Title: all is not gold that glitters
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Graphic descriptions of wounds.

Summary: When Loki gets himself in a spot of trouble that he can't get himself out of, who can he turn to for help? Well, Steve Rogers isn't doing anything this Friday night...

Author's Notes: Written as a gift for lise, whose Steve/Loki and whose Loki Whump are both beyond compare.

Steve woke up to the sound of someone outside his door.

He found himself doing that a lot these days. The future probably wasn't really any louder than his old home town had been, if you added in the planes and cars and subtracted the crying babies and drunken workmen, but his hearing was sharper and his sleep lighter. When he'd first come into his new strength, the war had been on, so he'd assumed that his new tendency to snap to attention at every scrape and cough was just the result of having to be on the alert for days at a time, weeks on end. But no, it looked like that was something that was going to be permanent, like the way he couldn't get drunk or get any tattoos.

He woke up, but didn't move from his bed at first - it might just be his neighbor passing by, and he could fall back to sleep easier if he didn't leap to his feet at every sound. But instead of shuffling on down the way, the unnamed stranger at his door just sat there, little noises of shifting cloth and creaking leather and edged breathing.

By the time the knock on his door finally came, his nerves were stretched so tight with anticipation that he nearly leapt out of bed, wide awake. So much for getting back to sleep. But who would be at his door at this hour of the morning, and why? Twenty dollars says trouble, Steve thought glumly.

When he opened his door to reveal Loki - Loki, brother of Thor, Loki, one-time would-be conquerer of Earth, Loki, part-time ally and full-time pain in the ass - he kicked himself for making a bet he hadn't wanted to win.

Loki was in his usual fancy get up, all black leather and green starch and glinting golden accents. Not so glinting right now, actually, nor so fancy - Loki looked like he'd been dragged behind a train. His clothes were scuffed and torn, his hair in dirty tangles, and the pale tinge to his skin made the dark circles under his eyes stand out even more.

"Ah, good," Loki said, and despite the condition he'd shown up in - looking like something the cat had left half of on the doorstep - his tone was as precise and arrogant as ever. "You are at home. I rather thought you would be."

Steve wasn't sure how, exactly, he was supposed to react in this situation. Despite being the catalyst that had formed the Avengers in the first place, Loki was not technically speaking a supervillain any longer. Indeed, it could be argued (mostly by Thor) that he never had been.

Last year Thanos had come back to Earth at the head of a brand new army and had another go at conquering the place, and wiping out all life on earth to install his new subjects. This time, Loki had fought with them, and it had begrudgingly come out that he had only tried to conquer Earth in the first place in order to lead a united defense against Thanos when he inevitably turned up.

Ever since then he'd stayed on Earth, and shown up a few times to aid them in battle - always accompanied by pointed condescension and backhanded insults. Steve was pretty pissed off by Loki's arrogance - not to mention his presumption in thinking that Earth was just another military resource he could exploit - but he could admit that okay, there were worse excuses. They had beaten Thanos back in no small part due to Loki's aid; it's possible they wouldn't have been able to do it without him. The lives he'd saved, in the end, outweighed the lives he'd taken... and so Loki was, if by no stretch of the imagination a hero, at least no longer an enemy.

Even if he had been, Steve wasn't sure he'd know how to react to a former enemy coming to his door at three in the morning looking beat to hell and back. As it was, the best he could manage was a polite, wary, "Can I help you?"

"Surprisingly, you can," Loki replied. "I require an assistant with strong hands; and whatever qualities you lack, brute strength you possess in abundance."

Before Steve had quite worked out a comeback for that, Loki suddenly surged past him into the apartment. Steve gave way rather than going for a linebacker's block, and as soon as Loki was past him the barge gave way to more of a stagger. Steve took the time to close and lock the door before turning after his guest, only to recoil from the sight of Loki's back. "Holy shit, Loki!"

He'd thought Loki looked bad only from the front. His back was a complete mess - the coat and shirt had been torn to shreds, revealing skin that was barely hanging on to seared muscle and bone. The wounds (and what could have even inflicted those?) crisscrossed all across his shoulders and back, barely an inch of skin uncovered, and there was something... something bright buried in the cuts and creases of those gouges, something that squirmed and shifted under his horrified gaze.

"What an occasion," Loki drawled, though the sarcasm in his voice was breathless and thin. He swayed on his feet and caught at the back of Steve's couch, holding onto it for dear life. "I just heard a profanity coming out of the mouth of virtue. Mark the day."

"I do know how to swear," Steve said reproachfully. "I just don't do it all the time when there's no need for it. But this..." He stepped hesitantly forward, reaching out a hand that hovered without quite touching. He wasn't sure what to do, what not to do, but one thing was clear - Loki needed help. "Who did this to you?"

"Amora," Loki said through gritted teeth, leaning heavily on the sofa as he made his way around to the front. "A shot in the back." He glanced over his shoulder, taking in Steve's appalled expression. "Oh, don't look so shocked, Captain. No honor among thieves and all that rot. I'd have done the same to her if the occasion arose - I'm simply kicking myself for giving her the opportunity."

Steve drew closer, still hesitating to touch but needing to know more. On closer inspection, the gouges in Loki's skin were not randomly placed, but set in a meaningful pattern. Some of them were just cuts, swollen and oozing blood, but others - there was definitely something still in the wounds. Something red-yellow and shining that moved even as he watched it, cutting the lines deeper into the flesh. It almost looked and moved like molten metal, except of course that it wasn't nearly hot enough - but then again, given the way the skin around it looked almost burned... "What is it?" he asked, horrified.

Loki made it to the front of Steve's sofa and collapsed on it with a groan. "A variation of a curse," he said. "It digs into the flesh and attaches itself to the victim's life-force. I should very much like it to be removed." That last came out in a strangled tone accompanied by an involuntary arch of the back, as though trying to writhe away from his own skin.

Steve's head jerked back slightly. "And you think I can help you?" he said doubtfully.

"It's attracted to, and activated by, magic," Loki said impatiently. "It will not harm you, as your dull mortal soul has no magic to attract it."

Steve shook his head, daunted. " I don't know anything about curses," he said. "Shouldn't you go to Thor, or, or to Asgard?"

Loki hissed. "I would rather be hung from the roots of Yggdrasil upside-down in Helheim for a hundred years than to return to that place," he said. "As for Thor, don't be absurd. That oaf knows no more about healing than a pig knows about spacecraft. I want to be helped, not pummeled into a smear."

Steve wavered. Loki was obviously in pain, and desperate, or else he wouldn't have come to his onetime-enemy for help in the first place. Steve would never refuse to help an ally, even as twisty one as Loki. He just wasn't sure how he could help. "But how am I supposed to get it out?"

"With an amorphic dampening wave extractor," Loki said. He flinched again. "Or, lacking that, a pair of tweezers."

Steve went to get the tweezers - and some towels, while he was at it - from his backroom. When he came back he found that Loki had peeled out of the shredded remains of his jacket and now sat sideways on the couch, arms braced against the back. Steve pulled up a footstool and sat behind him, laying out his meager first-aid supplies on a towel next to him. He picked up the pair of tweezers and took a deep breath, facing Loki's horror of a back, and started looking for an end.

The bits of metal - curse, as Loki called it - were not hard to find; they were obviously foreign to his body, and were so shiny that they almost seemed to glow in the dim light of the apartment. They looked more than anything like short, thick lengths of red-hot wire, and resisted being removed. Steve had to put his back in it in an effort to get the first piece to detach from Loki's flesh, and when it finally snapped free the God gave a whole-body flinched. His head dropped forward, breath hissing through his teeth.

Steve hesitated. The removed curse-fragment left a long, deep gouge in Loki's back, skin and tissue torn away. He caught a glimpse of something pale and wet - maybe tendon, maybe bone - before the fresh blood covered it. "Isn't this hurting you?" he asked anxiously.

"Of course it is, you dolt!" Loki snapped. " I told you - they attach themselves to the life-force of the victim. Believe me if there were any more graceful way to have this done, I would - but I cannot work on my own back!" He got hold of himself, taking a deep breath, and braced himself against the couch again. "Just do it," he added more quietly. "I will heal, but I cannot until they're gone."

Steve did a few more pieces, and he began to understand why Loki had said he needed his strength; the curse clung with an unnatural (well, yes, magic) tenacity to Loki's flesh, and that flesh was much tougher than an ordinary human's. A normal doctor probably wouldn't have been able to pull them free at all.

But once they were loose from Loki's back, the moment they touched Steve's skin, the wire-fragments lost all their color and shine. They seemed to shrivel, like worms exposed to salt, until they were no more than little black strings of gum. He rinsed them off his hands into the bowl of water, which was getting increasingly more murky with blood and char the farther he went.

He'd gotten out all the easy, exposed pieces of the curse; now he had to really dig for each fragment, sometimes cutting through partially-healed skin to expose the ends. Loki tensed and twitched and snarled under his breath, obviously in great pain, but still fighting to keep still and quiet. It took Steve back in his mind to some of the medical tents he'd been in back in the War, sometimes on the frontlines when there'd been no morphine, no antibiotics, nothing to dull the pain of the surgeons butting through muscle and bone to try to salvage a life. He'd heard some of those same sounds then, ragged groans and bitten-off screams, and it made him hurt in sympathy.

"You know," Steve said as he worked, talking to try to distract Loki. "I'm just a plain guy. No supergenius like Tony, no giant alter egos, no magic tricks like you. No real smarts or skills at all. I'm a fighter, and that's pretty much all I'm good for."

"Is that so?" Loki said with a gasp. If it was meant to be mocking, it didn't have much bite left to it.

Steve continued talking. "Thing is, I know for a fact Thor thinks that about himself, too." He couldn't miss the way Loki tensed up even in the midst of his pain at the mention of Thor's name. "But I've seen him call storms and control the weather even without that hammer of his. Sometimes he shorts out toasters just by walking in the room. His magic is so much part of himself that he doesn't think of it as special, but it's still there."

He put down the tweezers for a moment and shifted around on the couch, looking Loki squarely in the face. "And that's why you wouldn't go to him for help, isn't it?" he said. "Because you said this thing is attracted to magic. You're afraid that the curse would attach itself to his magic and hurt him too."

Loki didn't answer. He turned his face into the back of the couch, avoiding Steve's eyes, and Steve knew he had his answer.

Steve bit his lip, then decided to forge onwards - for his teammate's sake if nothing else. "Just so you know, Thor really loves you," he blurted out. "He'd put up with an awful lot of danger and pain if it meant being able to help you."

Loki let out a noise that was almost a howl. "I know!" he gasped. "Don't you understand, that's why I can't! He would risk anything, sacrifice anything - he doesn't care for himself at all, the fool, the fool. Do you have any idea how hard it is to live up to that, to try to be worthy -" He cut himself off in mid-word, shutting down like a clam. Face, voice, expression - all blank and neutral.

"Just finish," he said in a cold and empty voice, and turned to present his back to Steve again.

Steve picked up the tweezers and scissors again, wordless as he moved back into position. Chewing his lip for several minutes, he finally said: "...you're a better brother than you think, you know."

Loki didn't answer, but Steve caught a muffled sound that might have been a whimper.

Steve finished his work in silence. By the time he was done, Loki was clearly at the end of his rope, sagging into the couch cushions and visibly shaking with exhaustion and pain. Steve rinsed the tweezers and his hands and stood up, clearing his throat as he regarded the bowl of by-now filthy water. "What should I do with these... bits?" he asked.

Loki stirred tiredly on the couch. "They should be properly annihilated, but I haven't the strength," he said faintly. "If you can burn them, it's better than nothing."

Fortunately, when Steve got this apartment he had insisted on an old-fashioned gas stove instead of one of those newfangled electric coils. He burned the soggy remains in the blue flame of his stove, feeling a definite relief as they curled and crumbled into nothingness.

When he was done, he went back and got all his clean towels from the bathroom, ran some warm water, and came back to the living room. Loki was now curled up on the couch cushions, face buried in his knees, and didn't look like anything short of a shell exploding could dislodge him.

He sat beside Loki on the couch and began to wash him, as gently and carefully around the deep rents in his back as he could. Loki started and stirred when the washcloth first touched his skin, but then sank back down on the upholstery in exhausted acquiescence.

Steve helped the injured man out of the shredded remains of his outfit, down to an at least comfortable-looking pair of leggings, which he then supplemented with a nightshirt of his own. Loki had been right, he was already healing - faster than any human would, but slower than he'd ever seen Thor heal. The curse, or the removal of it, really had exhausted all his reserves.

There was no way Steve could even consider trying to kick him out of the apartment now; he'd gladly let Loki have his bed, if he didn't think the other man would punch him for lifting him like a damsel in distress to get him there. The couch was comfortable enough for one night, he figured.

When Loki was at least marginally clean and comfortable, Steve sat beside him on the couch and put an arm across his shoulders, avoiding the injured areas. Squeezing gently, feeling the too-sharp bones beneath the skin, he said: "You know, Loki, I think you're really brave."

A surprised, wet-sounding inhalation of breath; then he slowly, shakily let it out again. Loki pressed against Steve's side, silently asking for more... more support, more comfort, more presence. Steve smiled a little where he knew Loki couldn't see, and settled into the couch cushion, nudging Loki up to rest his cheek on Steve's lap. He brought one hand up to card gently through Loki's hair, and the rest of the night passed in soft silence.

~end.