Chapter Text
When England entered his study, something was immediately disquieting. At first glance, it was difficult to place what: it was the same room he had left that morning, a desk and several chairs, a border of over-full bookcases, a sentimentally outdated throw rug, and a scattering of papers and pens from a last minute draft. England paused just inside the threshold and took careful stock of the evening-dimmed space.
His eyes fell on an uncommon book tucked between two common ones, off-center, as if ready to topple the stack. The last time he had opened that book had been to raise a once-nation from an arguably earned death. It was a book that belonged buried in the depths, and the uncomfortable fact was, it had been. To the best of his knowledge, the book was weighed down in an enspelled chest at the bottom of an ocean cavern that the Atlantic only gave him out of love, a singular denial of water’s sway over magic, and its best protection.
England sighed, removed his jacket, and threw it over one of the chairs.
Loki caught it and set it on the other.
“I’d appreciate you returning my books more if I’d known you’d borrowed them,” England noted as he took his seat behind the desk.
“And I’d appreciate borrowing your books if they were worth that effort.” Loki folded his hands in front of him and smiled neatly. “We must bear our disappointment.”
“If you told me what you were looking for, then perhaps I could be of help.” It cost England something to say, but whatever shape his words took with others, they took an honest one with himself. He found Loki to be relatable, and that was a rarity. Loki was not the only creature to wage regrettable wars, and England knew lost things well enough to know when one could still turn its head.
Loki laughed, short, indulgent, and it would have made Earth’s own winter prince sound balanced. The green of his eyes mirrored England’s own. “You are not so old as to teach me, scion of Midgard.”
“Perhaps not,” England affirmed. He reached for a pen instead of a curse. “But I could hold my ground as a peer.”
“All you are is ground.” The timbre of Loki’s expression let savagery slither through at the suggestion of equality, only to be tucked away again. “A fragile world’s silhouette, born of soil and a bit of blood.”
England answered with his own smile. Centuries-old, dead sailors shifted uncomfortably in their graves. “And of what, precisely, are you born, Liesmith?”
A terrible moment passed in which England believed he had overstepped. He could remember, quite clearly, how very talented Loki was with a knife, how it was to be pinned against an ash tree and watch Loki’s hand disappear into his abdomen only for the point of the knife to reappear, tenting the skin below his sternum before piercing it, slow, measured, and all the while, Loki smiling as England coughed blood against the pale column of the god’s throat--- all for talk of brothers.
Loki watched him, canted his head. “That fear you believe you’ve hidden is well deserved.” There was a respite of stillness.
Then England took a breath.
Loki displaced distance.
England tensed at the hand at his jugular.
Loki wrenched the nation’s head upwards, smiled at the audible clack of teeth, and stared down into eyes that bespoke growth, ash, rebirth.
“For all that your magic affords you, I will heal from wounds that you never will.” Physical and otherwise. England stated it calmly, unfalteringly, meeting the stare and taking an equal measure.
Loki’s hand clenched tight, and England’s voice cut off. “I did not come here to experiment with your body’s ability to overcome death.” He lifted his unoccupied hand with a knife spun into existence and brushed England’s hair from his face with the blade. “Although, I will confess an academic interest.”
England glanced pointedly to the returned book and then back to Loki’s eyes, a question. His mind catalogued the ways he could relieve himself of his current predicament and found a sufficient number to justify staying as he was. It was high time he knew what force Loki meant to harness.
“I am certain that in your years among them,” Loki began, with a dearth of emotion that suggested an emotion to hide, “You have met a human whom you wished to be less mortal.”
England’s smile was slow and knowing.
Loki snapped his neck for it.
---
As England shuddered into his resurrection, he discovered himself lying on the couch in his downstairs living room. The first thing he noticed besides the criminal headache was that his shirt appeared to be sticking uncomfortably to his skin. Eyes clenched shut against the throb of residual pain, England slid a hand down his chest to loosen whatever had caused it.
Bewildered, his eyes snapped open to find his hand bloody. A brief survey revealed his shirt to be tattered and alternatively caked or wet with red-brown.
“Twenty-seven minutes, thirteen seconds,” Loki offered, the picture of pleasant cooperation, relaxed in an armchair with one leg crossed over the other.
England forced the tenseness from his body and kicked his legs to the side so that he was sitting, facing the god. He summoned a smirk and tapped the tips of his fingers beneath his collar bone. “I see you weren’t particularly gentle with my corpse.”
“Not particularly, no.” Loki shrugged helplessly, unblinking, a crooked sneer in place. “But you’ll find I’m in a better mood.”
A breath hissed through England’s teeth, and he was careful to send the internal demand for recompense with it. “A route for a human to find immortality. I seem to remember you confessing that as your goal before you broke my neck.” He rocked his head from side to side. “Thank you, I suppose. You seem to have rid me of an irritating crick.”
Loki gave a low nod. “No thanks are necessary.” When he lifted his head again, the pretense of good humor been sorted back into the deck, out of sight. “And yes. That is my goal.”
“This human…” England, in contrast, retained the superficiality of his smirk. “Do they want this as well, or do you imagine you’ll make the choice for them?” Before Loki could answer, he went on with, “Whatever your answer, I assure you that I’ve been in both positions.”
There was silence, not for the choice of words, because Loki needed no measurable time to do so. England presumed it was one of observation, one of wondering why he could not recall ever hearing of an immortal human in England’s company, and what that might mean in relation to England’s words. Loki spoke slowly, as if the words had a weight. “The human in question is… not aware of my search as such.”
England arched an eyebrow. “As such?”
“At all.” A smile, all teeth, no trace of casualness or familiarity.
“Ah.” He rubbed at his temple and that damned headache. “Do you intend to tell them?”
“Is that an issue?”
England sighed. “Not for the magic, no, but it may be one for your relationship if that’s a question you need to ask.” He raised a hand in a preemptive placating gesture. “Meaning no aspersions on said relationship or your intentions, kindly do not snap my neck again. If that crick returns, I’m not helping.”
“What would need to be done?” Loki pressed, and his expression took an edge of hunger that England could relate to--- he doubted learning of magic would ever garner less from either of them.
Here was where England felt a stab of something approaching fear, not of Loki, not of the prospect, but of the means.
“England?” Loki pressed.
It was the tone applied to his name that led him to respond; that was desperation attempting and failing to disguise itself as a threat. “The fae,” England answered simply, quietly. “There are a number of magical artifacts and rites that could give you your desired result, but I’m sure you are aware of them. If you have sought me out, sought my expertise in particular, then I can only assume those avenues are closed to you. That leaves the fae.”
Loki did not contradict him.
“You read the book. You know the cost.” Flesh, blood, bone, and mind, and England may have healed from those past trials, but Loki couldn’t regrow lost limbs with the same ease. He knew the god had faced his own horrors, and he had no doubts as to his ability to withstand them, but it was something that bore reminding.
“I also know that the likelihood of them making a deal with one such as myself directly is very slim.”
England had no response for that except to stare, cold dread slipping down his throat to settle in his chest. “What are you suggesting?”
That carefully-restricted desperation leached some of the self-assurance from Loki’s features before he contained it once more. “I want you to broker the deal.”
His first impulse was to demand whether Loki knew what he was asking of him, but of course Loki did. He followed through with his second impulse instead: “Why would I? You’ve made it clear you consider us neither friends nor equals.”
“And you know me to be a liar.” Loki’s demeanor adopted a vulnerable shade designed to inspire empathy, the need to protect; England could appreciate the motive, but he wasn’t falling for it.
“And a manipulator,” he answered. “I’m sorry, is that supposed to be reassuring?”
The speed with which Loki could adopt and discard his masks was unsettling. The vulnerability was retracted, but now England had to wonder about the god’s investment in this endeavor, wonder if the vulnerability wasn’t the truth and the calm the lie. It was one of Loki’s many dangers. “What price must I pay to have your cooperation, England?” Loki sounded weary, and that much England could believe. “I am well aware this is not something I could hope to force you into, and even if it was, I wouldn’t wish to.”
A price from Loki… that was an interesting prospect, at least, provided he was sincere. England could endure a known risk to protect himself from an unknown one. “I will have to consider… It’s no small thing that you are asking me for.” He would need time decide, time to choose, and more time still to perfect the wording if he did elect to assist in this endeavor. If he could negotiate even a specter of protection for himself and other nations… “Is there a deadline?”
“He’s mortal.” Loki’s focus shifted to the window. “That is the deadline.”
---
----
---
10 months prior
Tony hadn’t been able to watch Loki drown, and that’s what it all came down to.
Some great gaudy idiot posing as a shark god in the Solomon Islands had teamed up with Doom, in counter to what turned out to be a sham of an alliance between Doom and Loki. Except Loki hadn’t known that dicey tidbit at the time, or that Doom had some sort of revenge planned for a past betrayal, and the end result was the Avengers minus Thor and Natasha caught in a battle between three villains who didn’t much care if the surrounding chain of islands got destroyed in their evilness equivalent of a pissing contest.
There was nothing quite like greeting the light of a brand new day with a cup of coffee and the news you were needed to fight two gods and magic dictator with a doctorate.
The shark god, whose name no one actually caught before Loki gutted him (Tony had been calling him Fin Man, but then Loki sliced off the fin early on, and it stopped having that certain ring), did have one trick up his sleeve.
Said trick shot out in purple light from his corpse, wrapped Loki and the dashingly-ready-to-attack Tony in a glowing sphere, and plummeted them from the village into the ocean, so quickly Tony barely had time to get a clipped “Fuck” over the comms.
They sank, and as both found with their initial outburst, they could not break through the walls, but the water could.
The suit was unharmed, the sphere stopped on the ocean floor, there was just fifteen feet of water above them, and Tony had enough air not to be too worried. The comfort it bought him after that panicked, disorienting moment of wait where did the land go, was swiftly upstaged.
Loki was still trapped with him. He’d called air around himself in a bubble, and was casting his eyes around the walls, reading the rolling script inscribed over its surface. By and large, he didn’t look like a guy who was having a good day, and suddenly it made sense why Doom would stoop to allying with a character like Formally-Finned Man. A guy could be a pushover in every other area, but if they were an expert in one, tiny ---Loki made a visible effort with his magic, the walls just shone brighter, Loki paled, and Tony developed some theories--- magic-draining area, that could be deal worthy.
“Iron Man!” Steve’s voice rang out, grounded him some, nevermind the disturbing lack of ground. “What happened?”
“Well, Cap,” Tony answered with a cheer he could convince himself he felt through the virtue of practice. “I seem to be trapped in a sinking purple death globe with Loki.”
Clint groaned over the comm. “I swear to god, we should just transcribe our battle conversations and make t-shirts.”
“We have to fight our way over to you,” Steve said with a grunt of exertion that meant a landed hit. “Hang on.”
“I have no other pressing plans,” Tony answered.
When he looked back to Loki, it was to see that his air bubble was shrinking in little bursts, echoed by pulses in the glow of the inscriptions on the walls. Definitely magic-eating then.
It didn’t take a genius to perceive that the air wasn’t going to last long enough for help to come, and Tony fit the genius bill and several stacks of its extraneous paperwork. He could perceive more than that: he could measure Loki’s remaining time to just over three minutes, and he could tell Loki knew it.
He wasn’t going to make it.
Thor’s little brother, Tony’s brain reminded him. Thor, who was one of the best friends he’d had in his vast and varied life of mostly friendlessness, who showed nothing but nearly painful amounts of devotion to his comrades, and must exceed even that for his brother, because whatever Loki had done in his time on Earth, Thor’s love for him hadn’t wavered. Forget the powerful alien-royalty and its reaction to Loki’s death, Tony didn’t jive well with authority figures: his friend was going to go through living hell if Loki died here.
But Loki was a mass murderer, and those deaths weren’t faceless for Tony. Loki had killed people, and some of them were friends of his just as much as his brother was. There was no getting around that.
Except, Loki just looked like a guy right now, a guy struggling not to die, a guy who was also his friend’s little brother.
It was happening too damn fast.
Two minutes, the air was disappearing, and Loki was going to die right in front of him.
Before Tony could react to that realization, Loki did something Tony was not expecting: he shrunk the air bubble to cover just his face, letting some escape to the surface in a stream, whipped out a knife, and slit his palm. Both palms, and two lines on his forearms. Blood fed into the day-lit water in red wisps, swept up with the flow of Loki’s clothes in the current.
“What the hell!” Tony shouted, jerking closer in the water.
He hadn’t really expected Loki to be able to understand what he was saying through the water, but apparently that wasn’t an issue, and those cornered, predatory eyes locked onto him. Loki said nothing, just sneered; it looked on the ill side of mad. He lost a little more air.
Tony spread his hands wide, though he was sure some of the angry desperation behind the gesture was lost in the suit. “Tell me what you’re trying to do! I’m not going to attack a drowning guy!”
He considered him carefully, and Tony felt absurdly naked, regardless of the armor. “The beasts in the water…” Loki’s voice sounded as clear inside his helmet as JARVIS or the comms would. It was as breathless as could be predicted, not afraid, but furious and something namelessly more. “His familiars… smear their blood on the walls… Living creatures can come inside. They just… can’t leave.” The air shrunk to cover the front of his face, like a layer of saran-wrap.
Tony absorbed that just in time to really register the swarm of shadows outside the sphere. Oh fuck. There was a good chance he was about to get stuck in a shark-tank Hotel California: all check ins, no check outs. Smear blood on the walls? He didn’t want to do it, sharks were cool, but---
One of the sleek, strong shapes darted forward to investigate Loki’s bleeding form at the same time as his air bubble disappeared.
“Shit!” Tony swore, and jolted forward, darting in front of Loki, and cutting his hand towards the shark.
The force of his fist connecting with its body struck it backward to slam against the wall of the sphere. Three of Loki’s daggers followed suit, the throw fast and accurate despite the water, and then there was blood on the wall, and the sphere was flickering. Cracks began to form from the point of impact, spreading, stretching, up, across, thin but widening with every bit of shark’s blood the wall drank in. The sharks outside the circle that hadn’t known what to make of Tony and Loki, got with the program when they sensed the distressed fish.
Cue enthusiastic lunch and much more blood churning in the water… and an airless Loki injured in the middle of it.
Tony didn’t think. He wrapped his arms around Loki’s feebly struggling form, and slammed upwards, against the sphere, creating larger fractures with the first hit and an Iron Man sized hole with the second one.
Eight minutes later, Loki had transported away, Clint was giving him shit about giving a villain CPR (a lie, and not going on a t-shirt), and Steve wanted to know how Loki had escaped, not in an accusatory way, rather in a curious one.
Tony thought through the flashes of memory from those moments: breaking the water’s surface, getting Loki to shore, his hands gripping Loki’s shoulders as he coughed up water, sudden deadly god-inspired force being focused in his direction, and then… abso-fucking-lutely nothing. Literally. Loki turned on him, and the good sense to be worried about his personal safety finally cuffed Tony upside the head at the look in Loki’s eyes, but instead of an attack, Loki vanished out of his hands.
“He just left,” Tony answered Steve, and then he jumped into the foray to help the rest of the team.
Thor was getting back that evening, and he’d just have to tell the story again anyway. He might as well wait.
---
If Tony could have split into two Tonys and slapped himself, he might have.
Clint had collapsed onto the couch next to him a few minutes ago, slouched in that casual, affected way he eased into when he wasn’t on duty and reminding people how fucking deadly he was. He shot Tony a smile and made a (probably sarcastic) comment about whatever was running on the tv ---Tony wasn’t really paying attention, he was busy designing an appropriately resilient robot puppy for Bruce and Hulk--- and then it really hit him.
He and Clint had been trading lighthearted barbs about his time in a mini-fishbowl with Loki the whole trip back to the manor. What had taken him so long to see that Clint was bluffing him? Tony had been thrown out a window after mouthing off, but Clint had gotten his head fucked with, had been used. Loki had killed people through him. There was no way he was genuinely so cavalier about something concerning Loki. He was the kind of person that took whatever they were going through and slathered it in one-liners and attitude until it was unrecognizable. It was trait they shared.
Tony had pulled Loki up from the water because he was Thor’s little brother, and Thor was his friend. But, shit, Clint was his friend too.
He thumbed through the pages of designs for Unnamed Hulk Dog and brought up a new set. “So, let’s talk new arrows.”
Clint arched an eyebrow at him but settled in for a conversation, kicking his feet up on the table and folding his hands on his stomach.
Eventually, a day would come when Tony wouldn’t be able to trample through his feelings by making or buying people things. Today was not that day.
It was, however, the day in which Thor provided him with an answer that gave him something to really think about.
Sometime during his and Clint’s brief foray into discussing a multi-setting, multi-target taser arrow, Thor padded into the living room, dressed down in sweatpants and a t-shirt, and sat in the armchair cattycornered to Tony. He listened intently, occasionally posing questions as to the nature of this explosive or that explosive. Thor looked calm, peaceful, and that was a tipoff. On the top hundred adjectives used to describe Thor, peaceful didn’t even rank.
About half an hour later, JARVIS informed them that the pizza had arrived, and Clint was up and moving like the kitchen was a fixed position he needed to take and hold.
Tony got to his feet to follow and hesitated. He reached out, touched the arm of Thor’s chair lightly. “Uh, listen…” But he got cut off.
“I thank you for what transpired today.” Thor tilted his face up to him and smiled a wide smile edged with a bit of pain that wormed its way into Tony’s heart and did its damndest to break it.
“Couldn’t just watch him drown,” Tony mumbled. He took his hand back and scrubbed it over his face. “Call it a personal quirk.”
Thor’s expression didn’t change except to dim the wattage to an ordinary level. “All the same.”
“Well… You’re welcome.” Tony shifted his weight, on the cusp of a step. He could have let it end there, could have walked to the kitchen and gotten a slice of Hawaiian before Steve decimated the box, could have left his next train of thought to another day. He didn’t though. Tony shifted his weight again, and when he could have gone forward, he let it land on the heels of his feet and took a step backwards instead. “Hey, I’ve… got a question.”
“Yes?” Thor asked, open, earnest.
“Whenever we get in a fight with Loki, you bring up the childhood the two of you had, your lives before the truth came out, I guess, and I was just wondering…” Tony cast around for a phrasing that wouldn’t get him hammered in the non-recreational sense of the word. “How many memories like these is it going to take to outshine those?”
Thor looked at him in confusion. “I do not love the memories, Tony Stark. I love him.”
A pause while he chewed on that. “And that’s a hard thing to outshine,” Tony continued for him, nodding, eyes on the far wall. When he glanced back to Thor, the guy looked like he was waiting on another response, a reaction attached to a judgment. Tony smiled, shrugged a little. “Okay.” Then, “Pizza?”
The grin was back as he stood. “Yes!” He clapped a hand on Tony’s shoulder, and Tony wondered if when he let go, it would hang a little lower than the other, because damn. “And may there be pepperoni for all!”
Tony laughed, welcomed the arm that settled around his shoulders, and not just because it might even them out. “Steve got there first, don’t count on it.”
Laughing over slices of what was mostly grease probably wasn’t a common scene for an epiphany, but Tony had one anyway. Bruce, who had emerged from the labs blinking like a nocturnal creature exposed to daylight in a fashion Tony could relate to, sat on a stool next to him and pawed for a thoroughly-pilfered pizza box. He gave Tony a tired smile, they toasted with the soda cans Steve set in front of them, Bruce turned to say something to Thor, and in that atmosphere of easy friendship, it just hit him like the thing with Clint had earlier.
Thor didn’t love the ghost of a changed man, and he wasn’t kidding himself by chasing after something that was lost. He loved Loki, the whole package and whatever that entailed. It was about people, all of this, a mess of one-on-one relationships amassed together in a bloody tumble. And Tony… Tony had a problem with cutting someone else’s ties for them. He’d defend himself in the moment, he’d attack, protect, fight, but he had a problem going for a kill when there was another opening left to him--- never a no-win scenario if he had a say in it.
He knew some of the team would make arguments towards protecting future lives, and yeah, he could see that, and he could think of quite a few times when he’d act in that mindset… But until Loki was in the core of some new scheme where there was a clear cut choice to kill him or watch others die, until that possible future got whittled down to become the present, Loki was in the middle ground, dangerous, an undeniable threat, but far too close to home.
---
Four days later, Natasha got back from her unspecified mission doing unspeakable things at an unnamed place. New York City welcomed her home with some asshat who made a blob monster. Tony disliked him on principle. Not only was it six stories tall and made of slime, but it moved too slow to be an actual threat and just coated everything in a thick blue mucus. In short: it was fucking pointless, and whatever it was designed to do, it obviously wasn’t doing it, if its apparent creator (who was riding on the tiny slab of a carapace where its head might, maybe, possibly, probably be) and his angry hand motions and shrieking were anything to go by.
The issue was that everything they tossed at the damned thing just zinged through or got stuck in it. Hulk ran through one side and came out the other turquoise. Judging from the roar, he preferred his natural green. Thor shot it full of lightning, and fuck all happened. For a second, Tony thought the thing’s maker had gotten roasted, but he’d just fallen backwards into its goo and crawled back out again. Tony had a lot of questions for this guy, and warring for priority were why the hell and how the hell.
In a beautiful demonstration of why they were friends, Steve brained the nuisance with his shield as he tried to pull himself on top of the carapace saddle.
Tony swooped in to catch the guy before he fell, and then almost couldn’t keep his grip through the layer of slime. He did though, because he did his hero-ing heroically, even when his initial impulse was to let go and take a lot of baths. “You’re a lucky guy,” he informed the man in his arms. “Well. Unlucky if you were trying to, you know, accomplish something. But still pretty lucky because mostly we’re annoyed instead of angry---”
The slime monster exploded; Tony and his cargo got splattered, along with everything else in the visible vicinity.
“---but whoever did that might be,” Tony finished in a rush, highly grateful he was inside the armor; oh god, his armor. “Was that you?” he directed to his villain tote. The guy shook his head so violently, his comb-over flopped sides. “Okay then.”
“Loki on the roof to your left, Captain,” Natasha’s voice announced over the comms. Tony bet she hadn’t gotten blobbed.
Steve turned to face the building in question. “Tony! Drop that guy with the police and get back over here!”
“On it!” Tony replied, holding nameless baddie tighter and zooming in the direction of the flashing (filtered through slime) lights.
He was gone maybe two minutes.
Apparently a hundred and twenty seconds was all the time it took for Loki to decide a slime-covered street in Manhattan wasn’t his scene.
Tony landed next to Natasha and Thor on the street. “What happened…?”
“Barton fired a shot, but it was one of Loki’s doubles.” Natasha tipped her head a fraction to the right, and Tony followed the motion to see Steve and Clint having a conversation behind a nearby bus. “Loki was waiting for it. He went for him when his position was revealed.”
There was an edgy quality to the way Thor was standing. Slime slid off him in thick globs. “My brother and Clint traded words, and then Loki departed. There was no battle save for Loki’s destruction of this strange beast.”
“Whoa, traded words?” Tony retracted the helmet. That couldn’t be good. “What kind of words?”
“I see your eyes are as clear as ever,” Natasha repeated. Her tone was devoid of emotion, but Tony would put money on pissed. “Whether or not I’m in them.”
Tony winced. “And Clint said?”
“Clint said: and yours make the same pretty targets,” Clint offered up as he strode over to them, Steve at his side. “And then Loki poofed. The end. Can we go home? It’s time for lunch.”
“Hulk wants hostess cakes.” The declarative statement came from approximately three feet behind Tony, and did not, by any stretch of the imagination, make him jump, yelp, or bite his tongue.
“I would also partake of the tiny wrapped desserts.” Thor nodded and slung the hammer back into place. His voice sounded fairly cheery, but he still wasn’t as good at the masking-of-emotion thing as Natasha. “But who will clean this… ichor from the streets?”
Steve rubbed at the back of his neck. “We aren’t exactly equipped for it.”
“And we didn’t even blow anything up,” Tony pointed out over a sore tongue. “I agree with Clint. Lunch! Hulk and Thor need their little cakes.”
“Cakes,” Hulk agreed with extra emphasis and the accidental breaking of a streetlamp in his enthusiasm.
Tony watched it fall and then motioned towards it with a flourish. “Lady and gentleman, the only thing we broke today.”
Steve let out a heavy sigh, and then articulated the glorious phrase, “All right, team, let’s head home.”
On the way, there was a heap of speculation as to why Loki had shown up just to explode the blob and then vanish. Tony one-third listened and contributed, and two-thirds surveyed Thor and Clint. If Clint was unnerved, he wasn’t showing it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, if Thor was ever going to not be gutted by a close encounter with his brother, it sure as hell didn’t look to be any time soon.
Tony groaned, internally, because externally he was laughing at Clint’s disguising joke and beaming at Thor like he believed he was okay. The truth of it was that this was the single area of life that Tony had no arguable degree of genius in. He could read people, given the incentive and proper attention span, and he could do a damn fine job at it. It was doing something with the information that he struggled with. He liked these people. He liked these people a lot. They’d built a nice, crazy, accidentally destructive, goddamn brave pseudo-family, and Tony was going to do his level best to be a good friend.
He was just a little fuzzy on the how.
He wanted to communicate to Thor that he trusted his judgment about Loki and that he supported him.
He wanted to communicate to Clint that he thought what happened to him was fucking horrible and that he’d like to help.
But those words didn’t feel like the best fit, and Tony didn’t know how to dress them up right, so he ordered everyone Thai food and put on a movie instead.
---
“Stark.”
He glanced up from cleaning slime out of the suit’s joints as Clint walked in. It took a few seconds for him to adjust to the novelty of the situation. Clint didn’t usually come looking for him in his lab. “What’s up? I thought you were on a quest for a meatball sub.”
Clint didn’t answer right away, just stood in the doorway with his arms crossed, tense, scrutinizing him, apparently fresh from a shower.
Tony shifted uncomfortably. All of a sudden he felt similar to when he was nine and a teacher walked in right after he’d halfway blown up his school’s science lab.
“When we got home, I went straight to wash off that slime. First time in a long while I’ve done anything before seeing to my weapons. Shouldn’t have broken habit… I didn’t notice it at first.” Clint reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny, black drawstring bag. He threw it underhand to Tony, who caught it in a fist, bemused. “There was a thread tied around one of my arrows. When I tried to pull it off, it turned into that. It’s already been looked over by Thor and Banner. They don’t seem to think it’s dangerous, but they can’t get it open either.”
Still blinking in confusion, Tony turned his attention to the miniature leather pouch in his hand. With a jolt he got part of why Clint’s tone was coming across a tad anxious. There was a tag reading For Stark written in what he had a sneaking suspicion was a certain trickster’s handwriting.
“Thor said you’d be the only who could untie the knot.” The words were spoken as factual and little else.
“Why’d you go to Bruce before me?” Tony asked quietly.
Clint shrugged, but he wasn’t fooling Tony with that faux coldness. He was worried. “Wanted to be sure it was safe before you indulged in your special brand of reckless and stupid.”
“And might I ask why you didn’t turn this thing in to be prodded at in some SHIELD lab somewhere? To be added to the evidence about Loki?” Tony turned the bag over in his palm. It was strange. He could tell there was something in it, but it was impossible to tell what, like the material had a constantly changing nature to conceal its contents. Magic, had to be.
“Technically, I did turn it in to a lab, and knowing you, it is going to be prodded. The biggest authority on Loki is his brother, and Thor’s already in this building.” Clint shrugged again, the action just as artificial as before. “The bastard used me as a messenger. I want to know what for. Not after weeks of tests before it gets classified. Now.” On the last word, he made eye-contact with Tony, and there was a sensation of a bulls-eye painted smack dab in the middle of his forehead. It wasn’t threatening, but it sure as hell was intense.
“Well, then. Let’s see what’s in the bag.” Because how else could he respond to that, really? He’d been presented with a mysterious gift from an alien god and given the go ahead to open it, with the added point of providing answers for a teammate. He could assuage his curiosity and be a good person.
The strings were warm to the touch when Tony began to undo the knot, like they’d been left out in the sun while the rest of the pouch was in the shade. It came open as effortlessly as any other double knot Tony had ever seen. Clint crossed the room to stand at his shoulder, and Tony gave him a nervous smirk. He eased the mouth of the bag wider, careful, a tad apprehensive, abruptly wondering if they should be wearing some protective equipment, but stuck in that heady anticipation that made those thoughts an annoying, ignored buzz.
A ring fell out of the bag.
Tony stared.
Clint stared.
Tony opened his mouth.
Clint beat him to it with a mild, “Congratulations?”
“Oh, fuck you,” Tony scowled, but there was no heat to it. “Probably shouldn’t touch it. Maybe get Bruce down here, and the two of us can run some more tests, see if it means anything to Thor, just to be…” His voice trailed off as he got a better look at the purple gem in the middle. “Oh hell.”
“What is it?”
Tony bent low, surveyed the stone in more detail. It wasn’t really purple. It was like the outside of a clear stone had been swathed in a violet tint, and there were bitty symbols turning circles across its surface. Locked in the middle, nearly obscured beneath the busywork on top, was a miniature, ghost-like fish, flickering in an unearthly light, blue, then white, then gold.
Clint made the universal, wordless sound for what the fuck. “Is that a shrunken fish? Because I’ve got to say… Loki might want to have a talk with his jeweler.”
“I don’t think it’s real,” Tony said offhand. The point was clear either way. “Damn, he figured it out.”
“Figured what out?”
Tony straightened, pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and sighed before pulling up a chair and sinking into it. “The spell-cage-thing we got stuck in on that island. He’s telling me he knows how it works, so I shouldn’t waste my time finding a way to use it against him.” He almost reached for the cup of coffee on the table next to him, but dejectedly stopped short when he remembered how long it had been sitting there.
Clint leaned a hip against the table, still watching the ring. “So what are you going to do with it?”
The temptation to ask why Clint was throwing protocol to the wind on this one came and went. “Try to figure it out anyway. No one tells me what to do.” Tony shot him a smirk. “Clearly, he has underestimated both my stubbornness and my need to throw things in people’s faces.”
“Good man,” Clint replied, a hand molding to Tony’s shoulder before he pushed off from the table and started for the door.
“Hey,” Tony called after him, full of a now or never mindset, along with some unfortunate incoherency. He just knew he should say something even if he’d missed whatever line the majority of humanity had gotten in to pick up their friendship scripts. At least he had the comfort of knowing Clint hadn’t gotten in that line either. “You know, if you… need. You know.”
“Don’t,” Clint shut him down without turning around, but he did linger for half a step on the threshold. “But yeah. I know.” He kept walking.
Tony watched him leave and then swiveled in his chair. He was kind of relieved Clint hadn’t stopped right then. That sterling example of human speech was pretty much all he had to say. He wanted to help, but when it came to putting that into conversation, he was still tapped. “Okay, JARVIS,” he redirected. “Tell me about my creepy fish ring. This friendship stuff is stressful. I need a good brain teaser.”
“Scanning, sir.”
---
It was a warm Tuesday afternoon a week after the slime monster fiasco. Pepper had time for a rare lunch away from the office, they’d gone to a low key café, and Tony was in the middle of catching her up on bits about the Solomon Isles and the ring that he hadn’t been able to convey over the phone. Namely, the bits where he had feelings. Pepper was good at cutting through his bullshit and getting to the sinewy meaty emotion at the center, all without sending him on that awkward shifty spiral that happened when someone else tried it. It was shaping up to be a perfect afternoon.
Then came the sirens, followed by the shouting.
He should just never drive a Maserati. Something bad always happened on the days he drove a Maserati. There was a Maserati curse.
“Pepper…” he started, fully prepared to draw her attention to this fact.
“There isn’t a Maserati curse,” Pepper denied with preemptive, dry precision as she sipped at her mocha. The café’s clientele were beginning to head for the emergency exits, and she was standing calmly in the line preventing a bottleneck. “There may be a Tony Stark curse, but it has nothing to do with a Maserati.”
Tony ruminated on that while reflecting on the evolving scene outside. “Hmm, okay, sure, but consider this: is the city ever attacked by fire-breathing lizard people on the days I pick a Jag?”
Through the window over her head, a fireball blasted down the street, followed by a nine-foot russet nightmare. Pepper sighed. “No. No, it isn’t.”
“Say it with me.” Tony lifted his hands to gesture as he enunciated, “Maserati curse.”
Pepper picked up his briefcase and pressed into his chest with a crooked smile. “Go save the day.”
Tony’s hands closed over hers and then the briefcase as she slipped them back. He grinned. “Rain check?”
“Rain check,” she agreed, elegant brightness and safety and smiles. God, he loved her. Pepper jerked her head towards the street and stole the rest of his cookie before retrieving her cell phone to start making calls. “Now get out there.”
He pressed a kiss to one fine cheekbone, said “Stay safe”, and went to work---
And promptly got hit by a fireball about fifteen seconds after he’d gotten the armor on. He was forcefully blasted at an upwards diagonal, blindsided and ill-prepared.
“Sir, the roof.”
Tony threw out a repulsor and corrected the angle to narrowly miss crashing. “JARVIS, what are they?” he asked when he’d straightened out.
“There is no available data. SHIELD is preparing a dossier, but it is neither complete nor accessible.”
“The rest of the team?”
“Thor and Hulk are already engaged. Captain America, Black Widow, and Hawkeye are en route.”
Below him in the streets, the bipedal Komodo dragon look-alikes were flooding the streets. Crap, it hadn’t looked like that many from inside the building. Tony surveyed them, gathering whatever information he could. They were moving as a mass, but they didn’t seem to be organized in a military capacity. It looked closer to a pack mentality. They weren’t wearing any sort of clothing, and they weren’t carrying weapons. Tony was starting to get a sneaking suspicion that this wasn’t an attack so much as a misplaced herd.
Natasha’s voice came over the comm. “These creatures didn’t orchestrate this. They’re confused. I believe they’re aggressive out of fear and stress.”
“Yes, they breathe fire when alarmed,” Thor confirmed. A pause. “I seem to keep alarming them. Though, not so much as our friend Hulk.”
Steve made a thoughtful noise. “Okay, defend yourselves, but let’s try for a catch and release first. It doesn’t look like they’re here on purpose.”
Tony wondered where, exactly, they could release them to, but that was someone else’s puzzle.
“Thor, we’re going to herd them towards you,” Steve directed. “Try to keep them corralled. Hawkeye, when you reach him, stay and help from the rooftops.”
“Can do, Cap.”
“Okay, team, everyone think like Lassie!” Having achieved some input, Tony dove towards the lizard people and left someone else to explain that reference to Thor.
The unwitting invaders swiveled their heads towards him as he veered past, orange eyes managing to convey without definable expression that they weren’t fans of the friendly neighborhood Iron Man. Tony used a repulsor to deflect an answering fireball to the sky. Satisfied that they were paying attention, he turned and headed back to the stragglers farthest from the front to see if he could convince them to speed it up. It didn’t go quite as well as he was hoping. If he was channeling Lassie, they were channeling Smaug, and the armor didn’t have an invisibility setting.
He fired a few warning shots that went off harmlessly in midair. A smattering of the horde reared backward on a hooked claw and did a bird-like headtilt as though they weren’t quite sure what to make of him. Then they came to the logical conclusion that running was for non-fire-breathers, and Tony was put on the immediate defensive.
He was doing everything he could to keep the buildings from being blasted, but while he could engineer the line of fire, they weren’t always cooperative with their aim. Two of the apartment complexes on either side of him were hit and went up in flames.
“JARVIS tag those buildings for the Fire Department!” Tony called out as he spiked another blast away from the street. People were starting to rush in the opposite direction, and they were doing a good job of taking side streets, but the sudden uproar of noise was just adding to the creatures’ fireball-inducing stress. Traffic had elected to stop happening in the vicinity as well, and Tony was thankful for that; he didn’t want to imagine what the reaction to the sounds of horns and breaks would have been.
“Done, sir.”
The horde had their collective sights on him now, and they seemed to be rather single-minded about taking him out of the sky. Fire was collecting over their skin, forming a visible current in their mouths like roiling fog.
“Guys, the herding thing isn’t going so hot,” Tony called over the comms. Clint groaned, and the joke was on him really, because he hadn’t even meant that pun. “I think I’m going to try being bait instead.”
“Be careful,” was Steve’s reply, and that was his green light.
He cracked a wide grin and went low, patting one lizard man tauntingly on the head as he dashed over. It snapped its jaws forward and caught nothing but air.
“Come on, kiddies,” Tony shouted to them. “Catch the gorgeous man in the gorgeous armor!”
That worked like a charm. They let out a cry that came out in scary staccato and gave chase in a passing imitation of a raptor scene from Jurassic Park. Tony slowed so he was enticing with the illusion of obtainable. Funny how some parts of his life carried over into other areas.
As he panned past another street, several little things went wrong and added together to make one big thing: a second pack that was spread out over the intersection joined the first, an empty bus in front of him got hit by a fireball and exploded, and both packs fired at him at the same time.
He did the only thing he really could do. He pulled up, couldn’t cut it quick enough, caught the top of the bus’s flare-up, and was struck in the side by a blast that had been shot a little higher than the others.
Tony slammed into the side of a building.
Sharp pain forced a shout from him, mute, breathless, and buried in a cascade of brick and glass. He’d struck the wall with that space between the scapulae, landed on the round ball of a shoulder. Tony skidded, tearing through floor and furniture until his leg caught on a door frame and spun him around to strike flat against a wall.
It wasn’t the worse hit he’d ever taken, but it didn’t need to be. There had been piping in those walls, and he was looking at the mess metal and brick had made of one of his repulsors.
“Shit,” he swore as he pushed himself up onto his knees and one hand. Broken shards crinkled in his other fist as he rolled his fingers experimentally.
“Kneeling becomes you, Tony Stark.”
Fucking Maserati.
“Loki!” Tony drew out with as much false cheer as he could muster through the shock of impact. It came out as a croak. His chest still felt concave, emptied. He couldn’t get air fast enough. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” a deep, rattling breath, “---but this isn’t the greatest time.”
“Better than some of our past encounters, surely.” Loki hadn’t quite made it into his vision yet, but once that stopped swimming, Tony was pretty sure the bastard would be smirking. “For example, on this occasion you’ve been thrown in a window rather than out of one.”
A sliver of fear went toe-to-toe with his innate need to mouth off and got its face bashed in. Tony grinned around it, nevermind that it couldn’t be seen through the helmet. It made him feel better in any case. “Yeah, well, you know. I like to keep my routine flexible.” Score, his voice sounded less raspy that go around.
There was no doubt another smart comment on its way after that, but they were interrupted by the appearance of a handful of reptilian heads peaking into the hole Tony had made in the wall. They weren’t gearing up to fire, but it looked like they were thinking about it.
Tony straightened into a crouch, and finally made out Loki’s outline on the threshold of what was probably a kitchen. “Not that I don’t enjoy our talks, but if we’re about to get into a fight, I’d really like to know because I may be double-booked.”
The shift of Loki’s attention from him to the creatures considering advancing into the room was a tangible thing, like iron fillings dragging in the wake of a magnet. “We share our current engagement.”
“Wait…” Tony deadpanned. The effect was extra deadpan when filtered through the helmet. “You’re here about the lizard people?”
“They are the result of a young, amateur sorceress attempting to summon an army.” Now that Tony could see his face, he could tell Loki was pretty pissed. That sent off all sorts of internal warning alarms telling him to get the fuck out of dodge. “I was going to kill her after what these animals did to my apartment, but they were quicker about it. They ate her. Idiot.”
Tony’s internal monologue of fuck trapped between Loki and fireballs fuck came to a screeching halt with a blip of shit they eat people. “You… have an apartment in Manhattan?”
“I have several apartments in Manhattan.” There was mild annoyance in the tone, as if Loki couldn’t understand why that was the part he was fixating on when clearly the important bit was that he’d been wronged.
What the hell, Tony had some people to talk to. “How has SHIELD not found you?” he asked, and there was no vaguely hysterical bewilderment to be heard. Voice filters were awesome.
“They aren’t particularly adept at looking.” The corner of Loki’s mouth twitched. “I imagine you’d be surprised by how many villains have invested in this city’s real estate.”
“Whoa, wait a second…” A fireball coasted past his head, went through a doorway, and into the building beyond. There was a ping of JARVIS contacting emergency forces. Tony raised his good hand and fired a repulsor at the ragged gap and the onlookers, but it didn’t stop him from continuing down his current train of thought as they dipped out of sight. “You’re pissed because an attack on the city destroyed your apartment?”
Loki lifted a shoulder in the most lazy, noncommittal shrug Tony had ever seen, and that was saying something. “Yes.”
He couldn’t help it; he took his eyes off the scattered reptile brigade to turn his head and stare. “Huh. At least you’re an attractive hypocrite.”
That got an outright laugh; it sent chills crawling like spider legs down Tony’s spine. “The best sort. Don’t you agree?”
Shakily, Tony got to his feet. His legs were not proponents of that plan, but he convinced them to reevaluate. “They are a weakness of mine.” He lifted the functioning repulsor and took a staggering step towards the hole and the street beyond, ready to fire the next time a head came into view.
“One of your many weaknesses, Stark.”
“Sir, he’s---”
“I know,” Tony answered JARVIS, his entire body tensing in an instant. There was a dull roar in his ears as he registered Loki’s abrupt relocation to the space directly behind him. Putting an end to the instinctual surge of fear was impossible, fire and pitch. It hammered inside his pulse, made his vision fade before he got it back. He stood stock still. If he attacked, Loki would attack, and Tony had no illusions as to what the result of that would be.
“How did you like your ring?” Goddamn evil voices and their apparently default silkiness. Loki was close enough that Tony was pretty sure if the god took one deep breath, he’d make contact with the suit.
Tony cut his eyes to the side even though he couldn’t see him. “Would have been more meaningful over a nice dinner instead of stashed on my friend.” Shit, shit, okay. He could kick around, get the repulsor between them, make for the open air…
“Sir, I am informing Captain America of the current situation, as well as of the creatures’ possible proclivity for human flesh.” Rather than put it to voice, JARVIS scrolled the statement in silent text across his visor, and Tony gave a minute nod in response.
Before Tony could enact any of his admittedly less-than-stellar plans to fight or snark his way out of his current predicament, Loki swept around him towards the battered wall, all billowy cape and willowy grace. “As I said before, we share our current engagement, so kindly put away your pathetic notions of attacking me. For now, my concern is removing these relics from the streets.”
Tony swallowed hard, carefully didn’t take offense at any of that, and then got out, “We’re going for a catch-and-release type thing… We’re trying to get them focused in one central location to see if we can---”
“A fool’s errand,” Loki dismissed. “They are constructs of a long dead sorcerer and are a violent, overpopulated blight in the realm they call home.” A knife found itself lodged in a scaled head that had hesitantly taken a look into the room. “Furthermore, if you restrict them to such an area with nowhere for them to direct their focus but on each other, they will begin to cannibalize their wounded, resulting in a feeding frenzy you will be hard-pressed to control.”
A memory of sharks, of chumming the ocean, doused him like a flash of ice water. “JARVIS,” Tony said numbly. “Relay that bit to Steve, and let him know Loki’s attacking the targets, not us or the city.”
“At once.”
Almost immediately, Steve came over the comm. “All right, everyone. The catch and release isn’t going to work. Kill shots, and be prepared for possible attacks on civilians. Be advised that Loki is in the area but appears to be solely engaging the creatures. Avoid confrontation if at all possible until this mission is complete.”
Tony wanted to tell him good luck with that last part but didn’t.
“I have elected to go on a full offensive,” Loki informed him, striding forward to stand on the edge of where room met empty air. He turned to glance back at Tony, smiled darkly as he knocked several of the creatures down to strike cement below. “You’re welcome to join me, Stark.”
Tony watched him disappear as he jumped from the perch of broken bricks. He sighed heavily. “Oh, I’m about to do something that isn’t very genius-y.”