Disclaimer: I don't own. I don't profit.
Unbeta'd. Slash. Which I hardly ever write, but there was an idea I wanted to explore...so. If it sucks...I'll take it down. This was written before the Avengers came out, so some of the details of place/timing of events is slightly off.
The Texture of His Skin
The first time Steve sees Loki is when they capture him. Or rather when Loki surrenders to get inside SHIELD headquarters and closer to the Cube. But the Avengers don't know that yet and it feels like a victory.
Six soldiers lead Loki into the interrogation room. He's too pale, his skin wan beneath the fluorescent lights. His hair is too long. He's not as broad as Thor, but that is all right, Thor is as bulky as a bear, his weight unnatural, Loki looks like a man whose form is hewn by use and action, not magic or misplaced vanity.
Steve thinks he's beautiful, and Steve's eyes, on an old instinct he's spent years trying to control, drift down over Thor's younger brother's body, betraying Steve's own. When he remembers himself, and lifts his eyes back up, the young prince of Asgard is smirking at him. Steve wonders if his team mates notice, half expects Loki to say something...Something along the lines of, "Like what you see?"
No one would take it seriously, and even if they did it is a different time and his team mates think differently about men being attracted to men than they did in Steve's day. Steve knows this, even if he doesn't feel it.
But Loki says nothing, his smirk just drifts away, and Steve is left staring at Loki's eyes and they hold no expression at all.
x x x x
Loki steals the Cube. The Avengers get it back.
And then Steve doesn't see Loki again for a year.
Steve's fighting HYDRA agents in some dingy castle in a tiny country that used to be part of the Soviet Union, and the place catches fire. Fire too hot and too blue to be natural. He's cut off from his teammates, and in a last desperate gamble he throws himself through the flames. His suit may not catch fire, but it feels as though every nerve in his body does, it hurts so badly his body freezes. He isn't in pain. He is pain. Until there is darkness.
He begins to regain consciousness on a bed so comfortable it is a struggle to come fully awake. Every time his eyelids start to lift sleep pulls him down with warm and welcome tendrils. It is only when he realizes that he doesn't hurt anywhere that fear jolts his eyes open. He should be melted, he should be in agony. He looks at his hands, they are perfect...but bound in fabric that feels like silk, but is impossibly strong. He thrashes against it until he is panting and the covers that were over him are tangled with his naked limbs.
He's just realizing he's going to have to start using his brain rather than his brawn to escape when he hears a familiar voice.
"Ah, good you're awake."
It's Loki. He's dressed in his armour, though he's not wearing his helmet.
"Now you've aligned yourself with HYDRA, Loki?" Steve says. "I thought you'd find working with humans beneath you."
"No, I have no alliance with HYDRA," Loki chuckles. " I just happened to be passing through and decided to help out. " Loki smiles. It is almost, not quite, a smirk.
He sits down next to Steve on the bed, and Steve finds himself licking his lips and not meeting his gaze.
"What am I doing here?" Steve says, furrowing his brow, focusing on his restraints.
"You are simply too beautiful to die," says Loki in a soft voice.
Steve's eyes betray him again. He meets Loki's gaze. Loki is not smirking. Not even smiling. Steve feels himself flush - everywhere. And he looks away. "You can't have me," he manages to say.
Loki ghosts a hand over Steve's abdomen where the covers have been dislodged, and lays it gently, reverently on Steve's exposed midriff. Steve hears men marvel how soft women's hands are. Loki's hand is not soft. It isn't calloused, but it is rougher than a woman's hands, the skin thicker and tougher, and there is the hint of stronger sinews and muscles beneath. It is such a small thing, the texture of a man's skin, but it is as heady a mixture as the sight of a man's body. Steve squeezes his eyes shut, but seems incapable of struggling. Is it magic, or is it just the relief of finally being touched?
"No," Loki says, his voice going icy. "I can have you."
And then Steve does struggle, twisting his torso out from beneath Loki's hand, and it is really a relief to know that as base as his desires are he is not that demented, he does not want to be raped by the God of Mischief and Lies.
Loki sits back. "But not the way I want you."
Hazarding a look at Loki's face again, Steve sees, he thinks, the briefest look of regret. And then just like that Steve is wandering through snow drifts, with only the blankets from the bed he was lying in a moment ago to wrap around him. There's a homing chip implanted in his ankle, and out of Loki's hideout, away from blockers, it must be a quick trace because it's not long before a helicopter picks him up.
He can see the question in Coulson's eyes when they pull Steve up in only bed covers and he tells them he was being held captive by Loki.
"I'm fine," Steve says. "He didn't hurt me." It comes out with too much vehemence. Steve's not sure if it's because he's afraid they won't believe it - and will pity him, or secretly suspect that he wanted it, which he didn't. But he did.
Or maybe the vehemence is because Steve doesn't really believe it. The would be destroyer of worlds, the man who killed his own father, who ripped up city blocks as though playing a child's games, the man who's desires are twisted in the same wrong way Steve's are apparently has some lines he will not cross. And Steve doesn't cross those lines, but they do, and it just doesn't add up somehow.
x x x x
Steve loves Natasha Romanov in all the right ways but one. He loves to make her laugh. He loves the way she makes him laugh. He admires her, idealizes her in fact. She is just a touch stronger than he was as a 90 pound weakling but she has honed her body and her mind into a killing machine. He does, on an intellectual level, think she is gorgeous.
There is just one way he doesn't love her. Just like Peggy.
The guys in the Avengers think there is something between Natasha and Steve. He doesn't disabuse them of the notion. Nor does she.
Natasha and Steve are out getting ice cream one day, just the two of them, and they're in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time, when the gay pride parade begins. Some of the participants in the parade behave so lewdly it makes Steve's stomach constricts. He hates it all instantly. Even if he is slowly, painfully, trying to come to terms with who he is, who he wants, it's too much, too loud, too showy. Steve is an American first and foremost, a soldier and Avenger next, an artist, an avid motorcyclist, and a baseball fan. He has a visceral distaste for these people who seem to want to make his sexual orientation his primary identifier.
Natasha raises an eyebrow and says, "I think a nice quiet doctor or accountant would be more your type."
Steve scowls at her. They haven't talked about this. He hasn't talked about it with anyone, and he hates that she just assumes, just knows.
Looking a little hurt she says, "I thought we were friends..." And then looking down, she adds, "I thought we both wanted protection," she says. And he knows what she means. She gets tired of wandering hands, and innuendo, and invitation, and even just simple innocent misunderstandings.
He wants protection too. Because as different as this time is from his own "that is so gay," is still bandied about the Avengers headquarters. It's a far cry from things they said in his day, things like, "Hitler got it right when it came to the homos," but he still doesn't want to deal with it.
He looks away.
"I'm sorry," she says. "You're from a different time."
And he loves her and hates her that much more for understanding.
x x x x
Tony makes the magic dampening collar. It is Thor who finally gets it on Loki as Ironman and Steve hold the God of Mischief and Lies down.
As Loki's strength leaches away beneath Steve's hands, color begins to flood into Loki's skin. Like waves over sand, Loki goes from being too pale to storm cloud blue. Deep purple lines splay out from his eyes, and cross his forehead like a crown. His eyes go from green to glowing red.
Thor stumbles up and back. Steve only sees Thor's face for an instant, but it is enough to catch the look of disgust before Thor turns away.
"What, why can't you look at me brother? Why are you suddenly afraid?" Loki hisses. And then Loki looks down at where the plating of his armour has been stripped away from his thigh to reveal naked skin and he gasps.
The look of horror on Loki's face catches Steve off guard. He's heard Thor say that frost giants are the monsters parents tell their children about at night. He's heard them described as fearsome and hideous, with sharp teeth and misshapen bodies and heads - none of which Loki seems to have. But to see the look on Thor's face, the look on Loki's face, it is to understand, to feel the weight of these words.
And suddenly so much falls into place. Loki's inferiority complex, his intense self loathing, even his attempted destruction of Jotunheim hits Steve close to home. During World War II a soldier tried to creep into one of Steve's guy's bunk in the middle of the night, completely uninvited, and with malevolent intent. Steve had killed enough in battle at that point to almost not think about it. But he'd never wanted to hurt anyone so much as that would be assailant, the assailant who was Steve through a twisted mirror. He still wasn't sure how he didn't do more than just hand the guy over to the MP's a little too roughly.
Steve had 26 years to learn to cope with what he was. Loki had hours before Thor came back to Asgard and Loki tried to destroy Jotunheim.
x x x x
Without his magic, in his true color, Loki seems to whither. The once proud, arrogant, prince doesn't look any of the Avengers in the eyes anymore. When Steve looks at Loki, Loki studiously trains his eyes on a point just below Steve's chin. They lock him in a cell, and he hardly protests. The Avengers always keep someone on watch, it is Loki, and they can't quite believe they've vanquished him, but mostly they move on to other supervillians.
It's near the end of Steve's watch one day and Steve's not doing really doing anything. On the other end of the video monitor Loki isn't doing anything either. Loki's face is as hidden as it can be from the three cameras - which isn't much.
It's such a strange thing to Steve's mind that being blue would bring such shame. Loki's still beautiful. Maybe more beautiful. More exotic. More otherworldly. And his glowing eyes, they take some getting used to, but they are hardly ugly.
Steve shakes his head. He wants to talk to Loki, but distrusts his motivations. So he sits on one end of the monitor and Loki sits on the other.
Leaning forward, he jumps a little when Natasha says, "Hey, you're relieved soldier."
She's in for her shift, and Steve would have gotten up and left right away, except Tony is walking by and he pokes his head in.
"Hey you two," Tony says, "No mischief here!"
Tony winks at the pun and Steve turns away embarrassed. Things with Natasha aren't how they were before.
It's because he's turned that he notices. "Hey guys, it looks like one of the cameras went out."
Tony comes in and taps the monitor. "Huh," he says. "Well our boy is alright. Look there he is."
Steve looks at the other camera, and there is Loki in semi-profile, Steve can just barely see the sharp outline of his cheek, the barest hint of his nose. The other camera is trained on the door of the cell.
Tony probably doesn't have the map of Loki's cell ingrained in his mind quite the way Steve does. "Call medical!" Steve yells, and rushes from the room.
It's grueling long minutes before Steve is able to rush through the cell door. Loki's tipped the bed up, it leans against the wall and Loki's got a noose tied to an upper strut that looks like it's made from the same fabric as the sheets. Loki's eyes are closed, but his body is still twitching, and even if it wasn't Steve still would have run over, lifted Loki's body and ripped the noose from the strut. The effort of holding Loki's body aloft and disconnecting the tightly wound cord has both of them collapsing on the floor when Steve is done, Loki nearly falling in Steve's lap, both their legs splayed out before them, Steve's back to the lifted bed, Loki's back to Steve's.
Steve is gasping and Loki's lungs tremble and wrack his chest. The breaths Loki takes are ragged and unvoluntary. With an angry gasp Loki says, "Why did you do that?"
Steve's arms are around Loki, he can feel Loki's muscles beneath the shirt he wears. Sighing into Loki's hair Steve huffs a laugh. "Because you're too beautiful to die."
"You are a liar!" Loki says and tries to pull away but Steve holds him fast, leaning into Loki's back, pushing him down, the blue of Loki's blue cheekbones with their indigo starburst patterns a blur at the edge of his vision. Finding Loki's hands with his own, Steve, squeezes tightly. The texture of Loki's skin - it is still the same.
Lifting one of Loki's hands up, he stares at the knuckles for a moment. They have the starburst patterns too. Steve kisses them gently and Loki shudders but doesn't struggle. The security footage will reveal it to all later, but it is a life, or maybe two he's attempting to mend.
Neither one of them is whole. Neither one of them is healed. But. Turning his head to Loki's ear, Steve whispers, "Not anymore."
A/N:
This is really just a quick sketch of an idea. Someone else can probably do it better (maybe has done it better). I won't develop this story more. So have at it if you want!
But I thought the someone growing up homosexual in the early part of last century, and someone who is "the monster parents tell their children" about at night, might have a bit in common.
Reviews don't have to be love.