Random, brought on by Sig's mentioning of how darcy should be all about Loki's hands. This is AU in that before Tony got to his penthouse, Darcy was there dropping something off for Pepper and didn't realize it wasn't a good place or time. Er, just go with that? :)

There are hands and then there are hands and there is touching and then there is caressing, stroking, coming undone with fingers gliding and smoothing over skin, over muscle, over bone, through hair again and again and again. Then there is touching to kill and to hurt and to leave scars.

Darcy will die by one hand alone, she thinks. It will be easy. His hand, his fingers, curling around the handle of a dagger and one sickeningly smooth move will have the cool metal buried deep in her chest. Her heart will shudder. Her heart will convulse. Blood will bubble up from her mouth and from her chest like a well of fresh spring water.

She says this to him.

"If you do it, make it good," and she is staring at his hands. She is entranced by the way his fingers, long and slender, hover over the blade's hilt. His eyes are fixated on her mouth.

"If you do it," she says, and she sounds like she is in a trance. Dazed. Dreaming.

"Make it count."

She doesn't beg. Doesn't say please and doesn't say oh god no, not me, not me.

His eyes are a pale blue but color floods the iris until they are as green as a forest, dark, pupils blown wide. He can hear the distant sound of the man of Iron approaching. He doesn't say anything to her and when he turns to look over his shoulder he comes to find that is all the time she needs to run and hide. Not so scared that she would beg but smart enough to run, run, run.

When the Iron Man enters Loki is waiting for him. His hand is now curled around his scepter and she watches from the sliver of a crack in an open coat closet near the main elevator. When Loki speaks she listens but she watches his hands grip the scepter like it's his life line, like it's another arm. When he speaks he watches Iron Man and then the city and the whole time he is thinking of her lips and her words and his hesitation and how it's been happening more and more, how the hold on his will is slipping, slipping, slipping.

Hours and hours later he is in a cell and the walls are so white it feels like they are screaming and he feels like his body is a furnace. He knows they do not underestimate him so they will not send anyone in for the longest time. His body is a furnace, Thanos' poison is a fever, it's trying to bleed from his every pore, his body is trying to force it out. The scepter is gone. The tesseract out of his reach. In a fever dream he think of bright red lips and wide blue eyes and a girl that whispers make it count over and over again until the words lose all meaning.

He wakes up with a heavy ache to his temple and cold metal on his mouth. It's a welcomed sensation for his skin still burns and now itches. If his hands were not bound he would scratch himself bleeding. Thor takes him home that afternoon.

Loki stands on a pedestal for a year in the court of Asgard. His mouth is sewn shut. His mother weeps. His father mourns quietly, with a stern gaze and no words beyond the ones that send him to his fate. Thor comes every evening to sit beside the pedestal and read books from Loki's library. Loki pretends Thor is not there until the twelvth month. In the twelvth month Thor reads from Loki's favorite story from their child hood about two brother tigers. A book from Midgard, a curiosity that Frigga indulged in having for her sons when they were small boys who liked stories before bed.

Thor can not finish the story. He sobs into the pages of the book and apologizes until he is hoarse. Until Loki feels the numbness in his limbs let up. He can feel he is being unbound though Odin is no where to be seen. He has dreamed of this freedom, of how he would jump from the pedestal and give them all what they deserved but it doesn't happen. Instead, the moment he feels the strength return to his bones he falls like a rag doll at Thor's side and they, grown men, clutch at each other like children again. His hands bunch into Thor's tunic, his knuckles turn white because he holds to him so tight.

It is one thing to find and give forgiveness with Thor. It is another to do the same with the men and women of SHIELD and the Avengers. The only good that has come from his earlier transgressions seem to be the unity of the Avengers themselves, that and perhaps that he knows Thanos' weaknesses well enough to be useful to their cause. He wins them over one at a time, by battling by their side and bleeding the same. By saving lives, by playing by their rules, by doing everything to make his actions count.

It's been two years, at least, since he first saw her and it is still her words that echo in his head.

Make it count.

She hadn't meant this, whover she was. She had meant her death, his unfinished murder. He wants to blame it on everything but what it really is. He thinks it is simply because she was one of the very last midgardians to even speak to him that her voice and vision sticks with him. He thinks this but knows it is not so or else he would still be obsessing over words spoken by Tony Stark, by Black Widow, by a slew of others. If Loki is honest with himself he knows he thinks far too often of how her blue eyes, wide, wide, wide, had caught him off guard along with her lack of fear. He thinks too often of her lips, of her scent, of her disheveled curls and the way she kept staring at his hands.

If Loki is honest with himself then he knows he wants to find her.

When he finds her it is a strange twist of fate. When he finds her it is because he is looking for Thor and Thor is with this Jane Foster and Jane Foster works in Stark Tower where the girl with the eyes and the words makes copies of things, answers phones, does busy work to give Jane, and others, a chance to do the science that has now fixed the Bifrost.

She spills her coffee on his shoes and neither of them move to clean it up. There is a silence so thick and heavy between them that he drowns in it. Loki Wordsmith has a tongue that feels like lead and Darcy Loud-Mouth Lewis feels as if her mouth is suddenly too dry. She breaks the stillness first.

"You could have killed me, once."

What do you say to that? He isn't sure and then suddenly her eyes (which fixate on his hands as if maybe he is about to pull a dagger from thin air to finish the job) move up to some point over his shoulder. He turns, like he did that day those two years ago, and when he sees that there is nothing there to see he turns back to her and finds her gone.

That night he dreams of all the things he should have said back to her but never did.

I could have but I didn't.

Why did you not beg for mercy?

Will your eyes ever stop haunting me?

They meet several more times and never alone. Always with Thor, or Jane, or both, or all the Avengers. They go to the same parties, get togethers, formal meetings and informal. He catches her staring sometimes. Other times, she catches him doing just the same. Words are never exchanged but he knows everything about her that gossip grants him. Her name, her likes, her dislikes, her reputation, her friends, her education goals, her favorite places to eat and what she does on the weekends she gets to be away from the office. It's probably downright creepy for him to know all of this without exchanging much more than stolen glances but he can't help it. Knowing her is an addiction and soon hearsay isn't enough.

The next time they meet alone is another accident. He is always seeking out Thor when she appears and this one time she appears alone, bent over her messy desk searching through stacks of papers for something. It's late, most everyone has left. A pencil in her hair falls to the ground and he, coming from behind her, stoops down to pick it up just as she turns to do the same thing. Their fingers touch and it's electric and it's fire and he can't say how it happens or who starts it but within seconds he has his hands caressing, stroking, fingers coming to glide over freckled skin, over delicate curves of muscle and bone.

Within seconds he has his hands on her thighs and her ass on the edge of her table and her beautiful, haunting voice, finally begging of him for mercy.

Please, please, please.

They make love on her desk, they make love in her living room, they make love on her bed and on the floor and against the tiled wall in her bathroom under the spray of a hot shower. His kisses her mouth into a swollen, bruised frenzy and she guides his hands over her heavy breasts and aching nipples. She guides his hands lower to her soaked need that soon clenches tight around his bucking cock.

When he comes he has his thumb pressed over her lips and she sucks wildly on it.

There are hands and then there are Loki's hands and she says she remembers how they filled her dreams for so long after the first time they met. She says she wasn't scared and she doesn't know why and she doesn't know that she will ever know why or if maybe she had been stuck feeling like that moment was just a dream, something she imagined. He says he understands, that while she dreamed of his hands he dreamed of her eyes and her mouth and of her words.

"You said to make it count," he murmurs, lips at her temple. "Said if I did it to make it good."

"Glad you're finally following through," she whispers back.

His heart skips a beat.