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Chapter Text

Bucky knew he shouldn’t have gone to the old ruins on the hill. No matter what way you looked at it, there was no reason for a GI to be hanging around a little old church on the hills above Azzano. It was war, not a sightseeing party.

Some of the boys were talking about going into the town to pick up the Italian girls, and, well, it could definitely be argued that war was no time for partying either. Either way, he didn’t know why he decided not to join them and make the trek up here instead.

Okay, he didn’t know what he’d tell the boys about his decision. But as he stretched his back and saw the autumn sun caress the warm coloured limestone walls of the old church, he knew he’d made the right choice.

Stevie would’ve loved this. He shaded his eyes and grinned up against the terracotta tiles balanced on the gently crumbling walls. The winds of yesterday had died down. The mountain snow hadn’t fallen down here yet. There was a bird singing. For all Bucky knew about birds, it could’ve been a skylark. That would’ve fit the picture.

He touched the wall as he passed into the quiet cradle of its wings. No bullet holes, he couldn’t help noticing. It seemed like the war should never exist here. How could it? That was a skylark singing. Probably.

He pushed gunfire and blood back down into his memory, just for a few more hours. What would Stevie want to sit and draw? How could he describe this for him when he went on leave? The grass growing straight out of the roof, the broad puddle where the roof had fallen in reflecting a hint of the old frescoes on the walls, the sun bringing the memory of warmth and wine and fine days sniffing around his heels.

He and the other guy clocked each other at exactly the same time. Both froze. Bucky must’ve read as an American straight away, the telltale greatcoat and cap of his uniform, the boots, the pistol.

The other guy was a civillian, or at least dressed like one. That didn’t mean he was out of the woods. Intel had said Azzano, maybe even more than the rest of Italy, was fiercely resisting the Nazis, but that was on average. The individual always had the power to surprise.

The other man’s shoulders relaxed, almost deliberately. “I’m sorry,” he said, a smooth, deep, almost British voice. “I didn’t know there was anyone else here.”

“Me neither,” said Bucky, forcing himself to relax too, smile. “Couldn’t resist the view.”

“I, too,” said the man, his eyes widening in a sudden rush of enthusiasm. “There’s such a quality to the light here, don’t you think? It makes even October seem warm.” He stopped himself and chuckled, held up a sleek little camera, much more fancy than any Bucky had seen. “Excuse me, I get unduly excited about such things.”

Bucky grinned and took the few steps closer. “It does make it summery, doesn’t it?” He held out his hand. “Bucky.”

“Oh… Loki. A pleasure to meet you.”

“Loki, huh? What’s that, Dutch?”

“Norwegian,” he said, his eyes flickering down in something like penitence. Survivors guilt, Bucky guessed. Norway had been hard fought.

He was pretty, Bucky realised as those lashes fluttered up at him again. A strand of black hair, escaping his slicked-back style, blew across his pale skin like a fairy tale. Cheekbones and high breeding a man could cut himself on if he wasn’t careful.

“You a photographer, then? A journo?”

“No, I couldn’t claim anything so lofty. This is but a hobby I indulge myself in rather too much.” He looked ruefully at the camera, like he was apologising to it. “I’m just a librarian.”

“Hey, no ‘just’ about it. That’s a helluva job.”

“You’re too kind,” he said, raising his eyebrows in amusement.

“I’m not kidding. My sister works in a library back in New York, keeps the kids reading and helps their moms with the paperwork they need to fill out to get the help they’re due. It’s a damn fine job.” He stopped himself with a frown. It had been a compliment. But maybe a guy like this wouldn’t like to be put into the same category as Becky Barnes. Some men could be like that.

Loki smiled, though, another sweet half-smile. Up close Bucky could now see the scarring on half of his face and down his right arm, cruelly twisting the fingers. He must’ve caught Bucky’s gaze, flexing them. “They work well enough when I need them,” he said, fitting his camera into the curl of his hand.

Bucky smiled through thoughts of Jenkins, Thomas, O’Dell, Marijus, and countless others gritting their teeth into grins and brandishing their new prosthetics. “They always do,” he said.

He shook his head. The war didn’t exist here, he told his mind, pressing his old comrades back into the endless boxes of memory. Skylarks, golden sunlight, grass on the roof. “What a view,” he said, breathing deep.

Loki hummed his agreement, turning to watch the play of light and clouds over the lake and the town below. “A photograph could never do it justice.”

“No? I guess not. You’d be missing all the colour. Better ‘n my dumb description of the place at least.”

Loki looked amused. “Are you planning to describe it to your sweetheart back home?”

He laughed aloud. “Sweetheart? God, no - my best friend, Steve, he’s an artist, and damn sore about not being able to join up. Medical grounds, you know. I write to him but I don’t want to talk about what I’m doing. Don’t want to rub it in.”

Loki hummed again. Bucky bit his lip. “Don’t want him to glorify it, either. What we’re doing here. I’m glad he’s out of it.”

“My brother said much the same to me, when he joined up before I was old enough. I understand. But understanding is not the same as accepting.”

“I hear that,” Bucky said. “Steve, he’s a tiny ball of rage, swear he thinks he can punch Hitler himself.”

Loki laughed, his eyes crinkling, distracting Bucky from his indignation. “Now he sounds like my brother. Although nobody could call Thor tiny.”

“Well, then let’s hope he gets the opportunity to punch Hitler instead.”

Loki looked down at his camera, the smile fading. “I would like to hope so,” he said quietly. “Wherever he is.”

Bucky squeezed his shoulder and didn’t ask. Whether Thor was missing, or Loki simply hadn’t heard from him in a while, didn’t matter. The pain was the same, a hollow, terrified void you simply learned to live with. Loki glanced up at him and leaned into him in acknowledgement, just for a moment.

Bucky broke their gaze before it drew him in and never let go. “Hey, c’mere, did you get a photo of this?” He plucked at Loki’s elbow until the man followed him, limping, back up into the ruin.

Now, where was it? “There!” he said, pointing. A little sapling growing right out of the wall, halfway up the ruin. The sun was lower now, casting a long shadow of the spindly limbs that crawled up the wall behind it. Bucky wondered if that’s what it aspired to, if on hard days it thought of that shadow and dug its roots in a little harder, held in its vegetable mind the image of itself stretching beyond the wall.

Loki reached up to the little plant, his long fingers tracing the crumbling mortar under the roots. The leaves, though there weren’t many on such a small plant, were a dark, dense green that caught the light. Loki held the camera up to his eye, bent this way and that, moved closer, moved around, until finally, clunk, the shutter flickered.

He traced the dark vine of shadow up the wall. Bucky wondered if a man like him had the same flights of fancy about the ambition of trees. Probably not. That was okay, nobody ever seemed to, or if they did, they kept it quiet.

Loki turned to him, put his head on one side. “Do you mind?” he asked, holding up the camera.

“Huh? No,” he shrugged. He’d brought Loki to see it, after all. If he couldn’t bring his best buddy to put it down somewhere permanent, this fey creature would do. Would more than just do.

He was surprised when Loki pointed the lens at him, turned that artist’s eye away from the beauty behind and walked closer. Bucky ducked his head. “Ain’t you got better things to look at, here of all places?”

Loki reached out, cupping his chin with long, delicate fingers so Bucky only just stifled a gasp. He tilted his face a little. He felt the sun warm his cheek.

Loki’s fingers fell away from his face, the touch lingering on his skin in sparks of that something out of reach. A shadow on a wall.

“Don’t smile,” said Loki softly.

Bucky immediately laughed and glanced down as the shutter clunked. “Ahh, Jeez, I’m sorry. I ruined it.”

“Not at all,” said Loki, the half smile mischievous. “You relaxed. Let me see you for one snap of the shutter. Thank you.”

“It’ll be all blurred,” said Bucky, and wondered why he was breathless. “I moved.”

“It’s a fast shutter speed. This light allows it,” said Loki. He reached for Bucky again, twitched a strand of hair out of place. How had he got this close? And when he stepped back, why was he so far?

Clunk.

Bucky must have looked a gormless fool in that one. He didn’t think he could look otherwise. Loki was back again, close. Bucky could smell him, clean and fresh, the wool of his suit, the heat of his skin.

When Loki reached for him again, he held his hand still against his cheek, gentle, never a trap. He held his wide eyed gaze, waiting.

He drew his hand down, Loki’s palm stroking across his lips, slow as the sun on the mountains, every motion an out, a chance to pull back and laugh it off.

There was a darkness in Loki’s eyes, some untapped power behind the sweet librarian mask. A wolf, a deep weir, a giant. Bucky closed his eyes and shivered under that gaze, kissed the open palm over his mouth.

He expected a burst of aggression, one way or the other. Almost wanted it in the intake of breath that held for an eternity, the uncertainty.

The sudden arm that wrapped around his back was strong, but perfect in its control. The mouth that claimed him did so with the steadiness of self-assurance. Only when Bucky groaned into him did Loki’s breath shudder, the fingers on his face dig into his hair with greed. “Beautiful,” Loki whispered against his lips. “So beautiful.”

“You’re one to talk, doll.” He shouldn’t have been so breathless. It was always fast, that transition between caution and unbottled, desperate rush to take all you could while you could, but how many times had he done this? Kissed someone in the hidden places of the world, flirted, swept people off their feet. But with Loki he was rapidly losing his ground.

One handed, Loki gently placed the camera down, then stepped him back so that he hit the wall, pressed against him from head to toe, and rolled his hips so that Bucky saw stars. Still he kissed him, breathing him in, his cool fingers combed through Bucky’s hair. He was adrift in an ocean, his entire mind filled with him, the taste of him, the tracing of his lips along Bucky’s jaw and neck, the knee pressed between his legs, so close and not enough.

He scrambled to catch the loose threads of his brain in the hurricane Loki was making of him, and do more than just stand there and be kissed. He wrapped his hands around Loki’s slim waist, around his ass, guided him impossibly closer so Loki groaned against his skin, a deep rumbling of distant glaciers.

He followed the line of Loki’s waistband back around with one hand, the other still clutching at the perfect ass beneath the warm woolen suit, plucked at the buttons until they parted under his eager fingers and plunged beneath. Loki gasped as Bucky reached for him, cupping a mouthwatering, long cock, fingertips rubbing his balls as the heel of his hand pressed, taunted, against the head.

“Fuck,” murmured Loki, biting Bucky’s neck below his ear, rocking those wicked hips up so Bucky’s mouth fell open. “Fuck,” he said again, his voice gravel deep. “Your hands will ruin me.”

“That’s the idea.”.

“If I had you in my rooms I would not let you come like this,” Loki said, pulling back from his kisses just long enough to pin Bucky to that wall with ocean green eyes, and Bucky shuddered under the threat, the promise. “I would have you naked, spread on my sheets, begging me to take you.

“Fuck, yes,”

“Is that what you want?” Loki had his hand in Bucky’s pants too now, and Bucky cried out, his head falling back and hitting the crumbling wall as he nodded. “You would hold your legs up for me while I lick every inch of you, prepare you until you’re weeping, only mine to touch.”

He wrapped his hand around Bucky’s length, and Bucky felt a wave of ecstasy rising with Loki’s words, imagining himself at his mercy, sweat soaked and crying out for Loki’s cock. His hole clenched with the lack of him as Loki’s fingers cupped him, pumped him.

Loki’s other hand pulled Bucky’s away from his pants. “Let me see you,” he demanded in Bucky’s ear. “On my bed, coming apart at my hands. You’d take me so well, wouldn’t you, beautiful?”

“Please…”

Loki groaned and kissed him. “Yes, like that, just like that. I’d make you feel so good, I’d fill you like you were made for me alone.”

He twisted and pulled on Bucky’s cock, but it was the words that pierced him, struck something deep in his mind and drew out a long cry as he came. He was there, in the picture Loki’s words made, lying under Loki as he fucked him hard, kissing him against silk sheets drenched with their sweat.

Loki looked almost shocked, almost afraid when Bucky opened his eyes, coming back to himself through aftershocks, breathing hard. Before he could say anything, Bucky slipped loose and turned them, still shaking from his orgasm. He dropped to his knees and took Loki into his mouth, moaning around his cock as he tasted the bitter precome.

“You…” Loki laughed breathlessly, which turned into a moan of his own. “Look at me,” he said. Bucky looked up at him, pulling off slowly and twisting his tongue around the head of his cock, his afterglow intensifying as Loki’s eyes fluttered shut, biting his lower lip.

“You’re made for me,” Loki whispered, stroking Bucky’s jaw as he took him in deeper. “Fuck, yes, like that, oh Gods, you’re made for me.”

Bucky pulled Loki’s hand up, tangling it into his own hair, an invitation. Loki whimpered at that, and at last seemed to have run out of words. His fingers tightened in Bucky’s hair, fucking his face, and Bucky loosened his jaw, squeezing Loki’s hips tightly, drinking in all of him as he came with a muffled shout.

They breathed heavily for a moment. Loki untangled his hands from Bucky’s hair as he stood. Again, he was looking wary, like he expected Bucky to haul off and hit him. Instead, Bucky leaned in and kissed him, his lips rubbed sensitive and seeming to spark with every touch of Loki’s tongue.

“Where did you come from?” Loki murmured, stroking Bucky’s cheek and tugging him closer. “Right out of my deepest desires?”

Bucky could feel his face flaring with embarrassment he wished he didn’t feel. “Honestly, I think I just learned some things about myself.”

He wrapped his arms around Bucky, engulfing him in his scent and warmth. “I’ve never felt blessed until today,” he said softly, almost below Bucky’s hearing.

Bucky closed his eyes and imagined that the war didn’t exist, that everything could come down to the world inside Loki’s arms.

When the sun sank low enough that they had to bid their goodbyes, Bucky turned one last time to look at Loki, standing in the last rays of light, in the ruins of the old church. Loki lifted a hand one last time, and Bucky told himself he was happy to leave him there, safe from battle. It was foolish, he knew. There was nowhere truly safe from bombs and shrapnell.

Chapter Text

Áleifr Loki Borson, code name Jotunheim, waited until he knew the allied forces were well on their way up the mountains before he developed the film.

He prepared the chemicals in dedicated bottles and laid them out on the bathroom sink. On the shelf above, in the same order he used every time, he placed the can opener, canister, scissors and old Brownie developing tank. He touched each item in order. Then he reached over and turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness.

He’d checked its totality earlier, plugging the gaps around the door with socks and folded paper until his eyes strained for light.

He found the shelf in the darkness, tapped along it to the first two items, and began.

The meditative actions, so familiar to him, calmed his nerves for the task that lay ahead, and silenced greedy memories of the day before.

Bucky’s hands. Bucky’s lips. Bucky’s smile, his body arching under Loki’s against the crumbling walls of the ruins, an unholy act in the bones of a once holy place.

His fingers shook and he dropped the scissors into the sink, and sighed. Clearly, this didn’t silence the memories enough.

Nothing seemed to.

He gave in to them, completing the development on autopilot, counting minutes in the different chemicals the way he had counted Bucky’s breaths, the freckles on his skin, the stars in his blue, blue eyes as he knelt before Loki. There would be photos in this roll of him. One sacrificial roll to test the Leica’s limits, see its resolution in the dark, the distance, with movement, how it played with Loki’s own weaknesses, how he would have to adjust.

Tomorrow, if intel was correct, the Gestapo in Loki’s library would be receiving a visit from someone in high command. They should arrive by noon, and Loki would be, as always, quiet, mousy, overlooked. He would continue to collect little pieces of information, a document here, a photograph there, all of which could be sent through his handler back to allied command. Chip away at the monolith, a fragment at a time. One little grey worm that would eat away at the foundations of the Reich until it fell.

Until it paid for what it had done to him. His brother. His mother. His country.

Loki emerged from the makeshift darkroom, blinking, and held the pictures up. Learned from them, all his intellect bent to apertures and shutter speed, grain and ASA speed.

Two photos he cradled in his hands. Bucky, just a little bit blurred, smiling. Bucky, his eyes wide, wanting. Loki looked at them for a long time, committed them to memory, as if the feel of Bucky’s skin were not already embedded there. Then he burned them to ash in the sink.

The last photo, though, that was safe to keep. A sickly little beech tree growing into the wall of an ancient church, the same light kissing its leaves that had caressed Bucky’s face. He thought of himself as that twisted sapling, digging insidious roots into something impossibly strong. By himself he was nothing, a cripple, a bastard claimed and discarded. A traitor who turned back too late. He was not even a tree, just a single filament of a root.

But he was not alone, not in this grey and secret war. Loki folded the photo and tucked it into his pocket, over his heart.

Loki’s hands never shook as he worked, the fingers on his left quick and able, flickering through documents, memorising dates and places if he could, taking a photograph if the information was too dense. Back at his lodgings he would write everything out in meticulous code, then go to the little cafe on the Via Marconi and ask for honey with his breakfast. If one of the contacts was present that day, the pot he received would have a hollow base, a depression just big enough to hold a roll of paper, or 35mm film.

Soon, he hoped, he would receive a microfiche. It irritated him that he hadn’t yet, but he told himself it was because he didn’t need it. Loki had an excellent memory for numbers and names. The tiny cameras were better off going to someone who needed them more, and were much more difficult to explain if stopped. Loki always made a point to establish himself as an amateur enthusiast, pinning up photographs of the sparkling fountain in the piazza, a vase of tulips catching the golden afternoon light, and his three colleagues, barefoot and smiling on the shores of Lake Como on a summer outing.

As the only man working in the library, it was easy to make himself a sullen, constant presence around the Gestapo. He hoped that even without the necessity of his profession, he would have appointed himself this role - the four SS men were a constant threat to Nina and Toria, the two young girls, and Loki was sure that fifty-year old Mathilde was only granted a temporary reprieve. Having said that, having only a man to bully and grope up against the filing cabinets for a laugh didn’t seem to bother them.

Loki’s hand hesitated over a sheaf of letters, missives, it seemed, from Goering himself. He dismissed them for now. He’d been sent for coffee, there was no time to do this justice.

He slipped to the door, listening for a moment, then hurried to the kitchenette. The skin behind his knee was tight today, and he pushed himself to walk upright. He could slow down in front of the Nazis. This was no time for vulnerability.

“Where were you, Nicolo?” called Roth as Loki pushed the door open with his back. He had his feet kicked up on the table, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. “We were just beginning to miss your cheerful presence.”

Ziegler and Baumann sniggered. Oh good, they were bored. Loki mumbled an apology in Italian-accented German, and set about pouring coffee and ferrying it to the men.

He should really have expected the leg sticking out to trip him up. He half had been expecting it, but not from Baumann, the scrawny kid who followed Roth around like the second coming. His foot caught and in slow motion Loki saw the coffee fall across paper, the typewriter, and Roth’s arm.

“Fuck! You little piss-worm, what have you done?” Roth leaped up, pulling at the steaming shirtsleeve. “What’s wrong with you? Are you simple, as well as crippled?”

“I’m sorry, sir, sorry,” Loki babbled, wiping at the spilled coffee with his handkerchief, picking up pieces of broken ceramic. He was expecting the slap, really. He put his hands up around his ears, waiting for more, waiting for the others to join in.

“Roth!” The voice was outraged, a schoolmaster ashamed of his rowdy charges. The three men snapped to attention, heels clicking, saluting loudly, Roth’s only slightly behind. “What is the meaning of this?”

“This piece of shit threw coffee at me! See? He’s ruined all my reports-”

Loki stumbled to his feet. “No, please, Obersturmführer, it was an accident, I’m sorry!”

“Shut up, both of you,” Winkler hissed. “Roth, if you’d been wearing your uniform properly you would not be embarrassing yourself so. You,” he gestured at Loki. “Clean this up.”

Loki turned to his tray, gathering splintered pieces of cup and saucer with trembling hands, his shoulders up around his ears, listening as Winkler’s voice became greasy and unctuous. “I apologise, Obergruppenführer, I assure you, this is highly out of the ordinary.”

If Loki had stayed where he was for one moment longer, he would have heard the man’s voice. Enough time to plan, time to hide. If he had kept his head down as he turned, perhaps he’d still have had a chance.

Instead he looked where he was going, turning with the coffee tray in his hands, plans to clear up and return with more. He looked up into the face of his nightmares.

Schmidt, the monster, the man who led the army through the halls of Breidablik, tearing Loki’s home to search for artefacts. Who held a knife to his mother’s throat as he demanded the tesseract of his father, who threw Loki into the fire when he rushed upon him in his rage, whose face turned red in the flame and the blood of Loki’s nightmares, his memories.

He recognised him. “You!”

He wished, in that calm and silent part of his mind even as the world went to shit around him, that he had a chance to tell Nina, Toria and Mathilde to run. Perhaps they would have been okay.

Winkler was the first to die, Roth’s letterknife in his throat. Roth was close enough that the heavy steel tray hit his temple with a crunch, and Baumann had the glass coffee jug smashed onto his forehead. As his screams cut the air, Loki ducked Ziegler’s first wild, panicked shot, came up by his shoulder and snapped his neck in one smooth movement, catching the gun as it fell.

In his desperate, tearful fantasies of revenge, the bullet hit Schmidt through his throat, so that he died gasping and bubbling with Loki watching, exorcising the demon. Between the eyes would have to do, and Loki shot the man behind him, and behind him.

He’d known he was likely to die. He thought, at least, that he’d taken his family’s killer with him.

Instead, Schmidt moved inhumanly fast, the bullet dropping to the floor with a tiny clink louder in Loki’s ears than Baumann’s screams. His hand gripped Loki’s throat, lifting him, choking, clear off the floor.

“The Borson lordling,” Schmidt hissed, and oh gods, the red skull hadn’t been a trick of the light. “I have just the place for you.” And darkness crept upon him.