(no subject)

[semi_stable]

For the most part, making his living via the ChoreWeasel app works for Bucky. As a kid, he did odd jobs all over town, especially after the war started and before he got drafted. It was a good way to make money, and he felt as if he were being especially helpful.

This remains true, and now it's made easier for him. Each day that he feels like working, he can open the app and scroll through the jobs, picking the ones that he feels confident that he can take care of quickly. He likes the ones that require hard labor or heavy lifting, because they pay well and don't exert him like they would other people.

On this particular day, he breaks down and an old shed and tosses the remains into the rented dumpster, and then rakes an absolutely humongous yard out in the countryside. The latter one is fun because he takes Bopp with him and gets to watch her jump excitedly into leaf piles. Her joy and silliness can be a little infectious sometimes, and he's grateful all over again for her presence.

After that, he grabs some food and heads home to stuff his face, intending to stay in for the rest of the day, but that doesn't happen. His status on the app is still set to available, and keeps asking him to go install an air conditioner in an apartment window. It's a quick, easy job so he declines it, only to keep having it pop up, so he ends up accepting it.

This turns out to be a mistake, because after he arrives, it becomes pretty clear that the middle-aged woman had kept canceling the job until Bucky was the one who accepted it. She's sauntering around the apartment in a flimsy robe and too much make-up, obviously angling for some sort of hook up, and Bucky feels so entirely awkward. Maybe there are people out there using ChoreWeasel app to hook up, but he isn't sure why. There are other apps for that, where she'd be more successful.

After he installs the air conditioner, he once again declines her offer of coffee or something sweet, and makes his leave. She follows him all the way down to the lobby and out onto the street, grabbing at Bucky's arm.

"Are you sure that you wouldn't like to stay?" She asks with a simpering pout that Bucky doesn't find attractive at all, but he doesn't really want to be rude. Okay, he mostly doesn't want to fuck up his very good rating on the app.

"No, ma'am, sorry," he says to her, watching her nose wrinkle in irritation at the word. "I have other jobs that I need to get to."

"I could pay you more than they could," she says, and Bucky lets out a startled cough, cheeks flushing a little as he gently pulls his arm away from her hand. "And we'd have more fun."

"Yeah, those aren't the kind of jobs that I do, ma'am," he says as he takes another step back, wanting badly to just turn and flee. "Have a nice night."

Comments

[thewrongpath]

The kiss was a surprise, but not an unpleasant one, and he let his hand slip down to rest against the small of the other man's back as they stood side by side, watching the woman storm off.

"Rude!" He called after her, affronted to have been so utterly dismissed. Did no one value manners in this place?

"And yet you've escaped with your virtue intact."

[semi_stable]

"Right," Bucky replies with a scoff, smiling wryly and patting Loki's back a few times. "Because I have so much of that."

He lets go of Loki to pull his phone from his pocket and mark his task completed, and then immediately changes his status to unavailable. He's done for the day after that one.

"Thanks for the assist," he says to Loki, pocketing the phone and smirking over at him. They're still standing awfully close together, but Loki's mouth has gotten him out of two jams now, so he'll allow it. "Oddly enough, it's not the first time that's happened."

[thewrongpath]

"I haven't forgotten," he said, with a wry smile. He let his hand fall away from the other man's back, but didn't move away quite yet.

"Is that working out for you? That little device directing you where to go for odd jobs?"

[semi_stable]

"Not all of us can conjure whatever we want out of thin air," Bucky says dryly, knocking his shoulder against Loki's. "I have to work to eat."

A window above slides open and the woman that Bucky had just helped sticks her head out to glare down at them. "Get out of here!"

"Hey, lady! What do you want from me, huh?" Bucky calls back, letting his Brooklyn accent come out plainly as he holds his arms out to the side in an exaggerated shrug. "Your air conditioner works now, right? I'm off the clock."

[thewrongpath]

Hooking an arm possessively over Bucky's shoulders, he called out to the woman, "We'll be on our way now, madam. Have a lovely day."

With a subtle flick of his wrist, Loki sent a faint swirl of magic up through her window. Luckily, she was too busy losing her head over absolutely nothing to notice.

Leaning in close as he steered the other man away, his lips brushed Bucky's ear as he murmured, "Pity about her plumbing."

[semi_stable]

Loki's arm goes Bucky's shoulders in a way that initially makes him tense up because it's far too close than he lets just anybody get to his neck, but he relaxes as soon as he realizes what's happening.

"Sure thing, doll," Bucky jokes, still in that drawl of an accent, curling his arm around Loki's waist to rest his metal hand against the man's hip. Just as he's being turned away, Bucky swears that he sees a flash of green from the corner of his eye, but then Loki is leaning in close and whispering so low that no one else could possibly hear it.

"You didn't," he says as he turns to Loki, noses practically brushing before he turns his back towards the window. Thanks to his own sensitive hearing, he can tell that she's yelling, and the sound of it echoes off bathroom tiles. He can't help but to laugh, because he supposes that backing up her toilet is a relatively harmless prank. She can call someone else to fix it, because it certainly isn't going to be him.

"Okay, that's a little funny," admits, still chuckling as he turns to face forward again. The two of them are still holding onto each other, but he finds himself in no great rush to part ways. He was a little touch starved even before the war, not to mention now.

[thewrongpath]

Thor and his warriors had always been demonstrative, living like soldiers in a barracks, always in each other's space and carrying with them an easy camaraderie that Loki had always stood apart from. He imagined that Barnes and Rogers had been much the same, developing a closeness and intimacy that Loki had always struggled with. No matter how badly he'd wanted the love and acceptance of his brother, he always found a way to wiggle out of anything real.

He and Sylvie were learning together, but he couldn't deny that getting to know Barnes had been its own sort of lesson.

"A foolish prank, but given her behavior, it seemed appropriate," he smirked, turning to look at the other man just as he looked away. Barnes looked softer. Younger, perhaps. Once, Loki might have felt pleasure at causing that old harpy a bit of pain, but he found himself drawn instead to how it felt to make another person smile.

[semi_stable]

"My knight in shining armor," Bucky jokes, sliding his hand up Loki's back to squeeze at the back of his neck and jostle him a little. He looks over at Bucky with an easy smirk and maybe if he had gum to pop, he'd look just like that guy he used to be. The confident one who knew how to cut loose and talk to people.

"Well, I'm off the clock and I've got a few hours before Bopp needs to be let out," he says, finally drawing his arm away to glance down at his watch. "We should, uh. Hm."

It's then that he realizes that he has no idea what people really do for fun these days, so he puts his hands on his hips and furrows his brow a little as he looks at Loki again. "What should we do?"

[thewrongpath]

"Don't look to me for your answers, Barnes. I can't imagine I have more experience than you do with the midday leisure activities of this realm," Loki pointed out, letting his arm fall from the other man's shoulder.

"Though, judging by how cagey you've been about your life prior to Darrow, I do realize I could be wrong."

[semi_stable]

Bucky used to be good at this, he thinks. It wasn't as if there were a ton of options back in Brooklyn, and he managed to find ways to pass the time. Now he realizes just how often those activities included Steve or whatever girl he was dating at the time. Had he ever learned how to entertain himself on his own?

Loki's comment draws him from his thoughts and he turns his head to give the man a slightly quizzical look. He's made similar comments, but at the time Bucky had assumed that Loki was just prodding him for more. Now, he's wondering why he made that assumption.

Because Loki knew who Steve was, he realizes, In his head, they're a package deal. How could people know Steve but not Bucky, Bucky but not Steve? It was a foolish thing to think, and he has to swallow hard as the realization settles.

"I knew Steve long before he was ever Captain America. We were kids together. Just regular kids," Bucky says after a long moment, blinking and turning to look ahead, biting his bottom lip. "It was after we got the serum that things got complicated."

Different serums, different paths, different lives crashing together like cymbals until suddenly he was just gone for good. "We didn't exactly run in the same circles."

[thewrongpath]

"And what do regular kids do for fun?" Loki asked. He had no intention of trying to recreate the other man's childhood with Steve Rogers, of all people, but he was curious what it was people did on Earth.

Human lives were so miserably short, how could they possibly have the time for anything?

[semi_stable]

“These days? I haven’t a single clue,” Bucky says dryly. “But it all seems to involve screens.”

Nothing makes Bucky feel more like a relic out of time than spending more than a minute around the average modern day teenager.

“We grew up pretty poor, so we kind of had to make our own fun,” he explains, thinking back an entire lifetime. “Play stickball, jump the train into the city, scrounge up change to see a moving picture.”

He gives Loki a sarcastic look because he can only imagine what someone from Asgard would think of Brooklyn in the thirties. “They were all the rage, you know.”

[thewrongpath]

"So I've heard," Loki said, eyes bright with amusement. "I do rather enjoy them. I've always considered myself a patron of the arts."

He gave the other man a look, arching a questioning brow.

"There's a cinema not terribly far from here."

[semi_stable]

"You wanna take me to the pictures?" Bucky asks with a good-natured laugh. He isn't sure why, after everything, that this is something that surprises him. He can't remember the last time that he saw a movie just for the hell of it. "Fine, but I'm not putting out just because you buy me Raisinets."

He smirks and knocks his shoulder into Loki's as he passes by, heading in the direction of the theater. "Nothing with 3D. My old heart can only take so much."

[thewrongpath]

"Of course not. If you were going to put out, it would be because of my disarming good looks and effortless charm," Loki said, with a smirk of his own.

"Oh, come now. Your heart's just fine. Unless we're speaking metaphorically."

[semi_stable]

"Is that right?" Bucky huffs out a laugh, shaking his head in amusement as they walk. "Too bad you're otherwise occupied. I suppose we'll never know."

His tone is light and almost teasing, almost like he's a soldier giving another soldier shit over the boudoir photo tucked into a letter from home. Happy for them, sure, but a little jealous to not have a photo of their own.

"Let's not speak metaphorically about my heart," he continues, smirking over at Loki as they round a corner. "We don't have all day."

[thewrongpath]

Loki's steps faltered, his mouth turning downward into a nearly comical frown.

"Otherwise occupied?"

It's not how he would've described it, but it occurred to him that he and Sylvie hadn't actually spoken about the boundaries of their relationship. He couldn't help but be startled by the casual way the other man had defined something he and Sylvie continued to bumble their way through.

"Another day, then," he said, a bit distracted.

[semi_stable]

It isn't easy to catch Loki off guard, but Bucky seems to have done it and he wasn't even trying. He turns to look at Loki's befuddled expression and feels a strange twist of something in his own belly, something other than awkwardness, but that's all he can pin down.

"Oh, I just assumed," he says, reaching up to rub at the back of his neck, unsure of how to continue. It occurs to him that he has no idea of Loki knows that he and Sylvie slept together. He had assumed that maybe they talked about it on Valentine's Day after Bucky made his escape from the club, maybe even laughed about it, but that's probably his own self-consciousness talking. He has no idea how to do this shit anymore.

"Are you two not together?" Bucky asks, because now he finds himself curious about the situation, but then he shakes his head and holds up his metal hand, palm out. "Sorry, not my business."

[thewrongpath]

"No, it isn't that," he murmured, a bit of the bewilderment clearing from his expression. "Sylvie's her own woman. I don't seek to control how she spends her time when we're apart."

Bucky seemed uncomfortable with his own curiosity, but Loki pressed on.

"I can't, however, speak to how she feels about it all. We haven't discussed it."

[semi_stable]

"I'm being old-fashioned again, aren't I?" Bucky asks with a wry smile, ducking his head a bit. He keeps up with this modern world easily enough, he thinks, but there are times when he defaults back to how things were when he was young. He saw two people together, even two people as nuanced and complicated as Loki and Sylvie, and assumed they were going steady. It's kind of ridiculous now that he really thinks about it.

"As long as you're happy, right?" He shrugs his shoulders and slides his hands into his pockets. "That's all anybody wants."

That feels too revealing, so Bucky smirks at him and turns to keep walking, calling back over his shoulder. "As if she could ever be controlled."

[thewrongpath]

"Perhaps. I can't really speak to the ins and outs of mortal relationships," Loki admitted, returned Bucky's wry smile with one of his own.

"I suppose so," he agreed, with a quiet thoughtfulness many would have believed him incapable of. His smile softened again and he agreed, "I wouldn't presume to try."

[semi_stable]

The whole conversation makes Bucky feel a whirl of things that he can barely decipher, let alone process. It feels almost as if the knowledge has opened a door, but is that really true? Is he just conflating friendship with something else? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that he’s done such a thing.

And if some door has been opened? Where does it lead, and to whom? He’s probably thinking too hard about something that may not require much thought at all.

“I wish I could say that mortal relationships were simpler,” Bucky finally says, glancing over at Loki as he puts his hands in his pockets. “But that hasn’t necessarily been my experience. Maybe when I was a kid, but a lot of things seemed simpler then.”

[thewrongpath]

"To be quite honest, I can't say much about relationships at all," he admitted, his smile faintly, uncharacteristically self-deprecating. "Mortal or not. And that is something of a misrepresentation. We're not immortal. We'll live quite a long time, but we do die. We will. Either by misadventure, or simply fading back into the cosmos."

His smile softened once again. "In all my years, I've learned that few things are simple. On the surface, perhaps, but not where it matters."

[semi_stable]

"So painfully or peacefully, just like us," Bucky muses, sighing deeply as he tips his head back to look at the sky. "If only we could all be lucky enough for the latter."

He's sure that he's going to die bloody someday. It isn't a matter of if, so much as when. Steve got peace, but maybe that's what he deserved.

"You're not wrong about that," he says as he lowers his head to find Loki smiling at him. It isn't his usual smile, sharp with a cynical sort of edge, but something softer. Bucky doesn't know what it means, but he finds himself returning it.

"Come on," he says, reaching out to clap his hand down onto Loki's shoulder. "Popcorn's on me."