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There’s a story about a prince entirely forgotten. Steve remembers it, because his mom’s eyes sparkle through it, and her hands move in the light, the flashlight beam cutting butter through the dark, and he sees the shape of the raven that’s the prince’s only friend and the prince himself, with his wide green eyes and his clever smile, and the tower that the prince hides in, alone, always alone, except for when the raven decides to remember his name.
Steve isn’t ashamed of his imaginary friend when he’s five, because he imagines that everybody has one. But when he’s six, and when he’s eight, and when he’s nine, he talks to Loki less and less, because it’s strange, it isn’t done, it isn’t right, and Loki, with his clever eyes and all that bitter green around his smile, accepts it.
When Steve is ten and his parents are dead, Loki comes back, offers him treasure (lie), offers him happiness (maybe a lie), offers him forgetfulness (he hopes it’s a lie), and all he has to do is take his hand. He doesn’t, but he does hang onto Loki like a lifeline, all night, crammed onto his thin cot of a bed, his skinny arms wrapped around a torso just as small as his own, if more purposefully so, and he lets Loki tell him about his tower. When Loki tells it, it’s darker than his mother’s story. The tower is higher, the townspeople crueler, his father so much colder, and he doesn’t say anything when Steve pulls him tighter, but there’s a hitch in his voice and Steve thinks, maybe, that helps.
When Steve is ten and his parents are dead, he finds Bucky and Bucky finds him, and he isn’t alone anymore.
Loki is.
Steve doesn’t say goodbye when he lets him go.
At night, someone whispers about the wingspan of a raven, the difference between a raven and a crow, the cold air at the top of the tower, the joy that comes from climbing across the stones, the temptation to let go, to see what happens when you crash across the jagged rocks beneath. Steve allows it, even though he closes his eyes tighter. He doesn’t give into Loki’s trickster tongue or his clever hands, the ones that play across Steve’s own, across his hair, trace the bridge of his nose like little planes taking flight. Loki doesn’t sound sad. He never sounds sad. Steve tells himself that Loki isn’t real, but he never says it when Loki’s around to hear it.
Loki grows up faster than Steve does and, sometimes, Steve doesn’t think it’s fair. It’s not fair that he’s the real one, red blooded and alive, but he’s also the one who dances around death, coughs when he wakes up and coughs harder when he goes to sleep, bleeds, sometimes, when he least expects to, and Loki. Loki grows tall and gangly, still thin, but lithe about it, built narrowly strong, flexible, able.
“You’re not even real,” Steve tests out, one evening, when they’re stretched out across the roof and the sun is setting. The red light makes Loki look like he’s glowing, and that makes Steve feel that much more right. “You can’t be. You’re imaginary.”
Loki only smiles, sharp and insincere, and Steve hates that about him. Always has. “Am I? And who’s imagined me?”
“I did,” Steve says, “I imagined you.”
“Because you were lonely,” Loki muses. “Perhaps I was lonely, too. Perhaps we imagined each other.”
“No.” He doesn’t get to do that. This was Steve’s game, Steve’s mind. It was never real.
“Perhaps I didn’t say anything because I was trying to be polite. I would hate to trod upon your sense of self,” Loki says, but it’s taunting, now, he’s putting on voices, standing up on the edge of the roof and waving his arms like an actor, and Steve would laugh, usually, he would, but…
“You can’t have imagined me,” he says, getting to his feet. He wobbles. Loki is strong and tall and sure of himself, and Steve wobbles. Loki is agile, and Steve is clumsy and unable and he’ll probably fall of the roof to his death, if he keeps this up, and then who’s imagined whom? “Why would you imagine someone like me?”
“To make myself feel better?” Loki offers softly, and Steve doesn’t think he means it to be cruel, because he’s heard Loki cruel, heard him double-edged, so he tries to swallow back the hurt, tries to keep it from making his throat too tight to breathe through.
“I imagined you because my mother told me stories, about a forgotten prince,” Steve says, looking away, looking back at the sun, letting it burn into the back of his eyes, scarlet and bleeding orange. “And I didn’t want you to be forgotten.”
He looks over at Loki when he knows his eyes are dry. Loki’s eyes are wide and startled, and he’s breathing quickly, but Steve’s not going to apologize for the truth, because the truth is important. His mother taught him that much. “Steve—”
“Steve?” It’s Bucky, breathless, an inch away from laughing at something, a joke, maybe, that Steve will laugh about with him, or a game, or a piece of news or, better, gossip, and so Steve heads for the window, heads back inside.
It’s a gust of wind that catches him, right before he makes it to the window. He’s too small, he’s always been too small, but it’s never been as much of a problem as it is now, when he’s losing his balance, thinking about heaven and thinking about stars and thinking about his parents and thinking that, well, if he’s going to die, at least it’s quick, and then— nothing.
Nothing, because Loki has his hands around Steve’s collar and is pulling him back until they’re toppling, until Steve’s on top of him, breathing fast, uncomprehending, because he’s not real, Steve should have died, Steve was going to die—
Loki looks surprised for all of three seconds more, and then he’s grinning impishly and pressing a kiss to the side of Steve’s mouth and disappearing, leaving Steve belly-down on the roof tiles, red faced and wet cheeked, because he’d almost died, and Loki is imaginary and sense is a thing that is entrenched in reality— it’s what he needs, the only thing he has, all he’s ever wanted— and he’s losing that, slowly. Worse still, he doesn’t mind, because Loki.
Bucky slams open the window nearest him and whoops. “Come on, Steve-o! We’ve got a city to see!”
Steve wipes his face against his sleeve and goes inside smiling. Bucky’s too excited to notice how red his eyes are or the way his hands shake. That’s good. Stickball is easy. Stickball makes sense. Steve sits the game out and nobody complains, tucks his knees up to his chin and tries to imagine a solution. It’s not the first time his imagination’s betrayed him.
When Steve is twenty years old, the world starts to whisper war. Bucky and Steve are in an art class because Steve feels comfortable like this, a stick of charcoal in his hand, everything dissolving into light and line and capturable, for a moment. The whole wide world, and he can hold it on his pad, under his fingers, map it out in pigment and hue, shape it the way it should be, the way it is, the way he wants it.
The first class, they’re meant to draw old fruit in a chipped red bowl. Steve finishes that in the first twenty minutes.
The next forty, it’s a tower, someone slight and dark-haired lounging in the highest window, cheeks gaunt and eyes hollow, and there’s a sadness he feels from it that makes him put down his stick before he’s finished.
It’s been six months since he’s seen Loki, even longer since it’s been more than just a glance in acknowledgment.
When Bucky leans over to see what Steve’s done, he whistles, deep and quiet. “Well that’s a sight. Your princess looks a little-“
“Prince,” Steve correctly quietly. “He’s a prince.”
“Oh. Er. That’s nice. Say, does this look like a tomato to you? I think I’ve done something funny.”
Steve smiles. “Unless Ms. Flotsam’s switched out a tomato for that apple, you’ve definitely done something funny.”
The world hums about a war, and Steve goes up to his room at night, lights a candle, and tries to remember what Loki looks like, tries to call him back.
“Lonely again?” Taunting, low and dark with a threat of violence. Steve can see him in the corner of the room, but Loki doesn’t move to unfold himself from the floor. There’s knife in his hand, a bruise on his cheek, and his hair’s grown longer, long enough that it curls up where it hits his collar, and Steve wants to touch it, to see if its real.
“I drew something for you,” Steve says, instead of walking closer. “I just… see?” He pulls out the charcoal sketch, of the dead, rocky land and the dark spike of the tower. The face in the window, turned up towards the sky.
Loki’s eyes are almost as empty as they are in the picture, harsh and cool, but there’s a flicker, there, when he sees the picture, so Steve walks over to him, drops to his knees and swipes his thumb across Loki’s cheek.
Loki peers up at him, bemused.
“Charcoal.” Steve grins. “Huh. Seems like you’ve got a little something, right—”
Loki laughs like it’s a surprise that his body can make that sound. He blinks too fast when Steve lights another candle. Loki's limbs are long and tucked up close to his middle, and Steve wonders what he's protecting himself from, but Loki never says. Will never say. Instead, Loki kisses him.
When Steve is twenty years old, he learns just how clever Loki’s hands are and just how wicked his mouth is, and he thinks, if this is imaginary, heaven must be, too, because he’s never felt something quite as strong and quite as fierce as Loki moving over him, sinewy and firm boned, touching him like he matters, like anything matters, and when the candles go out and Steve whispers his revelation into Loki’s shoulder, Loki sings out like a bird on fire.
Steve wakes up slow and happy, Loki is nowhere to be found, and Bucky sees the round red bruise at the side of Steve’s jaw and crows his pride.
Steve starts to believe in magic a little more and Loki a little less, because one week later, there’s a knife in his wall and a picture hanging from it, and he pulls both down like he already knows that they’re the goodbye he never offered.
Loki’s rubbed his face out of the drawing. It doesn’t look like the prince is searching for the sun, anymore. It looks like he’s turned away from the world.
Steve stops thinking about it.
The knife, a stylized, bejeweled dagger, is sold at a pawn shop when Steve is twenty-two and most of the world is trying to tear apart the rest of it, for victory and glory and cruelty. He gets enough money for it to cover rent for a month and have a little left over.
He supposes he should thank Loki for that much.
He doesn’t.
And then Steve is twenty-three, and he’s ready to go to war, to battle, to take up the mantle of the father he never got to meet, so Bucky takes him boxing, tries to get him ready, tries to add muscle to a frame that seems allergic to it, and Steve tries not to be bitter when Bucky sweats and looksstrong doing it, when he hits the bag, hits the other guys, hard enough that they go reeling, and, when he gets hit, the way he stands back up, bruised and ready for another bout. Steve tries to be anything but bitter when they tell him to wait, that he’ll get it, look at him with pity and derision and amusement when he tries, when he runs, when he gets winded, when he coughs hard enough that he tastes blood at the edge of his teeth and has to go outside, because he’s not going to let any of them see him die, if this is it.
He’s never been afraid of dying, and that’s never going to change, so when they tell him that hopping into the ring the way he is is suicide, he grins and pulls the same old bashful routine that they’re expecting and lets them beat him down, again and again and again and again and again.
He survives.
He’s twenty-three when he meets Dr. Erskine and everything changes. Everything changes because Erskine is kind and wise and knowing, and he doesn’t look at Steve with pity, he looks at him with consideration and a smile, and he makes Steve feel comfortable in a way he’s not sure he ever has, not really. After Erskine comes Peggy, and she doesn’t mock him, either, and she smells like vanilla and cinnamon and she has beautiful hair, and he thinks he might be in love with her as soon as he sees her, and that’s never happened before but he’s always been open to firsts.
They’re impressed when he throws himself over a grenade. They forget, for a moment, there, that that’s all he’s good for— protecting whoever can really do what needs doing. He’s extra. He’s extra, but he’ll do what he has to. He might, he thinks, sometimes, in the barracks, with the lights down, be a little bit desperate, but he’s always been a centimeter away from death, and he thinks that the Grim Reaper will have a handshake and a nod for him at the end of things, because he's got to know Steve’s done so much goddamned surviving already.
One day he’s reborn. Everything happens too fast and too slowly and, yeah, when he’s travelling around like a circus freak, a shield over his arm in a mockery of the only heroic gesture he’s been able to follow through with, he’s lonely enough, lonely enough to think about the— about Loki— but he thinks about Peggy instead, about her hair and her lips and her eyes and the warmth in her smile and it makes it a little bit easier, because he knows who and what Peggy is and he knows she deserves it.
It’s after Steve has played the hero, after he’s shown the other soldiers that, yes, he deserves this, he deserves to be among them, after he’s someone new, mind and body at peace, after that, that Loki appears, in the corner of an empty barracks, dressed in green and black leather with a circlet of gold laid over his hair. Steve looks around himself, for confirmation, maybe, for someone else to shoot him for trespassing, accuse him of being a spy. For a moment, Steve lets that fantasy play out, imagines that he wouldn’t stop them from taking Loki wherever they wanted to, from accusing him of treason, from…
But Loki is looking at him cautiously, his mouth half-lifted, ready to smile if the occasion calls, ready to shout if it doesn’t, and Steve’s never been good at holding onto strife, so he gives up, sits down on the side of his bunk and goes back to lacing up his boots, because if Loki thinks he’s going to say anything, he’s a damned fool.
“Soldier now,” Loki says.
“You look different,” he says a little bit later.
“Not bad. Simply different,” he says, a little bit after that.
Steve has untied and retied the laces of the same boot three times, thoroughly.
“Please say something,” Loki breathes, and Steve laughs down at the ground, because saying please can’t be something that the forgotten prince is used to.
“Why?” is what Steve goes for, and he keeps any and all inflection out of his voice. He pulls on his Captain voice, because he’s Captain America, Captain Rogers. He’s important. Loki will realize that. He puts his head up, but Loki’s closer than he thought he was, and he has to lean back, a little, to look him in the eye. He’s gotten taller.
“I didn’t know if—” Loki starts. “I… It wasn’t real,” he finishes weakly, and Steve snorts.
“I told you that,” Steve tells him, “when we were kids. I told you—”
“You got it backwards,” Loki says fervently. “I dreamed you up. I was lonely, and I had magic, and I was a child, and they all hated me, feared me, so I dreamed up someone who couldn’t, someone who would love magic on principle because only magic could’ve made his life any different—” Loki stops himself with a gasp of air, and Steve stares up at him, unblinking, because it’s never made sense.
“Look at yourself, Loki,” he says slowly. He holds up a hand when Loki’s mouth opens, wet and desperate. “No. Who would forget someone like you? My mother told me about you, and I dreamed you up, because I wasn’t just lonely, I was alone. It was me, and it was her, and she got sick soon, and then I was entirely by myself. So I thought you into existence, something beautiful because of how dark everything else was—”
“Beautiful.” Loki spits out the word like it’s toxic. “I’m a pariah, Steve. Do you know what that means?”
“I know what that feels like,” Steve answers, and the look he shoots Loki dares him to answer back. “But I stopped questioning this a long time ago.” He can have a dance with Peggy, beautiful, kind, headstrong Peggy who shoots straight and is the truest thing Steve has ever known. He can fight alongside Bucky, Bucky who’s saved him, time and again, Bucky who he’s known since his life meant anything. He can have glory, he can have good, he can have a triumph over a darkness that needs to be put down. “I stopped questioning this when it stopped making sense. And I stopped trying to think about you.” He only stumbles over the words a little bit. The flush working its way up his neck is a tell, but it’s one he hopes that Loki will dismiss.
He sees Loki swallow. “Perhaps we dreamt up each other. Two lost, lonely souls, reaching across the cosmos.”
“That wouldn’t change anything,” Steve says, as coldly as he can manage.
He’s done nothing to warrant Loki dropping to his knees between Steve’s own, using Steve’s thighs as leverage to mount up and kiss him, light and pleading. He’s done nothing to warrant Loki’s tongue brushing across the seam of his lips, cool and persistant. He’s done nothing to make it go further, except for placing his hand at the small of Loki’s back and pulling him closer, kissing him deeper when he lets out a sound, a gasp of relief, of regret, of homecoming, because they fit, they’ve always fit.
Steve hears the first hoot and holler of the approaching men. He pushes Loki away by his hips, wrapping one hand around a sheath that makes him think of a pawned away dagger, a gift from someone crueler than Steve sometimes remembers.
Loki’s mouth is red and messy and swollen, and his hair is falling across wide blown eyes, and he looks at Steve, for a moment, like he’s everything he’s wanted and everything he can’t have, and Steve understands that, feels it, but he pushes Loki away all the same, because they have a mission tomorrow, someone to stop, and he doesn’t need Loki here when the guys get back, doesn’t need one more stick to throw in the wheels, so he nods his head at him and tries to smile goodbye.
Loki swallows and nods back at him, hesitant and delicate, and god, Steve wants him, wants whatever he is, whatever he’s created or Loki’s created or something, but he has to watch him screw up his eyes and fade out of sight instead.
It isn’t quite twenty-four hours before Steve is aiming for the ocean, his heart in his throat and his lungs somewhere around his ankles. He can’t quite get his head around how quickly the water is rushing towards him, how hard the oxygen is trying to stay away from his body, so he promises Peggy his first dance, promises her, in his head, that in the next life, they’d have something, and he disconnects, because he can’t. He just… it’s too much. The water is coming. It’s going to be cold. He’s going to die.
“Steve.”
No.
“Steve, look at me.”
He does, because he’s weak, and he’s dying, and equipment is flying every which way, and he narrowly avoids getting hit in the head by an empty gun, and Loki’s there, in the corner, the way he always is, standing there, lost and confused and helpless and Steve wants to scream.
“Go. You have to go, now.”
“Maybe I can—”
“You can’t—”
“I’ve saved you once, I can do it again—”
Steve kisses him before he can say anything else, and then he shoves him away, far away, tips his missing helmet in his direction, says, “Good-” and the hull breaks across the water.
When Steve is twenty-four years old, he’s reborn again, this time into a world with more lights, less clothing, and more noise than the one he left behind, and he’s not sure what to think about the world because he’s too busy thinking about everything he’s lost.
He tries to call for Loki, that first day, after everything’s done. He tries. And tries. For an hour, he says his name, tells him he misses him, tells him everything he meant to say but never got a chance to.
He doesn’t get an answer.
A lot happens in seventy years.
Howard Stark had a kid, all of Steve’s other friends are dead, and the world’s turned crueler, meaner, sleeker and slicker, and Steve’s not sure how to look at people anymore, never mind speak to them, so he writes letters. Letters to Peggy, to Bucky, to Loki, to the Howling Commandos, letters that they’ll never get, but they help. He’s adjusting. He’s learning to bottle, to focus, to take it out on a handful of a sandbags and a couple bottles of Gatorade.
And then he’s conscripted. He’s an Avenger, a defender, a hero, and they say Loki but they also say terrible things about him, and it can’t be his Loki, because he wouldn’t. His wouldn’t.
It can’t be his Loki. It can’t be Loki who carves into a man’s eye for something that will help him take over the world. It can’t be Loki who he fights, shield against magic until he yields. It can’t be Loki who has a brother named Thor, big and blond and well-meaning. It can’t be Loki who kills eighty people in less than a week.
This Loki doesn’t recognize him. This Loki looks at him and laughs at him and threatens him and tries to kill him, but he doesn’t recognize him. He doesn’t know Steve from Tony. He doesn’t care. And Steve has learned better than to expect anything from this new world, so he turns himself off.
The night after Tony flies into the greater universe with a nuclear warhead and falls back out of the sky, Steve takes the letters he wrote to Loki and burns them, one by one.
His hair got long. Seventy years will do that to you, Steve imagines. If you’re anyone but Steve.
When he’s ninety-four years old, Steve strips off his clothes and tosses them in a bin, because he smells like smoke and almost a hundred years of bad luck, and he wonders if that’s some kind of record, because he deserves a medal, for that. For living through the galaxy doing its best to destroy him, night after day after night after decade.
He’s ninety-four hears old, and he doesn’t expect the hand at his shoulder, and he doesn’t expect to recognize the touch, but it won’t take much to take care of him if he has to, so he lets his posture relax, steps away from him, and turns to face him.
Loki stands in the middle of his room, unshackled and filthy, the cuts on his face far from healed. He runs his tongue across chapped lips, and Steve keeps himself stony faced and solemn, in the hopes that Loki will get to his point quickly and get out.
He should call the other Avengers. He should call Thor. Loki shouldn’t be free. Loki, in this game of gods and heroes, is the villain. A villain and a god and evil to the marrow.
Steve wonders how he’s missed that.
“You died,” Loki says. His eyes skitter across the walls, across the floors, landing on the window, the door, the bed, the closet. “I was there, and you died, you… They killed you.”
“Nobody killed me,” Steve tells him. “I killed myself. I would have, if I’d stayed dead. I crashed the ship. I did it to save them. To save—”
“How are you alive?” Loki cuts in, and here, finally, he focuses, his eyes standing out stark and lit against the bruises below them. “How is this possible?”
Steve shrugs. “Super soldier. It has its perks.”
He thinks, right there, that Loki’s going to hit him. He comes close, grabs Steve by the neck and yanks him in close, but Steve has spent twenty years unafraid of Loki, and it’s a difficult instinct to generate now.
Loki bares his teeth just short of Steve’s neck, and Steve wonder’s if he’ll die for real, now. Wonders what it will feel like.
“I went mad. I thought you’d died. I—”
“You’re selfish,” Steve says softly, pressing down on Loki’s wrist until he lets go, reeling back as if burned. “Selfish and vain. You went mad? I froze. Under the ice. For years, Loki. And when they finally found me— do you know what that was like? Thawing out? All of my senses coming back online and being nothing but pain, the agony of being broken apart again and again, of coming back to life— you don’t get to complain. You were alive.” He hasn’t raised his voice, but Loki is cringing away from him, shifty and uncomfortable in his own skin, and this isn’t his Loki, not really. This Loki is broken, is scarred with something he knows nothing about, is crooked and wrong and wicked, and maybe it’s pity that makes Steve step forward, but he sets a hand against Loki’s shoulder and he’s on him, pushing Steve back until the wall is holding him up, and there are noises coming out of his mouth, low, half-crazed mewls when he strokes a hand down Steve’s chest, down his arms, across his cheeks, through his hair, and Steve lets himself be touched, holds himself still while Loki searches out his answers, and it takes him a moment to realize that it’s words that Loki is whispering to him.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry I couldn’t do anything, I’m sorry I couldn’t give you what you deserved, I’m sorry you’re so good, I’m sorry I’m not, I never was, I never will be, this is all wrong, I know this is, it got ahead of me and it shouldn’t have, I’ve always been clever, I know better, I should, I’m sorry, I lo— I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
It takes another moment for Steve to realize that, maybe, Loki is more than crazy, so carefully sane for so long, and that, maybe, this is mourning. Maybe it is grief, and Steve thinks about how miraculous that is, to witness someone grieving over a living corpse, and he doesn’t mean to, doesn’t want to, doesn’t intend to, but he slides is fingers under Loki’s jaw so that he can see his eyes— searching his own, quick and hesitant and a little less green than they were a thousand years ago— and Steve leans forward to kiss him.
It’s a thank you for mourning me and thank you for caring and thank you for trying, I’m sorry you tried to hard, I’m sorry you loved too hard.
It’s goodbye, so he lets Loki touch him, lets himself touch Loki, ease him back onto the bed like he’s something special, now, like he’s something delicate, and Loki looks so close to breaking and Steve knows, at the core of him, that he’s the one who’s going to break him and that it’s going to be better than good, so he kisses him again. Loki melts below him, the greatest permission he’s ever been given, and Steve peels away layers of leather, peels away layers of mask and deceit until those green eyes are glowing and his smile is wide and haunted and unbelieving and so, so sharp, until Steve kisses the edge away, kisses the blade dull, pushes into him like he never has to leave. Steve rocks up to meet every touch, every sigh, and Loki, Loki, with his body impossible, keens like royalty when his head snaps back, his back arched and his eyes rolling when Steve whispers something that might be love against the inside of his thigh. Steve bites his way up the column of his neck because he can’t make him bleed, he's never been able to try, but he's always wanted to do this, see how close he can push him to the end of the world, and when Loki cries out his name, ragged to the bone, he’s pretty sure he’s made it.
He wakes up alone. He’s expecting it. He’s got a bite mark on his hip that’ll be gone in a week, scratches across his back that’ll be gone in less, and words that he never wanted to hear— never let himself want to hear— ricocheting inside his head.
Steve Rogers is twenty-four and ninety-four and too old for this and too new to this, and he’s wondering about evil and bruises in the pattern of fingerprints and the same shade of green as desperation and carelessness, the same sort of wild abandon that led to the downfall of kingdoms and the chaining of wolves.
But it’s the morning. There’s duty. Duty, propriety, and the process of forgetting, again and again and again and again.
Dismantling one more tall, black tower, brick by brick.