This follows on from StarTrekFanWriter's "What Happens in Alfheim (stays with you the rest of your natural born life)" and that follows on from my "A Kindness Repaid." I recommend reading both of those first if you want to understand Loki's motivation in this, and why everyone's so worried about Thor. But if you don't fancy that, suffice it to say that Steve and Lady Loki have woken up after a night of carousing in Alfheim to find themselves unexpectedly and irrevocably married...
o.0.o
The next time he awoke, Steve was alone in the bed. There was a clink of metal, a scent of warm raspberries and fresh bread. When he raised himself to an elbow, looked out at the rest of the room, he found his wife – his wife, how about that? – setting out covered plates of breakfast on the low table.
She'd swapped her evening gown for something a little more Asgardian, but it wasn't the armour she wore as a man: Skin tight green leather trousers and tall boots with a little kick heel, a blouse that was half corset, half plate mail, yet still did nothing to conceal that magnificent cleavage. She must have just come from the bath, for her raven hair was beginning to dry into tumbled curls. Golden ornaments clipped into it shimmered as she moved and were echoed by the delicate golden chains she'd wound around her hips.
And how strange it was – yet why was it strange? – that she looked so womanly, so comfortable in that body, when (he?) had looked so confident, so elegantly, deadly male in the other.
Somehow the prospect of getting up, eating, bathing, moving on with his life brought everything home to Steve. When they had woken up first, she'd obviously got there ahead of him in terms of figuring out what a God damned mess this had made of both their lives. He'd been too busy reassuring her to think deeply himself. And then there had been the sex.
She'd led him through that with patient, imaginative and unsparingly detailed instruction. He'd been too distracted, split between excitement and cringing embarrassment to worry about anything else, though the thought of where she must have acquired her encyclopaedic knowledge still disturbed him more than a little. But now, now there were no more distractions and the sheer enormity of the rest of his married life clamoured for his attention.
As he slid out of bed, she looked up and smiled. No tears any more, this was the inscrutable smile he was used to from his friend – the one that said "I know something you don't. It's ever so funny, but I don't feel inclined to share."
"You seem," he tried, feeling the situation sifting through his fingers like sand, "a bit more yourself. Is it OK if I... if I get cleaned up?"
"Of course," she sat with the same quiet graciousness she had used when (he?) had rescued Steve that first time, healed and restored him in (her?) supervillain lair. "I'll leave you at least half of breakfast, though if you take too long it will be the worst half."
Last night, when they'd been dancing together, even this morning when she wept like any ordinary woman, he had been able to think of her as a separate entity – a pretence, a disguise put on by his friend that was different in some fundamental way from the real thing.
But with her poise restored, the riddles back in those green eyes and the twist of that habitual smile – even on lips redder and fuller than he was used to – it was becoming harder to keep the two versions apart, either in his head or his heart.
That shouldn't come as quite such a puzzle. Shaking his head, because he couldn't get the thoughts to settle into any kind of realisation, Steve swathed himself in a sheet and took his sudden attack of philosophy to the bath.
An elvish bath, shaped out of one huge diamond and lit by a skylight that allowed the sun to beam onto the pool and fill the room with rainbows that split and shattered and swam across the walls with every ripple of water. Steve's incipient dark mood couldn't survive the radiance, and after five minutes immersed in light he found all his misgivings dissolving away and a great buttery lake of satiated smugness taking their place.
OK so this was not how he'd imagined his future would go, but oh boy, it had its compensations.
He was whistling as he emerged and knelt by the table to discover he'd been left all of the bacon and the sausages, half of the bread, none of the raspberries, and about a half a mouthful of small beer sloshing forlornly on the bottom of the tankard. Watching him squint at it, she gave a winsome smile that worked on Steve a great deal better in her new form than it had in the old, and shrugged. "I forgot."
"So," Steve got water from the bathroom instead. It had a slight fizzy tang of sulphur and hot springs, but that only made it more refreshing. "Where do we go from here?"
"Firstly," she leaned forward onto her spread elbows and watched with apparent amusement as Steve's gaze slid from her interlaced fingers to her chest. Snapping her fingers in his face, she let her long sharp nails rest – half threat, half promise, just dimpling his lower lip.
"Firstly I destroy the Queen of Elfland for perpetrating this little joke on us." She narrowed her eyes as if finding it hard to pick between two equally stylish dresses. "And possibly grind her entire realm to dust under my heel. Conquer or annihilate? It's such a difficult choice."
And yeah, you know what, it suddenly became crystal clear to Steve that Loki as a woman was neither more nor less Loki than he ever had been.
He didn't quite know what to think about the fact that that came as something of a relief. So instead he focussed on the more familiar situation of being Loki's external conscience and gave a snort of laughter as if the suggestion could not possibly be taken seriously. "I'm pretty sure she did it because she thought it would be nice for you. Give you someone to talk to, you know? Someone to be on your side. She owes you, after all."
Loki's sideways jerk of the head made all the ornaments in her hair jingle. Her mouth went surly-hard. "She thought it would be nice for me if she placed my only friend in mortal peril?"
"I'm sorry?" in the absence of a magical wardrobe of his own, Steve struggled back into his tux from last night. "I thought we'd agreed that 'married to Loki' was not a fate worse than death, so you could lay off the 'putting him down for his own good' thing."
Though Steve was probably Earth's greatest expert in the meaning of Loki's expressions, that wasn't saying much at the best of times. Less so now, when they had all become unfamiliar by virtue of her new face. But he was pretty certain he saw a flash of surprise before all the shutters slammed closed and she applied a smile stolen wholesale from the Mona Lisa.
A swooping fear, Damn! Did she poison breakfast? was shouldered aside by concern. Ninety percent of the time, Steve knew Loki's mask concealed either "don't bother me now, I'm plotting the apocalypse," or "I am so hurt I can't bear you to see." Sometimes both at once. Steve didn't know which it was this time but he wasn't happy with either.
Kneeling next to her, he took her hands in his own. Long fingered hands that felt delicate and breakable in his larger grip. Not letting thoughts get in his way, he squeezed them gently, surprising her into looking at him. And under that luminous gaze, the beauty that made awe and lust tie his tongue in knots between them, it was a lot easier to carry on simply not thinking at all. "Hey. It's OK. Whatever it is, we're in this together. OK?"
She took a breath, her tight Asgardian top making it do interesting things to the mounds of her breasts, and her blankness passed into a look of such affection it startled him. There were actual dimples in her cheeks as she leaned in and kissed him soft on the corner of his mouth. "I have been worrying about how to shield you from my enemies," she said, in partial explanation.
"Most of your enemies are SHIELD," Steve touched the corner of his mouth tentatively with his fingertips, feeling it curve up in a wondering smile. The sex had been great, of course, and he was very grateful for it, but this... this made him ache a little closer to the heart. She was capable of love – he knew that already – but this was the first time he'd let himself wonder if she was capable of loving him. "And they're my friends."
"Indeed. Perhaps you are right – the Avengers should be tackled first. The Queen of Elfland can wait to find out what I thought of her little surprise. I'm sure she will enjoy the anticipation almost as much as the eventual response."
"My wife the supervillain," Steve laughed, disturbed at himself for being so amused, but Loki seemed to take the sentence for rejection. She flinched, and Steve watched with concern as she backpedalled, covering her tracks, trying to pretend she'd never reached out and made an unguarded gesture of warmth.
"We do not have to tell them. It might be wiser not to. I can invent a reason, a dozen different reasons for changing sex, or give none at all, and we can continue as before. No need for them to know we are anything more than—"
And Steve couldn't stand to hear it any more. "I'm not ashamed of you." He pulled her into a fierce hug. After a while her arms unstiffened and rose to wrap around his waist. She tucked her face into the junction of his neck and shoulder, held on tight.
"I'm not ashamed," he repeated, more gently, and if perhaps there were elements of what he said that were not strictly true, he intended to make them true, fast as possible. "I'm proud to have you as my wife. I want to tell the guys straight away, and they'd better treat you right, because if they don't—"
She didn't raise her head, just murmured it into his collar. "I don't need your protection, Steve Rogers."
It made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. "I know you don't, sweetheart. I know. But you've got it anyway."
Steve had never been able to work out the principle behind the time difference between Alfheim and Earth. Last time, they'd been in Alfheim four days and four weeks had passed on Earth. This time they left in daylight the day after Steve's party and arrived at four am on the evening before. This – and a small invisibility spell - allowed them to get to Steve's room at the mansion without encountering anything more Avenger-like than a pair of Stark's discarded pajama bottoms lying crumpled in a sorry little heap just outside his door.
And since it was the middle of the night, and they were newlyweds, he was happy to be persuaded to put the big confrontation aside until the morning and concentrate on getting in some conscientious practice with his new life skill.
When the morning eventually came, and found him waking up alone in his single bed in his cheerless bachelor room, he surprised himself by feeling miserable at the thought that maybe it had all been some weird hallucination caused by Victor's pink cloud of doom. He scrubbed a hand through his hair and lurched out to the kitchen, in sore need of a coffee and someone to tell him he hadn't dreamed the whole thing.
Which was why, when he stumbled blearily into the scent of pancakes and syrup, found Loki up before him, with an apron on, and earbuds in her ears, singing along to Evanescence while she whisked eggs, his first reaction was to go over there and kiss her on the back of her neck. It took the choking, horrified laugh over by the fridge to alert him to Tony's presence, where he stood between the fridge and the door, barefoot in old jeans, with his dark hair spiky and the blue glow of the reactor shining through his shirt. "Oh shit," he said. "Don't tell me I saw what I just saw. I may never eat again."
Steve's super-hearing picked up the tiny creak of a high-tension crossbow from behind the other door. A faint scent of dusting powder and floral shampoo said that was Natasha. Casually, he placed himself between Loki and the door – if the bolt came, it would have to go through him.
"Is this going to be a regular thing?" he asked as Loki took her headphones out and turned to smile at him. "You getting up and cooking me breakfast, I mean."
It was a different Loki this morning – one he hadn't seen for some time. Several layers of concealment and sharpness the god had not used with Steve since their friendship began were back in place, more polished and cutting than ever. The little glint of manic laughter in her eyes told him she was having a fine time dancing on the edge of chaos – half terrified, half gleeful, altogether engaged. "It is a wife's task," she said, enunciating clearly so Tony could hear every word, "to rise before her husband and make the fire, milk the goats, collect the eggs and make all ready for his comfort. In the absence of goats, I am doing my best."
"Wife?" Natasha gave up on hiding, opened the other door and leaned her shoulder on the jamb, though the pocket-sized crossbow remained unwaveringly trained on Loki's heart, via Steve's kidneys.
"Indeed," Loki gave that half moon smile – the one that said "I don't suffer from being seriously deranged: I enjoy every moment of it." If possible, it looked even creepier on her more delicate face. She leaned around Steve's sheltering bulk, stretched out her left hand, fingers splayed, and waggled her wedding ring in front of Natasha's disbelieving eyes.
Oh, Steve thought, retrieving a mug and the newly brewed dark black coffee that filled the percolator jug to the brim. We're not going with the truth, then. He took a sip and tried to not feel unprepared for this conversation, even though his teeth felt fuzzy and he wished he'd put on real trousers before leaving his room. Of course we're not. Loki would die rather than admit he was tricked into anything. Besides, if I told them, they'd try to fix it and I'm not sure I want it fixed.
"Steve?" Tony asked, coming out of hiding and taking one of the seats. His eyebrows made a break for the ceiling when Loki put a cup down in front of him and poured him coffee too. "Something you want to tell us?"
Steve gave a sheepish grin and showed them his matching ring. "It was a kind of spur of the moment thing. But yeah. Everyone say hello to Mrs. Rogers."
Lured by coffee, Natasha took a moment to speak into the headset she was already wearing, and drifted over. Effortlessly, a full cup materialised in front of her, and a plate. Loki put down pancakes in front of everyone, and Tony, who had lost his eyebrows somewhere in his hair gave that sickened scoff again. "Shit. This gives a whole new meaning to 'sleeping with the enemy.' You do know he's not even really a woman, Cap? Right?"
"Wait a moment," Natasha had produced a small device from somewhere on her skin tight costume and was testing the pancakes for poison. She had the earnest look of someone determined to do the right thing. "We don't know that. Maybe she always was a woman, and that's what made her so angry. Asgard doesn't seem like it would be a good place to be transgender – all that macho Viking bullshit."
Checking the readings, she took up a fork and speared a mouthful of pancake, picked it up and pointed it at Loki, who was leaning against the cooker looking thoroughly entertained. "You're a villain and everything, but you still get to say what you are. So what is it? Are you male or female? Are you a man or a woman?"
"I can't believe we're having this fucking conversation," Stark muttered sotto voce, as the sound of running footsteps heralded the reinforcements arriving.
Loki flicked her hair over her shoulder and grinned. "Yes."
Natasha looked like someone had stomped on her cereal, and Steve tried not to laugh. "Loki's just Loki," he said, and got one luminous moment of gratitude over her head before both doors opened again.
Clint and Bruce came, shoulder to shoulder, through one. Through the other –it took watching Loki turn to diamond hardness to prompt Steve to get a hold of his own complex of fear and fury, just at the sound of the footfalls. How had he not thought that coming home meant subjecting her to this? Through the other door came Thor.