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“I thought we’d start by spending a few days here,” Loki is saying, fiddling with the lock on the cabin door. “The gravity is about eighty-five percent of Earth’s standard, so you’ll need some time to get accustomed.”
“A few days,” Sam says, still standing where Loki deposited him. “Here.”
The cabin door and most of the front wall sit on solid ground in front of them, but the ground drops off after a few yards, and the cabin keeps going, suspended in the air. Behind it, Sam can see a basin of sun-baked rock formations, all at least half a mile below them. This is probably something close to how Scott would feel sitting on the edge of a bowl and looking down at hunks of granola, if falling into the granola would kill him. These are the kinds of thoughts Sam has, now, in this phase of his life.
Loki has the door open, and he’s looking back at Sam. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “Sorry, I - it’s beautiful.”
Loki’s mouth does the little tug at the corners that means he’s found something genuinely funny. “Turn around.”
Sam turns around.
It’s like, Sam amends, if Scott was sitting on the edge of a granola bowl that was nested inside of another, taller bowl. A much taller bowl, made of rocks and covered in blue-green plants that glowed a little bit. It’s a trick of perspective, Sam knows, but the rock face seems like it’s weighing itself down, bowing back toward the earth under its own impossible height. Two moons hang in the sliver of sky at the top, counterbalancing the sun setting on the other side of the basin under the cabin. There’s some kind of animal a few hundred feet above Sam’s head, scaling the rocks like a six-legged alien goat.
“It’s tall,” Loki offers from just inside the cabin door.
Sam points and says, “There’s a little guy up there.”
Loki makes noise with every step as he walks from the cabin to stand behind Sam. Sam has seen Loki move with absolute silence, avoiding danger or throwing himself into it. These crunches in the dirt are deliberate. Sam shifts his weight back on his heels when Loki gets close enough, and Loki takes the invitation, wrapping his arms around Sam’s waist and hooking his chin over Sam’s shoulder.
“You think it’s dangerous?”
Loki shrugs, and Sam can feel the movement all along his back. “I have no idea,” he says. “We can ask someone when we get to the city.”
They watch as the thing opens its mouth and shoots its tongue toward the nearest plant. It connects in a burst of bioluminescent sap.
“It’s cute,” Sam says.
Loki takes a step backwards and tugs Sam with him. “Come inside.”
All the furnishings in the cabin face the back of the room, which looks, for a dizzying moment, like a missing wall. Loki walks into the room first, and Sam follows as soon as it’s clear they won’t fall through the floor. As he does, he starts to notice a glare along the back wall from the hanging lights inside the room.
“We can turn the window off if it’s too disorienting,” Loki says, waving his hand at a dial on the wall.
“There is no way in hell we’re turning off the window.” Sam takes in the rest of the room: a big round bed, a couch, something that looks like it’s meant to be a bathroom, and - “Is that a fridge?”
“Yes.”
Sam steps closer and squints at the crack in the metal right under the door handle. “Is that Tony’s fridge?”
“I borrowed it.”
Loki is smiling when Sam turns around. He looks pleased with himself, probably because Sam’s eyes have been dinner plates for the past five minutes.
“You are going to ruin me for all Earth-based vacations,” Sam tells him.
Loki makes a sound that Sam can only describe as a purr. “Good.”
“No joke about ruining me for Earth-based men?”
“I thought I’d already accomplished that. Or do you need a reminder?”
If they were back at the New Asgard palace or the compound in New York, they could have kept that line of teasing going until everyone around them got uncomfortable enough to leave the room and give them space. But they’re alone, here, all interspecies negotiations carrying on without them for now, Sam’s emergency Avenging phone buried inert in his bag, no demands on their time for the next two weeks. Sam can just do what he always wants to do when Loki starts with his deliberately terrible flirting, which is walk across the room and shut him up with kisses. Loki makes a pleased sound low in his throat and pulls Sam closer, fingers hooked in the belt loops of Sam’s jeans.
Sam breaks away to breathe and says, “If this cabin falls off of this cliff I’m going to haunt you for the rest of your very long life.”
“My apologies for the things you’ll witness.”
Sam shuffles Loki back until he’s pressed between Sam’s chest and the window. The sun is halfway below the horizon, and Loki is haloed in orange. Sam looks at him until his eyes start to hurt. He closes them, and kisses Loki again.
“The cabin won’t fall,” Loki says against Sam’s lips. “The foundations have beams extending thrice again as far into the rock. And,” he adds, his hands wandering below Sam’s waist, “if we manage to break them, the building is fitted with a failsafe propulsion system.”
“You saying we can’t take that out, too?”
“Probably not,” Loki murmurs. “But we should try.”
-
Sam isn’t sure if Loki needs sleep the same way humans do, but he seems to enjoy it. He doesn’t fall asleep like a human; there’s no drifting, just a flipped switch, conscious to snoring. He wakes up easy, too, like he’s been floating just below the surface, waiting for something interesting to happen.
It’s still dark when Sam opens his eyes. He doesn’t know what qualifies as a full night of sleep on this planet, but he feels rested. Loki pulled a blanket over them at some point, and it’s warm underneath. Loki has his arm draped over Sam’s chest, his hand cupped around Sam’s hip. He’s still, his breathing even, until he’s not. A shuffle, a sigh, and then Loki’s peering up at Sam through the dark, his cheek pressed to Sam’s shoulder.
“Hello,” Loki says.
They got all the urgency out of their systems before they went to sleep, and there’s no pressure behind their kisses, now. Sam shifts his weight and rolls Loki onto his back, his legs wrapped around Sam’s hips, heels resting on the backs of Sam’s calves. Sam keeps one hand cradled at the base of Loki’s skull, the other curled in his hair.
Loki’s body runs colder than Sam is used to - something to do with being an ice alien - but he feels good underneath Sam, a contrast to the sweat starting to gather where they’re pressed together, skin on skin. Loki breaks their kiss to tip his head back and stretch the sleep out of his spine. Sam pushes his forehead into Loki’s cool neck and kisses whatever’s closest to his mouth, which ends up being Loki’s collarbone.
His head still rolled back, eyes serenely shut, Loki rummages one-handed through the pillows until he finds their bottle of lube. Sam holds a hand out for it, but Loki hits him in the shoulder with it, instead. Sam stares at the bottle for a moment, then back up at Loki’s face; Loki is looking at him again, smiling half-lidded, his hair tangled out around his head.
“You could just ask,” Sam tells him.
“I could,” Loki agrees, rolling his hips.
Loki is still loose from however many hours ago they last did this, but Sam slides two fingers into him, anyway, just to feel. It’s familiar - not like brushing his teeth is familiar, but like the hum of the Falcon on his back is familiar. Sam scissors his fingers and lets Loki sigh little noises into the hinge of his jaw.
Back when they first started this thing, whatever it is they’re doing, Loki would open himself up before Sam ever got his hands on him. They could, Loki had rumbled into Sam’s mouth, fuck and come and fuck again in the time it would take Sam to prep Loki the old-fashioned way. Sam had argued, afterwards, that it was as much about the journey as the destination. They’d ended up making a bet that Sam couldn’t get Loki off with just his fingers. Loki had lost, or won, depending on whether an orgasm outweighed being proven wrong.
They still have rough, fast fucks, sometimes, demanding and efficient and incredible. But right now, Loki is rocking his body into every twist of Sam’s wrist, tilting his sharp hips to get the angle he wants. Sam sits back on his heels to watch, and Loki plants his feet on the mattress, using the new leverage to work Sam’s fingers deeper.
Sam kisses Loki’s left knee, just because he can.
They end up on their sides facing the window, Sam molded to Loki’s back, one of Loki’s legs pulled forward to give Sam room to move. Sam folds one of his arms under their heads and keeps his other hand splayed out over Loki’s pelvis. Loki reaches back to hold on to Sam’s thigh, massaging the muscle while Sam fucks him with long, slow rolls of his hips. Sam keeps the pace until Loki is gasping into the crook of Sam’s elbow, his hand pressed over Sam’s on his belly.
Sam nuzzles into the soft hair at the nape of Loki’s neck. “Harder?”
Loki shakes his head. “Like this,” he breathes, his lips brushing over Sam’s bicep.
Sam shifts to see Loki’s face, careful not to break his rhythm. Loki has his eyes shut, strands of hair clinging to his forehead, his nose smushed into Sam’s forearm. He looks decadent.
They’ve been here enough times for Sam to know when Loki is close. He drags his hand down to Loki’s cock and uses Loki’s precome to slick his grip, rubbing his thumb under the head the way Loki likes. Loki comes with a pleased groan, and the sound alone is enough to have Sam close behind him.
He grits his teeth and rubs his hand up and down Loki’s thigh. “Where do you want me?”
“Inside,” Loki rasps, sounding entirely too satisfied with himself. “ Please .”
Sam obliges.
They come down face to face, breathing each other’s air. Loki has the expression he makes when he thinks he’s gotten something over on someone, or, Sam has discovered, when he’s just had good sex. He presses his lips together like he’ll say something to jinx his hard work, but smiles in spite of himself. It’s a useful expression to recognize in the wild, even if Sam has associations that maybe lead his mind in less useful directions at inopportune times.
A third moon has joined the two Sam saw when they first arrived. The sky remains dark and heavy, no sign of dawn. Loki rolls halfway onto his back to see what Sam is looking at, and Sam flops his arm across Loki’s chest. Here Sam is, on an alien planet looking at alien stars with his alien something-or-other, and all he wants to do is cuddle and possibly go back to sleep.
“My uncle thinks the moon landing was faked,” Sam says.
Loki looks at Sam like he’s realizing for the first time that they’re from different planets. “Lots of people have landed on lots of moons,” he says.
“I mean Earth’s moon. Some astronauts flew up and walked around in the sixties.” Sam lays his head down next to Loki’s on their pillow. “No one told them they could just teleport if they knew the right people.”
Loki looks back out the window and thinks about that. Sam still isn’t fully used to Loki thinking about things Sam says to him. “Teleportation would have been less convincing,” he says, eventually.
“I don’t know. The complicated stories are the ones people really want to pick apart. More chances for whoever came up with them to make a mistake.”
“Did those people think the Chitauri were faked?”
Sam does his best not to act surprised. Loki can probably read all of Sam’s biochemical reactions with alien science magic, but Sam hopes he’ll appreciate the effort, anyway.
“Yeah,” Sam says, after what he hopes isn’t too significant of a pause. “A bunch of people are still convinced it was a cover-up for a nuclear accident. Like, a drug-induced mass hallucination.”
Loki shifts almost imperceptibly closer to Sam. “It seems a dull way to live,” he says, “rejecting the evidence your senses provide because it doesn’t support the conclusions you were expecting to make.”
“You’re talking like that’s a human thing,” Sam says into Loki’s neck. “That’s an everybody thing.”
Loki props himself up to look at Sam properly. “The tragedy, of course, being that humans never get the time to better themselves.”
“A hundred years,” Sam says, “is not as short of a time as you try to pretend it is.”
Loki’s mouth tugs at the corners. “It’s a blink.”
“Yeah, old man,” Sam grumbles, his feet back on familiar ground. “You’re lucky you caught me while I’m young and virile. I’m gonna burn out a few thousand years faster than you.”
“We’ll figure something out,” Loki says, like making sex plans for Sam’s geriatric years isn’t a big deal. Because, Sam thinks as Loki kisses him, this is the world he lives in, now. Loki does things like take Sam to a space cabin with a stolen fridge for a vacation, and chat offhand about the invasion that Thor is still struggling to see him forgiven for, and casually suggest that he’s planning on fucking Sam for the rest of Sam’s life.
“Why,” Loki asks when he pulls away, “are you talking about the moon landing?”
Sam waits for his post-kiss brain to catch up. “I, uh,” he starts, while Loki smiles because he knows exactly what’s going on. “I was just gonna say. I don’t know if I’ll be able to sell my uncle on the vacation pictures I’m gonna take.”
Loki stares at Sam as though that’s somehow the most ridiculous thing either of them have said in the past five minutes. It makes Sam want to kiss him again, so he does.
-
They spend the first day of their vacation in bed and the next two days exploring. Sam never imagined Loki was someone who went out of his way to be outside, but he puts up with it on Sam’s behalf. It’s easier to walk for long distances when the ground only tries to hold on to them eighty-five percent as hard as Sam is used to. He takes pictures of the scenery, which is surreal, and of Loki, who is lovely even when he’s dressed in unflattering clothes he stole from Sam and a little bit sweaty from too many consecutive hours in the sun. They find patches of shade to eat and make out in. Their last night in the cabin, Loki figures out how to turn all the walls, floor, and ceiling into windows, and they fuck and fall asleep under the towering cliff face and the sky.
They have their patch of rock to themselves the entire time, which Sam finds odd while they’re there, and unfathomable once they leave - as soon as they come down from the cliffs, the opposite direction from the granola quarry, there are people. People on foot, or whatever appendages their species use for mobility; people in various kinds of alien transportation devices; people piling on and off of what look, both comfortingly and unsettlingly, like Earth trains.
Loki and Sam take the train, pressed in with a whole biology textbook of sentient stuff. Loki keeps his arm around Sam’s waist to steady them as their car hums and rattles.
“How were we alone up there?” Sam asks, keeping his voice low in case anyone other than Loki can understand him.
“The land was attached to the cabin. It’s a private property. I thought you might get overwhelmed if I led with this.”
Sam can feel someone’s gelatinous body part pressing against his back. “Probably. I’m good now, though.”
Loki smiles and tightens his arm around Sam’s waist. “I remember the first time I knowingly traveled to another realm,” he says. “I vomited in the Bifrost.”
“I don’t even know how that would work.”
“I suppose it ended up somewhere in the universe without me.”
“Saves you the cleanup, I guess.”
They settle into silence for a while. Sam listens to what he assumes are conversations that make linguistic sense to the people having them, and tries to pretend he’s not staring at the crowd.
“If you have any questions,” Loki says, “you’re welcome to ask.”
“You want to break that seal?”
“Go ahead. It’ll make me sound smart.”
“Can anyone else understand us?” Sam asks.
“That’s a boring question.”
“I’ll get to the interesting stuff once I know whether or not I’m going to offend anybody.”
Loki glances around. “Probably not. There’s no way to know for sure unless somebody reacts poorly to your description of them.”
“Okay, great. See that yellowish guy over by the first window on the left?”
Loki leans with elegant subtlety to peek over Sam’s shoulder. “I see it.”
“Is that its head? The thing on top that keeps vibrating?”
“If I were coming up with words to describe that protuberance,” Loki says, “I would not start with ‘head.’”
“What would you start with?”
Loki frowns. “It’s sort of … if you mashed the entire reproductive system into a slurry and put it inside a gland.”
“Is it supposed to be that big?”
“I think it’s with child,” Loki says. “That’s probably why it got a seat while the rest of us are standing.”
Sam glances over his shoulder. “That,” he says, “is actually really cool.”
“I’d tell it you thought so, but I don’t think I can produce the nuanced smells necessary to communicate in its language.”
“Please don’t try.”
Loki just laughs and pulls Sam even closer.
-
The city, Loki tells Sam, is the only population center on the planet. Sam tells Loki that if this is what counts as a city, galactically speaking, he has some news for a few of Earth’s smaller countries.
They whip through the packed layers of buildings in a high speed pod that travels, Loki claims, three times as quickly as a bullet train, and it still takes them half an hour to get from the outskirts of the city to the place they’ll be staying. Sam watches the blur of sun-baked yellows and oranges through the pod window while Loki digs through one of his three overstuffed bags for their reservation. It’s all well and good until the pod starts slowing down and hits a speed that Sam’s body is abruptly able to comprehend as fast . Loki stops rummaging at around the same moment, and sits very still while Sam tries to convince his insides that they can safely stay where they are.
When they finally get to the stop they need, Loki hustles them out onto the street, and they watch the pod rocket away until it takes a sharp turn out of their line of vision.
“How does that even work?” Sam asks, out of breath.
“I think it has something to do with magnets,” Loki says. When Sam turns around, Loki looks a little haggard, his hair tousled and his cheeks pink.
“I think,” Sam says, “we should walk places, from now on.”
“Definitely.”
They check into their room with the hotel’s receptionist, who has three limbs visible above the desk and a pleasant disposition. It’s smaller than the cabin, with a window over the city and a bed that Sam can already tell will require spooning to fit them both into, not that spooning Loki is ever a hardship. Loki brought the fridge, somehow, and he hooks it up to a power source before crawling into bed and holding his arms out for Sam. They nap together, Loki’s head pillowed on Sam’s chest at an angle that would give Sam a stiff neck if he tried it. Loki seems unbothered when he wakes up - because, Sam reminds himself for far from the first time, Loki is an alien whose body has another few thousand years before it starts to give up the ghost the way Sam’s has been threatening to for the past decade.
We’ll figure something out.
Once they’re out of bed, Loki pulls Sam back into the street. “There’s shopping,” he says, by way of explanation.
‘Shopping’ is Loki’s word for a massive, four-tiered open air market, swarming with people of all shapes and sizes and epidermal textures. Loki tangles his fingers in Sam’s and leads him up a ramp to the second story, which looks like mostly clothing, unless there’s some other common use for textiles in space that Sam doesn’t know about.
Sam leans in to keep Loki close as something quadrupedal bustles past them. “I can’t believe there’s capitalism in space.”
“Not everyone can be as enlightened as you. Awake?”
“Woke.”
Loki kisses the corner of Sam’s mouth and guides him toward the nearest shop. Sam doesn’t realize they’re going through an entryway until they’re already on the other side. As far as he could tell, they had just been walking toward a display of fabric. “How did-”
“It’s a dimensional thing. You just sort of….” Loki trails off, waving his hand, and Sam makes sure Loki’s looking at him before he rolls his eyes.
Rolling his eyes gets Sam to actually start looking around properly. He catches himself about to spin in a circle like a toddler at a theme park and just turns his head, instead, like a normal adult. The shop still seems to be open air, but it’s bigger than it looked from the street, presumably because of dimensional things . Sam can barely see the canvas walls of the stall beyond the horizontal bars draped with fabric, stacked in rows on each wall from floor to ceiling. He can’t tell if they’re displaying finished clothes or just samples to choose from, but aliens of various heights are inspecting them with their hand and eye analogues. Tables in the middle of the room have piles on them that remind Sam of a discount table he saw toward the end of the day the one and only time he took his little cousin Black Friday shopping.
“How,” he asks, slowly, “do you even buy stuff in space?”
“ You don’t buy anything in space,” Loki smiles, letting go of Sam’s hand to wrap his arm around Sam’s lower back. “Come here, they need to get your measurements.”
Those wall racks are samples, then. “Did you bring me to a space tailor?”
“We can spend all day looking for the three stores that cater to bipedal people,” Loki says, guiding Sam toward one of the far walls, “or we can get something made to your proportions and limb configuration.”
“Are you getting anything?”
“I put six orders in from the cabin.”
What follows is the most complicated shopping experience Sam has ever had.
The process starts with a full scan of Sam’s body. He holds very still and lets little metal drones map him while Loki stands to the side and chatters with a small, roundish blue creature. Loki apparently speaks its language, which reminds Sam of a mourning dove, if the mourning dove was trying to vocalize underwater. If there are any smells involved in their communication, Sam can’t tell from where he’s standing.
As soon as the scan is done, the blue creature floats up toward the ceiling and returns with its six arms full of fabric scraps. Loki makes a few coos that get them a mirror, and spends the next twenty minutes fawning over Sam to a degree that leaves Sam feeling both uncomfortably self-aware and very, very attractive.
“Jewel tones,” Loki sighs, holding three different greens up to Sam’s face so he can see them in the mirror. “You wear all that grey when we’re back home.”
“I like the middle one,” Sam says.
Loki considers it, until he nods and tosses the other two samples onto the reject pile. The reject pile is smaller than the approved pile, which is a little alarming, but that seems to have been Loki’s plan from the beginning. Sam asks Loki about the cost once, and Loki just kisses him until he stops trying to talk about it.
Fabric decisions made, Loki and the blue creature make some notes on a tablet. The creature gathers up the samples they chose and floats away.
“Where did you learn to coo?” Sam asks, watching the tiny thing disappear around a corner.
“Is that what it sounds like?” Loki presses a fingertip to his lower lip. “It just sounds like talking, to me.”
“Is this general alien stuff, or you-specific alien stuff?”
“It’s Asgardian stuff,” Loki says, with the deliberately disinterested tone he uses whenever he talks about his adopted home. “If you’re going to preside over nine realms, you’ll want to be able to talk to them.”
Sam takes a moment to process that. “I always thought you guys speaking English was weird.”
They stand together in comfortable silence for a while, watching the other customers going about their business. Someone with a long orange neck and no obvious mouth holds up a mirror and ducks its head under a rich red fabric. It’s a flattering color for it. Sam almost gives it a thumbs up, before he remembers that that gesture doesn’t even mean the same thing everywhere on Earth, much less everywhere in the galaxy.
“Do we come back next week, then?” Sam asks, right before the blue creature returns carrying a comically tall stack of folded garments.
Loki just smiles and pulls a large quartz crystal out of his pocket.
“Oh.” Sam blinks as Loki passes the crystal to the blue creature, who opens a mouth at the base of its belly and eats the crystal whole. Sam can hear chewing and horrible crunching as the creature pushes the clothes into a bag and passes them to Loki.
“Is that - okay, that’s it?”
“I should tip,” Loki murmurs, reaching back into his pocket and pulling out a paper clip. The creature eats that, too. The noises aren’t nearly as bad.
As Sam and Loki turn to leave, the blue creature makes one more series of soft coos. Sam tilts his head, and imitates the sounds back. He does his best, which is, he realizes as he’s making the first few sounds, not going to be good enough. The blue creature makes a trill that could mean any number of things, but then it pats the end of one of its limbs on Sam’s shoulder, which he’s guessing is the universal symbol for ‘nice try.’
“It laughed at you,” Loki says, helpfully, as they walk back into the street.
“What was I trying to say to it?”
“‘Thank you, and come again.’”
“Oh, god. It’s like if a waiter told me to enjoy my food and I said ‘you, too.’”
“It’s more like if a waiter told you to enjoy your food and you made a series of sounds that didn’t mean anything.”
“I think that’s the better option, actually.”
Loki takes Sam to two more shops. He pays at one by handing over an Earth credit card and just leaving it there, and at the other with a drop of his own blood.
“Space capitalism isn’t normally this complicated,” Loki tells Sam as they leave the third stall, one hand full of bag handles and the other hooked around the inside of Sam’s elbow. “This particular district just tries to deal in pretty much any currency there is. A lot of tourists come through here, especially this time of year.”
Sam grins. “You brought me to the Times Square of space?”
“This is better than Times Square.”
“It’s in space, so yeah, it clears that hurdle.”
“Not everything in space is better than Times Square.”
“I’m gonna take you there during a holiday,” Sam says, a little more threatening than he intended, which makes Loki laugh. Loki has a nice laugh, when it’s genuine; it’s warm and understated, nothing at all like the spectacle Loki makes of himself most of the time.
“We actually just missed the holiday that brings people here,” Loki says, tugging Sam a little closer. “It started out as a religious rite, but it’s been overrun with gimmicks.”
“I’m starting to think space is just Earth with weirder-shaped people.”
“Does Earth have a festival dedicated to bathing in the afterbirth of the creation of the universe?”
“No. Ew.”
“It’s mostly about having fun with water, now,” Loki sighs, like he misses the good old days of doing whatever in the hell aliens do to feel like they’re swimming with the placenta of the cosmos. “The whole city is rigged with pipes that make it seem like it’s pouring rain for days. They have to import water from off-planet to manage it, but it’s beautiful.”
“As long as they’re not outsourcing it from a space uterus.”
“We should come back for the street celebration,” Loki says, gazing off down the road. “It would have made a terrible first trip off world, but it only happens every ten Earth years, so you’ll have plenty of time to acclimate to the eccentricities of galactic travel.”
“We’re making plans for a decade from now?” Sam asks, trying to keep his voice steady and mostly succeeding.
“Technically it’s a little less than a decade. Nine years and fifty weeks, give or take a few leap days.”
“I’ll pre-order some calendars when we get back.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll remind you,” Loki says, his voice bright. Sam glances up, and Loki’s not even looking at him. He’s gazing at shop displays, figuring things out for when Sam is in his mid-forties.
“I don’t know,” Sam says carefully, “if I can commit that far out.”
Loki looks down at Sam, a little crease between his eyebrows. “Why not?”
“I just, you know,” Sam offers, “could die before then.”
“That’s very unlikely.”
“Listen,” Sam whispers, surrounded by bustling people who may or may not speak the language he’s whispering in. “I’m not going to live for five million years.”
“I won’t live for five million years either,” Loki says, and then adds, “I don’t think.”
“Humans have a hundred, if we’re lucky. I probably have sixty. Maybe less. I’m not very careful with myself.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so upset,” Loki tells him, but he stops walking.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Sam says at the most reasonable volume he can manage. “You’re an alien from ice-land who can casually agree to four decades of space dates with someone who’s probably going to get erectile dysfunction halfway through.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“I’m going to get old,” Sam says, slowly. “I’m going to get wrinkly and gassy, and you’re going to stay this -” He cuts himself off and waves his hands.
“Do you not want to continue spending time with me?” Loki asks, his voice even.
“Of course I do,” Sam hisses. “I just don’t see what you’re getting out of it.”
“What are you getting out of it?”
Sam spins around in place, feeling like an idiot. “Good company! Good sex, good conversation, space travel. When somebody says something stupid I can look across the room and you’re looking back at me.”
“You’re going to stop making eye contact with me when you’re older?”
“Not on purpose! What if I get cataracts?” Something with three heads may or may not be staring at Sam; he can’t tell, entirely, but he lowers his voice again. “You’re pretending you’re more of an alien than you are and you’re making me sound irrational for thinking about my future.”
“You’re thinking about your death, not your future.”
Before Sam can get another word in, Loki leans forward just enough to give Sam what’s probably the chastest kiss they’ve ever shared. Sam lets himself savor it, the steady pressure above and below his lower lip, Loki’s cool breath on his cheek.
Loki pulls back after a long, clinging moment. “Do you want to keep doing that?”
“Like, right now? Or just in general?”
“Would that change your answer?”
“No.” Sam pauses. “I mean, no, it wouldn’t change my answer. Yes, I want to keep doing that. Now and in general.”
Loki smiles, close-lipped and intimate. “Then why are we bickering?”
Sam runs his hands up and down Loki’s arms. They’re sturdy under his tunic. “I think we’re both being totally rational for who we are,” Sam says. “That’s not really anybody’s fault.”
Loki looks at Sam for a while. “I’m going to carry on kissing you,” he says, eventually. “Now, and in general. Let me know if you’d like me to stop.”
Sam isn’t sure how to respond to that, but his mouth is occupied soon enough.
-
Sam’s not going to lie to himself and imagine he’s the best Loki’s ever had, but it’s still a rush to fuck all the multi-syllable words out of someone who calls himself a god.
Loki’s breathing yes every time Sam thrusts into him, gasping for air when Sam pulls out to do it again. He has one knee to his chest, the other leg slung over Sam’s shoulder. His hands are limp on either side of his head like he forgot they were attached to him, the left one sliding closer and closer to the edge of the pillow. Sam grabs them both and laces his fingers with Loki’s, and Loki squeezes so hard his knuckles turn even paler than they already were.
“Jesus,” Sam whispers, and if Loki weren’t so far gone he’d probably make some stupid joke about how he didn’t want Sam saying other deities’ names in bed. Loki is always clever and considerate and lucid until he decides to take his pleasure, and then he takes it, whatever Sam gives him, hedonistic and shameless.
Loki groans, and yes yes yes turns into now now now . Sam tries to take one of his hands back, but Loki won’t let go, so, okay, if that’s how he wants it, Sam can work with that. Loki tilts his hips to get the angle right and Sam snaps in and in and in until Loki’s legs are shaking and his vocabulary is well and truly reduced to nothing.
In normal, human life, Sam would be a gentleman and pull out to let Loki recover. But this is space vacation life, and as soon as Loki’s breathing evens out, he flips them over and keeps grinding down into Sam’s lap, his palms on Sam’s chest to give him leverage. Loki’s hair curtains down around his head and swings as he rocks his body, skinny slivers of light flickering over his face whenever they can get through. Sam sits up and presses his forehead to Loki’s bony shoulder, and Loki runs his nails down Sam’s back, and that’s it for Sam.
Loki keeps Sam inside him until it’s too much and Sam has to wrestle Loki out of his lap. Loki just laughs and uses all of his limbs to pull Sam close until they’re intertwined to Loki’s satisfaction.
Sam props his chin up on Loki’s collarbone and watches Loki finger comb his hair back into order. “That’s a losing battle,” he says, tugging a curl out from behind Loki’s ear and letting it fall across Loki’s face.
Loki hums and lets his hands drop down onto the small of Sam’s back. Loki falls asleep like that, one long lock of hair lying the wrong way across his forehead, and Sam slows down his breaths to match Loki’s. The tension seeps out of him, and not even post-sex stickiness is enough to get him to move and break the moment.
Sam thinks about how Loki’s going to pout about how gross and sweaty they are in the morning, and how Loki will manhandle them into the shower even though Sam knows for a fact that he could just clean them off with space magic, and how it’s weird that alien planets have showers, and how that might have been a factor in Loki’s choice of vacation destination; and then Sam is waking up, Loki shuffling Sam gently, at least relative to his usual levels of gentleness, which are low, onto his side, and wrapping his long arm around Sam’s waist, and slotting his nose in behind Sam’s ear, where Sam can feel his breathing even out again.
-
In the pre-morning dark, bundled into luxurious piles of blankets, Loki says, “I’m not especially careful with myself, either.”
Sam doesn’t know how Loki figured out he was awake, but he opens his eyes and finds Loki staring back at him.
“It’s remarkable I’ve lasted this long, if I’m being honest.” Loki’s voice crackles in the silence. “I expect I’ll eventually find myself in a situation I can’t get out of. I’m hoping that day comes later rather than sooner, but with the company you and I keep, it’s difficult to predict.”
“You’re not allowed to die before me,” Sam says.
Loki looks pleased, and he inches closer to Sam. “Do you have plans for me?”
“Did you wax poetic about your early death just so I’d tell you I want to keep fucking you?”
Loki quits smirking. “I was trying,” he grumbles, “to commiserate.”
“Sorry. That was good commiseration.”
“Clearly not good enough.”
Sam laughs. “Come here,” he says.
Loki closes the rest of the gap between them and tucks his head under Sam’s chin. Loki has enough height on Sam that when they lie stretched out like this, Sam can barely touch his toes to the tops of Loki’s feet. Sam feels a little ridiculous, but he mostly feels all-encompassing, like an envelope or a clam.
“I’ve spent my whole adult life assuming that I’d either die young by myself or die old next to another old person,” Sam says into Loki’s hair. “When I think about - about committing to someone, I still picture us giving each other the rest of our lives. That’s an equal exchange. With you, it’s different. I know it’s not fair of me.”
Loki smooths his hand up and down Sam’s back. “You think the weight of my offer and the weight of your acceptance are uneven.”
“I do think that, yes.” Sam shuts his eyes and focuses on Loki’s cool fingers trailing over his skin. “I don’t know whether or not that’s right. I don’t know if there is a right.”
“Ours is not a conventional arrangement.”
“I don’t want you to think,” Sam starts, and then stops to rephrase. “I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m not interested. This all probably sounds stupid to you.”
Loki shifts his head so his cheek is pressed to Sam’s collarbone. “It did at first,” he says. “But I suppose it makes sense. You’re usually reasonable, if only from your own perspective.”
“I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
Sam feels the little puff of air that comes with Loki’s laugh. Loki’s hand stills at the small of Sam’s back, and Sam half expects it to wander lower and put an end to whatever this conversation is, but Loki just presses his palm into Sam’s skin, like he’s trying to even out the temperatures of their bodies.
After a minute of comfortable quiet, Loki says, “I am the one that will be left behind, you know.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “I don’t get why you would want that.”
“I don’t want it. I do want the four decades between now and then.”
“I guess it’s sort of like a fling, for you.”
Loki shuffles backwards until he can look Sam in the eye. “How many affairs do you think I’ve had?”
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
Loki grins. “Guess.”
“I have,” Sam says, “no idea what a polite answer to that would be, for you.”
“When have I ever asked you to be polite?”
That, Sam concedes, is fair. “Okay, how old are you, exactly?”
“One thousand and sixty-five.”
“Is it weird that the sixty-five part makes you sound older to me than the one thousand part?”
“Yes, that’s weird.”
“I’m just imagining fucking a sixty-five year old man.”
Loki looks solemn. “I have news for you, Sam.”
“One thousand and sixty-five,” Sam says, loudly. “And you’ve been hooking up with other people who live forever?”
“I can’t tell you,” Loki says. “That’s cheating.”
“You,” Sam says, “invented cheating.”
“I didn’t invent it. I’m just very good at it.”
“Twenty,” Sam says.
“That’s your answer?”
“Higher or lower?”
“No, explain. Why twenty?”
“I don’t know,” Sam grumbles, flapping his hand. “It seems like it could be average. That’s, what, one every fifty years?”
“Solid math,” Loki says. “Three.”
“Three every fifty years?”
“No, three. Total. That’s the answer.”
Sam props himself up on an elbow and stares at Loki, who beams up at him. “I’m sorry,” Sam says. “I find it very difficult to believe that you’ve slept with three people in a thousand years.”
“Oh, I’ve slept with more people in the last century than you’ve been on a first-name basis with in your entire life,” Loki says, his face perfectly benign. “I’ve had three affairs.”
“‘Affair’ meaning, what?”
“Meaning I liked them enough to fuck them over an extended period of time without an ulterior motive.”
Sam snorts. “Romantic.”
Loki winks and tilts his chin, and Sam leans down to kiss him, a lazy slide of lips. It has the potential to turn into something more urgent, but it doesn’t, yet.
“Who were they?” Sam asks. “If you don’t mind talking about them.”
Loki shifts to rest his head against Sam’s bicep. “You won’t be jealous?”
“You remember two minutes ago when you bragged about the thousands of people you fucked in the last decade?”
“That’s an exaggeration,” Loki says. “Although I was, admittedly, also exaggerating.”
“I had a feeling.”
“The first was a soldier in the palace guard,” Loki says, his breath on Sam’s skin. “I was three hundred and twelve. She could have snapped me like a twig if she’d wanted to. People like her tend to prefer my brother, but she wanted someone smart. We sparred together.”
“Oh, you sparred together.”
“It was very educational.”
“What happened?”
“I was a prince,” Loki shrugs. “Nobody expected my youthful dalliances to amount to anything. She left for another position in another guard. She was married, last I heard.”
“That sounds amiable,” Sam says.
Loki purses his lips. “I wept,” he says. “Alone, into my pillow. It was satisfyingly maudlin.”
“How many days did you stay in bed?”
“I could have made it a week if Thor didn’t keep talking about how delicious every supper I missed had been.”
Sam makes a gentle noise and pets Loki’s hair back from his face.
“I was a wretched thing,” Loki says.
“You were young.”
“I was three times as old as you’ll ever be.”
“Yeah, but you were royalty, too. That kind of pampering sets you back a few centuries.”
Sam kisses Loki, just in case his words sounded harsher than he intended them to. Loki hums against Sam’s lips and runs a fingertip down Sam’s jaw.
“Number two,” Sam says, when they break apart.
Loki smiles with all his teeth. “A dignitary,” he purrs. “You can’t imagine the scandal.”
“I thought these were people you fucked without an agenda.”
“I liked him,” Loki sighs. “The fact that it irritated my family was, for once, an afterthought.”
“Where was he from?”
“Vanaheim. It was during a particularly rocky period in our political relations. I like to think I helped.”
Sam kisses Loki’s neck, just above his pulse point. “I’m sure you were a wonderful representative.”
“It was a rich and mutually beneficial cultural exchange.”
“Did your parents put a stop to it?”
“They tried,” Loki says. “I ignored them. He and I stole time together where we could. I was starved for rebellion, and I thought love was a noble reason.”
Sam feels his face do the soft thing he can’t stop it from doing when he’s fond of someone. “You loved him?”
“I thought I did.”
“Do you still think you did?”
“I suppose.”
“So you did,” Sam confirms, “love him.”
Loki wrinkles his nose like he’s eaten a bite of something new and he’s waiting for it to register a taste. Eventually, he says, “Eurgh.”
“Is that a bad road to go down?” Sam asks. “Sorry.”
“No,” Loki says. “It’s just odd. He spent fifty years away on Alfheim, and when he came back, it wasn’t right, anymore.”
“He changed?”
“We both changed.”
Sam nods. “There was a guy before I was deployed,” he says. “We were both different people when I came home. Nobody’s fault.”
“ There was a guy ,” Loki repeats.
“Shut up,” Sam says.
“How long was there a guy?”
“Not long. A year, maybe a year and a half.”
Loki stares at Sam.
“A year and three months,” Sam says, “if you count from the first time he spent the night.”
“Should I dislike him?”
Sam shrugs. “I don’t. And you’re changing the subject.”
“I told you all of mine.”
“You didn’t tell me the third one.”
Loki rolls his eyes. “I’ll let you work that one out on your own,” he says, his tone just disparaging enough to let Sam know that he’s feeling wrong-footed.
“Does that mean it’s someone I know?”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Yeah, but you like me.” Sam pauses, and the realization is like cold water, but pleasant, diving into a pool after a stressful day. “Oh.”
“Two,” Loki mutters. “I’ve had two affairs.”
Sam grins. “You already said three.”
“I’m taking it back.”
“You can’t take it back.”
Sam rolls on top of Loki and settles between Loki’s thighs, propped up with his forearms on either side of Loki’s head. Loki shifts his hips, a tease poorly disguised as an escape attempt, and finally gets his hands below Sam’s waist.
“The point of all that,” Loki says, inches from Sam’s lips, “was that if I wanted a fling , you would have shared my bed for an evening. Maybe two, if something particularly novel happened the first time.”
“Poor choice of words, on my part. Got it.”
“ Fling is not the category you fall under.”
“You’re - wow, you’re making that clear.”
“You’re handsome, and you’re clever, and you don’t ask for anything other than what I am, and I want you,” Loki rumbles at the absolute lowest pitch in his register, “exactly like this, for as long as I can have you.”
Loki buries his face in Sam’s neck and does a thing with his tongue right at the base of Sam’s throat.
Sam says, “You should get inside me right now.”
They almost never arrange themselves this way, which makes it that much more earth-shattering for Sam when it does happen. He knows he’s loud, possibly too loud, but Loki swallows his sounds and licks them back into his mouth. Sam meets Loki’s thrusts until his muscles fail him, and then he shuts his eyes and lets Loki work him over, his arms wrapped tight around Loki’s shoulders. Sam comes, and Loki keeps going until Sam comes again.
“Tell me,” Loki rasps, after, slipping out of Sam and taking over with his own hand.
“You already know.”
“I want to hear it.”
Sam uses what’s left of his energy to lean up and kiss Loki. “You’ve got me,” Sam tells him. “Baby. You know you’ve got me.”
Loki presses his forehead to Sam’s and shudders as he finishes himself off.
“You,” Sam croaks, “are not allowed to write any of that into a play.”
Loki sighs, settling down on top of Sam. “I’m not going to write any more theater about myself.”
“That’s a lie.”
“The art is not worth the scorn.”
“You have to keep the part where you said I was clever.”
Loki tilts his hips against Sam’s a few more times, unhurried. “You are,” he says, “relatively clever.”
“You didn’t say relatively.”
“It was implied,” Loki says, but there’s nothing cruel in his tone. There almost never is, when he talks to Sam.
Sam tugs Loki down for a kiss with one hand and rubs the other up and down Loki’s back, from the base of his neck to the dimples between his hips. Loki is heavy, and exertion has him as warm as he ever gets, which reminds Sam of the temperature of shower water right when the heater first starts to kick in.
“You gotta at least tell affair number four all the good things about me,” Sam murmurs when they break apart.
Loki pulls back and folds his hands over Sam’s chest, resting in the divot under Sam’s collarbone. “Would that make you happy?”
“It’s sort of nice to think about.” Sam curls a lock of Loki’s hair around his finger. “Some weird alien somewhere hearing how clever I was.”
“How clever you are .”
The sun is starting to rise outside their window. The half-light makes Loki look young, all the little spider lines on his face smoothed out into shadows. Sam imagines Loki just the way he is now next to Sam at sixty, at eighty, wrinkled paper skin and failing organs. Sam used to imagine dying in a blast of fire or a too-familiar plummet; later, he imagined his children around his bed, his partner beside him or waiting for him wherever he goes next. He tries to imagine Loki there, instead, a cool hand pressed to Sam’s forehead to usher him on.
“If you change your mind when I get incontinent,” Sam says, “we’re gonna have words.”
Loki makes an undignified sound somewhere between a laugh and a sneeze, which is good enough for Sam.
-
Sam returns to New Asgard with the largest wardrobe he’s ever owned. He sorts everything by color and hangs it all in the closet in his room in the palace. He’ll take some of the simpler stuff back to his apartment across the ocean, but there are a few things that aren’t going to look right anywhere other than a place where people unironically wear capes. Sam never thought he’d feel ridiculous going to a meeting in a suit until he became a liaison to fancy aliens. Maybe if he shows up tomorrow in eight yards of space fabric, that one guy who runs the bank will stop calling him ‘the human.’
When all the rest of his unpacking is taken care of, Sam prints out month by month calendars for the next fifteen years and puts them in a binder. Nine years and fifty weeks ahead, he writes ‘space placenta’ in pencil, with arrows to the left and right and ‘leap days?’ underneath those. Then he fills in his schedule for the next three weeks of the current year. He shuts the binder and puts it away on the shelf above his desk, unobtrusive next to the rest of his books. He stares at its spine for a while.
They’re going to Sam’s favorite restaurant in Kristiansand with Thor tonight, because Loki might know space, but Sam knows tapas. Sam isn’t sure what they’ll do afterwards, but whatever it ends up being, they probably won’t do it in public, and Thor definitely won’t be involved. Sam will wake up in Loki’s bed tomorrow morning and use Loki’s nice bath soap, and Loki won’t complain because Sam will smell like him for the rest of the day. They’ll go to council meetings, and Sam will report to the skeleton of SHIELD as Fury works to put meat back on its bones. Loki will teleport Sam to and from New York if Sam’s avenging services are needed, which isn’t happening nearly as often as it used to. A little less than ten years from now, he and Loki will go to a planet-sized party. Later, at some indeterminate time, Sam will die.
Forty years feels like infinite time and no time, like Sam is refocusing his eyes between something close up and something far away. In the middle ground is Loki.
Sam picks one of his new shirts and wrestles with it until he figures out how to get it over his head. He ties the three sashes that hold it together and checks every angle he can manage in his mirror. Loki was right about green jewel tones. He could be right about other things, too.
