mentalmimosa

[mentalmimosa]

a certain sort of surrender

“I’m not your savior, Ben,” she said, very softly.

He lifted his head from her breasts and stared at her, those dark eyes fathoms black. “I know that.”

“Do you?”

His mouth twisted, his expression a sudden cruel cousin of the one he’d just worn in ecstasy. “I’m hardly the one who needs to be rescued, my lady.”

She speared her fingers through the damp snarl of his hair and pulled until he leaned into the tug, shivering, the long column of his throat bared. “Mmm. You’re right.”

“I know.”

Rey tipped her head up and rubbed her mouth against the mark she’d left beneath his jaw; she marveled at the heat there, the raised bruise born of her excitement and his blood. “Tch,” she murmured. “No. What I mean is that no matter what you’ve done, darling, you’ve no need of a savior. There’s nothing about you that’s not already been redeemed.”

He made a low, aching sound and she felt his member jerk, the part of him that he’d let her trace with her fingers and her fist until her curiosity was sated, until she could not help but see the tension in each line of his body as he struggled to lie still and let her have her fill--until the small cabin sang with it, how much he wanted her, and oh, what power there was in that.

“Please,” he’d breathed, his big, beautiful body trembling, his back arched, his cock like warm steel in between her palms. “Rey, my god, woman. Don’t make me spill like this. Let me inside you.”

“Yes,” she’d sighed as he’d pushed up and turned them over, crushed her gloriously into the bed. “Oh, Dia, yes.”

Now, in the soft spell that came after, his features had grown melancholy and despite their closeness, the singe of his skin against hers, she’d felt him begin to retreat from her, from this moment, and flee back towards his own mental fortress again, and it seemed to her that the act of love was the only thing that might prevent him from hiding his face again as he had for so long and by gods, after the unexpected pleasures of tonight, she did not want that.

When she had reached for him in the firelight, emboldened by wine and long-mulled desire, she’d expected him to take her, to order and demand as he did during the day or on their long, nightly rides when his temper was all too ready to flash.

But he hadn’t.

Instead, as soon as her hands had folded around his face, he’d becoming living clay, fevered and eager to mold himself to her touch and it had shocked her, how greedy his acquiescence made her, how his groans made her bloom between her thighs--but then, there was so much about him that confounded her and had from the moment they’d met.

To be drawn aside by a highwayman on the lonely roads outside of Kent on a warm, summer evening when the sun had barely set was shocking enough, but the way he had looked at her tear-seared face and her shaking hands and understood at once that it wasn’t he who’d made her weep; the storm she’d seen on his face, plain as day, as the moon caught the glint of the jewels around her neck; the way he’d tucked his pistol in his belt and taken a step back from the carriage and said: “My lady, forgive me. You’re in need of assistance, it appears.”

It was perhaps a sign of how dreadful the day had been that instead of slapping the horses or jumping from the trap and running away, she’d chosen to be honest with him. “Yes,” she’d said, rather hoarsely. “How’d you guess?”

He hadn’t sneered at her when she’d told him why she was alone and that she was lost or when the words poured out of her about Armitage Hux, Esquire, God damn his soul, and of her now shattered engagement, and even when she spoke of the shame of it all, being cast aside so publically and having no one--not a single, solitary person, many of whom she’d counted as friends--speak up for her, stand up for her; of the awful, crushing silence that had reigned in its aftermath, he had not flinched. Indeed, he had listened in silence out there on the road, his black mask and the shadows conspiring to shield his expression. But when she was done, when the words stopped and the tears came again, he’d moved close and pressed a white handkerchief into her hand.

“They weren’t your friends,” he’d said simply. “It’s good that you understand that now. He has the money, my lady; they’ll always be his, even if you had married him. Such is the way of the craven.”

“I may have aspired to be so until this evening, sir, but I am no lady.”

His mouth had curved a little, the first hint she’d seen that he could smile. “Perhaps we have that in common. Surely it’s clear I’m not a gentleman.”

“Aren’t you?” She couldn’t help but smile back. “You’re aiding a woman in distress.”

“Am I? How do you know this show of kindness isn’t all a ruse of some sort? You don’t. I could have designs upon your trap or your jewels or even, dare I say, upon your fine person. I could have a dozen ways in mind at this very moment as to how I might overpower you and take possession of each.”

His voice had been lighthearted; his eyes had not. Something within her had shivered--and yet what she’d felt was not fear.

“Are you a danger to me, then?”

He’d regarded her for a moment, his eyes sweeping from her face to her emerald necklace to her muddy dancing slippers and back.

“I think,” he’d said finally, “that is a question I should be asking you, if only I knew your name.”

She’d folded his handkerchief neatly and held it out in the darkness, a certain sort of surrender. “I’m Rey.”

“Rey.” His gloved fingers brushed hers and lingered there, the white cloth caught between them. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“What shall I call you?”

A chuckle; the scrap of white had disappeared into his pocket. “Haven’t you guessed it by now, my not-lady? I’m the one they call Kylo Ren. Now, shall we get on with the business of the evening?”

Kylo Ren! The man was notorious--violent, greedy, bold, he had held up guests and friends all the best families in the county for more than a year, but there had been no sightings for weeks; Hux and his cronies had believed him fled and gone. Oh, of all the awful luck to be taken in by this man tonight, of all nights! And how cruel of him to play at gentlemanly manners, just when she needed such comfort most. She hated him a little bit, then.

Her eyes had filled with tears again but long practice had kept them out of her voice. “What business is that?”

A true smile then, long and searing and wicked. “Why, kidnapping you, of course.”

#reylo #Early 19th Century #highwayman!au #kidnapping #first time

[mentalmimosa]

a purely professional service

He almost calls it off.

He has the phone in his hand and he’s scrolling through his Recents and he's this close to clicking and then he gets that fluttery feeling in his gut again, the one that’s been chasing him since he first opened up that website, the one that Tony swore was the answer to all his problems--namely, the biggest one: getting the hell out of his own head.

“You’re stuck,” Tony’d said, plain and simple, as he reached for the bottle of wine. “You, my friend, are in a goddamn rut. And not the fun kind.”

“I’m not stuck.” The words had sounded lame even to him, to the passing waiter, probably. “I’m stressed out.”

“Wasn’t that the whole point of you shunning civilization and decent clothes in favor of seven flavors of plaid?"

“Wasn’t what?”

Tony had waved his hands in the air. “You being a walking stress bomb, Steve! Jesus. I thought the cabin-in-the-woods and using pine cones as a pillow was supposed to change all that. And yet”--here he leaned across the garlic bread and his fettuccine, his voice dropping out of shouty--“and yet, here you are with six months of clean air in your lungs, supposedly, and you’re still a fucking Brillo bath bomb of angst. Seriously, man: what gives?”

Steve’d hidden behind his angel hair for a while and Tony had let him, which was in and of itself worrying.

“Look,” Steve said finally, “maybe I’m still carrying some crap around with me--"

A snort. “Maybe. Uh huh.”

“And maybe it hasn’t been as simple as I’d thought it would be, getting out of town and everything. Not as simple as, you know, flipping some mental switch.” He’d looked up, squinted at Tony in the candlelight. It was a relief to say it out loud. “I thought I’d leave town and I’d be able to forget and I wouldn’t feel like this anymore.”

“Like--?”

“Like I’m skydiving without a parachute every damn day, and yeah, there are times out there when it's not so bad, when I’m too busy to focus on anything except the fence I’m building or the tree I’m cutting down, you know.”

“But you thought it’d be like that all the time. That you’d be able to let go of that shit and breathe.”

He’d felt a surge of affection for Tony then; there was a reason they’d stayed friends after they ditched the rings. “Yeah, exactly.”

Tony held his eye for a second and then grinned, the big, wide, I have a cunning plan sort of smile that usually presaged a misdemeanor. “So, I can’t help in re: the whole all the time thing, but I think I know somebody who can add on an hour or two."

“Who?”

“Gimme your phone.”

Which was how the website had made it into his bookmarks, how he’d stayed up in Tony’s guest room half the night scrolling and thinking maybe, just maybe--

And then he’d woken up in the morning to find out his two AM self had been busy and booked an appointment for the next week and well, that’s where he is: back in the city for the second time in five days, standing on the street outside a bland-looking office building on perfectly ordinary block in Brooklyn, fingering the Recents on his phone.

The first session was just a looksee, the website had said, a fact briskly repeated by the woman he’d had to call to confirm. “Chemistry is important in these things,” she’d said in a tea-and-crumpets accent. “Before the work starts, it’s important for everyone to have a chance to sniff each other out, as it were.”

“But there’s no”--he’d winced in the little kitchen in his cabin, leaned hard against the sink for support. “What I mean is, this isn’t an, er--we’re not talking about sex or anything like that. Right?”

She sighed. He’d practically heard her roll her eyes. “Sessions can be sexual in nature for some of our clients, yes, but you’re not renting an escort, Mr. Rogers. Ours is purely a professional service. As you’d know if you’d bothered to read the consent form that you’ve already signed online.”

He’d gone the color of beets then. He'd felt it. “No, of course, of course. Sorry. Just wanted to make sure that all that was clear.”

“Six o’clock in the evening, next Wednesday,” Ms. Carter had said on the other end of the line in a voice that shouted this conversation’s over, weirdo. “Please be on time. You already have our address.”

Inside, the building’s lovely in a Marriott sort of way. The elevator, however, is not.

“Sorry,” the guard at the desk says ruefully, a shrug of his shoulders. “They had to order a part or something. Stairs are just over there.”

Five flights up. Five flights to think and dozens of footsteps. But it’s not the climb that has him winded when he reaches up to knock on Suite 505’s door.

The door buzzes and he walks in and comes to a dead fucking stop because the man who’s waiting for him is one of the prettiest he’s ever seen. Dark hair and long lashes. A soft-looking mouth. Bright blue eyes that find his and stay there. Dear god.

“You’re right on time.” The guy pushes up the cuff of his leather jacket. “A minute early, in fact.” He smiles and hello, Steve’s knees are already Jello even before the guy purrs: “Eager, aren’t you? I like that.”

“Um. I, er.” Shit, he sounds like he’s having a stroke. Kinda feels like it. “I’m Steve.”

Another smile, one with an edge. “I know who you are, Mr. Six O’Clock. C’mon in here with me. Let’s talk.”

#stucky #d/s #sub!Steve #Dom!Bucky #anxiety #past stony

[mentalmimosa]

now is the time for you to be beautiful

There is a ritual each time they wake him. Strong hands draw him from the cold and guide him towards warmth, towards light; they squeeze him when he stumbles--it takes time for all of his body to awaken--and murmur to him in voices that are soft and unfamiliar, though his stirring mind tells him that the words they speak are always the same:

Come, pet. Just a few more steps. Now is the time for you to be beautiful, eh? Come.

He knows the dreams have ended when they press him into the water, when its waves swallow him up to his chin. He is still weak, more like a kitten than the tiger they wish him to be, so it’s easier for him to surrender to the ritual than to fight it, even as some part of him understands that he is a grown man who can wash his own hair and scrub his own body and rub soap over the curves of his face. In an hour, he knows, his eyes closed, his skin stirring at the power of another’s touch, he will be capable of this and more, so much more, and he aches for it by the time they’ve finished with him, by the time they lift him from the water and turn sweet-smelling cream over every inch of his skin.

The ritual allows for this, in time and opportunity: the arousal that sometimes follows the end of his dreams. There is a bed in a locked room; an eager, willing partner. He brings them pleasure. He finds his own. He doesn’t fall back asleep.

Then there are clothes for him to wear and a briefing for him to scan. Where and when, this briefing tells him; who and how. A hand on his shoulder, then, that belongs to a man in a uniform. Is it the same man each time? He’s not sure.

“Come, pet,” the uniformed man says, no gentleness in him. “Just a few more steps. Now is the time for you to be beautiful, eh? Come.”

*****

There are constants in the world that transcend calendars. Zima knows this. They are his stock in trade. The man in the uniform calls them his weapons, but such a description strikes Zima’s ears as crude and inelegant. He’s no soldier in his own mind; he is a creator of love.

Da, there is work to be done after sex and sometimes before it: papers exchanged or photographs taken, the quiet theft of a key. And the love he weaves for an hour or a month is never lasting. That is not the nature of the thing. But what he gives the men and women he lures into bed is beautiful, Zima thinks, while it lasts. The man in the uniform sneers at this notion: “Tch, you do what you were designed to do, comrade shlyukha,” he is fond of saying. This is not part of the ritual. “You bend over when we tell you or you take it out and you fuck. It is nothing more, what you are. Only this.”

After many years, however, Zima has chosen not to take this to heart. There is little room left, anyway, so crowded are its chambers with each person he’s been awakened to love.

And he does love them, even though they try to make him forget them. He may know them an hour; he may know them for months, but he remembers each of their smiles, the way each of their hands felt on his face. He remembers the sounds of their pleasure and how it had felt to come with them, for them; each of these joys, in Zima’s mind, is a different color that is captured in amber, and they sit in a place within him that the machines that preface sleep cannot touch.

The man in the uniform does not know this. Of course he doesn’t. If he did, he would not be so quick to call Zima a whore.

The world changes in between Zima’s dreams, dreams of a city he’s never been to, of streets filled with people that steam after it rains. Of a blond boy with thin arms that feel like steel around his neck whose kisses are fierce and taste of apples and bitter bathtub gin. The world changes, yes, but people hardly do, whether he tugs them out of short skirts or silk trousers or wide-lapelled suits. They fuck his mouth with the same abandon in the days of rationing as they do in the age of plenty and color TVs; their bodies are as tight inside for him, because of him, when the Berlin Wall rises as they are in the year that it falls. And the shiver down his spine when they clutch at his hair and cry out his name--whatever it happens to be, in this time--is just as sweet when phones live on tables as it is when they appear in people’s pockets: lovemaking, it seems, is a constant. Is it any wonder that he cannot forget any of them? The tease of their tits against his chest or their strong thighs spread around his head; the taste of their precum, delicate and salty; the spear of red in their cheeks, after, when some of them know shame.

“Oh,” he’ll say through hooded lashes, then, biting his lip as he was trained to, bidding his own face to fill with heat. “You won’t tell anyone about this, will you? If they knew what I just let you do to me, they might think I was…” Water in his eyes, a tremble. “You know what they’ll think. Please don’t tell.”

Sometimes, this makes them reach for him, soothe him, smooth their hands down his back and whisper soft things that takes their focus from the mistake they’ve just made. Sometimes, his fear excites them and they fuck him again, their own potential ruin forgotten as their cock stiffens or their pussy softens and they take what they need from him.

The man in the uniform finds these moments amusing. He makes a point of telling Zima so.

“They know they’re fucked; that’s why they do it. Deep down, they know you’ve screwed them over, so they figure why not get one last screw out of you?” He will look at Zima then and pretend to wait for an answer. Chuckle when there isn’t one. “Fools, shlyukha. That’s who the Motherland sends you fuck. They deserve what they get, don’t they?”

No, Zima will think, for this is the hardest time for him, when the man in the uniform is at his side again, marching him back towards sleep, when he cannot help but know how are he is again from the warmth he was programmed to crave. They deserve to be loved and I gave that to them. They’ll remember that, even after the bitterness comes, the anger. They will remember my love.

“Tch,” the man in the uniform will say, the sound like a stone. “Come, pet. Just a few more steps. Now is the time for you to dream, eh? Come.”

#winter soldier #honeypot au #eventual stucky

[mentalmimosa]

cuts both ways

There are deer at the window when Will opens his eyes; two of them. Their heads are bent to the grass and all he can see are the curves of their backs; their tails, twitching. It’s raining. But neither of them pays the water any mind.

“You’re awake. Good. We were starting to worry.”

Will can almost feel the deers’ fur in his palms, the damp velvet of it. “Why?”

“Because,” Hannibal says from the other side of the room. “You’ve been asleep for a very long time.”

When he turns over, it’s with the expectation of pain. There isn’t any. He clutches his stomach beneath the covers; is surprised when his hand comes back dry. What he remembers--what does he remember?--is the prick of a knife.

“How long is very long?”

“Nearly a day. Since the night we arrived here; you picked at your supper and then you collapsed. I haven’t had the heart to wake you since. And I haven't allowed your dog to do so, either, much to his chagrin.”

They’d come in darkness, Will remembers, the headlights on the stolen Mazda low, Abigail peering out eagerly from the backseat, Winston snuffling warily beside her.

“Welcome,” Hannibal had said formally at the doorstep, smiling at each of them as he turned the key. “To you both: welcome home.”

When Will blinks, Hannibal is standing beside the bed, sitting on it, and running the tips of his fingers over the scratch of Will’s cheek.

“I was afraid that I’d overwhelmed you,” Hannibal says. “I’m fond of surprises and it was only after that I realized perhaps you do not like them so much.”

“You could have told me sooner. Christ, you should have. I never would’ve”--blood, Will had seen in Hannibal’s eyes, their bodies pressed together and the pressure of a blade at his gut; blood and pain and fury and the acknowledgement of so much regret. “I never would have dragged us so close to the edge.”

There’s a tremor in Hannibal’s touch. “Perhaps not. But perhaps you would not have acted as bravely in that moment had not you not felt the call of the rocks down below.”

“You would have thrown me over. You would’ve killed me.” Will’s gut twists. “And her. I know you. If I hadn’t---you would have burned it all down and made me breathe in the ash.”

“Mmm,” Hannibal says. He’s leaning over Will now, the heat of his body more familiar now, close. “And I would have thought you deserved it. But you claimed your place instead.”

He tugs a hand from beneath the sheets and squeezes Hannibal’s arm. “You hesitated.”

“Did I?”

“Oh, yes.” He stares at the red spread of Hannibal’s mouth, remembers its taste, the startled, heated noise that Hannibal had made in the kitchen, his hand clutched in Will’s hair. The smell of blood in his nose, seeping up from Hannibal’s shirt.  The quiet, final clatter of the knife. “You didn’t want to kill me, Hannibal.”

“No, I didn’t, but I would have found pleasure in doing so. One cut for another, eh?” Hannibal’s hair is in his eyes, tumbling over Will’s forehead. “For my darling, you have wounded me so."

There is no way to change what’s happened or erase what might have, Will knows. There is only the weight of Hannibal’s body on top of his, the way his back arches when Will pulls at his hair.

“Where’s Abigail?”

A sinking kiss at his throat. “In the garden. Or the kitchen. What does it matter?”

“Close the door, then.”

“I can’t bear to let you go.”

“Get up and close the damn door, Hannibal.”

Hannibal kisses him again, drives him deeper into the bed. Whispers: “Why?”

“Because,” Will says, smiling, his lips wet from Hannibal’s tongue. “I want you to fuck me. And I don't want to scare the dog."

When they’re naked, Hannibal buries his face against Will’s stomach and bites a row of kisses there, vicious, groaning, his hands curled like claws around Will’s hips, holding him still, and when he lifts his face, there’s a fever there, a blazing sort of triumph that makes Will’s heart stutter.

“You were going to cut me there.”

“Tch. No. I was going to gut you. There is quite a difference."

“Regardless. You didn’t.”

Hannibal turns his head and nuzzles Will’s cock. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” Hannibal’s tongue finds his slit. “You did the most dangerous thing that you could have in that moment."

"And what was that?" He knows the answer; needs to hear it now. Just once.

Two dark eyes rise to find his. "My dear Will. You showed me your love."

He comes down Hannibal’s throat, wild and fast, like a kid who’s never given it up, but that’s because Hannibal’s fingers are inside him, turning, pushing, stroking, nudging, and then Hannibal’s on his back and Will’s on top of him, taking, getting hard again on the steel shove of Hannibal’s dick, the goddamn stars in those full fathom eyes.

“My darling,” Hannibal snarls, his fingers pressed hard against the bruises, the place where Will had felt his blade brush. “Oh, my darling, never forget this, whatever comes after: you are mine.”

When Will comes again, he digs his nails into the gray tangle of Hannibal’s chest and howls and howls and feels Hannibal hot inside him, beneath him, sighing, that sudden, sweet shot of heat, and when Will can move again, feel his fucking limbs, he’s cupping Hannibal’s face, stroking that trembling jaw with his thumb.

“Cuts both ways,” he says, hoarse. “I’m yours and you’re mine.”

Hannibal’s eyes flutter and his hips jerk again, his hands on Will’s thighs going tight. “Yes,” he murmurs. “Yes, yes. This it is.”

****

When Will opens his eyes again, the deer are long gone and the sky is much darker. He can smell onions and butter drifting in from the kitchen, the low murmur of a girl’s voice, the shuffled gait of a dog. It’s still raining.

Another kitchen, another night filled with rain. It feels like a lifetime ago, Christ, he thinks; it’s only been a few days.

“We came so close to missing this, didn’t we?” He can see it so clearly, as if he’s already lived it: the blood in Hannibal’s eyes that night, translated into Will’s death. And Abigail’s. He shudders. “A foot put wrong by either of us and it all would’ve gone to hell, just like that, wouldn’t it?”

Hannibal hums and curls tighter around him. He feels like a barrier against the might-have been. “Mmmm,” he says in Will’s ear. “How very fortunate, then, that we didn’t.”

When they kiss this time, they meet midstream, equidistant from opposite banks: Hannibal’s hands cupping his face and Will’s wound ivy around Hannibal’s neck.

“Is this all that you had hoped for?”

“Going to bed with you or running away with you?”

Hannibal’s lips twitch. “Yes. Both.”

“I don’t have enough data to answer either question.”

“No?” There’s a butterfly stroke on the inside of Will’s thigh. “Shall we investigate further?”

“Yes,” Will says, a roar of distant thunder, the clatter of pans in the kitchen, the sound of Abigail singing to his dog. “Let’s.”

#hannigram #au post-mizumono #schmoop #first time

[mentalmimosa]

the opposite of answered

“He’s not one of ours.”

“Meaning what?”

Felix chuckled and tugged out another cigarette. “Meaning that he generally hangs out with a different set of shady characters than you and I do, James. He’s one of Nick Fury’s boys.”

The headache that had been crouching behind Bond’s eyes all day sat up and stretched with a roar. “You’re pawning me off on S.H.I.E.L.D, Felix?" he said, incredulous. "What the hell did I ever do to you?”

“I was just as surprised as you are, believe me. It wasn’t my call.”

"Christ."

Felix's eyebrows lifted over the bright tip. “A little birdy told me you’ve worked with Fury before.”

“Once. Just bloody once. That all parties emerged with limbs intact is something of a miracle.”

“Job go bad?”

“From Fury’s perspective, no.”

“And from yours?”

Bond swept back the last of his scotch. “Let’s just say I made it extraordinarily clear to the powers that be back home that they’d be well served never to put me in such a position again.”

Felix signaled for the bartender and pointed at Bond’s empty glass. “Well, my friend, it looks like your prayers have been the opposite of answered.”

“Apparently.”

“But, if it’s any consolation, I know this Rogers guy. He’s good. Ex-military. Enormous but surprisingly stealthy. Not one of the regular S.H.I.E.L.D showboating types. He won’t talk your ear off about aliens he’s killed or sea monsters he’s wrestled or any of that other bullshit."

“Well,” Bond grumbled. The stale smell of last call and the absolute cock-up of it all made his temples throb. "That’s something, at least.”

****

The meet was set for 10 am at the Cloud Gate in Chicago. The sunlight and the happy Sunday crowds--never mind the splashing, shrieking children--did nothing to improve Bond’s mood.

He normally liked working in America; he didn’t get to do it often. The Company lads had never been particularly eager to throw open their turf to anybody, even those who were ostensibly friends, and in the last decade, their tightfistedness had become only more pronounced. He’d spent more time with Leiter in Prague and Sao Paulo than he ever had in the States. Most of his colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic would have considered that a blessing, not a curse.

But there was something about the vastness of the US that appealed to Bond, the sheer volume of it: the great plains and the rivers, the tight clusters of the cities, the sky. No wonder its denizens were such fans of excess; they were surrounded by it, steeped in it, so much so that they were blind to it, too. Their openness fascinated him, their sometimes inexplicable propensity to smile at strangers on the street. Their anger, he’d found, could be just as quickly expressed when given the right impetus. In America, more so in nearly every country in the world, emotion lay so close to the surface that it seemed all you had to do was reach out and touch.

Which was why the Americans were the only ones who could’ve come up with an outfit as ostentatious as S.H.I.E.L.D., an organization founded, so far as Bond was concerned, on a frankly ridiculous set of fears. Pakistani extremists getting hold of a nuke or the Russians reclaiming Alaska or climate change, for fuck’s sake--those were the kinds of things one should be afraid of. Not invasion from the outer regions of the galaxy or murderous robots or gods who walked among men. Humans were perfectly capable of orchestrating their own destruction; they didn’t need any assistance from a deux ex machina or a flying man in a gaudy red suit.

“Look,” Fury had said twenty years before, knee deep in a Bosnian graveyard, “you’re a dinosaur, Bond. Or you will be, soon. Believe me, man, there’s shit so far out there that’s happening all around us that you can’t even fucking fathom. You really think that this is as bad as it gets? A localized genocide? Pfffft. Bond, the crap that my people deal with day to day are on the scale of extinction level events--as in multiple on a weekly basis.”

“Really? Then how come I’ve never heard of any of them?”

“Because you and the fellas at Langley aren’t looking for them. Your eyes are trained on a different place, and that’s ok. That’s good, in my book. Because there’s plenty of shit to be shoveled and no reason we all gotta dig in the same place.”

Bond had swept his hands at the carnage around them: mud and bones, the evidence of pointless suffering. “You were sure there were extraterrestrials involved in this, weren’t you?”

“I was.”

“Well,” Bond had snarled, “there fucking aren’t. Just people, Fury. Just goddamned terrified people who bought some bullshit about ‘ethnic cleansing.’ We’ve seen that movie before, eh?  And look what the sequel has wrought.”

The look in Fury’s eyes had been almost pitying. “You don’t have to believe me, Bond. It’s ok if you don’t. You’re a smart guy, though; I thought you deserved to hear the truth. Whether you believe it or not is entirely up to you.”

Now, parked on a bench at the center of a living city, it was too easy for Bond to imagine the paving stones pulled and the giant video screens lying in ruins. Blood everywhere. The hollow echo of screams. It wouldn’t take aliens to get them there; all it would take was a bomb. A few pounds of explosive, some radiation or smallpox mixed in, and someone like him failing to stop it, to even see it coming, and--

He sat back and pulled at his tea, grimaced. Fuck. It never tasted right in a paper cup.

“The sun’s higher than it usually is, isn’t it?”

A shadow fell across his lap. Bond looked up.

“There’s something about fall that throws the angle off, I’m told.”

“Ah,” the man said. “That’s funny, isn’t it? Since astrologically, it's still summer.”

“Mr. Rogers,” Bond said, the ritual completed.

The man smiled and sat down beside him. “Mr. Bond. Nice to meet you.”

#00Cap #james bond/steve rogers #because why the hell not

[mentalmimosa]

smashed timber and tangled sails

Prompt: Lighthouse

Will’s lighthouse sat at the end of a long, hooked inlet that curled out into the sea. The beaches along this stretch of coast were rocky and unforgiving, unlike their sandier cousins farther south, and even if the nearest house were not five miles away--a distance that felt more like 10 in bad weather--conversing with another person was, for Will, a very rare thing.

This what was he loved most about his lighthouse: the quiet. The distance. The peace.

He was well aware of the irony, of course, that he stood astride a beacon of connection, a harbinger of proximity; a warning, sometimes, or an answer to a prayer: a lonely sigil waving light into the night towards ships that had made hard journeys across unforgiving seas. Stay away , the light said some nights; others: You’re home and you’re safe.

The rooms inside the lighthouse were narrow and chilly and there had been times, when he’d first come to live there, when he’d awakened in the night in a panic certain that he was about to be crushed. But such dreams had eased now, five years hence; it helped, too, that he spent many evenings outside of his tower in a small house just off the beach. It had been used as a supply shed, once, then allowed to go to seed, but one summer Will had reclaimed it; three months of hard work and fevered sweat and the little shed had become more a home. He braved town to order new windows; he’d made putty to seal them and the cracks in the walls with animal bones. And he’d toted some of his treasures down the slick, winding stairs and positioned them on the shelves he’d mounted: books about weather forecasting, some star charts, a small rug that had once been his mother’s. His fishing gear. His favorite knife. His one bottle of wine.

It had not been his intention to do so when he began, but in the end, as fall drew its cloak close, Will found that he spent most of his time in the small house--cooking meals on the beach until he’d finished building a chimney, watching the dogs chase each other through the scrub grass and the sun. He returned to the lighthouse only to complete his daily tasks and, when the moon rose over the water, to lay his head upon his pillow with one ear cocked towards the waves and sleep.

As it grew colder, so too did it grow more difficult to leave the cabin each night and walk the few feet through the wind to the metal door at the foot of his tower. Indeed, as the snows of December descended, Will found himself grumbling along with the dogs as he shooed them from the fire and the time of his departure grew later and later each night.

And then one evening, the inevitable occurred: he grew too cozy in his nest and passed the night in his armchair, his feet stretched out towards the hearth. He awakened in a panic as the first stretch of dawn touched his face and raced towards the beach without his coat, certain he would spot smashed timber and tangled sails, wounded men, even, and bleeding flesh.

But there was nothing. Not a single sign of disaster. The world, it seemed, had gone on about its business unaffected by Will’s shirking of duty. And what had he to show for it, this failure? A racing heart, slowing, slowing, and the sweet ache of a good night’s rest.

One of the dogs bumped against his knee; it was Winston. The dog’s eyes were dark with worry.

“It’s all right,” Will said, stroking Winton’s wind-roughened head and smiling into the slap of cold that rose from the sea. “See? Look, boy. It’s all right. Everything’s fine.”

And so it was, even as he began to spend most nights outside of his tower, the lamp lit at dusk, its eye turned towards the ocean, Will still with one ear cocked towards the sea.

Until one night he was roused by a muffled shout and a fist on his door.

The man who stood beyond it was soaked to the skin. His face was bruised and his fine clothes were torn. There were cuts on his hands and his chin.

“M’aidez!” the man gasped. “Mon bateau. Les rochers…”

“Dear Lord. Come in. Come in!” He dragged the man over the threshold and shut the door against the cold. “You’re frozen.”

The man’s eyes met his, twin embers; in each was caught the firelight. “And you,” he said softly, “are an angel, are you not? I have died in the water on this night and here you are, angel, to keep me from the depths of hell.”

Will flushed. “Nothing so fancy as that. I’m just the lighthouse keeper.”

“Tch. Just nothing.” The man touched his face. “Death reached for me tonight but I find myself in your arms instead. There is something angelic about that, yes? What is your name, angel?”

“Will. Will Graham. You?”

“Je m'appelle Hannibal.”

Will guided him to the fire and propped the man’s shoulders against the mantle. “Hannibal. Like the elephants?”

“Mmm. Indeed.”

The dogs milled about as Will pulled the man’s wet clothes from his body. Everybody where wary, Will noticed, but not nervous. They kept looking to Winston, Winston kept looking at him. So long as I keep calm, Will thought, tugging at the swollen knots in the man’s shoes, they will, too.

“Here,” he said when Hannibal was naked. “Wrap yourself in this. Are you badly hurt?”

There was a garden of bruises on Hannibal’s ribs. It spilled down his right thigh and pooled there like spilled wine.

Hannibal shivered into the blanket. His teeth were chattering. “I fear my ankle is twisted. There may be a few bruised ribs. But nothing is broken, if that’s what you mean.”

“It was. And I’m glad.”

Will guided Hannibal to the cot and helped him lie down. He tugged the quilts up to Hannibal’s chin. “I’ll make coffee.”

“Brandy would be better.”

“I don’t have any.”

Hannibal’s eyes closed. “That’s quite all right.”

“I have wine. Will that do?”

“Fine, ange. Fine.”

When he turned back to the bed, mug in hand, Peach had hopped up and laid herself across Hannibal’s feet.

“Let it be,” Hannibal said before Will could open his mouth. “Better than a hot water bottle, that one.”

He raised his head when Will cupped his neck and took in two big swallows of wine. His eyes stayed closed. His tongue chased over the stretch of his lips. And then, with a sigh and a turn of his face, Hannibal was asleep.

Will had the strangest desire to reach out and touch him, to see his fingers against the bruise on Hannibal’s cheek. There was a warm stir in his belly, as if he’d drunk the wine, and he tipped it back without thinking, drained the last few sips from the mug. Looked down at his sleeping guest.

“Nice to meet you, Hannibal,” he said softly. “I’m very glad you’re not dead.”

#hannigram #19th century AU #lighthouse

[mentalmimosa]

no place in the world left to go

They’re at a flophouse in Rome, a hotel so rundown that no fleas would set down their bags, and Tony’s tired, fuck, is he. The kind of tired that only scotch on the rocks, keep ‘em coming and an icy blonde with a nice rack can fix.

But there’s no blonde here. There’s only Bucky, a roughshod sergeant with dirt from the forests of France under his fingernails, still. They’ve been in Italy almost a week.

Which is why when the sergeant turns from the window and pulls off his shirt, the view is pretty but also rank.

“Need a bath,” Barnes grunts. “I saw taps down the hall.”

Tony waves his hand and doesn’t bother to raise his head from the bed. “Sally forth, then, soldier, and be clean.”

Bucky takes the view with him. But sadly not the smell: sweat and blood and something else, something even more pungent. Tony takes it in, lets it out, sticks it. Ah yes, he thinks, weary. That’s grief.

Steve Rogers, the Allies’ last great hope, had been dead for a fortnight, as the Brits say. 14 days, two weeks--whatever way you slice it, he’s dead and now Hitler’s winning the race. It was a propaganda boon. It still is. Tony’s gut says it might be enough to carry Germany to the finish line. There’s the Manhattan thing back at home, but the boys there have been too goddamn slow, and who’s fault is that, now? Not Tony’s. They’d booted him out of their secret club a few years before.

He isn’t bitter about that anymore. Mostly.

He’d loaned himself out to Churchill’s men and that had been a better fit for a while; they’d seen his value, the British, and given him money to play with and men, so many men eager to do what they could for Old Blighty and for Tony, eventually. They fell easy for him, those Englishmen, happy to spread their cheeks for the cause because they all wanted to be chosen as the world’s first Super Soldier: rich men and poor ones, Scottish and Irish and Welsh, each ready to pay for the privilege if necessary and oh, Tony was damn good at convincing them that it was.

But in the end, it hadn’t been his call after all. No, Winston had phoned his friend Franklin and the president had send his choice across the ocean and delivered him to Tony’s front door.

“Hi,” the kid had said, confident despite the skinny legs and big ears. “I’m Steve Rogers, sir. You must be Mr. Stark.”

“What the fuck,” Tony had said through a head full of hangover. “You’re Steve Rogers?”

That’d only made the guy stand up straighter. “Yep. Mr. Roosevelt sent me, sir. I was told you’d be expecting me.”

“Expecting, yes. You? Pffft.” Tony had turned his back and wandered back into the cool dark of his lab. “Fuck no.”

It had taken a lot of convincing and a flurry of all-caps coded telegraphs, but in the end, Tony had gone with it and strapped the kid into his machine and made--if he did say so himself--a hell of a man with a chip on his shoulder when it came to Tony a fucking mile wide. But Tony liked that about him, liked that he was mouthy when the brass wasn’t around, liked that Steve had a bit of temper that even after the serum a little well-placed whiskey could bring out.

“You,” Steve had hissed in his ear the first time Tony got fucked, bent over a workbench with screwdrivers biting his arms, “you are the bane of my existence, Stark.”

It was hard to sass with that thing in his ass, but he managed. “Then get the hell off me, asshole.”

Steve had laughed then, laughed and pulled Tony closer, squeezed his hips tighter. “No. I like screwing you too much.”

It was fun while it lasted, but then, of course, Steve had a job to do, didn’t he? To go and win a goddamn world war.

“You’ll miss me when I’m gone,” Steve murmured that last night, his mouth pressed to the back of Tony’s neck. “You’re gonna miss me so much.”

They were in Tony’s bed and Steve was fucking him through it and Tony was crazy to come, dying for it, but Steve’s fist around the base of his dick was a bitch .

Which was why he’d lied, whispered “I won’t” even though he knew that shit wouldn’t fly.

Steve nuzzled his throat and Steve slammed into him again and again and Steve didn’t make him take it back, didn’t call him on it, didn’t have to, so bald was the lie. And when Steve had come, he'd bitten the meat of Tony’s shoulder and howled and was still spurting when he'd open his fist and muttered “Come” and Tony'd gone firehose in the sheets and screamed for what felt like a week.

“Yeah,” Steve said when they were face to face again, when he was weaving his fingers through the mess on Tony’s stomach and Tony was panting like he’d just run the three-minute mile. “You will.”

*****

They hadn’t seen each other for years after that, not until 1944 when the Battle of the Bulge went south and with it, everybody knew, the Allies’ advantage. Russia had drained Hitler’s forces but the Bulge fiasco gave the Germans the victory they needed to get the homefront onboard with the war effort again.

Times were bad. Tony’s life, too. He hadn’t been able to get the serum to take in anyone after Steve and the Brits had taken his tech and booted him out. He was one wrong bottle of rum from sleeping on the goddamn street.

But then the telegram had come from a holdout area in France: SR WOUNDED. DOCTORS USELESS. COME. And then a set of coordinates, which he had chosen to ignore, because how the fuck was he going to zip across the channel while dodging Nazi arms? He'd comforted himself with bathtub gin and no ice. It was probably a prank, anyway.

In the morning, though, there’d been a knock--10 minutes worth, actually--delivered by a no-nonsense woman bearing Army boots and flak jacket.

“Put these on,” Captain Carter had said brusquely. “We’re crossing the channel in five hours. Tell me, do you have your own gun?”

“Do I--?” He’d blinked in the dusty sunlight she’d brought into his flat. “No.”

She crossed her arms and pointed at his pants, waited until he’d picked them up. “Well. You do know how to shoot at least, surely.”

“Not really.”

“Christ on a cracker. A word of advice, Mr. Stark: don’t repeat that to anyone. If asked, you’re a crack shot with your daddy’s pistol, which I shall provide, and you shall carry as if you know what the business end is for, hmm?”

It’d taken almost a full day to get from London to the middle of some fairytale forest in France where Steve Rogers, that bastard, was trying his damnedest to die. He was gray when Tony bent over him, gray and without that sharp, fuck you light in his eyes.

“Docs can’t do anything for him,” a dark-haired guy crouched by Steve’s head said. “They got the bullets out ok, but the wounds won’t close, even with real tight stitches.”

“Bucky threatened to nail ‘em shut,” Steve croaked.

“And I would have, too, if somebody hadn’t stolen my hammer.”

“Boys,” Tony’d said, easing back the blood-stained dressings. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Steve thought it might have something to do with the serum,” Captain Carter had said on the way over as the boat skipped silently through the waves. “He’s never been cut so deeply before, so he wasn’t sure if there’d been changes to his blood chemistry that might be interfering with the healing process.”

“Shouldn’t be,” he’d told her, repeated to himself again and again. “Not by design, anyway. But intent only gets you so far, huh?”

Now, staring down at the putrid mess that was Steve Rogers’ chest, all he could think of were the hours he’d spent with his head there after they’d worn each other out, after Steve’s steam had blown off and his own fuzzy, righteous anger at the universe had been temporarily pummeled away. For all the rough of their fucks, what followed was sweeter, more goddamn gentle, than Tony’d ever been with another man. Girls, they liked that sort of thing sometimes, to be coddled and cooed at before you booted them out, but the men in Tony’s life had always been of the fuck-and-run variety, and he’d been just peachy with that.

But Steve was a cuddler, a warm, overheated blanket once his balls were empty that wanted nothing more than for Tony to be tucked up in the lea of his arm, their mouths close. Sometimes, that kind of shit led to more sex, but a lot of times, it didn’t; there was just skin against skin and breath over breath and the soft slide of Tony’s fingers up and down the pretty valleys of Steve’s chest.

None of that was left; it’d all been blown to shit.

“Two bullets,” Barnes told him when they stepped away, leaving Captain Carter and the Commandos behind. “Point blank. Stevie never had a chance.”

“How the fuck did this happen?”

Bucky just blinked at him. “It’s war, Stark. Shit like this happens all the time. He turned his back, he got jumped, and now--”

“Now,” Tony said softly. “He’s dying.”

In the end, he figured it wasn’t the serum that was killing Steve, it was the only thing keeping him from dying, and wasn’t that the cruelest irony of them all, huh? The thing that’d made Steve a weapon in the first place had made him its last victim. It’d have been better if he was just a man, a mortal, whose heart wasn’t fueled to fight, whose body would have reached for peace and just let him die.

“It was a longshot, bringing you out here, Tone.” Steve’s fingers had been stiff and frozen in his. “I’m sorry you risked your life for nothing.”

“Pffft, nothing,” Tony said. He didn’t try to hide that he was crying. They all were. “Got to see your mug again, didn’t I?”

Steve had smiled at him, dry lips stretched. “You’ll miss me when I’m gone, won’t you?”

Tony kissed his forehead. “I have already, asshole. This whole fucking time.”

They’d buried him behind the barn where they’d been hiding. Barnes wouldn’t let them leave a cross, so Dugan and Happy built a bairn.

And then there was nothing left of Steve Rogers, of the Super Soldier Project, and the war was getting closer. Tony could hear the German firing line.

“Well, gentlemen,” Captain Carter had said. “That’s it then, eh? Good luck to you.”

“Yeah,” Falsworth said, repositioning his cap. “Godspeed and all that.”

“Hey,” Barnes had said at Tony’s elbow, his eyes dark and his mouth set. “You’re with me.”

Tony startled. “Why?”

A shrug. “Because. Steve would’ve wanted it that way.”

*****

Two weeks of running later and they're in fascist Italy, of all fucking places. It wasn’t much, but it was damn sure a step up from a country crawling with Nazis. Here, there was only an infestation and these were fat and happy, living it up on Il Duce’s hospitality.

“This is better,” Bucky had muttered as they crept through the night streets. “Believe me.”

“Does that mean you’ll let me sleep? for more than two hours at a stretch?"

Bucky’d chuckled and swept an arm around Tony’s waist, a counterweight to keep him upright. “We find an inn that’ll let us in, Joseph, and sure. Knock yourself out.”

But he isn’t sleeping, is he. He’s lying on a bed for the first time in what feels like a lifetime and he’s not asleep. No, he’s listening to the water run down the hall, the pipes creaking and banging, and imagining what Sergeant Barnes looks like with his clothes all stripped off.

He’s grieving and he’s exhausted and somehow, beyond all that, he can feel himself getting stiff.

He’s feeling too much, that’s all. The world is turning upside down and a man he might have loved, whose life he might have ruined, died right in front of him and there are flames flickering at the foundation of the person he was before and the promise of ashes doesn’t frighten him as much as it should. His body and his brain are just overwhelmed and they’re taking it out on his dick. If he just lies here still for a minute, just lies here and breathes, he won’t think about the fact that Steve’s eyes wouldn’t close or that he was still bleeding even after he stop bleeding or that no one beyond the circle who dug it will ever know the location of his grave. He won’t think about the fact that there’s only one bed in this hotbox, one bed and two bodies and how lovely Sergeant Barnes is, the way his voice sometimes hits the same notes as Steve’s. He won’t think about spreading his fingers over clean skin or about Bucky’s back bowing. He won’t think about how much he needs to be kissed. He won’t--

“Stark.” Bucky’s in the doorway down to his shorts. “Taps are free. You should use them.”

“Yeah?” Tony sits up. Too fast, it turns out. “Do I smell that bad?”

That almost-smile again. “Hell yes.”

He leaves his boots by the bed and strips fast in the bathroom. Bucky’s rinsed out his shirt and pants and hung them crooked on the towel bar. When Tony’s done, shivering in the draining tub, he drapes his over the side. There aren’t any towels. It doesn’t matter. They’re the only ones on the whole top floor.

Which means, he figure as he pads soggy down the hall, that if he can jimmy the lock, there’s no reason for them to share a room. No reason except, when he steps over the door jam, Bucky’s thrown back the sheets and opened the windows and is framed in one by the stars and flickering streetlights.

“Tony,” he says. “You should see this. C’mere.”

Outside, the streets are quiet. A few cars, a couple of horses, but if he looks out beyond, towards the horizon, Rome herself is dressed for high times. Victory. Il Duce can probably smell it. God knows Hitler can. Captain America’s disappeared from the scene and the jackboots are marching, marching, and soon, Britain will be in the Axis’s grip. As for the US, South America, the rest: it’s only a matter of time.

Bucky’s shoulder brushes his. “You think we can still pull this out?”

“No.” Tony tips his body until their skin touches again. “Fuck, no, kid. It’s all over now but the shouting.”

“That’s what I figured. I could see it Captain Carter’s face, you know? She never would have split us up otherwise.”

“You didn’t have to drag me along, you know. I’d, uh--I'd understand if you wanted to go your own way now that we’re out of France.”

Bucky turns his head. “Why would I do that?”

“Come on, Barnes. I have to be slowing you down.”

“You don’t get it, do you?”

“What?”

A hand on his face, worn and gentle. “Steve’s gone. I got no place in the world left to go.”

It’s only when Bucky’s lips meet his that Tony understands, like a kick to the gut: You, he thinks as Bucky’s thumb traces his jaw. You loved him, too.

In bed, Bucky’s slow, the kind of slow that makes Tony want to break apart, the kind that turns his body to sugar melted under the heat of Bucky’s mouth and his hands.

“Wish I could be inside you,” he mumbles as he straddles Tony’s hips and leans down to nuzzle his neck. “Wish I had some slick to get you stretched so I could feel you all around me, huh? I bet you get so tight when you come.”

Bucky's hair isn’t as long as Steve’s was back then. He's a lot skinnier--the war diet; his cock’s fatter and he moans so much sofer when he comes. But in the dark, in the growing chill of the coming dawn, it’s close enough that Tony’s heart blurs and then he opens his eyes and sees Bucky's grin, watches Bucky's eyes flutter when Tony's back arches and he gives it up and up and up and then Bucky's saying his name and kissing his face and it isn't ok that Steve's dead, fuck no, it isn't, but right then, as he kisses Bucky back, for the first time in a long time, it feels ok that he's alive.

“We’ll need to leave in the morning,” Bucky says. He’s strumming the lines of Tony’s ribs. “Not at first light or anything, but one night here is enough.”

Tony kisses the dip in Bucky’s chest. “Where we going? Got some place in mind?”

Dry lips on his cheek, the promise of something--what? “Nah. Some place different, hmm? That’s enough.”

#stony #stucky #winteriron #major character death #wwII AU

[mentalmimosa]

an inconvenient gift (part iv)

Previous installments here: [archiveofourown.org/works/19264735/chapters/45815008]

She shows them photographs, spills them out between the jelly jar and the toast, and it’s fucking eerie how much the images look like they marched straight out of Tony’s memory: those high, dark walls and the dim, weird light and the coldness of the place that had struck him the second that he stepped inside. Never mind the other horrors he’d found there--his parents’ deaths, Steve’s betrayal, a real and vivid desire to strike Steve down and watch him bleed into the concrete. The drive to kill Barnes had been bad enough, but that the same instinct for one horrible set of seconds had extended to Steve is just too goddamn awful to think about, thanks.

Because it’d been the start of a quicksand of anger that hadn’t dried up until he’d torn his heart out and shoved it into Steve’s hands and he remembers the sensation of drowning in that moment, one drawn not just from a shortness of breath but from all the shit he hadn’t let himself feel for years tumbling down on his head and falling at Steve’s feet, gasping, he’d felt like something in him had finally broken and could finally, finally start to fucking heal.

And it had, ok, messily and with a lot of schmoopy talk and angry sex and then they’d gotten stuck in 197-fucking-5 while their reality (probably) ended and was it any wonder seeing those pictures made him feel legitimately sick?

“There were others,” Peggy says, her hand splayed on Tony’s back. “Others that were in cryostorage, ike Barnes. But their chambers had been damaged, somehow; a malfunction, maybe, or simply age. It looked like we were the first ones in the place for quite a while. His was the only tube that wasn’t covered in dust.”

“Did you open it?” Steve sounds strangled.

“No. It opened on its own. Part of a security system, we think.”

“How many people did you lose?”

Her shoulders slump a little. “Enough.”

Steve touches the bruises on her face, gently. “He did this, huh?”

“He did, yes.”

Tony asks what he knows Steve can’t. “Did you kill him?”

“No,” Peggy says, “but perhaps I should have. Then he wouldn’t have gotten to so many of my men, or gotten quite so many strikes at me.”

Steve makes a soft, hurt sound and she turns to him, kisses the inside of his wrist.

“It was my call, darling. I wanted him alive, even before I recognized his face. We’ve no idea if HYDRA has other facilities like that, and the technology on display there--what it must have taken to create even one like him, much less others--it’s essential that we understand it. No matter the personal cost.”

“You can’t contain him,” Tony says. Understatement of the decade. “He’ll bust out of the best prison you’ve got.”

“Tony’s right. He’s more dangerous than anything you’ve ever dealt with, Peg. There’s no way that you’re ready for him.”

She snorts and shuffles the photographs, black and white and color, all pictures of hurt. “Now how,” she says, “in God’s green earth do you know what I’ve dealt with, Steve, hmm? I’ve got 30 years on you, 30 years of the weird and the vile that never made it into any file.” Her voice is steel now, Early Gray. “And while a murderous super soldier with metal appendages who happens to be someone I know would for most people be the strangest thing that’s ever happened to them, for me, it doesn’t even make the top 10. So I don’t care what future you come from, darling; don’t either of you ever fucking presume to tell me how to do my job, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tony says, because he’s pretty sure that’s the right answer.

“Peggy,” Steve says, because god love him, he’s an idiot, “I didn’t mean to--”

Peggy stands up so fast the salt cellar goes tumbling. “Telling you about this was a courtesy. Dare I say a moment of weakness. And now I can see that it was a mistake, one I shan’t make again.”

“I’m glad you told us.” Steve’s face is set, stubborn. “I think we can help.”

She sweeps the photos from the table, clutches them to her breast. “You’ve not heard a word I’ve said, have you, Rogers? Of course you haven’t. Christ!”

“I heard you fine. I just think what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense.”

Oh, Tony knows this dance. He’s jigged it a hundred times. Steve gets his back up and Steve runs his mouth and nobody leaves this pas de deux satisfied. It’s fucking weird to watch it from the outside.

Weirder still because Peggy has enough sense to do what Tony’s never been able to: to turn on her heel in the face of Steve Rogers’ rationally delivered outrage and walk the fuck away.

“What just happened?” Steve says when the front door slams, when they hear her car rev in the driveway. He looks honestly gobsmacked.

“You stuck your foot in a bear trap and then jammed it in your mouth and our Ms. Carter refused to help you pull it out.” Tony reaches for the last of the bacon. “Nice work, sport. Hell of a way to say welcome home.”

“But she doesn’t understand what she’s dealing with, Tony! You know that. I mean, we could barely deal with him 40 years from now.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, crunching, “but see, I may not know Peggy as well as you do, babe, but I do know that she got this far without our help--so why the fuck should she need it now? Mmm, spoiler alert: she doesn’t.”

Steve’s face is the color of raspberry jelly. It’s amazing. He’s never seen Steve this pissed off at somebody’s who’s not him. “Because she’s never dealt with the Winter Soldier before, and he’s--!”

“Steve.” Tony reaches out and pats the man’s hand, balled into a fist in the tablecloth. “Seriously. Let it go.”

Steve goes to work steaming and Tony turns on the radio and pulls out a pad and starts sketching out some home defense options, 1970s-style. You know, just in case.

#stony #steggy #steve/tony/peggy #and a wild bucky appears

[mentalmimosa]

an inconvenient gift (part iii)

Previous installments here: [archiveofourown.org/works/19264735/chapters/45815008]

It happens like this: in time, they triumph. It doesn’t matter how; it doesn’t matter why. But there's some shit to tidy up first.

They pack up Steve’s papers and straighten up the basement.

They buy a bigger bed.

Tony learns things about Steve he’d never had time to notice before: how he likes his toast (OCD perfect golden), how he folds the newspaper into neat quarters as he reads, how softly he sighs when they get up before him and he walks in on them in the kitchen, Peggy’s thighs spread and her dressing gown open and Tony’s mouth on her breasts as she rides him, the chair creaking and both of them moaning and Steve standing in the doorway, watching, rubbing himself through his shorts and when she comes, they do, too--Steve in his hand and Tony tucked up inside her, grunting, the flutter of her cunt almost too much to bear.

“Shame on you,” Peggy says, still moving up and down on his dick and grinning at Steve, reaching for him. “Bad influences, both of you. I’m going to be late for work.”

Steve gets a job at the grocer’s because he needs something to do and wants to feel useful. Tony doesn’t, because fuck that. Instead, he learns how to cook. He gets a library card and Mastering the Art of French Cooking and highly approves of the notion that a glass of wine is central to one’s success. Sometimes, Steve comes home for lunch and Tony’s already chopping shit for supper, covering the counter with neat bites of onions and carrots and celery.

“Oh, no,” Steve says, chuckling, “no way, babe. I’m not kissing you until you put down the knife.”

There are nights when Peggy gets home at midnight. Sometimes, she doesn’t come home at all. Sometimes, she drags them to bed the moment she walks in the door and that means she’ll be gone tomorrow on some mission or other, running around the sketchiest parts of the planet, gun drawn. On nights like that, supper goes stone cold because she wants to have both of them inside her, one after the other, wants to be so full that she’s dripping and they have to clean her up, have to, trading kisses as they lap at her cunt, and on nights like that, they cling to her, press her between them and reassure her that when she comes back, they’ll be there.

When she’s gone, Steve gets drawn up and worried, the first signs of wrinkles around the edge of his eyes. When she’s gone, Tony’s gut gets in a twist and he drinks more than he should, sometimes. When she’s gone, they make out on the couch until Tony’s hard in Steve’s fist and then they make love, stupid slowly, spread out on Peggy’s part of the bed, the smell of her perfume clinging to their skin.

“We gotta change the sheets,” Steve mumbles against Tony’s neck, after. “You spunked the hell out of these.”

“You say that like I didn’t have help, Peaches. You were pretty critical to said spunking. Dare I say you were the inciting incident.”

“Mmmm. Still. Clean sheets tomorrow. Don’t let me forget.” A sigh, a warm hand against his heart. “She deserves things to be nice when she gets back.”

He draws his fingers through Steve’s hair. Thinks about saying she might not be back tomorrow, though. Understands that Steve’ll just hear she might not be back.

“You’re right,” Tony says instead, softly. “She so does. And things'll be perfect when she gets back, yeah?”

It’s two more days before her key turns in the lock. It’s 10 o’clock in the morning and she has a black eye and Tony’s the only one home.

“Peggy, jesus! What the hell happened? Are you ok?”

She winces when he hugs her but doesn’t pull away. Hangs on tight.

“A cracked rib and some bruises,” she says. “They look a little nasty, but I’m all right. Mostly. I--”

She tips her head back and he can see the ache in her eyes, the pain, the kind that doesn’t come from the body. She’s seen some shit, some real fucking shit these last few days, he thinks.

“Tony?”

“Yes, honey?”

Peggy’s lids fold and her mouth opens beneath his. “Kiss me,” she says, the words thick. “God help me. Right now, I can’t talk.”

When he opens her blouse in the bedroom, the soft skin of her chest and belly is a garden of bruises, violent colors where there should be only cream. Her ribs are taped and she’s already wet for him, he can smell it. She pulls his hands to her breasts.

When they kiss, it’s with a kind of desperation he’s never felt in her before, and it does things to him, feeling her nails digging into his spine, the greedy arch of her hips, the unmistakable heat of her pussy behind too many fucking layers of cloth, and when he opens her up, he sits down on the edge of the bed and tugs her towards him and pushes his face between her thighs.

“Gently,” she whispers. There’s a hand in his hair, guiding. “Lick me gently, darling, come on. Use that sweet tongue of yours and get me there.”

He cups her ass and does as she asks, keeping each stroke of his tongue lighter, light. It’s not what he wants; he wants to devour her. He wants his beard to drip with her excitement and then plunge into her until she feels so good that she can’t remember that someone hurt her, that someone treated her beautiful body this way, that someone took the woman he loves, that Steve does, and brought her pain.

She claws at his shoulders, his old workaday plaid. “Good boy. Good, Tony, god, yes. Yes, just like that.”

He knows she’s close when she whimpers and starts working her hips, shoving her cunt at his face, and that’s when he breaks the rules and sucks on her hard, the tip of his tongue working against her clit, furious, the way Steve does, the way she fucking likes it, and that whimper rolls up to a cry that shatters the mid-morning calm and her labia trembles when she comes, her folds shaking against his face and he sucks her again, groans, squirms on the bed like a teenager when she throws her head back and comes again, still, waves of pleasure that make his dick ache.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says when he’s braced over her, his flushed dick on the edge of Valhalla.

“Good.” Her hand in his hair again, stroking. “I won’t let you, I promise. I won’t.”

*****

She’s still asleep when Steve gets home. Tony’s staring down a glass of Merlot.

“Something happened,” Tony says quietly as they stand in the doorway, watching her shoulders rise and fall. “Something bad, Steve, I don’t know. She wasn’t ready to tell me.”

Steve winds an arm around his waist, bless him, and takes on some of the weight. “She will when wants to, I guess. As is her way in all things.”

He says it very Steve-like, very square-jawed no nonsense, but Tony’s been around long enough to hear through that shit. “Can I say something rude and semi-patronizing?”

A snort. “Go ahead.”

“I hate that she does this. I fucking hate seeing her hurt.”

“Well,” Steve says, his mouth against Tony’s hair, “if it helps, imagine how bad the other guy looks. You’ve never seen her in a fight, Tone. If this guy whelped her, then believe me, Peggy kicked the shit out of him. Ten bucks says he got carried off in a body bag.”

“Seriously?”

Steve chuckles. “Because I love you, I’m not going to tell her you said that.”

Dinner’s nearly over by the time they hear her footsteps in the hallway, see the tattered flap of Steve’s robe wound around her.  She folds herself in Steve’s lap and kisses him without a word.

“Hi,” Steve says after a moment, his arms turning around terrycloth.

A tired smile. “Hello, darling.”

“We missed you.”

Tony swallows. Christ, they’re beautiful together, even like this: Peggy exhausted and Steve’s forehead pinched with worry, both a little unsure. “Yeah," Tony says. "We sure did.”

Peggy sighs and leans her head against Steve’s shoulder, chestnut combed with silver and gray. “In the morning,” she says. “Is it alright if we talk about this in the morning? I need”--her eyes find Tony’s, and god, there’s something in them that’s so goddamn fragile--“I need to enjoy the comforts of being home with you first.”

Steve kisses her again, his hand turned around her face. “Of course, sweetheart. Of course.”

She stretches her arm across the table and finds Tony’s hand. He winds his fingers through hers. “Tony,” she says. “Come here.”

In a moment, he’s on his knees beside Steve’s chair and the three of them are kissing, mouths moving one to another, ping ponging, a sloppy sort of give and take, and they make her come like that, pitched perfect between them, Tony teasing her nipples and Steve’s big fingers in her cunt and her own hand on her clit, her lips, leaning back against Steve’s arm and pressing herself against Tony’s mouth and singeing the air with her sharp cry, one that Tony’s willing to bet the neighbors can hear because the kitchen window is open and that makes it all the sweeter, somehow, how much Peggy needs them both, how willing she is to show it, English decorum be damned.

“Well,” she says later, stretched out in bed beside them as they fuck, “they must not have thought too much of it, eh? No one seems to have called the police.” Her fingers climb down Tony’s spine as Steve pounds him and god help him if that doesn’t do it for him, isn’t just enough straw to break the proverbial back and having him shouting into the sheets. “That is, not yet.”

Tony dreams of Peggy covered in yellow and purple roses and of Steve’s hands, his, working frantically to shove them back.

It’s all right, dream-Peggy murmurs, flowers streaming from her mouth. It’s all right, darlings. Drowning is part of the job.

No, Tony tells her. He can see a shadow at Steve’s back, looming. No, it isn’t!

Oh, my dear. Peggy’s voice is there, but she isn’t, now. The shadow has swallowed her. The shadow is Steve. It has been since long before you were born. You’ve forgotten, Tony--this isn’t your fight.

No, he says, certain, raising his hands against the darkness, light in his palms. Now it is.

*****

In the morning, they sit very still around toast and coffee. The window’s closed and everyone’s dressed. Peggy looks incredibly pale.

“For the last week,” she says, “I’ve been in Russia. Siberia.” Her eyes turn to Steve’s. “Something tells me you know what that means.”

Tony’s never seen anybody hit by a 10-ton weight, but damn if that’s not what Steve looks like. And based on Steve’s expression, it’s probably what he looks like, too. Because what the fucking fuck, unwelcome blast from the future past. Siberia? What the hell. What the everloving fuck?  She can’t mean--!

“You found Bucky,” Steve says, just like that.

Peggy’s fingers curl tight around her cup. “It seems we did, yes.”

#stony #steggy #steve/tony/peggy #oh no there's plot

[mentalmimosa]

when the time comes (part viii)

Previous installments here:[archiveofourown.org/works/19702240/chapters/46626097]

Loki stood at the edge of all things. Or so to her it seemed.

She had reached the edge of the Lake unclothed, her skin swallowed by mud. It had been in her hair, smeared between her breasts. She imagined she had felt it in her teeth. But when she stepped into the water, crystal gray touched by blue, it had overtaken her with every step. The waves had come up to her neck. She emerged, though, on the other side of everything clean and smooth and wet.

And warm. Ah, sweet gods; with every step she took away from the water, her skin felt like living fire. It was as if Donar were clutching her bare, soothing her with his touch and his breath, and as she moved towards the low white dome that had eased itself from the mist, she found that molton feeling was as true within her as it was without. She found herself sighing, filling the still, beautiful air with soft sounds of desire. She wanted him and he was not there. She wanted him and he could not be.

And then she saw the pillar of light.

It was pouring in through the dome and she knew without looking that the dome’s eye was open and that above her lay the moon, unblinking.

The light was hers, and so were the Hours, the hands of the goddesses. They reached for her now and in another step, as she stepped into the moon’s glow, Loki the reigna reached back.

We have brought you the stars, the Hours whispered. Caught them in our hands so that you might see them this night, Loki. Lift your face to ours, child, and see.

She did so without a thought--there was no need for thought here, only breath and sensation--and in return, the jewels of the night were tossed into her hands, made to drip over her face, and she felt--

You love him, the Hours murmured as each star fell past. You love him, Loki. It is time to let him love you back.

“Yes,” Loki said so all the green world could hear. “Oh, yes.”

And then her hips were in his hands, hands that she would know in any darkness, and he was there with her, panting, his cock jutting urgently against her back, his voice in her ear, breaking:

“Doch, liebe. Doch, doch.”

“Elskede,” she whispered as he stroked her skin, curved his hands over the tops of her thighs.

She spread her legs and arched her back and when he pushed inside her, it was in one, rough molten slide and then his arms were around her and it was as it had been before: his chest at her back and his breath in her hair, but this time, he was crying out, making small, wounded sounds that made the softest parts of her flare and shudder and as they stood joined in the pillar of light, she felt a light within her, a great sort of unshuttering, as if her heart had been a dark room that now lay itself bare to sunlight.

The words were a slurry, the best sort of song: “Move, Donar,” Loki said into the stars. “Take me. Take me. Move.”

~~~~~

It was only then, as he withdrew from her honey and shoved back in to the root that Donar understood that he was not dreaming, that what he held was no haint: it was his reigna he held and his reigna he fucked and his reigna who turned her face to his and pressed her mouth to his cheek and moaned out his name.

“Loki,” he grunted. The word seemed drenched in light. “Loki, liebe, oh, oh!”

She was a river before him, moving, twisting, rushing back to meet him, and it excited him, how wet she was, the squeeze of her channel impossibly tight, and he felt pleasure coming, thunderclouds building at the base of his spine. She was his and he would fill her, again and again until what had always lain between them was sated at least for a little while. This was clear in Donar’s mind, the only thread left of anything that was not Loki, for he was drowning in her: the smell of her skin and the weight of her breasts and the eager, greedy pitch of her hips.

He moaned against the back of her neck and one slim hand flew up to clutch at his arm and the other slipped over her sex and he could feel the change in her when she found the tense bud at its center and slid her fingers over its bloom and then even the Jungfur themselves could not have stopped his seed or the roar of his climax or the shiver that nearly struck him down as she rippled around him and filled the light around them with the sounds of his name.

She loves you, your Loki, the Jungfur whispered to him, their words cool within his fevered thoughts. Now is the time to let her love you back, erneut and erneut and erneut.

And so it was, even as the moon’s eye slid onward, as he withdrew from her body and she turned to him and raised her hands to his face, her thumbs climbing over its curves. Even as she pulled his head to hers and kissed him, her soft breasts teasing his chest. Even as she took his hand and let him from the light and tumbled with him onto a soft bed made of sweet ivy and greenmoss and grass.

“Erneut,” she said as he lay his head between her thighs and lapped at the dark hair there, devoured the taste of her slick wound with his spend.

“Erneut,” she sighed as he arched over her, trembling, the tip of his member stroking the butterfly wings of her entrance.

“Erneut,” she moaned as she sank down on his cock, her skin damp from his tongue and his spunk her hair a storm about her shoulders, tangled. “Elskede, please, I need you again.”

He could not speak to her any longer, not with his voice; only with the shove of his hips and the broad, loving squeeze of his hands. But in those long, gorgeous Hours between them, reflections of the years that lay behind, each touch they traded, now skin against skin, spoke of love and as he moved once more inside the cradle of Loki’s body, as she clawed at his chest and threw her head back and came with a fierce, aching cry, that love seemed to Donar like nothing less than a creation of the divine.

“My love,” she said as he pressed her into the grip of the green world, his head bent to the silken heat of her breasts, her hands wound in his hair. “Oh, Donar, my love, elskede, don’t stop, don’t stop, I need you. I need you.”

And you have me, Loki, he Knew, raising his mouth to find hers, to devour it, to sing devotion inside it. 

~~~~

When Loki woke, there was honeyed wine at her side. She did not wonder at its appearance but felt only gratefulness; the need for refreshment was sudden and real. When she rose from the lee of Donar’s arm, he sighed softly and turned onto his back. Even in sleep, she saw, his body had roused itself again. It took effort to turn away.

She reached for the goblet and drank deeply. Shivered. Drank again.

Above them, in the open eye of the temple, the night sky still reigned. Some part of her recognized the strangeness in this--how long had they lain together? this part of her wondered; how many times had they coupled? Surely, the darkness should have softened at least to shadow by now. When would daylight come back?

“Liebe.” Donar’s hand brushed her back. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere, darling. There’s drink here. You should have some.”

“Tch,” he said, but when she turned, goblet in hand, he reached for it gratefully, and she watched him drink his fill. Yet it was full when he handed it back.

She took a last sip and set it aside. “The Hours,” she said softly, “provide.”

When she kissed him, he sighed as he had before and opened his mouth. She lapped the taste of wine from his teeth.

“May I touch you?”

He played his fingers over her shoulder. “Please.”

His flesh was firm when her hand found it; rigid after a few slow, teasing strokes, and as much as her body called her to take him, there was something delicious about feeling him stiffen within her fist, about watching his handsome face quiver and his big body writhe. Delicious, too, to bend her head to his chest and nuzzles the scratches she’d left there, to take the hard feather nubs of his nipples into her mouth as she stroked him faster, chuckling as each new assault of her tongue made his back arch and his hands on her skin open and clench.

“Don’t tease me,” he grunted.

“Why not?” She closed her teeth around his nipple. “You seem to be enjoying it.”

“Loki--”

She lifted her head and smiled at him. “And seeing your pleasure this way is making me very wet.”

His cock jerked in her hand, a rip of noise rose from his throat. “Reigna!”

“Yes, ˆ?”

Their eyes met. The air smoldered.

“Mmmm, tease me, sweet,” Donar murmured. He stroked her hair; there was ivy in his. “Watch my pleasure for as long as you like.”

When he came, he whimpered, creamy white dripping fast from her fist, and when the tremors had stopped, she lifted her slick fingers to her breasts and smeared the smell of him across her skin, rubbed his seed into her silken skin while she felt the sated heat of his gaze and when she was through, he drew her close and whispered: “Now, my love. Let me watch you.”

*****

There was sleep in soft grass, dreams within his embrace. And when she opened her eyes again, there was the pool.

#thorki #female loki #ritual sex #loss

[mentalmimosa]

buon anno

He drinks Robert's wine. That’s the problem. It’s red wine, good wine, or so Robert says, loudly proclaims to the whole table as he plucks the bottle from the waiter’s hands and shows it off with a twist of the wrist.

“A buon anno!” he declares. “Just like the last ten have been with you, friends. So drink up.”

Never mind that Robert’s own glass is filled with water, not wine, or that they burn through the first bottle and call for a second, a third.

“I don’t even drink reds,” Seb says happily, his body pitching towards Chris’s. “I mean, I hate reds, honestly, but this shit is amazing, huh?”

Chris nods, the stuff catching at the back of his throat: it was warm and it was sweet and just a few sips on top of whiskey have made his head feel heavy, like he was half asleep, and as he looks  around the table, at the faces caught in half-shadow by the streetlights, the edges of the world start dissolving a little and some of the sharpness of the night, of this final farewell, aren’t quite as hard to look at or bear.

“Chris.”

“Hmm?”

Seb’s hand on his arm, bold. Squeezing. “You look funny, ‘s all. You ok?”

“‘M fine,” Chris says, and he is. Really. “Just kind of smashed.”

“Pfffft. You?” Five fingers drumming over his. “No, man. You look sad.”

They don’t do this in public, even in front of their co-stars, people who know everything. This is a thing for behind closed doors and hotel rooms and Seb’s place in New York at 3 am. Seb knows that. Seb’s the one who made the rules.

He finds Seb’s eyes, summons a smile. “Dude, you’re drunk.”

“Duh,” Seb says. “Drunk doesn’t mean blind, does it?”

There’s a burst of laughter from the other end of the table where Robert’s holding court and Chris doesn’t have to look to know what he’ll see: Mark and Scar and Don Cheadle (it’s one name in his head; blame Boogie Nights ) leaning in to whatever bullshit Robert is spinning, some story of his younger days, of some star he knew way back when, of some moment in time when Chris was barely alive and Robert was hard into living.

It doesn’t help that tonight, Robert is wearing his glasses because tonight’s about family, about giving the old crew one last hurrah at some fabulous outdoor restaurant in Rome. If Chris had arranged this, it would have rained, probably, but for Robert, the stars are out and the night air is holding on to just enough of the heat of the day. Everyone else is lit up and having a fucking wonderful time and Chris isn’t, no, he’s not, but that’s nobody’s fault but his because his heart, no matter how much he drinks, is a self-centered bitch and he’s not going to get what he wants, he’s always known that, for as long as he could actually articulate to himself what that is, it’s just--he’s always had scraps to hang on to, you know? A scene, a stupid press junket, months spent together on set. The golden thread of possibility that one night or one morning after hours of filming there’ll be a knock on the door of his room or his trailer and the person on the other side will be Robert, not Seb.

“Hey, man,” he’s imagined Robert saying, squint smiling from behind dark frames, “I can’t fucking sleep but one of the sound guys hooked me up with some killer donuts. Want one?”

But they don’t eat in his daydreams. At least not for long.

“Pup,” Robert sighs behind his eyes when he should be sleeping, when Seb’s crashed out on the other side of the bed, “you’re always so goddamn eager.”

“Can’t help it.” His beard brushing Robert’s chest, his fingers tangled in Robert’s belt, that first touch of hard flesh. “Don’t want to.”

A firm hand in his hair, tugging at the long ends. “Oh, honey. Then don’t.”

He tips his glass back and drinks too much too fast because after tonight, there’s no conceivable way that can happen. The movies are done, the whole saga, kaput, and they’ll never be together like this again, in their own soft bubble of unreality; the real world beckons. Tomorrow, they’ll all move on to the next job.

Oh, they’ll see each other, because Hollywood’s a small town. They might even get together again, this core group. Hell, they probably will. But it won’t be the same as this: separate from the world, swimming in fine wine and the pleasure of each other’s company--no children, no wives, no partners. Just them.

Seb’s stopped touching him. He’s leaned over to talk to Mackie. It’s a good time to make his escape.

“I just,” he says into the din, to no one in particular. “Need a sec. Be right back.”

He pushes away from the table and his eyes well up, because he’s fucking drunk. Shit.

Five steps and he’s off the patio; a few more and he’s inside the restaurant, calm and quiet. For tonight, Robert’d bought out the whole place. But it’s good because the lights are off for the most part, blazing in the kitchen, the sound of chatter and laughter, but here, by these empty tables, he can almost pretend he’s in private. The shadows are kind of awesome that way.

A deep breath, another, and the tears pull back. His heart’s pounding in his ears; he can hear it now. His ears are hot and his throat hurts. Jesus. Why the fuck had he drunk that damn wine?

Because , his head says unhelpfully. It was Robert’s .

“What is awesome about you, bro, is your uncanny ability to want the impossible.” Scott had said that to him once in a faux English accent when they were kids on a PBS kick. “You wanna know what the worst part of that shit is?”

“No,” Chris’d said.

“The worst part, Christopher, you asshole, is that you usually find a way to get it.” His brother’s fingers on the remote control, drumming over the volume. “It's so fucking annoying."

“Maybe I deserve it, huh? You ever think of that? Or maybe I’ve earned it, or something.”

“Dude,” Scott had said with a snort, like Chris was the dumbest rock in the box. “I doubt it.”

But it was true, even now: he usually got what he wanted, no matter how lofty--by hook or by crook or by kismet. He ran a hand through his hair and sighed into the darkness. Yeah, well. He wouldn’t this time.

“So your retreat wasn’t total.” A voice dead ahead. Robet’s. “Well, good. That’s something.”

Shit. “Um, no, I wasn’t retreating. Just needed some air.”

“And naturally you went inside to get it. I get it. That whole outdoors thing’s overrated.”

“I’m fine,” Chris says, even though nobody asked.

“Ok, cool.” Robert’s close enough that Chris can see his head tilt. “I kind of assumed you weren’t dying. Unless you are. Are you?”

“No. I’m just drunk.”

A chuckle. “That seems to be a popular ailment this evening. Maybe the buon anno was too much, huh?”

“Maybe.”

He can see Robert’s face now, cut in kitty-corners by the drift of the streetlight. He has to ball his fists up and breath and breath because the red wine part of him, the whiskey, is bellowing at him to reach out and touch.

“Chris.” There’s a steel in the word, a little bit of a chide. “You don’t have to stay, you know. If you want to head back to the hotel, you won’t insult me one bit. I’m sure you and Seb need some time to say your adieus.”

“Me and--?” His face is hot now, a different sort of red. “We don’t--”

“Need time to say goodbye? Yes, you do.”

“We’ll see each other again. We always have.”

“I know.” There’s a hand on his elbow suddenly, an uncertain grip. “But it won’t be the same, trust me. When you’re working together, there’s a thing, you know, like a spark that doesn’t die, that like feeds on itself, but when the job ends, even if you’re still together, it’s different.”

Chris’s head hurts. His head hurts and his chest does and there are motherfucking tears in his eyes again. Goddamn it. “It’s not serious,” he says. “Seb and I.”

“He thinks it is.”

“How do you--?”

“The way that he looks at you sometimes. The way that he touches you when he thinks no one’s looking. It’s pretty obvious, you know, if you have eyes.” The fingers on his arm flex, tighten. “He’s in love with you.”

His skin is singing. His hands are shaking. “No, he’s not.”

“Yeah, he is. I can’t believe he’s never told you.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know.”

Softer now, words he has to strain to hear. “Or maybe he’s afraid to, hmm? Love is a damn scary thing.”

And there’s a sound, one like the day breaking, and it’s only when their mouths meet that Chris understands where it’s coming from: a place dug deep in the well of his heart, an ocean that roars somewhere in his soul.

“Oh,” Robert says, very gently. “Do that again.”

Robert’s tongue is warm and soft and outside, just beyond the doorway, their friends are still laughing, still shouting, still dwelling in the echo of the evening, but in here, unseen, the world is made only of them and he’s afraid to breathe, afraid to think too hard, afraid that if he says the wrong thing or moves the wrong way, the dream will end and he’ll wake up.

“You are the most beautiful creature.” Robert nuzzles his neck and winds his arms around it. “I thought that, you know, from day one, year one, and I’ve never gotten over it, how goddamn beautiful you are.”

Chris’s hips wrench. He pulls Robert close, closer. It feels like he’ll never be close enough. “Then why not--why didn’t you say something?”

“Because I hate settling for half-measures.” A chuckle with no humor in it. “It’s gotten me in trouble my whole life. Better to say nothing, to do nothing, than to be forced to settle for only a taste of you.”

This time, the kiss feels more desperate, hungry. Robert’s nails are in his neck and he’s squeezing Robert’s ass and he wants so much so badly that it makes him feel sick.

“Please,” he says when Robert lets him. “Please, fuck. You can have more. You can have whatever you want from me. Anything.”

And he can feel it, the moment the spell breaks, the moment that this part of Robert that he’s never seen slides back into its shell. A retreat.

“It doesn’t work that way. You know that.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do.” A hand in his hair. “This is it, Chris. This is all we can have. And that’s exactly why we’ve never done this. Not once in a decade, jesus.” He shudders; Chris gets a hold of his hips. “And thank god we didn’t because if there was another day after tonight, I don’t know how I’d be able to resist. God, you’re so--”

He groans when Chris kisses him, crush, collision; groans again when he yanks himself away.

“Stop it.”

“You don’t want me to." The words are vicious in his mouth. "I know you don’t.”

“Yeah, well, too fucking bad for both of us, huh? Because we have to stop. This is as far as it goes.”

They’re still holding each other, Chris thinks. They’re still holding each other but Robert is leaving. Some part of him is already gone.

“See? This is what I didn’t want. Half-measures.” Robert’s eyes are cut by shadow, his voice jagged. “Because this is worse than nothing at all.”

Chris swallows. “Not to me, it’s not. At least now I know what it’s like to kiss you. To hold you. It would’ve killed me not to know.”

Robert touches his face. “Which is the difference between you and me, honey. It’s the knowing that’ll kill me, each and every goddamn day. Knowing what I could have, but I don’t.”

*****

Later, when the hour is small and his hotel room is quiet, Seb says: “Seriously, babe. You ok?”

And when he can’t hold the tears back this time, Seb doesn’t ask. He just rolls over and pulls Chris into his arms and for that night, until the sun rises, they leave it at that.

#evansdowney #evanstan #pining #first kiss #angst #goodbyes

[mentalmimosa]

this is you

Prompts: Don't let the photograph replace the memory and National Park.

What are you supposed to do when your memory becomes history? There’s a difference.

It’s not as though Steve’s ever forgotten that day, all those goddamn years ago: the smell of the sunshine, the heady crush of the leaves, the way Bucky’s grin never faded, not once, the whole day. He remembers what shirt he was wearing, which sweater vest; he remembers the crushed box that served as their picnic basket upending in the car and sending sandwiches and bottles of beer all over the backseat. And he remembers the girls who took their picture, a couple of blondes up from the city like them, their skin flushed from the fresh hair and the bottoms of their skirts stained green by the last of summer’s grass.

“Hey,” the one had said, the Brownie camera steady in her hands. “Smile!”

What the picture hadn’t captured was what had happened a few minutes before: shouted laugher that had turned into a tussle in the dirt and then--

And then--

The end of a friendship and the beginning of something else. A shifting of the solid ground that had always lain between them into quicksand, uncertainty, a new kind of vulnerability. You can’t see that in the frame.

He doesn’t see the picture until years later. Decades, in fact. But when he does, he realizes how little he’s wanted to remember. The image brings it all back.

“Holy shit,” Sam said, staring over his shoulder as the helicarriers burn overhead. “Is that you, Cap?”

The man who is Bucky is sitting on the ground between them, looking as wet and battered as Steve feels, but there’s a light in his face that wasn’t there before, bruises and broken bones be damned. The photo came from his pocket. When they’d found themselves beached, before either could muster the strength to put up a punch, he’d pulled it from some inner pocket in his armor and shoved it into Steve’s hands. Said:

“This is you, isn’t it?”

He has the same answer for Sam as he’d given Buck.

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“Well, what the hell was he doing with it?”

“Tch,” Bucky says. “I have it because it's mine.”

*****

They hole up at a safehouse Nat knows about way out in the wilds of nowhere. Steve’s pretty sure it’s one of hers, but she will neither confirm nor deny.

“There’s a well,” she says, giving them a perfunctory tour as they limp towards the front door. “Solar panels shielded from satellites. Food. We’ll be fine.”

She’s wary of the Winter Soldier. Steve doesn’t blame her. But she puts as much care into stitching him up as she does Steve, Sam standing in the corner the whole time, semi-glowering at them both.

“I don’t care how many broken ribs he has,” he says. “Come on, y’all. He’s a killing machine.”

Nat shoots him a look that’s more broadsword than dagger. “You’re seriously not helping.”

“I’m trying to be the voice of reason here, is what I’m doing. Steve, I get that this guy was your friend, but--”

“But nothing.” Steve’s voice feels like a scab. Damn it, everything hurts. “He’s Bucky. He stays or I go.”

“We’ve had this argument, gentlemen,” Nat snaps. There’s a prick in Steve’s arm, something cool and weird in his blood. “And we’re here, so we’re not having it again. Wilson, take your shit outside and see if you can get that pump running, huh? I don’t want to hear another fucking word about it.”

“Свирепый,” Bucky murmurs. “A red tiger, eh?”

Nat stands up between them, their two cots side by side. “Sleep, идиоты. Both of you. Or else I’ll snap something that’s still in one piece, ok?”

When he wakes up, it’s dark and the room is quiet, the air still. He can hear Bucky breathing.

It’s been a long time since they slept in the same room. They had when they were kids, on and off, camping out at one another’s houses, and they’d always shared the single bedroom in their apartment. But after that trip to the lake in that beat-up, borrowed Ford, it’d been different.

Awkward, at first. Neither of them had really know what that kiss meant. Steve sure as hell hadn’t. He knew what he wanted it to mean, but that wasn’t the same thing. And frankly, he hadn’t wanted to ask.

The drive back was quiet, that first hour back in their apartment even more so. Bucky had fussed about setting out supper, like he always did, and Steve had taken refuge in the bathtub, ducking his face under the lukewarm water, reluctant to scrub the smell of the pine needles away. He got a little stiff despite the chill, much to his chagrin. Got out and put on a clean undershirt and ignored it.

“Made you a sandwich,” Bucky’d said from behind the newspaper when he padded into the kitchen. “There’s coffee. Any hot water left?”

It wasn’t until Steve had done the dishes and Bucky was finished splashing that it came to a head again: Bucky emerging in a cloud of steam and aftershave, his hands curving around the jut of Steve’s hips.

“I’m looking for my book,” Steve had said, strangled.

He’d felt Bucky’s mouth brush the back of his neck. “You left it in the car.”

“Oh.”

A gentle catch of sharp teeth. “Want me to put some pants on and go get it?”

“No,” Steve had whispered, remembers saying as if were only yesterday. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Laying in that safehouse all those years later, he remembers waking up in the small hours and being startled that Bucky was in his bed, that his best friend was spooned around him like a barricade, his skin warm and smelling like sex. He remembers that he made a sound, he must have, because even in sleep, Bucky had tugged him close again, sighing, murmuring something senseless in his hair.

There’s a tear on his cheek, a dozen, and he shoves them away, turns his face into the pillow. God, what he wouldn’t give for Bucky, even this hollowed out Bucky, to do that right now.

“That picture,” Bucky says rough in the darkness. “I stole it a long time ago.”

It takes Steve a moment to understand what he means. “Stole it? From where?”

“From your, eh, what is it called? National Archives.”

If Steve’s head was clear, he might question that. Right now, though, selfishly, he can’t. “Why’d you take it? Did they make you?”

“No.” There’s a pause. “I was sent for something else. They didn’t know I had this, that I took it. I found...it was hard to lie to them. But I found ways.”

“Why, then?”

He can sense Bucky’s head turning towards him. There are crickets in the shadows outside. “I saw it and I knew myself. That was the first reason. But also--there was you. There was me and there was you.”

There’s a pang in Steve’s heart, a different kind of pain. “You recognized me?”

“Not recognized, exactly. I did not know your name. Though I was sure, the first time I saw it, that I knew you.” A dry cough, a wince that Steve can here. “Only today do the pieces fit together. But I still cannot understand the picture they make.”

Steve’s face is wet again and the hope, oh the stupid fucking hope, at the back of his throat is champagne, fierce and bitter. “Well,” he says, “that’s a start, I guess. There’s me, now, and there’s you.”

*****

It takes months for Bucky to be able to think clearly, longer for Stark to figure out how to divest him of the HYDRA arm and give him what Tony calls a shiny, unfucked-up, non-killy version instead.

Time, suddenly, is something they have.

The team drifts back together, as it always does, inevitably. At the compound, secrets come out: what Bucky did, that some arms of HYDRA still live, that there are parts of the universe beyond the Earth and the moon that are bent on destruction. There are fights and occasional histrionics but in the end, the Avengers stick together. It’s all good, in the end. Gives Bucky the time he needs to heal.

The photo sits beside Bucky’s bed in a little wooden frame. They don’t talk about it, which is fine. It takes a while to remember how to be each other’s friend again.

One night, though, at dinner, Barton passes Steve a textbook cracked open to page 181.

“Will you look at that shit,” he says through a mouthful of taco. “My kid brought it home from school yesterday. You’re ancient history, Cap.”

Above , the caption says, in tiny block letters. Steve Rogers pre-Super Soldier serum, with James Barnes (1938).

“Hey,” Sam says, frowning over the edge of the page, “isn’t that--?”

Bucky isn’t at the table. He never eats with the crew; too many people, too much noise, he says. But Steve knows where he’ll be, where he is: in his room.

He’s smoking when Steve crashes in, leaning against the balcony in a cloud. There’s a half-finished tray on the coffee table and a book turned upside down beside it. He looks startled.

“What the hell, Steve? Since when don’t you knock?”

“Buck,” Steve says, shoving the textbook towards him. “Look. We’re history.”

Bucky whistles softly. His fingers drift up and brush the page, the washed-out image of them, of that day, the best day. A day that changed both their lives. “We’ve never been history, kid,” he says, rough. “But we never did get much here and now, did we?”

“No. I guess we didn’t.”

Then there’s no book in his hands and Bucky is smiling at him, sweet and sad. “What’d you think?”

“About what?”

Metal fingers on his cheek, cool against the heat. “Want to risk it and try again?”

They answer the call of the now in Bucky’s bed this time. They learn the changes in each other’s bodies and discover what’s the same and Steve remembers the joy of having Bucky loom over him, loving, cock buried inside and hips moving, churning, urging Steve towards the ecstasy of the other side, the side that time can’t touch, the side where memories never fade, the side where they once built things that even death couldn’t destroy and when Steve comes--the first time, the fourth, the fifth--it’s as if they’ve lived forever as the boys they were that summer day.

“You’re never leaving this bed again,” Bucky says when their bodies are still, when the world outside is, the small hours between dusk and dawn.

He reaches back and pinches Bucky’s thigh, snickers when he squawks. “I’m not, huh?”

“No. I’ve decided. You’re staying right here until I say otherwise.”

“I’d forgotten how territorial you can be.”

A flick of tongue against his ear. “Not territorial. Greedy. Head over heels in love with you. There’s a difference.”

It should be startling to hear him say it like that, almost casual: in love with you. It’s more like, though, coming home.

“You’re gonna have to let me up eventually.”

“Who says?”

“Me.” Steve lifts metal fingers to his mouth, kisses them. “And like or not, Buck, I’m bigger than you.”

Bucky laughs. “Well shit. That sounded almost like a challenge, Stevie.”

“Almost? Bullshit. It is.”

This time, all these years later, their tussle ends not in a kiss but with Steve coming over Bucky’s fist and Bucky creaming Steve’s ass and with them clutching each other and saying things, feeling things, that they never could have back then.

And when Steve falls asleep, finally, it’s with his eyes on that long-ago afternoon, framed at Bucky’s bedside. A memory, yes, he thinks, leaning back in Bucky’s arms, but not history, no. A beginning.

#stucky #post-winter soldier #canon divergence #first time in a long time #schmoop

[mentalmimosa]

casualties of love

It was his nerves that nearly did him in, nerves and the 80-proof whiskey he’d whittled down to two fingers over the course of the afternoon. His instructions, he’d thought, had been clear, and the Captain, for all of his faults, excelled at following directions and at giving them, if need be. That he hadn’t arrived at the appointed hour--with several minutes to spare, even--made the prince profoundly uneasy, but uneasiness was not an emotion he was keen to show with so many of his so-called advisors flitting inside and out, throwing maps in his face and making noises about troop movements and pretending to ignore his drinking. They were too polite to call him on it--too chicken shit, was more like--and too well-bred to send word to his father; the king was ailing and the queen was at his side and so like it not, they were, in this moment of crisis, stuck with the prince, and they knew it. When he wasn’t trashed, their barely-masked discomfort amused him. The kingdom would be his soon enough and he’d be rid of them, his fathers’ men, all of them. He had grand plans, oh yes, he did; but all of those, he thought miserably, would be for naught if the man who sat at the center of them were dead.

“My lord?” A timid face in the doorway.

“What is it, Barton?”

“My lord, Captain Rogers is here.”

“Well,” the prince sneered, his heart leaping behind his breast, some of the afternoon’s awful tension uncoiling, “get out of the fucking way and send him in.”

When he stood up, unevenly, anticipating, he discovered that there were others in the room--the odd general or two, someone banging away on a typewriter--and he waved his arms at them, bellowing, send them scurrying towards the same door that swung open as Rogers stepped in.

“Finally!” The prince snapped his fingers at the last retreating man. “See that we’re not disturbed. Next man who puts a fist to my door will get a bullet for his troubles, understand?”

When it slammed shut, Rogers said: “You shooting your soldiers now, highness?”

“If they keep showing up late, I might.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“No shit.”

“I don’t like it when you drink.”

“I don’t give a damn what you like, Captain. I gave you a very specific order to report to me at 1400 hours today.”

“And I,” the captain said softly, moving with the best sort of menace, “would’ve moved heaven and earth to be here on time but war doesn’t run on a timetable, my lord.”

In a moment, the prince found himself pinned: the edge of his father’s desk at his back and the brick wall of the captain’s body at his front and something in him, already ragged by the day’s worry, was tearing, was making the game they usually played--spoiled prince and uppity captain--feel hollow and empty and weak. There were slurs he’d had ready all afternoon, a dozen angry, cutting remarks, all of which would have lead them to the sort of sex he lived for: the captain’s hands bruising his hips and his own digging blood into the captain’s broad back until the captain, a man of control, a man whose mask beyond this room never slipped, was snarling in his ear and coming in his ass and not letting him have so much as a hand on his cock until the captain’s pleasure was done.

But today, in the last golden hours of the afternoon, he didn’t want that.

He wanted to touch the captain’s face, bearded, bearing the smell of gunpowder. So he did.

He wanted to arch in the cage of the captain’s arms, two palms pressed to wood that was older than them both, and pull that big, warm body to his. So he did.

And he wanted, more than anything, to tip his head towards that red, giving mouth and take it without asking; to drink his fill, and then drink more. So he did.

And his captain, bless him, didn’t argue. Instead, he slid his hands from the desk to cup the prince’s hips and tease his thighs until the prince’s legs were wrapped around his waist, the prince’s hands speared through his long, dusty hair.

“You’re late,” the prince murmured. He was trembling, he realized; so be it. “You’re so late, Rogers. You’re never late, and I thought that you were--”

“Shhhhh.” Rogers kissed him again, clawed gently at his back. “I’m sorry. I should’ve sent word.”

“Has something bad happened?’

“Darling, the generals would have told you if it had.”

“The generals, pah. Morons, the whole lot of them. None of them have the balls to tell me bad news.”

The captain nuzzled his throat. “Perhaps because you threaten to shoot them for no good reason, hmm?”

“No,” the prince said, laying his head back, humming. “For very good reason. You’re the only reason I got up today and I’ll be damned if I let them ruin it.”

He felt Rogers’ breath catch. “The only reason, huh?”

“Surely you know that by now.”

“Know what?”

He was hard, revved up by days of anticipation. The captain was, too. And the prince couldn’t remember a time when they’d let so much time slip by between their initial reunion and the tearing of clothes, the urgent, dirty slap of rough sex. But it seemed important now, to speak, to say words that worry and alcohol had teased out of what he’d always believed was the cold cinder of his heart.

He stroked Rogers’ neck and tucked his fingers beneath his collar, petted the damp skin he found there. Closed his eyes and pressed his mouth to the man’s temple. Whispered:

“I adore you, Steven.”

The captain groaned, his fingers digging fiercely into the prince’s back. “Oh, James.”

“I adore you and the thought of you lying dead in a ditch on some road somewhere, dead because of me, because I asked you to come back to me, because I needed to see you today, every day, the fucking war be damned--”

When they kissed this time, there was a sweetness to it, a different kind of desperation, and even through his booze-colored haze, the prince could feel the difference in the way the captain was holding him, the way he was rocking against the prince’s body, urgent and anxious and loving all at once.

“My darling boy,” Rogers breathed when they parted, only a slip of air pitched between them. “I need you so badly.”

“You have me,” the prince said. The words felt thick with tears, with whiskey, with the terror of the last hours and the shadow of what would have been regret. “Can’t you understand that? I’m yours and you, goddamn it, are mine.”

The desk was their bed, again, but this time, the captain took him skin to skin, their uniforms shed, sprawled like casualties of love at their feet. This time, despite their urgency, the captain licked him open with the sort of slowness that made the prince writhe before slicking his fingers and stretching, before coating his cock and catching, before easing the prince onto his back over the faces of a half dozen maps and pressing into him slowly, aching, tracing the lines of the prince’s ribs and grinning down at him as he did.

“Yes,” he murmured when they were joined, when the prince was straining again, his dick bobbing red and eager, his hands braced in the captain’s thick hair. “You’re so lovely like this, James. My god, yes."

And when the prince came, it was with the captain inside him and with the captain’s mouth on his and with the pleasure of knowing that he was alive, that Rogers was, and that together, their hands clasped and heat pouring between them, there was no one they couldn’t conquer, nothing they couldn’t do.

“I love you,” the prince said as Rogers stuttered inside him, ecstasy turning in waves over the captain’s handsome face. “And there’s no way in hell I’m letting you die.”

When he could, the captain kissed him, his mouth still slack from the shudder of release. “Only you,” he murmured. “Only you would you think you could command death herself, my prince.”

“Today I have, haven’t I?” He sighed against the captain’s cheek. “Today she spared you and brought you to me.”

#stucky #royalty au #captain rogers #prince bucky

[mentalmimosa]

the best and dirtiest places

“I know it’s ridiculous,” Tony said, “but that’s kind of the point, Steve! What part of fantasy do you not get?”

“But--”

“Look, if you don’t want to do this, just say it, ok? I’m not interested in talking it to death.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware that asking a single clarifying question constituted talking something to death.”

Tony scrubbed his face with his palms and seriously regretted every life choice that had brought him to this goddamn moment. Why the hell had he thought this was a good idea, again? “It is when you’re questioning the entire premise.”

“Of you wanting to pretend that you’re a prostitute?”

“We call them sex workers now, granddad.”

“Same difference.”

“Not really.”

“Well.” Steve leaned forward, the lamp by the bed catching the lines of his face. “I just don’t understand why that’s something you could possibly want, Tone. Even in a fantasy kind of way. Why would you ever want to be in a position where you had to sell your body to survive?”

“You are so missing the point of this. Like, in every conceivable way.”

“Ok, so. Enlighten me.”

“So,” Tony said. He crossed his arms across his chest, felt the steam caught behind the terrycloth. “Ok. A) having sex with a stranger, or someone you’ve just met. Hot.”

Steve squinted at him. “Is it?”

“Let me guess: you’ve never had a one-night stand.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Jesus. I’m banging a Puritan.”

“You’re not banging anyone at the moment,” Steve said, “and you won’t be until we get this sorted out.”

“Ugh,” Tony said, because being annoyed with Steve was easy but staying annoyed with him when he was down to his stupid cotton boxers in Tony’s stupidly big bed and Tony was fresh from the shower he’d taken expressly so he wouldn’t feel bad asking Steve to rim him to the point of incoherence and then sink down on Steve’s fat, dripping dick was way, way harder, ok?

“B,” he gritted out, “the idea of someone paying good money just to fuck you is, as in A, hot.”

“Hmmm.”

“And C, the idea of being with someone who’s desperate enough to pay for it is, who’s just using you as a way to get off is, uh--”

“Let me guess.” Steve looked like he was trying not to laugh. “It’s hot.”

Tony felt his face burning. Ok, maybe it didn’t sound super flattering when he said it out loud, but, hey: nobody said fantasies had to be nice. Hell, that was the whole point of a fantasy, wasn’t it, the beauty of dirty hot wrong. “If you’re gonna be a dick about this, Rogers,” he snapped, “then there’s the goddamn door.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve said, “I just want to understand. This is new territory for me.”

“What, nobody role-played in the ‘40s? I call bullshit.”

Steve slid up on his knees, smooth as silk, the blankets tangled at his waist. “No." He bit his lip. “I mean, I’ve never gotten to the point in a relationship with somebody where fantasies are a thing that we talked about, you know?”

“Do what now?”

“Tony, before this, you know, you and me, the longest I dated anyone was for like a month and we, you know”--he blushed, a sight that never failed to make Tony’s once-jagged heart turn over--“we didn’t do a lot of talking. About anything. She was, ah, one of the girls on my USO tour, and we...it was more of a steal-a-kiss-when-you-can type of thing.”

“And how many kisses did you manage to steal, Captain Rogers?”

“A dozen, maybe, give or take.”

“And did you ever wander anywhere below the lips?” Tony was moving towards the bed; he didn’t think about it, he just did. “She ever let you touch her tits?”

Steve’s mouth lifted. “She wanted me to. But I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Steve said, reaching, grunting when Tony straddled his hips, “I knew it could’ve led to bigger and better things. The kind of things that get you in trouble.”

Tony snickered and wound his arms around Steve’s neck. “Seriously? You didn’t trust yourself enough just to feel her up?”

“She was gorgeous. A brunette.” Steve dragged his nails down the back of Tony’s robe. “Never could control myself when it came to brunettes.”

“And you were horny as fuck, I’m guessing. One push into her bush and you’d have been done for.”

Steve made a hot little sound. “Yeah. Probably.”

“She never threw herself at you, though? Never walked back into your tent to find her wet and sassy in your bedroll?”

“What makes you think she was sassy?”

“Because I know you. She was, wasn’t she?”

A grin. “Sassy, yes. Fast, no. It’d have never occurred to her to hijack my bed.”

“Oh, it totally did.” Tony rolled his hips, grunted when his dick met the firm wall of Steve’s abs. “She thought about it all the goddamn time--you wandering in after a hard day of entertaining the troops and finding her there all spread out and willing. And I bet you thought about it, too. What it’d have been like to touch her.”

Steve moaned, dug one hand into the knot of Tony’s robe. “Uh huh.”

“How soft her tits would have been, huh? The pretty pink of her skin.” Tony licked at Steve’s neck. “The soft plush of her cunt. You wanted that, didn’t you? Back then.”

"Oh my god. Yes.”

And this was the beauty of fantasy in Tony's book: the plasticity of it, the flow, the way it’d sweep you along to the best and dirtiest places, if you’d let it.

He lifted his mouth to Steve’s ear. “Then I think you should have it.” He reached down and pulled open his robe, let Steve touch the hot, damp skin underneath. “Please, Cap, put your hands on my tits. Want you to touch them so bad.”

His robe, it turned out, made a pretty aces sub-in for a dress: he came with Steve’s fingers up his skirt and then Steve’s head beneath it, that long tongue buried in what he was very fucking pleased, thanks, to call his pussy as long the word made Steve groan and lick at him faster and swap in two broad fingers for his tongue.

“Please,” Tony said, because somehow, he was still driving, “no, I need you inside me.”

“I am inside you, honey.” A sharp twist of his wrist, a sweep of those bedroom blue eyes. “Can’t you feel me?”

“No, no, not your fingers.” He clawed at Steve’s shoulders and arched his back, painfully aware of how good it felt, playing this out. “Not like that.”

When Steve finally pushed into him, he was still wearing the damn robe, white terrycloth tangled around his arms, the whole thing wet with sweat and come and spit, and Steve stared between Tony’s thighs as he slid in, his eyes wide and his mouth open as he watched Tony take every inch.

“I should have used a rubber,” he said hoarsely. “I shouldn’t fuck you like this, honey, I could--”

Tony grabbed at Steve’s ass, felt the tension there, the need that was deliciously coiled. “Knock me up?”

Steve’s eyes shot to his. “Yes.”

“And you wouldn’t want to do that.”

“I...no.”

Tony raised his hips and Steve pressed in, deeper. “No, you wouldn’t, would you? Because that would be bad.”

“Don’t joke about that.”

“I’m not.”

Steve pulled back and humped in again, hard. “I should take it out and go find one.”

“Yeah, you should,” Tony said, biting back a serious whine. “But you’re not gonna, are you? Feels too good to be inside of me, doesn’t it?”

A moan, this one a shot that shook the bed, and the look on Steve’s face--shit. It made Tony’s tired cock jerk. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted this,” Steve said. “How long I’ve dreamed about fucking your tight little cunt."

Tony closed his eyes and grinned and grinned and grinned. “Then, for fuck’s sake, Cap, do it.”

They’d made love a hundred times before, more, but Steve felt like a different man this time; less a grown man who could marshall his own body than a kid who was a slave to its desires, to doing whatever his big, stupid cock wanted: a boy who found himself in a man’s body, surrounded by beautiful women, who hadn’t had enough sense at that age to let himself have a good time and a good, dirty fuck. But he was grown up now in all the ways that counted--pain and loss and isolation, too many years of fighting off fear--and it was way past time, Tony figured, gasping, that the boy get his reward.

“Come in me,” he rasped in Steve’s ear. “Fill me up, Cap. Give me your come.”

Steve grunted and thrust in hard, held it. “No, honey,” he panted. “I wanna come on your tits.”

And when he did, he made the sweetest sound, his free hand tracking the curve of Tony’s hip, his mouth soft and his eyes even more so.

“God, I love you,” he said, his cock still red and spluttering in his fist.

“Yeah, well,” Tony said, grinning, stroking the hot stretch of Steve’s thigh. “You’d better.”

“And because I love you, too,” Tony whispered later, when his robe had been tossed over the side and they were laying cheek-to-cheek, “I’m not going to ask a single question, clarifying or smartass or otherwise, about why you found that so fucking hot. Fantasy is fantasy, babe, am I right?”

But there was no answer from the peanut gallery because Captain America, champion of freedom, justice, and mild bedroom perversion was, it seemed, asleep.

Tony kissed that broad chin and snuggled closer. “Mmmhmm,” he said, “Yep, 100%. I am right.”

#stony #fantasy #gender play #dirty talk #condom kink

[mentalmimosa]

may look that way

Prompt: Secret relationship.

You’re pretty sure that no one knows.

You’re pretty sure that no one knows because nobody’s given you shit about it.

You’re pretty sure that no one knows because nobody’s given you shit about it and given that you and Steve live in the immediate vicinity of a super spy, a bow-happy treeblind, and a God, if those fuckers knew, any of them, you’d have been bombarded by their good wishes and/or what the fucks from jump.

But you haven’t, so you’re pretty sure they don’t know. This is the theory you’re running with.

It’s not that you care what they think, or that you think they’d disapprove. No, that’s not it at all. The thing is that right now, since you live in the happy shadows of other people’s ignorance, Steve’s all yours, this is: him in your bed and buried in your body and asleep in a puppy-dog heap on the cyclone that once was your sheets. It’s waking up to see him in the chair by the window, shirtless, a glass of something dangling from his hand as he turns away from the darkness, the deer, and the trees and stretches out an impossible arm.

“Come here.”

You yawn, feel the cobwebs. How the hell long have you been out? “Nuh uh. You come back to bed.”

He smiles. “I asked you first.”

“Well, tough shit. It just so happens that I’m comfy here.”

“Are you now. Hmm.” His grin gets a little wider and he tips his glass up, downs the rest of his drink. “Anything I can do to change your mind?”

Ok, your crank is officially turned. He always gets that look on his face when he’s fucking with you. The man’s turned it into some kind of an art. You cross your arms and sit up a little, peer at him across the prairie of sheets. “Pffft,” you say, doing your best to hide the heat. “I doubt it.”

Steve sets his glass down and pushes the chair back, turns it so it’s facing the bed. “Huh,” he says, “well, never mind me, then. Go on back to dreamland. I’m sure I’ll find someway to entertain myself somehow.”

In two minutes, his hand is in his boxers, these great white silly things that he loves. You’ve bought him boxer briefs to try and plum smugglers and even a lacy ladies’ pair, once, but nothing’s ever stuck and right now, as he teases himself behind 3/8th’s of an inch of cotton, you’re grateful as fucking Christ because through the damn things you can see every vein, every inch, every tiny strain of wet as he plays with himself and watches you, his breath coming in slow, hungry puffs.

“Sure I can’t tempt you to join me?” he says when he stops for a moment, fist dug in and wound around the shaft.

“No,” you say, ignoring the jerk of your own dick under the covers. “But thanks anyway. I’m good.”

Another two minutes and the cotton’s on the floor. His legs are spread and he’s looking right at you. The balls you had your mouth on an hour ago (two?) are heavy again, straining, and you have to clutch at the blankets and bite down on your tongue to keep you from giving in then and there. Steve loves it when you nuzzle his balls, tease them with your fingers while you suck him. He loves it when you kiss them and he loves it when you drain them and he tells you so, god, every time.

When you did it tonight, lapped at them between his bent knees, he’d made this wild sound like a goosed tiger or something and grabbed at your hair, made you be still.

“You keep doing that and I’m gonna come all over your face.”

You’d looked up, turned your smirk up to 11. “Then stop jerking off.”

His head fell back and he wheezed a little, that telltale spread of red on his chest, all the way up to his ears. “Mmmm, fuck,” he said. “I don’t wanna.”

But he’d wanted to hold you down more; to hold you down on the bed and loom over you, the way that you love, and slip his fingers inside your hole.

“See?” he’d said as you writhed--because goddamn was Mr. 1940s aces at bowing your prostate. “This is where I want to come tonight. Not on your pretty face, or in your smart mouth, but deep in here, right here, where nobody but me can reach.”

You’d come before he had because he likes it that way, loves to push his dick in while you’re still spurting and take your fritzed-out body for a hell of a ride until you were stiff again and he was close, so fucking close, so hot his hair was almost standing up on his head and when you stroked them, those wet, blond lanks, he butts his face against your wrist like a cat, greedy for you, asking for more.

He’s so beautiful like that, your team’s fearless leader: strung out and horny and yet straining for your affection, your soft words, your praise.

“Making me feel so good,” you’d told him, rubbing your beard against his flushed cheek. “You’re doing so good, baby. Making me so fucking hot.”

A rumble then, a groan you’d felt in his back. “Oh, god.”

“I love the way that you fuck me.” You’d traced his mouth with your tongue, riding out each incoming wave. “Jesus, don’t you know that by now?”

He’d grunted and slammed deeper inside. “Fuck.”

“Uh huh, that’s right. Just like that.” You’d slapped a hand on his gorgeous ass, squeezed. “That’s what I love. How big you are, how goddamn horny. How desperate you are to empty yourself in my ass.”

“Mmmm, Tony, jesus.”

“I want you to,” you’d murmured, raising your voice over the slam of your skin, the slap of the bed. “I want you to come in me, Cap. Love it when you come inside me, huh? Love when you get your face down there and lap it all out again.”

And Steve had lost it then, knocked his forehead against Tony’s and hollered and pumped it out in four big, sloppy gasps.

You wonder if he’s thinking about that now as he beats off, his balls bouncing, his teeth in his lip and his feet on the bed and his nipples pulling up, tight.

“I need you,” Steve sighs. His voice is the color of roses. “Can’t you see how bad I need you right now, Tone?”

“You look to me like you’re aces on your own, Steve.”

He moans. “May look that way, but I’m not.”

“Hmmm,” you say, because this is a game, this thing between you, right? And a game’s something you play. “Hard to tell from this angle, maybe. How about I come down for a look?”

As soon as you throw the sheet back and he can see the red, insistent jerk of your dick, he knows he’s won, that fucker, he knows it; knows it so well that he doesn’t respond to your next two dozen words--just stares you in the face, grinning. Victory is his, period, no matter what’s coming out of your mouth.

“How about,” you say finally, sitting now on the edge of the bed, pinned between his spread feet, “how about you put that chair down and sit right the fuck here and let me straddle your goddamn lap.”

That a man so big moves as fast as he does shouldn’t still shock you, but it does.

“Right there,” he says when you’re speared on his pretty, fevered dick, your knees biting his hips. “Stay right there for me, Tone.” His head falls back and he’s beaming, his fingers cupping the curves of your ass. “Oh, god, oh my god. You're so gorgeous like this. Oh fuck.”

This time, he lets you set the pace, the speed of it, the furor, the ride, and something tells you to take it slower than you want to, slower than almost you can stand, just to see the way his mouth twists, to feel the way his fingers dig in when you catch the right angle, the way that he breathes. At some point, he gets a hand on your cock while still holding your weight and that Does Things to your gut and to your dick, too: it’s easy to forget how strong he is, sometimes, how easily he could bend the world to his will, if he wanted, bend you, but for all your shouting and public contretemps, you know he’d never hurt you, no matter how mad you made him for calling him on his dumb and/or seriously misguided shit.

No, even now, he’s hold you like something fragile, somehow, despite the fact that he’s stripping your dick as you fuck yourself on his and that’s why you’re glad that nobody knows about this, it is, because it means that you can lean back in his big, broad, loving hands and let yourself be fucking held and when he comes with a wail that he bites into your shoulder and a twist of his wrist that makes you cry out and cream his stomach, his fist, the balance between you, in that fierce, beautiful moment is the best it’s ever been, the best you’ve ever had.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” you mumble later as he nudges you out of the shower and semi-carries you back to the bed.

“You don’t want me to?”

“No.” You snuggle into his arms, press your mouth against his neck. “You saying it’s my choice?”

“Isn’t it?” He kisses your temple and lays you back down in softness, in the least fucked-up part of the bed. “By which I mean, yeah, I think it is.”

“Ok, then. Stay.”

He chuckles, a dry sound in the warm dark, and tucks himself in beside you. “Whatever you say, Tony.”

There’s a smart remark there somewhere, but Steve’s breathing in your ear and pulling you close and hell, if you let him get away with it just this one time, nobody will ever know.

#stony #secret relationship

[mentalmimosa]

i’d tell you everything

Prompt: Phone sex operator AU

It’s not that Steve feels bad about calling a phone sex line. It’s that he feels, well, kind of ridiculous.

“I can set you up with Pepper’s friend from accounting,” Tony’d said that morning.

“Have you talked to that new kid in marketing?” Nat had needled as she lingered at his desk. "He's really cute."

“Hey, man,” Sam had said as they wandered back from lunch, cheap cigarettes in hand, “you seriously still running with this celibacy thing?”

Steve’d blushed and hidden it behind a sip. “I, uh. Yeah. I guess.”

They stopped at the crosswalk, stuck behind a gaggle of giggly tourists. “Steve,” Sam’d said, “this is gonna sound crass as hell, but it comes from a kind place, I swear: when the last time you stuck your dick in something that wasn’t your fist?”

“Er,” Steve said with a nervous laugh, “I don’t know. Not like I’m tracking it down to the minute.”

Sam’s eyes had gone wide behind his shades. “Oh, god. That long?”

See, he may have made a huge mistake in telling everybody he wasn’t dating on purpose, that it was an intellectual choice borne of thoughtful consideration and a deep reflection or something. The truth was that since his accident, dating scared the hell out of him, the singles scene even more so, and he’d be damned if he was going to waste his second chance at living worrying about whether he was worthy of love. He was, obviously, he just wasn’t going to burn daylight looking for The One because a) there was no such thing and b) he had his friends and weekend phone calls from his mom and he was fine on his own, really, pretty damn great. If he met the right person, cool, and if he didn’t, well, like Sam had said, sort of, that’s what his right hand was for.

Hence phone sex. Hence feeling 100% idiotic. Hence sweaty palms and dry mouth and (truth be told) an already semi-interested dick--all before anybody picks up.

“Hi, baby.”

“Um. Hi.”

A chuckle. “What’s your name?”

“Steve.” Shit. Steve winces. Was he supposed to use a pseudonym? Too late now.

“Hi, Steve. I’m Buck.”

Ok, that’s so obviously a fake name. He’s messed this up already. Why hadn’t he come with something before he dialed? Or just blurted out Tony? Stark would've approved.

“Steve?” A raised eyebrow of a word. “Did I lose you?”

“No, no, sorry. Sorry. I’m here.”

“No need to be sorry. Let me guess: this is your first time calling one of these things, isn’t it?”

“It shows, huh?”

That chuckle again, warmer now. “Baby, I can hear newbies a mile away. It’s ok. We can take it at whatever pace that you’d like. We can talk about the weather, if you want to.”

It’s a nice voice, Steve thinks. Brooklyn for sure, but with a background kind of purr. “People call you and talk about the weather? Come on.”

“Would you believe,” Buck says, “that I have one regular who jacks off to thunderstorms? Thinks he’s the Norse god of thunder or some shit.”

“Seriously?”

“Mmm. Nothing makes him come harder than a big lightning strike.”

There’s something about hearing Buck say come that makes Steve’s hips twitch like, hello , that’s the whole reason he’s here. Or not here here, but hearing every catch in Steve’s breath. There are a lot of those, suddenly.

“Oh,” he says.

A hum. “What makes you come, Steve?”

“Um.”

“Do you need a mouth on your cock?”

Oh god. “That...that wouldn’t hurt.”

“No, it wouldn’t. Not if I was the one licking you, nuzzling your balls and tracing your shaft and teasing that wet little slit.”

Steve’s cock jerks. “Shit.”

“Tell me what it looks like.”

“What?”

Buck laughs, the sound a hot shot. “Your dick, honey.”

“It’s, ah--”

“How long are you?”

Steve feels himself flush. “9 inches.”

“Ohhh, a big boy, huh? I like it. Does it drip?”

“Does it--?” It takes him a second. “Sometimes there’s a lot of precum, yeah.”

A soft little sound. “Is there a lot of precum right now?”

“I don’t know. It’s still in my boxers.”

“I think you should take that shit off.”

It takes one hand and some scrabbling and then he’s free, boxers around his ankles. “They’re off.”

“So. Look at your cock for me, Steve. Touch that pretty hot head. You wet for me yet?”

He’s sure Buck knows the instant he complies because a moan slips out of his mouth, a clean sheet waving in the breeze. “A little, but I’m not--”

“Not what, baby?”

“Not all the way stiff yet.”

“Haven’t you been touching it?” Buck’s voice is barbed now. “All this time we’ve been talking and you haven’t been playing with it?”

“No, I told you, I just took of my--”

“Get a hand on it.”

Shit. Steve’s hips come up off the bed. “Buck.”

“Oh,” Buck says, "that's pretty. I like that. Stroke your cock and say that again.”

The receiver is getting hard to hold on to; he pins it between his shoulder and his ear and reaches down, curls his fingers around the shaft, slides. “Oh, Buck.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“Feels good.”

A purr. “Then don’t stop.”

He doesn’t. He couldn’t. He lets his head falls back. “Keep talking to me.”

“If I were there,” Buck says, “I’d be watching you. Laying next to you and pinching your nipples and telling you to keep going, not to stop.”

“Not gonna. Not.”

“And I’d be breathing in your ear, just like this. Talking sweet and dirty to you as you made your dick hard for me.”

Steve’s eyes fall shut. There’s a blurt of heat from his slit. “For you?”

“Mmmhmmm. All for me. You know why?”

“No.”

“Because I’m wet and stretched already. Been like this the whole night. Ever since you came home from work.”

“You--?”

“Uh huh. The whole time we were eating supper, the whole time we were watching a movie on the couch, I was open for you, honey. Dripping. You could’ve taken me in one push.”

He can see it. Oh, god, can he: a beautiful man tucked beside him on the couch, smirking, his fingers teasing the curve of Steve’s knee all night, nails turning over denim: wet and ready for him and not saying a goddamn thing.

“Or in the kitchen when we were cleaning up,” Buck hums. “I thought about it, you know--unbuckling my belt and bending over the counter while your back was turned to see if you’d get the fucking hint.”

A whine rolls out of Steve’s throat, a whimper. “Oh, god. Why didn’t you just ask me to?”

“I thought you’d notice how hard I was. Wanted you to. Sometimes I like it when I don’t have to ask, when you just take me. When you can just look at me and know that I’ve been thinking about getting dicked all day.”

“Did you now?”

A moan. “Ever since you left this morning. Ever since I rolled over and tugged one out on your side of the bed. Can you smell me there, baby? I hope so. I poured out an awful lot.”

Steve can. God help him, for a second, he’d have sworn that he could. “Oh shit.”

“Thought about you all day. In the shower, when I was at the store.” Buck’s voice is softer now, but thicker: caramel straight from the jar. “But every time I got myself off, all I could think of was how much I missed you, Steve. How much I needed you to get home already and pound one out in my ass.”

Steve’s balls jerk, a sure, pure sign. Fuck, it’s been a long time. “Is that what you want?” he gets out. “You wanna be full?”

“Mmmmm, fuck.” Is it him, or does Buck sound a little breathless, too? “Fuck yes, I do. Of you."

“Tell me how you got yourself ready for me.”

“I got naked and spread out on your bed. Got the lube and my big toy, the one that reminds me of you, you know the one?”

Steve rolls with it. “Yeah. The purple one that you made me buy for you. The one you begged for.”

“Because it’s long like you are. Because when you’re not here and I need it, what else am I supposed to do?”

Steve is lost in this shit, lost, and suddenly the horror stories of 900-numbers and $300 phone bills don’t seem so goddamn far-fetched. He could listen to Buck talk to him like this for hours--if he weren’t about to burst. “You’re supposed to be good and wait for me. Not play with yourself all day.”

A whine. “I couldn’t help it.”

“Yes, you could. You just didn’t want to.”

“No,” Buck pants. “I didn’t. And I’m tired of waiting now. Let me sit on that dick, daddy, please.”

His fist is flying now. “You want it so bad, Buck,” he hears himself growl, “you come take it.”

“Mmmmm, god yes,” Buck says, the words curling in Steve’s ear like cats. “I’m straddling your hips and I’m sinking down on your big, hot cock. Making you push it in my tight little hole.”

The image is killing him: this velvet-voiced stranger arched over him, his body taut as he reaches down and guides Steve’s cock inside and all at once he’s close, holy shit, he is so fucking close to coming his brains out that there’s not a cent left to make words.

And yet somehow, this person who's never met him, who can't see him knows that he’s at the edge; he can hear it in Buck’s voice behind the heat, a surge of something almost triumphant. “And when you’re like this, daddy,” Buck breathes, “don’t you fucking forget: you belong to me. You’re mine.”

What comes after is a shout, a shout and a spurt that hits his chin as he creams his fist and somewhere, beyond the sounds of his own pleasure, he can hear Buck sighing, his breath going quick and gorgeous and sweet.

“That’s right,” Buck says in his ear like he’s really there, like there’s no static between them, no wires or receiver, no telephone line. “Oh, god, Steve, come for me. Just like that.”

#stucky #shy steve #phone sex operator bucky #1980s au

[mentalmimosa]

as they touched

The bed shifted, the silken sheet slipped, and Thor, King of Asgard and newly-crowned All Father, awoke just enough to squint into the sands of early morning light.

“Mmmm. Loki?”

Just beyond the bed, a slim figure stopped. “Brother.”

“Where’re you going?”

“Nowhere."

Thor raised his head a little and got a better look at Loki’s bony shoulders, the long tangle of his dark, snarled hair. “Now, now,” he said. “Don’t lie to your king.”

That got him a stink-eye, a perfectly curled wrench to his brother’s mouth. “Oh, please.”

“Ah, how I love to hear you say such things.”

He’d meant it as a tease, another way of needling, but when the words left him, they emerged into the world quite sincere, even to his own ear. Perhaps this was why they made Loki blush.

“So,” Loki said, “I am now very aware.”

It was only now as Thor’s eye adjusted to the shadows that he could see the angry bloom of love bites on his brother’s throat (Loki’s head fallen back, his nails in Thor’s neck, his voice loud and sweet--harder, he’d whined, shoving his soft flesh against Thor’s mouth. Oh, fuck, darling, use your teeth) and what roused him was not so much their presence but that Loki had allowed them to remain, these iris reminders of Thor’s eagerness and their shared desire. A desire, it seemed, that had simmered for centuries, a boil-pot they’d both allowed to linger on the stove and yet, until last night, never spoken of one to the other. And even that might not have come had Loki not come to him after supper shaking, the tremble in his body fiercer than any Thor had ever seen him wear before.

“You never cease to amaze me, brother,” he’d said when Thor let him in, when he froze just inside the doorway with his eyes dark and his fists closed and clenched. “Just when I think you’ve finally discovered some fucking sense, I swear, it’s as if you go out of your way to prove me wrong.”

Thor laughed. He’d had far too much ale and too pleasant an evening to let Loki’s temperamentalness shake him. He said as much. Which only seemed to incense Loki more.

“You’re making a fool out of yourself,” he’d said, thumping two fingers at the center of Thor’s chest. “You do realize that, don’t you? That...that boyis far too fragile for you. And far too dull, might I add. Are you really proposing to spend the next thousand years with a human like that in the sack?”

“He’s to be my consort, not my courtesan.” Thor brushed his brother’s hand aside and felt some of his good humor cracking. “And I can think of no better man for the task.”

“Man, pah! Precisely. I know you’re always set a store by Midgard, Thor, but that’s a far cry from marrying one. That's taking things a bit too far, don't you think?”

“I’m not going to argue with you about this, brother. It’s none of your concern and neither are you in any position, might I add, to be questioning your king."

“My king,” Loki sneered. “Yes, that is what’s got you back on your high horse, isn’t it? Stick a crown on your head and slap a gold patch on your eye and suddenly, you’re the All Knowing.”

“Yes,” Thor said. “That is exactly how it works.”

The expression on Loki’s face was more than a storm; it was fury. Never before had Thor seen his brother’s eyes so alight, so alive, and he was trembling again, so violently now that his hair had tumbled from its knot and lay shaking on his shoulders and it was as if Loki felt so much anger that his body could barely contain it, a butterfly about to burst from the nest.

“You’re making a mistake,” Loki spat. “A dreadful one, frankly. That boy--”

“His name is Steven.”

“That boy,” Loki said again, louder, “is not what Asgard needs. He’s not what you need, Thor. I know you can’t understand that because you don’t think with your brain, you never have, and this Steven, I think, appeals too much to your cock and perhaps even your heart for reason and good sense and the betterment of your fucking kingdom to have even the slightest chance.”

Thor grabbed his brother’s arms, each fist a vise at Loki’s elbow; the soft glow of the evening was gone. “You will not talk about him that way.”

Loki laughed, the sound and the color high in his cheeks. “I shall talk about him however I like.”

“Even you don’t have that right.”

“Wrong. I have every right. You’re just too much an idiot to see it. You always have been, though. I don’t know why I thought when we came to this moment it would be any different.”

He shook Loki hard. Hel, he hated riddles; hated them more when they came from Loki’s mouth, for even if he discovered the answer, there was always some barbed truth hidden there. “What moment?”

“This!” Loki said. The word rang from the walls, high and wild. His gown had slipped from his shoulder. “The moment of your marriage, brother.”

“I’m not married yet.”

“Don’t you think I know that? Would I be here if you were?”

“I don’t know!” Thor had shouted. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here now.”

And here Loki had gone soft in his grip, the tension in his brother’s body falling away, leaving only dark eyes and a slow, resigned sadness in the lines of his mouth, in his eyes. “Of course you don’t,” Loki said. “Which is why I must do this, or I shall never forgive myself. And if there’s one thing I can’t abide carrying along in this life, it’s remorse.”

Then Loki’s hands had been on his face, a long-fingered frame, his own grip broken as easily as silence, as glass, and then Loki’s mouth was on his, gently; a tentatively posed question, not a demand.

It was this softness that had taken Thor aback, that had startled him at first into submission and then, as his hands found his brother’s hips and swallowed the curves of his ass, he came to understand that what he felt all at once in his heart, in his blood, was no trick. There was no pretense left between them, he thought as Loki’s lips parted for his tongue, as his thumbs stroked the scratch of Thor’s cheeks; no more anger, no more fury. There was, as they touched, only this:

The stays of his brother’s gown tearing and the green-gray falling away, Loki’s body cool against his tunic, the gorgeous ache he felt to have that skin against his own.

Loki on his back, his legs spread. The smell of his sex as he watched Thor undress.

That first moment of union when he slipped into the folds of his brother’s body. The sound Loki had made. The way he had whimpered Thor’s name.

And then they had done it again, and again: winding themselves together in the king’s bed, Thor’s bed, and whispering things to each other that had for too long gone unsaid until exhaustion found the gods and swept them to sleep, intertwined, Thor on his back and Loki curled up against him, his dark head settled on Thor’s chest.

“Loki,” he said now, remembering, adoring. “There’s no need to run.”

His brother tightly clutched the sheet he wore about him. He was trembling again. “To be here isn’t my place," he said. "Surely even you--especially you--can understand that.”

“Your place is where you wish for it to be.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.” Thor sat up. He ached to stretch out his hand, but as he stood there, Loki seemed less like the fervent creature he had always known and more like a frightened bird searching for a reason to fly. “Even if I would like you to stay here with me.”

“Your servants will be in soon.”

“And?”

Loki bit his lip. “And if I am here when they do, it will be no secret.”

“And?”

“And, brother, word will find its way to your betrothed.”

“Better he know now rather than later.”

His brother’s eyes flew to his. “Knew what?”

“That I, as you are so fond of saying, my love, have been an absolute fool.”

And in that moment, Thor knew that it was so; knew that, somewhere in his heart of hearts, beneath the armor of Asgard, of their father’s expectations, of war and diplomacy and all the trappings that came with being at last a king, he had always loved Loki, always needed to have him near, and it was only now he understood that the closeness he’d always sought in conflict was so much more perfectly realized here in his bedchambers, between the whispered song of soft sheets, his brother moving beneath him in exquisite rhythm as together, they reached for the stars.

Loki’s jaw was set, but in his mouth, now Thor could see the need there, the ache. “I’m not in the mood for jests.”

Thor shot to the base of the bed on his knees and reached for his brother, knocked the sheet, the last fears he clung to, to the floor, and growled: “Neither am I.”

This time, when he claimed Loki’s cunt, his brother was astride him and the room was filled with light: the sun stretching her fingers around the edges of the drapes and the stretch of Loki’s smile, his own.

#thorki #first time #king thor