It's hot.

Loki wipes sweat from his forehead, wishes he could wipe it off his back. Maybe he should just walk around naked and simply glamor clothing on. Of course, the trouble with that is that he might bump into someone, and if it's Thor, he'll never hear the end of it. Leather isn't a sensible choice for New York in the summer, but he's hardly going to give it up and walk around in a t-shirt like Thor's taken to doing. It exposes the four ugly scars on his arm, the wound that never healed quite right. Loki did his best, but he's not a healer and Thor didn't want to go to a doctor. The scars still bother him, though he pretends they don't.

They're trying to lie low after their last battle with Ultimus's forces in the West Village. Two men in robes, one with a cape, had showed up right at the end. Loki had made Thor and him as invisible as possible to make sure they weren't followed, because he'd gotten an uncomfortable sense that the men weren't just a couple eccentrics, and that they knew exactly who they were looking at.

"He had Jotuns this time," Loki says, reaching up to pull his hair off his neck. Thor has his tied up in a bun, and after a second, Loki relents and magicks his up the same way. He doesn't like the way it looks tied back, but his comfort right now is more important than his aesthetic. Just barely.

"Hela must have joined him," Thor says. He sounds resigned. "The Nine Realms will all have fallen to Ultimus. All except this one."

Loki runs his fingers through his hair, digging them into his skull. Thor stops walking and looks at him in concern. It's rare for Loki to show his hopelessness so openly, rarer still for Thor to acknowledge it. "Why did he choose our universe?" Loki asks.

There's a silence. Thor looks afraid to speak. Afraid to say the wrong thing, perhaps, and have Loki snap at him. Suddenly, Loki feels bad for all the times he's called Thor stupid, all the times he's hurled invective at him, said he was an oaf, sneered at him for not living up to Loki's own intelligence. But the moment passes, because really, Thor doesn't have any fear. He shrugs, then says, "Bad luck, I suppose."

"Bad luck," Loki sighs. "What a time to be alive."

"Truly, brother." Thor puts a hand on Loki's shoulder, grips it hard, then lets go. "At the very least, we're together."

Loki's brow twitches into a furrow and he frowns. "Is that worth the rest of it?" When Thor gives him a confused look, Loki waves a hand and asks, snarls, almost, "If you could take away all of this, and all you had to trade was me, wouldn't you?"

A semi blares its horn on the overpass they're standing beneath, but neither of them flinch. There's a look of confusion on Thor's face. "But it doesn't work that way," Thor says.

"Why not?" Loki asks. Why is he doing this? "Maybe it does. Maybe it could. One life for the universe. Surely you'd do it?"

Slowly, Thor shakes his head. "No," he says. "I wouldn't. We may yet win this fight. And." He hesitates, then puts a hand to Loki's neck. Thor's palm is possibly sweatier than Loki is, which is disgusting, but he doesn't move away. "Brother, how could you think I would ever trade your life? For anything?"

"I would trade yours," Loki snaps.

Shaking his head, Thor says, "You wouldn't."

With a bark of laughter, Loki says, "Of course I would. I'd trade your life for far less than the universe." In a mutter, he adds, "Like an air-conditioned room at the Ritz."

Thor smiles. It's a little sad, but mostly it's just knowing. "I would sacrifice my own life for the universe, Loki. But I wouldn't change what's happened, because it brought us together."

Glaring at the ground, Loki says, "Don't be a fool." It's amazing that a minute ago he felt bad for all the cruel things he's said to Thor over the years, and he's so easily slipped back into them. He never changes, does he? For all that he is change, his change is immutable. Predictable.

"Brother."

Despite himself, Loki looks up. Thor's gaze is both impossible to meet and impossible to look away from. The older brother that he worships, hates, loves. "What?" Loki mumbles.

"I love you," Thor says gently.

Loki's eyes sting. He swallows hard, then shrugs out of Thor's grip. "As I said, you're a fool." He kicks a crumpled, empty cigarette carton and his boot crunches down on glass, and he crosses his arms over his chest, turning away from Thor. His brother is silent.

Finally, Loki looks at the sky, what he can see of it between chainlink and barbed wire, concrete supports and derelict buildings. It's bright blue and clear.

"I love you too," he says finally, and keeps walking.

Loki opened his eyes. His stomach hurt. Something felt like it was trying to scratch its way out of his brain. He thought he'd only slept for a few hours. It had been another bad few days. Yesterday, after two days of almost no sleep for any of them, he'd found Wong dozing at the kitchen table and had sat down next to him and stared at him until he'd woken up. Watching him jump practically out of his skin had been worth it.

"Don't you have anything better to do?" Wong had asked when he had his breath back.

With a slight smile, Loki had said, "Stephen's on watch right now, so, no."

Wong looked at him flatly. "Double entendre doesn't suit you."

Which Loki had frozen at. Wong had chuckled and walked away. Figured that one of the few times Loki heard the man laugh, it was at his expense. But within minutes of that, there'd been a crisis in Belize, which had required all three of them to leave the Sanctum and tend to it. Then there'd been multiple problems at once, so Wong and Strange had split up, Strange bringing Loki with him while Loki said, "One of these days, you should probably see about acquiring a sling ring for me."

"He has a point," Wong had said with a shrug.

Strange had just looked exhausted. Loki had wanted to smooth away the lines in his forehead, the dark circles under his eyes. He'd wanted to put his fingers to Stephen's temples and make him sleep for days with magic, so he would rest. And perhaps curl up next to him and wish he could have something nice.

It was Wong's shift now. Loki sat up and looked out the window. Perhaps he should ask for a clock and stop trying to tell time by the angle of the light coming in, though he'd become pretty adept at it. It was late afternoon. The days were getting shorter. It was September now—the twelfth, he thought? There was a calendar downstairs but he'd never paid much attention to it. The days didn't matter. Even when he'd time traveled, the days hadn't mattered.

To be honest, that had gotten him in trouble once or twice.

He showered and got dressed, and when he went downstairs, Strange was in the kitchen.

Loki stopped in the doorway. "I thought you'd be asleep," he said.

Giving him a wry look, Stephen said, "I could say the same about you."

With a shrug, Loki came inside. "We've had this conversation about me. You, on the other hand, are mortal, and clearly more in need of rest than I am."

Strange snorted. "Yeah, okay, doctor." He rubbed at his eyes. "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

"Which may be sooner than any of us would like," Loki said darkly. He dug through the cupboards until he found some tea, and as he boiled water, he added, "At the rate things are going."

With a tired chuckle, Stephen said, "Hey, did I ever mention I was never much of an optimist, either?"

Loki met his eyes, smiling a little, and got his favorite smile back, the sarcastic, dry one. The kettle boiled, and he brewed his tea. As he did so, he asked, as though he was making idle conversation, "What did Wong mean when he called the Eye of Agamotto the Time Stone?"

There was a silence. When Loki turned to look at Strange, he was rubbing at his beard with his thumb. "So you caught that," he said.

Giving him a withering look, Loki said, "Of course I did. As Wong meant me to. And as you're perfectly well aware." He blew at the tea, but of course it was far too hot. As he set it back down on the counter, he raised an eyebrow and asked, "Keeping things from me, Stephen?"

"Not in the way you're implying," Strange said.

"Then in what way?"

Strange set his jaw and exhaled slowly. "Wong feels that you should be made completely aware of what you've gotten yourself into. I…"

Loki was staring at him, feeling—betrayed? Him? Now the Norns were just being absurd. "Why in the Nine Realms should I not be made completely aware of what I've gotten myself into?" he asked, a nascent snarl in his voice. He'd thought—of all people, he'd thought he could trust Stephen—

But Strange held up a hand, looking guilty. "I wanted you to be able to get out, if you wanted to," he said, sounding tired. "I wanted to…I don't know. Protect you? Like you need protecting, I know, I know. You're a god. But I just—" He shook his head. "Sorry."

As quickly as Loki's anger had risen, it receded. He didn't want to be angry at Stephen.

When he just let out a huff of air and motioned to Strange to continue, Stephen ran a hand through his hair and said, "Have you ever heard of Infinity Stones?" When Loki simply furrowed his brow, Strange said, "I figured you probably hadn't. Wong has a real flair for the dramatic when he tells this, so sorry to deprive you of that, since he had to go back to Kamar-Taj for a few hours. Anyway. The Infinity Stones were created at the same time as the universe, with the Big Bang, and each of them controls part of existence. There are six of them: Reality, Power, Soul, Mind, Space, and Time." Putting a hand on the Eye of Agamotto, he said, "This is the Time Stone." He gave Loki a meaningful look. "And you have the Space Stone."

Loki's eyebrows drew together in confusion. What was Strange talking about? Was he even more exhausted than Loki had feared? But then, with a pulse of insight tinged with blue, he understood. "The Tesseract."

"Is an Infinity Stone," Strange said. "And the gem in the scepter that you had in 2012—that was the Mind Stone."

His brain was going in a hundred directions at once. The sensation he felt when the Tesseract and the Eye of Agamotto were in the same room—and which he'd felt with the scepter, he'd held—and Thanos had wanted—

"What could someone do if they had all six?" he asked.

Strange held his eyes. "Pretty much whatever they damn well wanted to."

The Aether. The Aether was one, too. He knew the stories; Mother had told them when they were children all about the Dark Elves and the Aether. It had to be the Reality Stone. Where was it? Thor had told him that Malekith had been defeated, but where had the Aether gone?

"Thanos is still out there," he murmured.

At this, Strange's brow furrowed. "Who?"

But Loki shook his head. "Nothing." He'd never told anyone about Thanos. He wasn't going to start now. Thanos would have to be a problem for another day. One reality-ending crisis at a time. At least Ultimus didn't know about these.

Loki closed his pocket dimension protectively around the Tesseract. He felt like its keeper, just as Strange and Wong were the guardians of the Eye of Agamotto. What an absolutely absurd idea—him, the keeper of anything, besides plans gone wrong and deep, deep self-loathing.

"So now that you know, you're kind of on the hook for the Time Stone, too," Strange said quietly.

Loki didn't say anything. Then, with a thin smile, he said, "Well, I do like to accessorize."

That got a laugh. "Yeah, obviously we're a pretty fashionable order."

The tension that had been in the room fled, and Loki picked up his tea again. Finally cool enough. As he sipped at it and put it back down on the counter, he said, "I'll never understand the trust you show in me."

"Yeah," Strange said. "I know you won't."

Loki opened his mouth to reply, but suddenly, the windows shattered. Without thinking, Loki threw himself over Strange, feeling the hail of glass shards patter across his back and his head, along with a wave of pressure that roiled his guts. Once the tinkle of glass on tile had quieted, he pushed himself up on a hand, pulled a piece of glass out of his hair, and said, "Sorry, I suppose you could have used magic for that."

Strange grunted and shifted. Their legs were tangled up together, and Loki pulled his away, taking care not to get any glass on Stephen. "Yeah, no apology necessary," Strange said, looking at the glass spread all over the floor.

A smile twitched at Loki's mouth. "I wouldn't want that pretty face of yours to get marred, Strange."

Innocently, Strange said, "And I'm not complaining about having you on top of me."

A bolt went through Loki, from his stomach straight to his groin, but Strange was already scrambling to his feet. There was a familiar feeling in the air and before Loki could stand up, there was a whoosh deep within his ears.

The two of them appeared on the street outside, Strange's hand under Loki's arm as he pulled him to his feet. There was a soft spot yawning open and Ultimus's creatures were already pouring through.

"Well," Loki said, "it looks as though the protections on the Sanctum itself held, though attacking outside is really the next best thing."

Strange snapped his arms out, shields appearing on his hands, and Loki summoned his knives to his hands and took his first good look at today's attack on reality.

They were Asgardians.

Loki's chest tightened and his mind screamed as he cursed Ultimus with every epithet, every piece of profanity, that he knew. Did Ultimus think that by sending his own people against him, that he'd stop fighting? Did he really think he could do worse than what he'd already done? Loki would fight him until Ultimus was dead, annihilated to dust and nothingness, or until he was dead himself. There was no in between.

With a hard laugh, Loki said, "It appears that I'm not the only Asgardian in your social circle anymore."

"You have a really interesting definition of 'social circle,'" Stephen said as the creatures charged them.

Loki shrugged, and, bringing his knives up, he crossed them and shot several balls of energy at the oncoming creatures. The Cloak of Levitation streaked through the shattered windows and settled on Strange's shoulders, tripping up several of the creatures along the way and allowing Strange to open portals up beneath them to send them elsewhere.

Then, the Asgardians were on them, black eyes wide open and unseeing, black veins pulsing. Loki slashed at them, cutting throats and sticking them through whatever was left of their hearts, as Strange dropped his shields in favor of a rope of crackling magic, which he wielded like a whip.

Spreading his fingers, Loki flung a swathe of magic at their attackers, knocking the front wave off their feet. Strange transported them away, and as he did so, Loki kept the creatures off him, flinging a knife through the throat of one, then whirling to jam his other blade under the ribs of another, rage pounding through his veins the whole time. Rage was better than grief. He summoned the dagger he'd thrown back to his hand as Strange lashed out with his weapon, ducking down to whip it out. It wrapped around the leg of a nearby creature, pulled it off balance, and Loki stabbed it in the gut.

One of the creatures barreled into him from behind, its hand reaching around for his face, trying to rake his eyes out with its long, dirty fingernails. He ducked away but it got an arm around his neck, hooking its elbow under Loki's chin and choking him. Right. They were Asgardians. And they were strong.

He flipped his knife the other way in his hand and stabbed blindly up and back. The blade found purchase, sinking into flesh, but even though the creature screamed, it didn't let go of him. Then, suddenly, Strange vanished from in front of him. There was a hiss of magic behind him then he was free. As he whirled to face the creature, he saw Stephen had his weapon around its neck. He released it and immediately circled his hand. The creature dove for him, shrieking, black blood pulsing out of the wound in its side, but before it got there, a portal opened, then lensed shut the moment it disappeared.

"Fuck off," Stephen said, snapping the rope of magic.

Loki caught his eye and gave him a feral grin. "Not a bad move, for a surgeon."

Strange scoffed. "I guess I should take that as a compliment."

And then they were fighting again. The soft spot seemed to be getting bigger and Ultimus's creatures were still pouring through it. This wasn't usually how it went. Usually they stopped at a certain point, because the soft spot got unstable on Ultimus's end—at least, that was what Loki had always thought.

Oh no. Was this the one? Was this the one that Ultimus had figured out how to keep open?

Loki blasted a line of creatures with magic, then yelled, "Strange, we have to bind that soft spot or eventually they'll overrun us!"

"It's too big," Strange shot back. He cast a spell that Loki had never seen before, causing the asphalt to fold in on itself, then outwards, covering a group of creatures, crushing them until their screams cut off. Loki ducked a swinging hand and stabbed a creature in the chest, pushing it away, and as he turned back to Stephen, he caught a flicker of unease on Strange's face. "Last resort," Strange muttered, then turned towards the soft spot and cast a spell.

Mirrored planes fractaled up and over the soft spot, and over the creatures still pouring out of it, and then all of it winked away into nonexistence.

Well, not nonexistence. It was the mirror dimension, which meant that inside it, the soft spot was still open and Ultimus's creatures were still coming out of it. But without a sling ring, they were cut off from the rest of the world.

A few of the creatures were still outside the mirror dimension. Strange opened portals up beneath several of them, but one was running at him from behind. Loki flung a dagger, which sank itself up to the hilt in the creature's throat. It toppled over as Strange whirled around. Loki flipped his hair out of his face. "You're welcome," he said, earning a wry smile from Strange.

That smile was thanks enough. Pathetic, but there it was. This was what love did to you.

That took care of all of them. As Loki made his way to Stephen's side, stepping over bodies, he realized he had to decide if he was alright with that. Being in love with this mortal. Because he was, wasn't he? What was the point of denying it anymore?

Then again, even if he wasn't alright with it, did it matter? It was what it was. He didn't think he could turn it off now even if he wanted to.

Strange was surveying the carnage in the street. "Maybe next time, we could try not to kill as many of them," he said.

Pulling his dagger out of the creature's throat—refusing to look at its face, in case this was someone he'd once known—Loki waved a hand over the blade to clean the blood from it, then vanished it back into his sleeve. "Right. 'Do no harm.' I'll stop killing them if they stop trying to kill us." Glancing at Stephen, he asked, "Why haven't you been putting them in the mirror dimension this whole time?"

"Because," Strange said. "The mirror dimension is even less stable than our universe these days. I give that one a week before it collapses."

Frankly, this didn't seem like a reason not to have made more use of this method, but Loki didn't want to argue. "I suppose we'll deal with it in a week, then," he said. Strange just made a noise.

The two of them stood side by side, both breathing heavily. His blood was up, adrenaline was coursing through him. It made him feel like all the reservations about his feelings that he'd been piling up in front of himself like a barricade were immaterial. Less than immaterial. Nothing. Pointless. Easily knocked aside, because he was a fool to have put them there in the first place. Because suddenly, Loki was vividly aware of how close Stephen was, of his body heat, his smell—sweat and magic and something indefinably him, the smell of his soap and laundry detergent and his skin—the fact that it was all too easy to imagine him breathing like that under different circumstances.

He turned. Stephen was looking at him. And Loki may have been young by Asgardian standards, but he'd been around long enough to know that look. This was stupid. He wasn't strong enough to fight it. He wanted Stephen Strange. And it was very clear that Stephen Strange wanted him too.

You want me on top of you, do you, Strange?

Letting out a hard exhalation of air, he closed the remaining distance between them and brought a hand up to trace his thumb lightly over Stephen's cheekbone. There was a look in Stephen's eyes, a yes, fuck yes, what are you waiting for kind of look. So Loki stopped fighting.

He kissed him.

And if Loki was given to sentimentality, to poetry, to romance, he would have thought something like, it was more than a single, stupid point of physical contact between them, more than their mouths opening to each other and Stephen's hands on him, it was—it was—well, there was magic, because that was who both of them were. He ran his hands down to Stephen's shoulders, then chest, and his arms went around him, his fingers catching on Stephen's belts. Stephen pulled Loki closer, his hands in his hair, palms pressed to his ribs and his hips, and for a minute, maybe two or three, or maybe an eternity, Loki gave himself over to the moment and stopped thinking.

But just as magic was at the core of who he was, so was thinking. Reluctantly, with a quiet groan, he pulled back, breathing more heavily now than he'd been during the fight. After a second, he opened his eyes to find himself looking into Stephen's, and he wished, not for the first time in his life, that he could be someone else. Not a Frost Giant raised as an Asgardian, not a pawn in a warlord's delusions of godhood. Not someone broken irreparably by his losses. Someone without his scars. Someone undamaged, who could fall in love and let that be it.

Most of all, he wished he could be someone who didn't wish he was someone else.

But Stephen was looking at him, knowing about all his damage and mistakes. Or if not all of them, then the most important ones. The worst ones. Loki knew that he knew, even if they'd never talked about all of them. The ones that he'd made to turn himself into the monster that he was born to be, and then turned around and tried so hard to atone for. There wasn't anyone left to love him. Did that make him feel the ache of this gift even more acutely? Probably. Was he going to twist the knife and let himself fall into this even more?

Possibly.

Alright, fine. Definitely.

"I have to admit," Stephen said, brushing his knuckles across Loki's face, "I didn't see this coming."

Loki smiled slightly. "No? You didn't use the Time Stone to look into your future?"

Returning the smile with a faint one of his own, Stephen replied, "I didn't say that. I said I didn't see this coming." Abruptly, he sobered. "I've never been able to see you at all, Loki. It's like you're…untethered from time. Unfixed. Like you're free to make any future you want."

Loki didn't respond right away. Then, he said, "Aren't we all?"

Stephen looked torn, like he regretted bringing this up, but finally, he replied, "Yes and no. Every decision that everyone makes affects something or someone else. None of us are free of that. That's why you can follow threads through time—every decision leads to others. They're possibilities until the choice is made to make them reality, but in a way, they all exist simultaneously." He stopped talking, then narrowed his eyes thoughtfully at Loki. "But you…you don't have a thread."

His hand stroked Loki's face again and Loki could feel it trembling. He reached up and covered Stephen's fingers with his own. The trembling stilled. Loki wasn't arrogant enough to think it was because of him. "That sounds like quantum theory. Quantum theory, with a bit of the Norns thrown in for good measure."

It was easier to say this than confront what any of it meant. Now he knew what the look that he'd seen on Stephen's face so often had meant. In a universe that was falling apart, nothing good could come of being untethered from it. Stephen had told him that their universe owed its existence to another, one that had been split apart. In a world like that, someone who was untethered from everything was a person who had to make a difficult decision. A person who had the ability to do something that no one else could.

Strange had said they couldn't change what had happened.

What if that wasn't true?

Loki didn't want to be the person who could change it. He didn't want to be special. Not that kind of special. He had only ever wanted the sun of his family's love, and now that was gone.

He didn't know what he wanted anymore, besides, right in this moment, Stephen Strange. He wasn't foolish enough to think this would last. But he wanted it. Oh, how he wanted it.

His mind was already scurrying towards realizations, towards inevitable disaster and tragedy. "Our universe was never supposed to exist," Loki said slowly. "We were never supposed to exist." The truth of this, and the weight of it, was finally starting to sink in.

"No," Stephen replied. Then, he caught Loki's eye and added, his tone entirely free of innuendo in that dry, amused way that Loki loved, "Which means we should probably make the most of the fact that we do."

This was enough, for the moment, to put a stop to the thoughts that he knew he was going to have to think. But maybe he could put them aside for now. There was a burn deep in his stomach and a rush of blood and heat, and—oh yes, he wanted to make the most of it, he'd been wanting that for awhile now. Wanting and thinking, the kind of thoughts that he'd tried to confine to lying in bed, his face turned into his pillow to muffle his moans when his thinking also turned to doing.

Loki smiled in a way that was very much not devoid of innuendo, and a look of profound need and—something else, something that Loki wouldn't presume to name—flashed across Stephen's face. Without breaking eye contact, he circled his arm, and a portal opened next to them with the Sanctum on the other side of it. But instead of stepping through it, Stephen raised a hand to twist his fingers in Loki's hair, then pulled him forward into a deep, slow kiss that made heat spread through Loki's body, and which left no doubt as to his intentions on the other side of that portal.

The sun was setting, the night was young, and Stephen's bedroom was beckoning. Loki broke the kiss and said, with a smile full of a certain kind of promise, "I'm still a god. I think we can make rather more of it than you ever have…"

Stephen laughed and held out a hand. Loki took it and the portal closed behind them with a snick.