Strangefrost Oneshots

part thirty-two ~ cosmic love

Stephen's Point Of View

He walked into the room with a silencing, commanding step. His eyes surveyed the room with glittering mischief as the chattering stumbled to a halt. His smirk crept up onto his face like poison ivy on a great wall of sandstone. Conversation found a gradual increase again as he delved further into the room, slow footsteps thudding on the floor, hands twisted behind his back.

The dim lights glinted on his slicked-back hair that curled up against his collarbones like razor-sharp barbs on a devilishly handsome marble sculpture. His stare dropped to the floor once it reached me, and he smiled a little, as though amused by my very existence. His boots of soft, worn leather, tread the ground carefully and they encased his calves like a second skin, the colour merging with his trousers further up his legs, reaching for the sky.

A cloth of plated fabric across his thighs hid the glory beneath as my eyes travelled up his body like glue to paper. A charcoal overcoat and hard leather was all that separated his lean, toned body from the tense air around him.

His vibrant eyes lurched his stare back to me.

"Loki," I greeted, gruff. I was expertly aware of the effect his control on the room had on me but that didn't mean he had to be.

His lips, decadently smooth and thin like sheets of carved ice, rose in the corners. "Strange."

"You're late. Party started an hour ago."

"Fashionably late. Did you see the stares I got on my way in?"

"Yet you're standing in front of me, not conducting the crowd."

"I'm past trying to lasso the human race, Strange."

"You sure as hell don't act like it."

Loki scoffed, walking closer, pulling my spine straighter as I stood up to his height. He traced a slender finger down my jaw and leaned his other hand on the bar behind me. The stool behind my knees prohibited anymore backward movement from my trapped legs.

"But you like that, don't you?"

I said nothing. My heart thrashed, trapped, in the confines of my rib cage. I felt a tug at my navel, forcing me to lean into Loki, despite my best efforts not to. After a gentle squeeze of my hip, he released my gaze and I could step back. I cleared my throat and walked the short distance to the bar, aware of him following me.

"Resisting me now, are we? What's changed since the last time we were -"

"Quiet!" I scowled, glaring at him as I slumped onto a bar stool. I cast my surveillance to the hosts of the party: Stark, Rogers and Romanoff stood at the centre of everybody's attention, unaware that I was even here, let alone being seduced by their enemy. Former enemy, I corrected myself. Whatever. 

Loki chuckled, and I couldn't control the slight upturn of my lips. His touch on my face had left me aglow and tingly. I remembered why I hadn't stopped myself the last time.

"You're such a - a..."

He brought his mouth down to my ear. "What am I, Strange? What am I to you?"

Every instinct in my body, every one that told me of the danger Loki posed, screamed at me to be afraid, but my mind was consumed with the pleasure I'd been repressing. They didn't understand Loki as I did. He could play out this facade as intricately as he wished, but I knew what lay beneath his glorious exterior. Perhaps that's why I was reluctant this time around. I was scared of him wanting to return the favour.

"I could ask you the same question," I mumbled, sipping the drink that'd been placed in front of me. 

I ached to feel his power. I'd dreamt of it. Wallowed in it. The cosmic kiss of his other-worldly lips. God, and he knew it.

"Oh, Stephen Strange," he sighed, taking a seat beside me. "You are among the strongest to be able to resist me. But you do it for the wrong reasons, you know."

"How so?" I growled.

He looked me up and down like a lion; a predator. It was magnetising. 

"I would never force you into revealing yourself to me."

I blinked. That bewildered me. How had he known?

He smiled, satisfied at my reaction, I was sure. "That's what you're afraid of, isn't it? Opening your broken soul to me and have me throw it into this crowd?"

I stared down at the bar table. Then back up at him. How I wanted to grab a hold of those sharp locks of hair.

"Do it." Loki's eyes darkened suddenly, and the intensity of his gaze made me wonder if he'd actually seen into my mind.

"D - do what?"

"Oh, for Valhalla's sake!" 

In one fluid motion, he grabbed my arm and we zapped away, reappearing in a much more private room. 

"Would you stop teasing me like this?" Loki hissed. "This game you're playing is killing me!"

"The game I'm playing?" I scoffed. "Have you even noticed how you affect me?"

"I had to bring us here, Strange, because you wouldn't! I can't do all the work!"

"The work? You call making me question my morals and judgement, in public no less, work? And for what?"

"For your affections, you bloody fool!"

My eyes widened as I stared at him. His nostrils flared and his fists were balled at his sides. I was huffing, centimeters away from his face.

"What?"

Loki closed his eyes and licked his lips. He opened both before he spoke. 

"You heard me."

I frowned. "You want my affection?"

He clenched his jaw. "Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you intoxicate me, Strange. I can barely think straight around you."

All this time, I'd thought it was just me.

"Why haven't you mentioned this before?"

"I made love to you, did I not? I'd have thought that'd been enough for you to realise how infatuated I am by you, but apparently, you're so thick-headed that you can't see it."

I cleared my throat. "I thought you were just... I don't know. Humouring me or something."

He continued to stare at me. I didn't want to believe him. He was a lunatic. A tall, pale, sexy lunatic. Confessing his feelings for me.

"I can see I affect you," he murmured, like it was going to help. "How you can't look me in the eye when I smirk, how tense your shoulder's get when my hands go anywhere near your waist, and how you continuously touch the skin on your face where my fingers have been as though it may have changed somehow."

I tried to straighten my spine and stand up for myself, but I couldn't defend myself against something so true.

"Let me in, Stephen," Loki whispered. "How can something wrong feel this right?"

"I don't know," I muttered fleetingly, melting in his arms as he wrapped them around my waist and kissed me.

My hands moved frantically to the back of his head and held onto his hair so tightly, I almost feared hurting him, however, I was reminded by the electrifying feel of his touch that his pain threshold outweighed mine by a hundred times at least. I pulled harder.

I felt like I was floating, my whole body glowing as he infected me with that sweet poison. His kiss hypnotised me and the memories of the last time we'd been together came flooding back in thrilling waves. The line between right and wrong blurred behind my closed eyelids. 

Was he an angel or the devil? I couldn't possibly tell you.

He devoured me tenderly, like he was scared of letting go, but ferocious about taking me all in at once. Words couldn't even begin to describe the supernaturality of this exhilaration.

But a soft chuckle in my head made it clear for me. 

Transcendent, darling.