"The people of Earth have agreed to allow you to stay, on one condition," Thor said.
The oaf had the gall to look happy about it. As if Loki wouldn't have been much better off taking back the ship and going on his merry way, leaving Thor and the rest of the Asgardians to their decidedly Midgardian fate. He knew where he wasn't wanted. He also had a pretty good idea where he wouldn't be able to get away with much.
In any case, it didn't take much guesswork: "I'm to give up my magic."
"--On two conditions," Thor went on. "The magic thing, and you must also marry an Avenger."
Once they were past the 'you want me to what a WHAT?' part of the conversation, followed by the 'but why can't I just leave and promise never to return?' part of the conversation, Loki sighed and said, "I won't marry Banner."
"No one suggested that," said Thor.
"I did," said Barton, because of course he had. "I definitely made that suggestion."
"Barton suggested that," Thor continued, "but Barnes is the only one who volunteered."
Barnes, Barnes...
"I don't recall any Avenger by that name," Loki said.
"That's because he isn't one," Rogers said, his jaw seeming more set than it usually was from Loki's recollections. "So we're not going that way."
"You owe it to me to let me make my own bad decisions, Steve," said the guy in the back with the really bad hair and the metal arm.
And in the end, after the kind of long-winded argument Loki had come to expect from the Avengers, (but had not known he could provoke without at least a token effort), that was pretty much that.
***
Six months later, Loki said, "I don't understand how this happened."
"You had the Tesseract and didn't tell anyone, hid it in my sock drawer and didn't tell me, and now we're both dead," Barnes said. "Thanks. I appreciate it."
"We're not dead." Loki peered at their bodies, sprawled on the floor. "I'm still breathing, anyway."
Barnes looked down as well. "Me, too. Huh. Now what?"
"I have no idea. If you hadn't gone and touched it--"
"You hid it in my sock drawer."
"In my defense, I must assume it's been five months since you've opened it, as that's how long it's been since I put it there," said Loki, wondering for about the hundredth time why he bothered defending himself to the husband he'd taken on out of self-defense. It wasn't as if he cared about Barnes' opinion of him. He was biding his time, that was all.
Barnes was less inclined to pointless arguments than the other Avengers. Perhaps it was because he was more of an honorary Avenger, perhaps because he'd actually been serious when he said he thought Loki deserved a second chance (even if it meant he, too, was on house arrest for the foreseeable future--the third condition, the one that had conveniently gone unmentioned until after the nuptials). At any rate, he said, "Yeah. Fine. Whatever. Now what?"
First Loki tried to touch the Tesseract in his incorporeal form. His hand went through it, but nothing else happened. Then he tried it seven or eight more times, in case he'd been wrong the first time. No response. Then he let Barnes poke it with the tip of his finger. When that didn't work, he managed not to protest (that much) when Barnes tried to pick it up.
When that didn't work, either, they exchanged glances.
"Steve will know what to do," Barnes said. Rogers came over to their apartment every single day, without fail. If Barnes had let him, he'd have moved in.
"That--" Loki began, and bit back fifteen or so synonyms of the word 'idiot' before he settled on, "--person will merely tell my brother about the Tesseract."
"And that's bad because...?"
Loki wasn't quite certain how they could have been married for six months without this becoming obvious. "Because then he'll have it, and I won't. We need to come up with a solution before then."
"Like what?"
"Do humans have any stories about things like this? Ways to break a spell, to wake the sleepers?"
"I don't know," Barnes said, but it was clear he was thinking. A minute later, he said, "Do you mean like fairy tales?"
"You'll have to tell me more, first."
"Well, there's Snow White. And Sleeping Beauty. In those kinds of stories, the princess gets cursed to sleep until the prince wakes her up with true love's kiss."
"That won't work," Loki said. Their marriage had been platonic since the beginning, which was all for the better when you considered Loki would someday 1. leave this apartment, 2. leave Earth, and 3. have an annulment. He just hadn't gotten that far yet. Because he didn't have his magic. Because he didn't have a ship. Because neither of those things were likely to happen anytime in the next century, and had accordingly begun to seem less urgent. He might have had the Tesseract, but it wasn't as if he could do anything with it for the time being.
"Hey, you're a prince," Barnes said.
"So?"
Barnes shrugged. "So, we could try it."
There wasn't a lot Loki could say to that. It was better than any of the Asgardian strategies for dealing with this kind of situation, which mostly came down to "hit it with a hammer." And it wasn't as if they hadn't kissed before. The briefest peck at the ceremony, to make it look a little better (not that it could have looked all that good in any case, considering how many Avengers were pointed in Loki's direction at the time).
It wasn't as if they hadn't kissed before, but when Barnes came to him this time, it didn't feel like half the annoyance it had the other. In fact, it started to seem terribly important. Not quite as important as keeping the Tesseract away from Thor, perhaps, but certainly more important than other, completely unimportant things. Then Barnes's lips were on his, and Loki was responding, and the fact that he was responding instead of leading the kiss into what he wanted it to be probably would have been annoying in and of itself, if it hadn't been for...the kiss. The kiss, and the way Barnes's arm had come to be around Loki's waist...and the way, after a while, they seemed to be tangled together on the floor, rather than floating over themselves as they had been.
"This was certainly...instructive," Loki said, attempting to extricate himself, which turned out not to be that easy with his legs around Barnes' waist and his back pressed against a hard surface (the side of the dresser, he determined a moment later).
"Sure was," Barnes murmured, and kissed him again.
Loki shouldn't have allowed it. There were a thousand reasons why. But, he reasoned, it had been a good long while since he'd done something he shouldn't, rather than just thinking about all the things he'd do once he figured out how to sneak past armed guards without the benefit of his illusions. Besides, Barnes' hand was warm and firm on Loki's hip, and his hair was much better now, and...
***
An hour later, they'd made it to the bed, which was a good thing, since that was around the time Rogers barged in. In retrospect, they really should have expected him; it was fairly late in the afternoon for him to not have shown up yet.
"What the hell?" Rogers said. But he wasn't looking at them. He was looking at the sock drawer, which they'd somehow forgotten to close, and was now glowing blue.
"Oops," Loki said.
"I have no idea how that got there," Barnes said.
And that was not anywhere near the end of that.