person of the Asset, the one he still sometimes returned to in other, less pleasant dreams, or in unguarded waking moments.
"Sorry," said Bucky. "I'm just--you were making these sounds. I wanted to make sure you were...I think you were having another nightmare. I'll leave you alone now."
His hands were behind his back now, but they'd been on Loki's shoulders before, shaking him. Loki could still feel them there. He could feel them all over, nevermind that his shoulders (and his hips and his buttocks--but that had been someone else) were the only places those hands had ever purposely been. His cock was hard enough to leave the rest of him trembling.
If he'd been awake when it started, he could have said, I want an Icee, or I want a cupcake, or I think I heard something would you please check the perimeter. He'd have been able to see beyond Bucky, to the Asset who had existed in his body before him. He'd have been able to remember why this was not a thing he should want. He'd have been able to hold onto it.
Instead, he said, "Would you--do you think you could--"
"What?"
"Would you fuck me," said Loki. He reached for the waistline of Bucky's trousers, tugged him a little closer, reached for the button at the front. "I need it. God. Please."
"...What?"
"You said that before," gasped Loki. "Surely there are better uses for your mouth."
Bucky reached for Loki's hands, which were struggling with his zipper. Then he stepped back, one stride and then another. It was the kind of rejection that once would have had Loki plotting revenge: a dagger in the night, a lie whispered in this ear or that one. Now, it just had him throwing back the light sheet he slept under, the better to follow Bucky to wherever he thought he was going.
Bucky held his hands up in a 'stop' motion. It was enough to make Loki slow down, just for a moment.
"What?" he asked, feeling there had to be much better uses for his mouth at this particular moment in time, as well. "Is there a problem?"
"I don't understand what's happening," Bucky said. "I thought you were having a nightmare, but maybe it was--something else. It was something else, and maybe you haven't woken all the way up from it yet."
"I'm fully awake and aware, thank you."
"You sure? Because I don't think you'd be asking for that if you were in your right mind. Not after everything."
Stung, and not a little petulant, Loki said, "Never mind, then. Though if you're not going to partake, I'll have you know that it would have been much better than it was before."
It was the sulky sort of commentary Loki might have used for a would-be repeat lover hundreds of years ago; recalling abruptly that Bucky, too, had frequent night terrors, and that some of them unquestionably starred himself, he at once regretted having made it now. He might even have admitted to the regret openly, except that Bucky didn't seem inclined to take offense, as Loki himself would have. Instead, he swallowed, hard. It was a surprising enough reaction for Loki to notice, finally, how flushed he was: a redness in the face that was almost as sweet as his smile.
Well. That was promising.
Loki leaned back in the bed, so that he was propped up against the headboard. He reached into the front of his drawstring sweatpants, began to stroke himself.
"Um," said Bucky, though he didn't look away as he took another step back. "I'll just..."
"Feel free to watch," Loki said, and drew his hand back out, just long enough to shove sweatpants and underwear down around his thighs. He wrapped his hand around himself again, and was rewarded with a sound from the other end of the room: a whimper that could have only one meaning. Bucky's red face was beading with sweat, his hair hanging over his eyes in a way that did nothing to obscure the way his mouth was hanging open. "It's a pity you aren't interested. It could be you, touching me like this. Or if could be your mouth, devouring me. And once I'd come down your throat in long hot spurts, you could slide your fingers into me--the ones on your left hand, I think--and then--"
"God," said Bucky, who, at a downwards glance, had a bulge in his pants that was at odds with the idea that he didn't want to; but even that sight did not compare to all the feeling in his eyes, an agony that was the antithesis of the Asset's dull nothing.
He took one halting step toward Loki, then another.
"Are you sure?" he asked, when he was there, when he was kneeling by Loki on the bed, close enough to touch, to lick, to bite, to take or to be taken by. "I mean--you told me not to touch you. You know. Before."
That cringing moment in his cell, which now seemed so long ago. Back when not being touched for weeks or months had seemed like the greatest possible blessing, instead of a drought that left him gasping for the cool clean water of someone's touch.
Not someone's. Bucky's. Only his, the fleeting thought of being touched by anyone else enough to bring its own equally-fleeting wave of nausea.
"That was for the Asset," Loki said. "It wasn't for you."
Still, Bucky didn't reach out to touch him. But he was close enough now. So Loki grasped him by the front of his shirt, and dragged him down, and kissed his mouth, and kept kissing him until Bucky broke free long enough to say, "So you wanted, what? My mouth, right? Or were you just saying that to get to me?"
Before he'd asked, what Loki had really wanted was anything, in any order. Now, though, he couldn't imagine wanting to start with anything else.
So Bucky kissed his way from Loki's jawline to his neck to his shoulder, all the way down his body. He sucked Loki dry, sucked him until he came in those promised long hard spurts, which Bucky swallowed down easily. Then his fingers, the ones on his metal hand, shoved into Loki, so much more welcome than anything that had happened between them before, and then--
It was a long night, and a longer morning.
It was far too hot and sticky to sleep in the middle of the day. They slept anyway, Bucky's chest pressed against Loki's back, his flesh hand curled around Loki's hip.
When Loki woke around dusk, on the wake of another delicious dream, he didn't even have to ask before a hand that wasn't his wrapped around his length, and pulled and tugged at him until he came. It was a smaller, weaker climax than any of the earlier ones, but no less welcome.
Within him, something shifted, the movement that always made something sour rise in the back of his throat. It did now, too, except--
He hadn't thought of it as belonging to anyone. Being part of anyone. It certainly wasn't his, nevermind how it had begun or where it currently resided. But the Asset had been there when it was conceived, and Bucky was still here now. He was here, and yet, despite the fact that it was half him, he'd never gone out of his way to bother Loki about it. He hadn't asked any questions, hadn't made any demands, hadn't done anything but exist kindly and carefully around him.
Bucky had been, in short, maddeningly neutral on the subject. But, now, lying here, Loki found that any neutrality reminded him much too much of--
"Here," he said, grabbing Bucky's hand and depositing it where the movement had been. "Be patient a moment."
"Okay," said Bucky, a little unsurely--and then the movement came again, rippling through him, until Bucky, feeling it too, let out a surprised little laugh. "Oh. Oh, wow."
Something within Loki twisted in several different directions. One of them hissed and spit, and wanted to ask how Bucky could dare express any kind of wonder for the thing he'd forced Loki to conceive in the first place. The other, smaller and quieter and very nearly drowned out by the other, wondered, in the wake of yet more of that sweetness, if there was another thing that could be turned around, just as Bucky himself had.
It wasn't a certain thing, wasn't a sure answer. It was barely a thread of a maybe, a suggestion of what could only be pure madness. And it was simply there from that moment on. A question that raised its head at odd moments over the next few weeks. Every time Loki bade Bucky to lay his hand there and be patient (for even now, it was the one place Bucky never touched without being explicitly directed to). The times, more and more frequently, that he began to wonder about the thing itself. Whether it would be blue, or pink, or some strange in-between color. Whether its features would more resemble Bucky's or his own, or hark back to some unknown ancestor on either side. Even whether it would be male or female. Whether he would demand Bucky to take it away, as he'd once thought he would, or if, instead, he'd actually consider keeping it. For a time, at least. Until he found out what sort of creature it was, and could better form a determination.
He still wasn't at all certain on that last one by the time the labor pains began in earnest. There was really only one thing he was at all sure of.
"Stay here," he said, gripping onto Bucky's hand in a way that would likely be humiliating later. "Don't leave me."
"I won't."
"To be clear, I don't care about the perimeter right now."
"Me neither." Bucky hesitated, glancing down at himself as if to check that he still had all eighteen guns. "I mean, I do, but I'm prepared for all the eventualities."
"Yes, I know, you won't let them have it," said Loki, joking and not entirely joking, because he'd certainly never gone out of his way to ask which of them meant more to Bucky. He knew what the answer had been, back when the Asset had broken his conditioning. It had been too obvious, no matter what he'd said about why. If the answer had failed to change in the last few months, Loki had no desire whatsoever to know about it.
Bucky looked at him so sharply that there was no doubting this had failed to soar over his head, even though similar commentary often seemed to. Plainly, he said, "Or you. Especially you. I'd die first."
"Good to know," said Loki, panting against another contraction, another gripping vise around his stomach. Until now, each pain had brought with it a base terror he hadn't felt since the last time he'd been strapped to a table. Now, though, it seemed to be turning into something else. Another kind of terror, and who knew whether this was the kind that could ever be mostly-vanished, the way the other terrors had. "To be clearer, there will be daggers involved, if you so much as try," he said, not a joke this time, or even an attempt at one; even now, Bucky was far from the only one who was loaded down with weaponry. "You'll stay the whole time, won't you? You won't go anywhere?"
"Nah. I'm here for the duration," said Bucky, who had once been the last thing Loki wanted to be near, and had somehow become something else entirely in the interim.