I carry band-aids: steve x loki

secret

Loki was sleeping when a hand urgently shook him awake. He didn't know where he was, didn't know what'd happened, but he was being touched. He remembered; hands holding him down, keeping him in place, then there was pain; excruciating pain everywhere as knives pierced through his skin.

"Loki!" Steve caught his wrist in time. He didn't know what Loki was doing, Loki didn't know what he, himself, was trying to archive; probably trying to claw out Steve's eye. The Captain's face was barely a few inches away from his. And for a moment Loki panicked, why was the Captain here? They found him. They were going to lock him up or worse.

But then he remembered, the Captain didn't find him, at least not this time. He was the one crawling to the Captain's front door and begging for a shelter. They were, as much as the thought still sounded absurd to Loki, roommates.

"It's me," Steve said, slowly letting go of Loki's wrist after Loki seemed to regain back his sense and no longer felt threatened.

"Captain Rogers," Loki said, there was a hint of embarrassment in his eyes, mostly because he believed he'd shown Steve his weakness again by being so... jumpy. "My apologize. I didn't meant to —"

"We have a problem," Steve cut him off. And Loki had only noticed just now there, too, was a hint of panic behind the Captain's eyes.

"What kind of problem?" Loki was suddenly very alert. His first thought was that it was HYDRA. They were ambushed.

"It's not HYDRA," Steve quickly said, like he could somehow read Loki's mind, and if Loki felt embarrassed before.

"Anyway, I wouldn't wake you up, if it's not urgent," there was a brief pause, like Steve was calculating how to break the news to Loki.

"Captain," Loki trailed of. So it wasn't HRDRA, that was, in its own right, a relief, though Steve being this nervous wasn't making it any better.

Steve sighed, then, running a hand down his face. "You remember my friend, Agent Romanoff,"

Loki went slightly rigid for a moment. He remembered her. He remembered them all, though his memories with them — the Avengers in general — weren't pleasant ones. "The feisty one," Loki said with a forced smile. He doubted, if it were her who found him instead of Steve, he would have still been breathing and talking.

"She's coming," Steve's voice was with a hint of panic.

"Okay..." Loki tried to take in the information. He may be injured and broken, but he wasn't stupid. If she knew about him being here, about Steve giving him a shelter. "When exactly,"

"Any minute. She didn't give any heads up. If I told her not to come, she'll start suspecting something's off," and Steve had already been acting weird lately. Better not blow himself off by acting like his house held the deep, dark secret, even though it did.

"She's going to take me away," Loki's voice was distant, like he wasn't particularly talking to Steve. Just stating facts. She was going to take him away and if he was lucky enough, he'd spend the rest of his life locked up without any warmth of sunlight.

"No," Steve brought Loki out of his trance. "That's not gonna happen,"
And really, Steve was clueless as to why he felt so protective of Loki. He liked to think it was because Loki was his responsibility now, whether or not he liked it. There was nothing more — the thought, of Loki being taken away from him, sending a wave of hurt and frustration towards something inside his chest was nothing more than Loki being his responsibility and so it was his job to look after him, or so Steve tried to convince himself that. "No one's taking you away,"

Loki raised his brows, like he was trying make sense of a word Steve said. "You can't possibly mean you'd like for me to spend an hour or two unsupervised in some library or a coffee shop as you have a conversation with her here, right?"