The room was fit for the king he would never be--which was to say it had the same dimensions as any other room on New Asgard meant to sleep two, was within easy walking distance of the council chambers, and came with a view Loki could have done without.
"I don't think I'm ever gonna get used to that," said his companion, who as usual seemed to have no such complaint. "Wow."
"I'd have preferred an uninterrupted view of the stars, myself," Loki said, glancing over at the sphere of blue and green in the top left corner of the window spanning the entire back wall. A year's flight on the Statesman with refueling stops at half a dozen nearly-identical planets along the way, yet there was still a part of him to which round realms would always feel surreal.
But Bucky only grinned at him. "You just don't like being three doors down from Thor."
"Isn't it terrible?"
"You know, I don't think it's gonna bother me," said Bucky, who over the course of a year had become on a friendly basis with seemingly everyone he'd so much as passed in the hallway.
"Wait until he decides he requires your presence when you'd rather otherwise. You'll wish you lived on the other side of the station entirely."
"Pretty sure the intercoms work in all the rooms," Bucky pointed out. Although he hadn't arrived on the station until after it had been built, he somehow always knew more of the small details than Loki, who had been instrumental in its design (and had been unaware of the existence of the intercoms for a good six months, due to the fact that Thor chose to bellow whether technology would carry his voice or not).
"We'll have to muffle ours immediately," said Loki.
"Sure," Bucky said, but less pointedly now. He was already exploring, running his fingers over the Wakandan panel embedded in the wall beside the door, running his eyes over the furniture alongside the opaque walls, then poking his head into the doorways leading, respectively, to the closet and the bathroom. Finally, he turned back around and glanced at Loki, and then at the bed, and then Loki again. His former grin had faded into a more serious visage, though still not entirely without humor. "You know nothing has to happen tonight."
"I seem to know a number of things I was never consulted on," said Loki. "And yes, 'something' does."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"The room is spelled," Loki said. "The magic will not permit us to leave until the marriage has been consummated."
Thor had, as the Princess Shuri would have said, crossed his t's and dotted his i's. He must have been much more concerned than he'd let on. Meanwhile, Loki hadn't known they meant to do it; he hadn't so much as suspected until the door, and thus the noose, had closed behind them.
Loki had spent the last year telling himself he needed an exit strategy; he'd spent the last few months, then weeks, then days, then hours telling himself ever more urgently. But here was the solution, wrapped up like one out of thousands of wedding gifts. There was no circumstance under which Loki's new husband, who had been held under the most primitive glamour for the better part of a century, would be willing to submit to this. It would solve for him a problem he had somehow been unable to solve for himself.
"Huh," said Bucky, appearing neither as relieved nor as distraught as Loki had fleetingly imagined he might. "We can't get out of it?"
"I could break it. If you wish," Loki said.
"Okay. How long would you need?"
Loki considered the door they'd come through, the shimmer upon and around it that only a sorcerer could see. He was tempted to lie, to say it would take a month, a year, a decade. To see what solutions Bucky would come up with, if he thought they were truly trapped here; to learn to what lengths Bucky would go not to fuck him or be fucked by him.
In the next moment, he decided he'd rather not know.
"No more than a few hours," he said. "This is very weak spell-work. They'd have required my assistance to bind us truly as they intended."
"See? Told you nothing had to happen tonight," Bucky said. Did he look relieved as he plopped down onto the bed? Loki couldn't decide.
"I didn't say they'd be easy hours." Now Loki was lying, or at least implying an untruth; the closer he looked at the magic, the more it became apparent that unraveling the spell in question would take no more than five minutes, and that only if he were doing four other, more difficult tasks at the same time.
At that, Bucky's remaining seriousness seemed to fade. He laughed and shook his head, and looked as oddly fond as he usually did when he accused Loki of being 'a contrary bastard.' "If you want something else, you're going to have to do something other than make faces at me about it, though."
"What makes you think I'd want something else?"
"Yeah, it's kind of hard to figure you out when you don't even know for yourself." Then, surprisingly, Bucky changed the subject: "So are all Asgardian marriages like this? With the binding thing, I mean?"
Loki sat down next to him, a preemptive measure so that Bucky could see his face only in profile, and would thus have difficulty making further remarks as to what was or was not upon it. "It's done only for the royal family--more specifically, when a sorcerer of the royal line marries." Never mind that he wasn't actually of the royal line, nor even slightly related to any Asgardian. No one else ever seemed to remember. When they did, they almost seemed not to care. And as far as the Midgardian governments were concerned, he was Thor's brother, and thus Thor's problem to be remedied. "It's to prevent deceit in the form of illusion."
"Okay, but why--"
"When Thor weds, the consummation will be public."
"...We got the better end of that deal," Bucky said with feeling, and now he indeed sounded unequivocally relieved. "I'm not a fan of being watched."
"You wouldn't be," Loki muttered, and somehow the combination of Bucky's certain relief at this moment and his less certain relief from before combined to make Loki take an action he hadn't intended to even a moment before: He took hold of Bucky's chin, and turned his head to kiss him. Lightly, momentarily, an impulse he immediately regretted and made to correct. But before he could pull back, Bucky reached for him, his metal hand cool on Loki's thigh and his flesh hand warm on the back of Loki's neck, fingers weaving through his hair.
The kiss deepened. Loki was for the ten thousandth time in his life swept along the unintended consequences to some impulsive action.
They hadn't kissed before now, nevermind spoken of their upcoming nuptials in any but the most general of terms. When Loki had learned a marriage pact for himself was part of the terms Thor had agreed to for the Asgardians to be permitted to settle here, he had insisted he be allowed to meet his future husband prior to the wedding. What he'd meant was that he needed an hour before the ceremony to determine whether the husband in the question would be better off managed or merely stabbed. What Thor had actually done was invite Bucky onto New Asgard for the traditional year-long courtship. The Midgardian governments had been annoyed to hear of it, but Thor had refused to bend on this issue, in a way so genial yet unmoving that they had been forced to shut up about it.
Meanwhile, Loki himself had been annoyed that he of all people was expected to play the host and show his new fiancé around the station. But it had turned out he'd hardly minded at all. He'd become accustomed to Bucky's company with an ease that seemed even more surreal than round planets. Even a decade ago, a year would have seemed like a laughably short amount of time to get to know a person, nevermind someone he was expected to marry; but the year it had taken to travel from Asgard to Earth might as well have been a century. Between that and the upheaval of the years before, this single year of peace and crises that were few and far between, not to mention rather on the minor side, had felt like an eternity. They might always have known each other, Bucky and he.
Now, they seemed to come together with the same ease that they had in the beginning. Still kissing, they lowered to the bed. Bucky's warm hand slid up from Loki's nape, tangled in his hair. Loki reached under Bucky's shirt, up and over that chiseled abdomen he hadn't chanced to glimpse nearly often enough for his appetites, harder muscles under skin softer than it had been in even his most frantic fantasies. His leg draped over Bucky's hip, and Bucky's flesh hand came to rest on his thigh again, sending sparks of heat to Loki's groin, making him gasp against Bucky's mouth. Lost in the sensations, in his own burning desire, Loki reached for Bucky's hand, pulled it beneath the band of his trousers. Bucky wrapped his fingers around Loki's hard length, and the rush of further heat was enough to make Loki make a sound. He'd never be sure even later what kind of sound it had been. Only that it had been beyond humiliating, and that if Bucky ever so much as mentioned it, there would have to be a reckoning.
"Yeah?" said Bucky, moving his hand slowly up and down, squeezing softly and then a little less softly, an exploration to leave Loki panting in and of itself. "So what's it take, to break that spell?"
"Penetration," Loki said, though it took him a moment to process the question, and a moment more to recall the answer. And at that moment, he'd have taken it, however Bucky desired to give it to him, and worry only afterward about his reaction.
"Oh," Bucky said, his hand faltering inside Loki's trousers. "We should probably. I don't. Uh."
If the sound Loki had made had been humiliating, this hesitation was by far the moreso. "You don't what ?"
Bucky's hand drew away, and even in the midst of the whirlwind, Loki found he missed it. "Um. I just. Don't. Have a lot of experience. With that." On the heels of this stammering nonsense, Bucky took a deep breath, then said, more coherently, "I haven't exactly, you know. Done this before."
The cold rising fury gave way to something else. "When you say you haven't 'done it'--"
"You don't have to say it like that, c'mon--"
"You're telling me you're a virgin."
"Well, yeah," Bucky said. His face was more flushed than it had been before, which was surely his own humiliation, come to overtake the desire that had caused the first flush. He wouldn't meet Loki's eyes. "Look, things were different when I was growing up. Nice girls didn't, you know? And nice boys didn't push."
"And you were a nice boy," said Loki, not as incredulously now as before, because of course Bucky would have been.
Bucky must have heard it as incredulity anyway, or something worse, for he sat up abruptly, turning his back to Loki, and said, in a voice full of something that would have been a great deal easier to decipher had his features remained visible, "Yeah. Back then, I was. Then I got to the army, and it was--I could've? But I didn't want to catch something and have it fall off."
"Was that likely?" Loki asked, having a guess as to what 'it' referred to, and unable to prevent himself being fascinated by whatever piece of Midgardian lore this might indicate.
"I dunno. There were all these posters," Bucky said, and then continued what he'd been saying before, an unusually long string of words about himself: "After the Army, I wasn't in much of a position to think about it, you know? And when I was, I wasn't exactly keen on putting myself out there. And then this whole thing with you happened."
"And with our wedding night so far in the future, you could put off worrying about it," Loki finished. "And now, perhaps, you're the one who'd prefer nothing happen tonight."
It made sense, and put it all into perspective, at least until the moment Bucky looked back at him, still flushed, looking somehow bashful and annoyed in the same moment. "Wouldn't mind if it did. You'd just have to, you know. Be patient."
Patience was not entirely his forte, Loki might have said. But that Bucky was looking at him turned out to be incredibly unfortunate. When he was looking, he tended to catch things Loki would have preferred he hadn't. Things such as the panic that rushed through him for a moment before it was plastered over by the relief: That if Bucky did wish to, then Loki would have to reveal himself tonight, after all; then that if Bucky truly had so little experience, at least he would have nothing by which to gauge Loki's performance.
" No ," Bucky said, "You too? But you're a prince!"
With anyone else, Loki could have affected having no idea what he meant. He could have walked them down the long and winding path of 'misunderstanding' until Bucky convinced himself he couldn't have seen the truth he thought he had, or it hadn't meant what he'd imagined, or that he had fabricated it altogether.
"I'm a prince who's always been in my brother's shadow," he corrected, instead, taking an entirely different misdirection on the theory that at least one part of this fiasco might yet be salvaged. "When would I have had a chance to come out from underneath it? In Asgard, everyone knew us, and would have compared. The same in the other realms, which we nearly always visited together. Then there was the Void, where--"
"Yeah, I saw the plays. All three of them. Four or five times each."
Bucky didn't sound as sympathetic as Loki might have hoped. "Besides which," he said, changing tack, "I've always had my studies to occupy me. One does not become a sorcerer overnight, or without prioritizing it above every other endeavor."
"That's not the real reason, either," Bucky decided, with that surety that was all the more maddening because he was somehow, despite having known Loki for the merest fraction of either of their lives, nearly always right. "You gonna tell me what it is?"
"No," Loki said, and grasped Bucky by the front of his shirt, that silken thing they'd dressed him in for the wedding, and pulled him closer. Bucky couldn't have known that by this Loki actually meant the opposite of his denial; but he met his kiss eagerly, all the same.
It was as if their new knowledge of each other had stoked the fire to even greater heights; or perhaps it was merely that they both knew, now, that it didn't matter if one of them fumbled, for the other would hardly know the difference. Before long, they were back to where they had been before: Bucky's hand inside Loki's trousers, fingers wrapping around his length. The exploration was again glorious; then Bucky began to stroke him, and it was better. It barely seemed to have begun before Loki was coming, spasming in Bucky's hand and clenching around nothing, his hands still clutching at Bucky's shirt, as if otherwise he might turn away again.
At least he'd gotten to experience that much, Loki thought. When Bucky made to draw his hand back out, Loki grabbed his wrist, stilling him. He led Bucky's hand lower, past his spent cock and his balls, until they came to the great secret, the part of Loki that was throbbing almost painfully now that his cock had been sated.
"Oh," Bucky said, digits sliding around the slick wetness there. "Wow."
He didn't look disgusted. Did he look disappointed, instead? Intrigued? Between the fear of a thousand years and the feel of being touched there, it was hard for Loki to decide. "I don't suppose most men on Midgard have cunts."
"Not as far as I know," Bucky said. His fingers kept sliding, with something that might have been intent now, but couldn't, Loki decided, have been a disgust so great as to immediately repel him.
"Neither do they on Asgard," Loki said. He'd worked out young that this was a way he was different. One that might--that would --bring him ridicule, if ever it came to light. There had never been anyone he would have trusted not to spread the story. After all, even Thor had been subject to gossip, even the golden prince not immune to the less-than flattering type (and nevermind from where most of it had originated). Now that he was here, he wasn't entirely certain what had possessed him to proffer this information to Bucky, no matter how much closer they already seemed than any of the 'friends' of Loki's youth--
Then Bucky found what he must have been looking for (though if it had been ineptly, Loki had failed to notice): One of the seeking digits slipped inside. Loki's lust, horrifically paused, came rushing back. He made another sound, but this time he heard it for just what it was. A groan, or more accurately, a moan. This, too, was horrific, but was nothing to the desperation Loki knew lay behind it. He could feel it, rearing up within, unknown until now. He'd never been in such a position, never expected to be; the pleasure he'd long since perfected in giving himself had never seemed to be so good as to be worth making missteps to get from another person. It couldn't be worth it now, no matter how desperately he wanted it. He had to stop this.
Then Bucky's finger moved, stroking him within, sparking a pleasure Loki had never known, nor had any reason to suspect--for though he'd tried this on his own, from time to time, when he was deeply aroused and felt as if he might actually die if he weren't filled, it had never been anything like this. It had been, as best, so briefly gratifying as to be unworth the mess. He'd given it up centuries ago, and spent the intervening masturbation sessions focusing nearly solely on his cock. Now his thighs tightened around Bucky's wrist, the better to keep him from changing his mind.
The pleasure continued to grow--and then the ache came back. The one Loki always ignored these days, returned for its revenge.
"More," Loki said, and Bucky, red-faced and harsh of breath, obliged by slipping in a second finger. But although the burn beat back the ache for a few moments, the desperation soon returned. "You've got a cock, haven't you?" Loki asked, and gave the bulge at the front of Bucky's trousers a good squeeze, feeling himself growing even slicker as he did. "Use it already."
"Okay," Bucky said, still red-faced, still enthralled. (That was what the look was, Loki had decided; not disgust or disappointment or even intrigue, but something much better.) He withdrew his fingers, all the better for them to separate, both of them shedding everything below the waist as quickly as they could. It took Loki moments longer, since he was obliged to remove his trousers completely, where all Bucky had had to do was open his enough to bring out his cock. Loki caught a glimpse of it in the midst of things, bobbing tall and ruddy against Bucky's shirt, and felt for a moment a little faint at the knowledge of where it would be a few moments from now.
When the way between them was cleared, Bucky came to him, and again they kissed. Open-mouthed, wet and warm, and the arousal that had stuttered when Loki saw the size of Bucky's particular appendage came roaring back again. Loki reclined upon the mattress, and drew Bucky down on top of him. Bucky's cock pressed against his thigh, and still their mouths moved against each other. Loki was so hard his cock was leaking; below that, or behind it, he was wet, and swollen, and empty with desire.
"Now," he said into Bucky's ear. "Fuck me now."
Bucky groaned, a response that would have been gratifying on its own, but was elevated by the expression on his face, a sort of beatific lust Loki had imagined in the midst of previous Bucky-themed masturbation sessions, but had never truly believed he might really witness.
Together, they led Bucky's cock to the slick place behind Loki's own cock, to the opening that shouldn't have been. It took several tries to line everything up correctly, but somehow the sensation of Bucky's hardness sliding through Loki's fold did nothing but bring him to new heights of need. Then the tip of Bucky's cock caught him there, not at quite the right angle, and they adjusted him once the more, and then he was pushing in, an unstoppable advance, and Loki barely heard his groan or Bucky's in the face of the knowledge that he was being stretched open, he was being filled, he was being fucked. Bucky was inside of him , a fact that was moreso in each moment, as he pushed in, inch by inexorable inch.
Wait, Loki wanted to say, and didn't. He didn't manage to say anything until Bucky was all the way in, huge and just this side of too much, and all within him. They were flush together, and although there had been more of those sloppy kisses in the first few moments of entry, now Bucky seemed too overcome to do anything but breathe harshly into Loki's ear.
"Wait," Loki said, finally. "Stay like this a moment."
"Okay," Bucky said, and lowered his head so that his forehead rested on Loki's still-clothed shoulder, and there took several long, anchoring breaths.
The burn faded away, much more quickly than Loki would have expected. The ache began to return, though now it wasn't an ache to be filled--he would never, he suspected, be more filled than this--but for something else. He clenched his inner muscles around the length of Bucky's cock, once twice, feeling the reality of it within him, glorying in it and the muffled grunt it drew from Bucky. Then he said, "Fuck me now."
"Okay," Bucky said again, more groan than word, in the end.
He pulled out, just a little and not quite far enough for Loki to miss him, then pressed back in. He did it again, pulling out a little farther this time, and pushing in a slightly sharper motion. After the first few tentative thrusts, he began to fuck into Loki in earnest, each withdrawal followed by an immediate, enthusiastic reentry.
Loki had imagined, occasionally, what it might be like to be fucked. It had always seemed as if it was likely to be more uncomfortable than anything else, but now he found it to be something entirely other than that. There was a certain burn to the thing, yes, that promised soreness later; it was hard to care very much about it when, the harsher the movement of Bucky's hips, the greater the pleasure sparking within him, deeper and better than any ache.
A minute later, Loki became abruptly aware of the absurdity of the thing. As Bucky's cock moved inside him, and Bucky's mouth hung stupidly open above him, he realized there was a sound to this act, a rhythmic wet thwacking, which seemed to grow louder and wetter the longer it went on. He was conscious of the way their bodies smacked together with every thrust of Bucky's. His thighs were gripping Bucky's waist, one of his hands digging into the flesh of Bucky's right arm, the other grasping against the metal of his left. The longer it went on, the hotter Loki felt himself flushing, until he knew he must be as flushed and sweaty as Bucky, without being half so delectable.
Stop, he nearly said, half a dozen times. Wait, he almost demanded, so he could have a moment to compose himself, or even to remove himself from this ridiculous position, spread out and vulnerable beneath a person he'd barely met, wanting it and, worse, liking it to a degree he'd rather have been doing this than literally anything else--
But before he could manage to gasp out either word, or even decide if he wanted to, Bucky's hips began to jerk more erratically. Then, he pushed all the way into Loki and groaned, face contorting into an expression Loki would have assumed to be pain, if it hadn't so clearly been caused by something else.
"Sorry," Bucky said, in the same moment Loki felt the new spreading warmth within, the warmth that had to be Bucky's spend, mixing with Loki's own wetness. "I was trying to hold off until--did you?"
Did I what, Loki nearly said, but realized in time to say, "Not yet."
For a moment, he felt nothing but smugness, that Bucky had wanted him so badly he hadn't been able to keep from spending, no matter what he'd wanted to do. This was replaced by annoyance and the longing of his groin when Bucky pulled out of him entirely.
Still red-faced. but seeming somewhat calmer than he had before, Bucky began to climb down Loki's body as if it were a scaffolding.
"What are you doing?" Loki asked sharply, hit with a sudden wave of mortification: that he was wet and open and dropping with both of them, and now Bucky meant to look between his thighs. Perhaps he'd arrive and find that nothing there was as pleasing as it had been when he, too, was aroused.
"Just because I haven't done anything doesn't mean I don't know anything," said Bucky, so reasonably that it forestalled what Loki had intended to do, which was to slam his legs together, possibly stab him, and most definitely go somewhere, anywhere, else. "I mean, I was in the Army. I heard things."
Before Loki could decipher this, Bucky's hands came to rest on his thighs, spreading him even more open as his face disappeared between Loki's legs.
"I," Loki began, meaning to say that he didn't particularly desire Bucky's mouth on his cock, which, while hard enough, didn't feel particularly in need of attention in the wake of the need of his cunt. "--Oh."
For Bucky's mouth had journeyed elsewhere, and what he found must not have displeased him after all, for he dove into this act with much more confidence than he had the last. Surely he must have had no technique to speak of, but Loki's swollen lips didn't seem to care as Bucky's tongue thrust between them, and nor did his center when Bucky's hands journeyed for themselves those last few inches, and spread him open as Loki had never once imagined being spread. It was abjectly humiliating, beyond every liberty he'd ever allowed another person. Instead of coming out with a dagger, his hands found Bucky's hair instead, gripping it so tightly that he was unlikely to have much of it remaining by the time they were finished.
Arousal sparked, more and more. The after-ache of being fucked must still have been there, but it was buried beneath the avalanche of being touched there in this way, of discovering how much he liked being touched so totally. Loki made another of those sounds, those groans, and another, and then lost track of how many he had made up til now, and whether or not he was making another in the moment. There came another ache, this one from a well-known place, but for a long minute the feel of Bucky's tongue inside of him and the scratch of his beard against Loki's inner thighs made it so Loki could hardly recall what to do about it. Then he did, and managed, somehow, to remove one of his hands from Bucky's hair, and wrap it around his own cock. He'd barely touched himself when he was coming, cock jerking in his hand, inner walls clenching around Bucky's fingers, which had become involved in the process at some point.
Bucky emerged from between Loki's thighs, his face slick with Loki's juices, far more pleased and somehow even redder than it had been up until now. "See? Told you I know something."
There should have been nothing more humiliating than this scene, but while masturbation had often improved Loki's mood, this had left him with a bliss that seemed to require nothing of him but to lie there, enjoying it. His thighs were nearly as open as they had been with Bucky between them, he was still exposed, but for a few moments it seemed not to matter.
Then Bucky straightened up a little more, on his knees before Loki, and that was when it might have begun to matter again, if Bucky had been soft instead of hard.
"I could almost believe you wished to fuck me again," Loki said, feinting, testing, now that every part of the consummation must surely have been counted by the spell.
"Yeah," Bucky said, gaze moving from Loki's groin to his face and back again, as if he was in no way certain which sight he preferred. "I would."
"Then fuck me again," Loki said, and a moment later Bucky was on top of him, kissing him again. He tasted differently than he had before, and in an earlier moment Loki might have recoiled, but instead found himself enjoying the taste of himself on Bucky's lips, tongue, mouth. As they kissed, his cock strained against Loki's thigh, and then they reached for it together, guiding the tip again to Loki's entrance, and then he was pressing in, and though there was an ache of complaint somewhere, ultimately it hardly mattered, anymore than it mattered that the squishy sound of this act was louder than before, that nothing about it could be anything other than absurd, that Loki could see it all even more clearly now that he'd come. What mattered was the eagerness with which Bucky came to him, the eagerness Loki could also see now, and also clearly.
He kissed Bucky through it, until Bucky was far enough in it that he could do nothing but gasp his pleasure. Then, he spoke into Bucky's ear: "Tell me how much you want me."
"--What?" Bucky managed several gasps later, his hips never stumbling in their motion.
"You've fucked me twice in under an hour," Loki said. "You must desire me more greatly than I ever dreamed. I wonder what you'd do to keep me?" Never mind that they were married, never mind that such a marriage could not be broken, nor its members do anything the spell (a far greater, older one than the little charm placed down for the wedding night) interpreted as parting; Loki would hear this, or at least hear himself ask these, the things he must have longed to say to a lover all his life, but never dared to think he might say in reality.
"I," Bucky said, fucking into Loki harder now, breathing so much harsher than it had been even a moment before, so that Loki could almost believe he was so overcome as to barely be able to stutter out any words at all. "I--fuck, I'd do anything."
It was a lie, of course. Even then, in the midst of it, Loki knew that much. There was no one who would do anything. Certainly no one such as Bucky, who seemed so ready to go along, yet had already shown himself to have boundaries he could not be convinced to let go. Still, it was a beautiful lie, one Bucky had gasped out in a moment of pleasure and longing for him. It was very likely the most gratifying sentiment Loki had ever heard. It was enough to make him realize, suddenly, that he was about to come again.
A moment was all he had before he did, explosively, clenching around a part of Bucky much more substantial than a finger or two. He'd barely finished when Bucky, too, came, with a groan that could have as easily been pain as pleasure, or pleasure as pain.
Afterward, they lay next to each other, until the peaceful glow from Loki's completion had faded enough to make him wonder again just what he imagined they were doing here.
"I'm guessing we can leave the room now," Bucky said.
Part of Loki wished to announce that they must commit that glorious, mortifying act at least five more times before the spell would subside. Another part of him wished to take offense that leaving was Bucky's first thought. The part of him that seemed to be in control, however, was that other, more measured part: the one that had seemed to grow stronger as they'd journeyed from Asgard, and stronger yet since he and Bucky had become acquainted. It was the part that had him saying, without too much consideration of the ways it might be used against him, "We could, but why would we wish to?"
Bucky grinned. He looked stupid and smelled atrocious. "Pretty sure no one stuck around for all that. I'm just saying, we could go find something to eat and probably not run into anyone."
"Our wedding is the only interesting thing that's happened in months. The bedding, even moreso," Loki said, neglecting the fact that while Thor might have arranged to spell the room, he himself had spelled the hallway, so that anyone who remained outside their door for longer than it took to walk very swiftly by, would soon discover that their guts had turned to jelly, and their presence was required immediately in the nearest lavatory.
"Oh, yeah?" Bucky grinned again, then winked. It was the same sort of wink he'd tipped Loki a hundred times since they'd met. Somehow, its new, lascivious meaning seemed to diminish its prior friendliness not at all.
"Or so they think," Loki said pointedly, which made Bucky grin all the more. "Of course, they're likely imagining you to have been slightly more experienced."
Bucky laughed, not looking the slightest bit put-off about it. Instead, as he stretched out sleepily next to Loki and pulled the blanket over himself, he looked even more pleased with himself than the first time he'd flown them out on one of the shuttles (Loki had been more or less a stowaway, as the treaty with Midgard required he remain more or less on the station at all times. Bucky had required little convincing to be willing to circumvent the law of the realm which had produced him, which was just one of the things that had made him such a delightful companion).
After a few minutes, Loki thought Bucky must have been asleep. But then, just as he was debating whether he, too, ought to climb beneath the covers, and whether he preferred to remain as naked as Bucky himself when he did, Bucky stirred a little, and said, "We didn't do too bad, did we?"
Loki hadn't planned to let on that he'd liked it, being fucked. He'd had quite a lot of practice in that particular sort of deception, lately. Ever since Asgard had burned, he'd spent a great deal of time concealing how much he enjoyed being depended upon. People were always stopped him in the hallways, asking his opinion on this stupid thing or that one. When Thor ran overnighters in the council chambers, he never began until Loki had arrived, and never allowed Loki to leave while they were still running.
Loki had thought things would change once they were here: that everyone would recall he was second-best, the sun's shadow, a changeling not to be appreciated once the greatest dangers had passed. Instead, his position seemed only to have grown. He would never be king, but he had the king's ear. He would never rule, but he was an influence, not even a hidden one. He should not have been happy, should not have found that the contentedness held past a certain point--and yet he was, and it had, and seemed somehow fiercer and brighter tonight, lying by his husband who was also, somehow, his dear friend.
No one knew of Loki's contentedness, or had until now. He made certain to complain to Thor at every turn, to threaten to leave on some occasions and feint the intention to do so on others. He hid himself from Heimdall's sight regularly, so he wouldn't see and come to a conclusion.
But perhaps it was all right if one person knew. It was likely Bucky suspected it, anyway.
"We didn't," he agreed, and got beneath the covers after all, and put the rest of the night behind him.