brandingproblem | au shenanigans for icasm

Is Loki aware of what Clint is getting up to? Yes. More or less. It's difficult not to be, honestly, when Clint is his own force to be reckoned with in his brain. And yes, the open entryway had been an invitation, because Loki cannot and will not shut Clint out completely even when he is being the most frustrating creature Loki has ever had the pleasure of knowing.

He's not surprised that he isn't followed, and he won't admit to disappointment either. Instead, while Clint is enjoying the grapes and the wine and the revelry, Loki gets extraordinarily high, a sensation he has missed quite a good deal, on Midgard. Which is somewhere he's chosen to exile himself, it would appear, until either the planet crumbles to dust or Clint decides to handle matters himself, whichever comes first.

The orgy participants let out little laughs and cheers as Clint joins them. They ask questions before they touch, but they are very engaged. Very thorough. Very invested in his enjoyment, and their own. However. Every party ends eventually.

There's a sense of people drifting off from the margins of the event, before there are fewer and fewer participants and then, suddenly, just Clint. At one of the chaises in the center of the room. It's clean, at least. Across the room is Loki, robe finally tied shut, holding a goblet of wine very loosely and looking less peevish and more simply unimpressed.

"You couldn't figure out how to leave, could you? Did it ever occur to you to ask anyone?"

The thing Loki most certainly is right about is that getting his brains fucked out by dream people isn't really that satisfying. Like, there's pleasure, the dreamsense of pleasure, the knowledge that there is and should be pleasure. His dreamed up body is feeling fucked, sure, but also, he's not very satiated by the whole experience. On one hand, it was great? On the other, it wasn't actually enough.

If Clint's at all embarrassed about being found laid out on the chaise, covered in fluids, some of them his own and some not, naked and befucked, then he doesn't show it. Annoyed? Maybe frustrated. Or exhausted but not in a satisfying way. He wonders what if any of it he might feel on waking.

He flips Loki off.

"I'm not asking fake people how to ditch their reality. And I wasn't gonna chase after you."

Loki rolls his eyes at being flipped off and simply has another sip of wine. "Well they would have told you, fake people or no. Besides, you clearly weren't too discerning in what you were willing to ask them." Nosewrinkle. Really, Clint. "Do you need a towel? A basin of water?"

"Sometimes it's nice just to lay back and let things happen."

That suddenly seems like the wrong thing to say. Like it's too close. Like he didn't actually mean to say it, and he pushes himself up to sitting to try and hide the fact that the words cut a little.

"Does my state of uncleanliness distress you? Maybe you should dream me all squeaky clean for you to touch."

Loki's nostrils flare and his head tilts in a way that implies he is displeased with Clint's particular choice of words. He sees Clint's attempt at... redirection or perhaps just his awareness that it was the wrong thing to say, and he knows Clint often doesn't say the right thing to begin with, but.

Still.

Loki turns away from him and waves his hand. The sensation of being dunked in warm water hits Clint full force for several moments before it dissipates and Clint is left sitting there, clean and only a tiny bit damp.

Loki doesn't turn back around. Apparently the taunt about touching was not taken as invitation. Apparently the strawberries on the table are more interesting than Clint right now.

"There was a time in which dreaming about sex with you would have been a welcome and enjoyable distraction from the active desire that plagues my waking hours." The problem is that it doesn't hold up. Doesn't exhaust and satisfy. It more or less feels like a daydream and not worth it, at that.

Edited 2022-08-22 13:44 (UTC)

Clint makes an undignified noise at the imaginary dunking, wipes at his face. Well, hey, at least Loki actually...did it. Even if in kind of an asshole way, which, sure, is deserved, fully. Fine.

He glances at Loki. "Kinda like having a whole alien orgy is an enjoyable distraction." And not enough. Not quite right, not quite there. "But it's not the same as the real deal, so it's not good enough."

He sighs, pulling his knees up under him on the soft cushion, feeling out the dull ache that does feel good but is also not-- "You want it, out there, and you want it to be enthusiastic and consensual and not full of pain and blood and all that shit I hurl at you." Given the antics of the orgy. He rubs his palms down his thighs. "You know it's complicated. With us."

"I do know it's complicated." Loki appears frustrated, voice tight, muscles taunt. Still not turning around. He picks up a strawberry, eyes focused on it and attention wholly elsewhere. "It is complicated for you. That you care, that I desire. It is complicated for me." For the same reasons but... not exactly.

Another complication though not one Loki is unused to. Since when do his desires and motivations align perfectly with someone else?

The problem of complications, again. To desire softness when there has been none desired before. From this man. When everything Loki learns about their connection and everything he is informs him that he is likely to continue desiring from this man for as long as he lives.

Frankly terrifying, thank you very much.

Somehow it was easier when he wanted a violent end that Clint was reluctant and unwilling to provide. Yes he was frustrated and angry at not being granted what he wanted but he'd found a way to get it anyway and then everything changed.

Or it didn't. Perhaps it's more of a losing of artifice. Perhaps he was correct, that he needed to die or else he'd be unable to change.

(Frankly terrifying, thank you very much.)

"I want it to balance, perhaps. A concept I tend to despise." Clint is his weapon yes. He tends to turn his weapons on himself from time to time. To test their sharpness. To improve his own.

Loki sighs. "Do you want a robe?"
Now, he'll turn around.

Edited 2022-08-22 19:16 (UTC)

He doesn't answer the question. Again. Directly. He feels like he can get away with that more in this space than he can out in the waking world, somehow.

"I can give you pain," he starts, quiet, staring at a spot on the chaise now than at Loki, "and I can give you softness. I know I'm capable of giving you both of these things," rubbing hands, an offered hug, "I just...don't know how to balance it myself, I think."

He is bare, physically. But he feels more bare emotionally, and it has an effect on him in this world. He is still Real. Solid, in a sense, where the rest is less so. How can one be more naked than naked? But Loki will be able to get that kind of sense, on looking at him. The same way that existing here, he appears more real. Like he could be translucent, but isn't. Like he could be shining bright, but doesn't. Like he could start to pull a loose thread on his person and unwind himself, but no such thread exists.

He thinks, for the briefest moment, should I run? Like Loki might suddenly become a hunter descending on prey himself.

"Sometimes I don't know if the things I want are the things I want." And that scares him. He breathes out, feeling near dizzy with the imagined effort of pleasing and being pleased by a number of strange bodies, the wine gone to his head that isn't even real. He feels barer than bare. He shivers.

"Yeah. I think I'd like a robe, please."

Loki notices. How could he not, when Clint seems more Real than anything has any right to be, when Clint is honest and exposed and shining, but clearly opting not to be exactly that?

He should look away, perhaps, and grant the other man a modicum of... decency, perhaps, or even just the suggestion of it. But this is Loki, in his own mind, dreaming his own dreams. He's already turned around; he makes a gesture with his hands, summoning a robe not unlike his own, expensively made, a little heavy, long and flowing; he doesn't look away.

Instead, he walks the space between them and offers the folded robe to Clint. He could ask for clarification; if the things Clint desires are not housed and created from within himself then where else could they come from? But Loki knows the answer runs the risk of being just as complicated, just as frustrating, as any conversation on the nature of desire or the locus of where they begin between them tend to be, and so he leaves it.

"...do you want me to show you the way out?"

Well. Mostly leaves it.

Edited 2022-08-29 23:00 (UTC)

There's nothing for Loki to see that hasn't already been seen, and in some ways felt, before. But that more naked than naked feeling remains. It's not his body he wants to cover, but his self. He takes the robe with a grateful nod and dons it, ties it off. Eventually, finally, stretches himself out to standing. If there's some wooziness, he tries not to show it.

Loki doesn't ask the obvious question. But then, Loki never really does.

Part of him thinks the question that he does ask should feel like a trap. But it doesn't. He's the intruder here, after all, and while perhaps he's welcome in some way, he doesn't belong, he shouldn't stay.

"I didn't mean to come here." He's said that before, but it feels like he should say it again anyway. "I don't know how I did. So I don't know how to get back out. Without you waking up or without me dying." Which he would very much like to avoid thanks.

Loki gives Clint a small smile. It means I know these things already; it means that Loki understands Clint's reluctance towards death between them, again, here in this new and yet familiar landscape. "I trust you," is what he says, instead.

Because he does trust Clint, even where and where Clint doesn't trust himself. That is regarding the extraction of Clint from his dreams, yes, but mostly it is about the idea of balance between them. Clint doesn't trust himself to determine where the line is; Loki trusts that when Clint becomes concerned that he's crossed it, that is when Loki should recognize it exists.

But that is a lot to put on anyone's shoulders and perhaps this is enough.

"It's not the only way." And perhaps, once this happens again (and he knows it will, now; the door is now just an entryway with no real sense of division, how could it not happen again?) he will begin the process of instructing a mortal in how to navigate others' dreams. "But I can wake myself easily."

Loki trusts him, and Clint shivers again, not from any cold. He knows it intrinsically, but saying it makes it mean something different. It's there, spoken, on the outside, like an object with actual mass, with heft to it. Thinks about the first time Natasha said it and meant it, how it had changed something between them to have it said aloud instead of merely silently understood.

Thinks for a moment he catches a glimpse of familiar red hair and--blinks it away.

Loki did not leave his dream. He stuck around. Wanted what happened to happen. Here, now, there's apparently options. Could wake himself up. That would be easiest, it seems like. Clint licks his lips. "But there's a way I could leave whenever I want to?"

Clint licks his lips and Loki's nostrils flare. There is, briefly, the awareness of something else introduced into the dream, but Clint blinks, and it's gone.

He won't ask.

"Yes. There are many ways, and one way, in the end." A slight lift of one shoulder. "You have to believe you can. The rest is merely the structure in which a mind could determine they possess the ability to do it, but that can be the part that takes the longest to learn."

"Click my heels together and say 'there's no place like home' a couple times, huh?" Whether Loki understands the reference or not doesn't matter to him. Clint moves past him, carefully, to the strawberries. Munches on one, also carefully. Does it taste like a strawberry because Loki knows what they taste like? Or does it taste like a strawberry because that's what Clint believes it's supposed to taste like?

"Do you want to wake up?"

Is Loki going to ask Nate what that particular reference might mean once he's awake? Signs point to yes. As it is, Loki does shift himself out of Clint's way as he walks back to the tables and their offerings, turning in place and folding his hands behind his back.

He's not looking at Clint when the next question is asked. Of course the answer is 'no'. Of course Loki doesn't make that simple. "Is that important right now?"

He could always sleep at three in the afternoon. Some other unlikely time for Clint to also be sleeping. It's fine.

"Yeah. That's important." He leans on the table and looks at Loki. "It's your head, your dream, your sleep. What you want," and he says it slowly, because...it's difficult for him to say, and it might be difficult for Loki to hear, "is important."

Doesn't mean he has to get what he wants. But keeping it all a secret isn't going to do either of them any favors, right?

Why, petulant and demanding, rises to the top and is almost spoken between them before Loki swallows it down. He doesn't have to believe Clint is right; Clint believes that enough for the both of them right now anyway.

"I suppose." A shrug. His eyes slide to Clint's and then away again. "You know the answer, anyway."

It's a good thing he doesn't ask. The answer might not be a fully coherent one anyway. But Loki has already made it clear: he trusts Clint. Which means trusting that he believes what he says.

"Yeah. I do." Could have saved them the trouble by not asking, but what kind of example would that set if he just went around making assumptions about what someone like Loki does or does not want? "So. We're both asleep; it's not like we're not getting rest. Should I just go hang out unobtrusively in a corner, let this thing keep rolling, until one of us wakes up naturally?"

He knows the answer to that is also no, but that one is not really the point.

The expression Loki fixes Clint is fully unimpressed, to say the least. Does the other man really believe this is how anything works? That he could just sit in the corner of Loki's awareness and be ignored?

Seriously?

"Definitely not, don't be ridiculous." Besides the primary goal of the dream was fulfilled in the orgy and Loki's uncertain what else his mind would come up with if he were to allow it to 'keep rolling' all on its own. "Do you want to return to the library? Perhaps the garden."

His rooms are still an available locale, as well, but. He's not sure about offering that either.

"Aw, what, you don't want me to be an irritating, niggling thought in the back of your mind? Isn't that what I usually am?"

There's no heat to it. Honestly more amused than anything. He pops another strawberry in his mouth and considers his options. Loki could wake himself up, end the dream, go the hell back to sleep. That'd be easier. He doesn't actually want to needlessly interrupt the sleep, though. "Don't most dreams sort of end when they've reached a kind of narrative conclusion? Or, no, you're doing that lucid dreaming thing. You can dream up whatever you want. Sure, we could go to the garden. I was actually...trying to get there, before? And then your library shoved me here instead. Or if you wanted to dream of somewhere else... It's your headspace. What do you want to have happen besides me either fucking you or killing you?"

"I wouldn't know about most dreams," he points out, because sometimes it feels like Clint forgets he's not human and what that means. "I'm familir with my own, and more recently, yours. That encompasses the bulk of what I know on the subject."

This is his dreamscape; he knows that and is, briefly, annoyed that Clint feels the need to remind him. Like Loki isn't trying to... be considerate of the fact that Clint never intended to come here in the first place.

"Nothing in a dream," he says more tired than annoyed, suddenly, and starts walking toward the door that once led to the library. The garden, apparently. it is.

A frown, sharp. Clint doesn't flinch, but he does tighten the robe around himself as he follows. Worries for a moment about the temperature. It had been cold in the library. What of the garden?

"You're telling me you haven't done the dreamhopping thing before me? So this is all new shit to you, too." Loki the magician would still have a much better grasp on all of this than he would, obviously. But it's telling.

And wisely doesn't comment on the rest. Nothing in a dream. Doesn't want to wake up (and have Clint leave) but also only has a few things he really wants out of Clint--which doesn't seem right. That feels a little reductive. Hm.

Tuck that feeling away for later.

"You made a mind palace. That's what the library is, right, a safe place deep inside your mind where you can store a lot of information, arranged in a way that you can easily find it again." Or he's conflating aliens and humans again, whatever. "Why's it cold?"

"Once or twice but in very different circumstances." Less than a dozen times, all told; not nearly enough for Loki to feel that he has any sense of what he's doing, certainly.

There are a lot of things Loki could imagine doing with Clint, here. Sparring or cuddling or reading. Showing him places Clint has never been, places long removed from the fabric of Fate. The problem is that Loki is currently much too fixated on desires unspoken and unrealized. The problem is that it doesn't feel equivalent between the two of them.

The problem is Loki wants, and is annoyed with himself for wanting. Still.

"Because I'm a Frost Giant," Loki explains. Does Clint actually know this? Nate does. Nate asked him once about what it meant to have lost everyone twice when he had to do an assignment about immigrant families for school. But Nate is very good at keeping Loki's secrets.

"Because I'm cold-hearted, perhaps." He glances over his shoulder at Clint before the throws the doors open.

The library, this time, is much more welcoming, much less a place of half-frozen and frightful things. Sure, they still exist there, but they aren't in stark focus at the moment.

"But you don't always need things cold. You don't crank the AC up and turn your place to an ice box." Hm. "But it's still more comfortable for you for things to be colder, huh. Wintertime must be a blast for you. Aside from the usual reasons."

The kids playing in the snow, making forts, throwing snowballs, making angels. Loki occasionally joining in the fun. In the air, from an indistinct Somewhere: children's laughter. It seems so natural a thing that Clint doesn't even find it strange or that he must have done that himself, smiling at the thought, the memory, the sound.

"You're not cold to me."

"I do enjoy it moreso than late summer." Which is when Loki's temper grows its shortest and he spends the most time isolated; being out in the heat in August or September is not his idea of a good time but often is the children's idea of a good time, so sometimes he just suffers through it all anyway.

He almost asks what Clint means by 'the usual reasons' before the laughter causes him to freeze, slightly. Clint is smiling; this is probably his doing, his own capability leaking out of him at the edges.

Loki's not sure if he's upset or excited at the prospect.

"There is an exception that proves every rule." Also, he's a contrary bitch, what do you expect?

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