Chapter Text
Honestly, the whole fiasco really began the day Tony realised Loki wasn’t simply fooling around without malicious intent (albeit on a very, very large scale), but was actually actively looking out for “the piddling mortals of this realm,” as he had once sneered with an excessive amount of disdain.
True, no civilians were ever injured beyond a few scrapes and bruises during their scraps with the caustic god, much less killed, but somehow that fact had been largely overlooked due to the not inconsiderable architectural damage that so often accompanied Loki’s appearances. Thor’s little brother might not rank high on their list of active supervillains at the moment (more like super nuisance), but they were pretty much morally obliged to stop his heinous activities anyway.
Interestingly, despite their continued attempts to foil his “pranks” (Thor’s words, not Tony’s), Loki clearly included the Avengers under his somewhat questionable umbrella of protection.
Tony should’ve gotten a clue when a mutated tiger thing had batted him right out of the air like a feather, and the next moment an airborne van had sailed over his head, coming to an abrupt and flaming stop at the foot of a bent streetlight.
But he had been just a little busy at the moment – too busy to notice that he would have been directly in the path of the offending van had the overgrown kitty not made its move.
And then Loki had slipped up.
Perhaps he’d thought no one would notice, or maybe he simply hadn’t had the time to divert one of his nifty creations to where Clint was perched atop a high-rise building. Whatever the case, one moment Clint was loosing arrow after arrow at impossibly faraway targets, and the next he was falling something like sixteen storeys to the ground.
Tony dived immediately, snagging the archer round the waist before he could splatter all over the pavement. “So, you’re Maid Marian today?” he teased, pulling into a steep glide.
Clint had just opened his mouth to retort when something exploded against the top of the building they had just left behind. Even through the suit, Tony felt the momentary sear of heat, and he spared a glance back at the inferno that would probably have incinerated a person in three seconds flat.
“Something pushed me off,” Clint said after a split second of silence, and there was no sarcasm in his voice. “Like, a force or something.”
“A force.” Tony’s tone was dry, but he was thinking hard, the puzzle pieces clicking together in his head. “Like magic?”
Which was when Tony began to realise that there might be a god looking out for them after all, and it certainly wasn’t Steve’s.
Not that he did anything to test that hypothesis. He might be reckless, but he wasn’t crazy enough to put himself in danger on the hunch that their nemesis might just save his life for reasons unknown.
Nor did he stop working on a brand new type of weapon specially designed to penetrate that frustrating magic force field Loki always had around him. It wasn’t a matter of malice; it was a matter of pride. Tony could only take the sight of repulsor beams, shields and arrows (Tony Stark-manufactured, mind you) all bouncing carelessly away from Loki with a shower of gold sparks for so long.
The first time he tested the Reindeer Blast (to be fair, he hadn’t seen the infamous helmet in a while, but why give up a perfectly good nickname?), it had rebounded back at him, shearing off a number of innocent tree branches when he dodged with a muffled curse.
Loki had laughed, and it almost sounded like there had been some genuine amusement mixed in with the evil cackle.
Tony supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that an enemy almost knocking himself out with his own weapon was the kind of thing that a god of mischief found entertaining. Black humour and all that.
The second time, he’d created a spectacular but ultimately ineffective explosion when blast met force field, something that Natasha had thoroughly reamed him out for.
Loki had only grinned his unnervingly shark-like grin and said, “Try harder, Stark.”
The third time, the force field had simply absorbed the impact with quiet efficiency, and for the first time, Tony saw a whole section of it glow gold where the blast had hit.
The god hadn’t smiled at that – not with any levity, anyway – only smacking Tony hard with an animated statue of a cherub, and god knew where that had come from.
Taking that as a cue that he was close, Tony went for subtle instead of flashy the fourth time round. Loki liked flashy, and he definitely didn’t want to give the Asgardian (“Aesir,” Thor had corrected him numerous times, with a woebegone expression when Tony failed to remember that pertinent fact) what he wanted.
“Try this on for size, Rock of Ages,” he said triumphantly, secretly thankful for the way the suit modulated his voice into something a little less gloating. It wouldn’t do to be heard crowing if the blast didn’t make it through again.
He had a good feeling this time though.
He raised a metal-clad arm as Loki looked up, gears whirring internally as his usual repulsor beams were replaced with the Reindeer Blast. The god’s lips curved into a smirk at the very moment a thin, almost laser-like blaze of bright blue flashed from his gauntlet, piercing right through the force field like it was nothing.
Tony only had a split second to feel triumph before the blast hit Loki square in the face and a gout of blood sprayed out into the air.
“Oh. Wow. Shit.”
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion right then – the graceful arc of Loki’s body as he toppled over backwards, the mist of red droplets speckling the grass crimson, the shortening distance between them as Tony dived to the ground.
Thank god Thor was in Asgard at the moment.
“Iron Man, what just happened?” Steve’s voice was loud in his ear.
“Did you get him?” Clint sounded more stunned than gleeful. “He’s down, I think he’s actually down!”
As always, Natasha was the most practical of the lot. “We’ll finish up here, then we’ll come help you secure him.”
But Loki was already sitting up by the time Tony landed, as far from dead as could be, which he would have been relieved about had he not been too busy trying to keep his lunch down at the sight of the god’s face.
Loki’s left eye had clearly sustained the majority of the damage from the blast – it was a ruin, the socket dripping blood, trickling down his bone-white face and dribbling steadily onto his armour. There was some clear goop near his hairline, which Tony thought might be the remnants of his eyeball, but he really didn’t want to think too much about it.
“Stark,” Loki snarled, his teeth bared and stained red. “You…” For once, he seemed lost for words, and he settled for spitting a mouthful of blood onto the grass in Tony’s general direction instead. It didn’t quite reach half the distance, but Tony couldn’t blame him – the god probably didn’t have much in the way of depth perception at the moment.
“I really didn’t mean to do this,” Tony said apologetically, lamely, knowing that there was nothing right to say in this situation. “Will the eye grow back?” His faceplate flipped up as he eyed the gory wound with a grimace.
“You,” Loki repeated, looking apoplectic with fury, so much so that his face was starting to suffuse with colour. “You did this.”
Tony wondered if he should take a step back, if he was in danger of sudden death by Norse god, even if said Norse god was still seated on his butt in the grass he had just watered quite liberally with his own blood.
“Ungrateful cretins,” Loki spat, planting one hand on the ground and bracing himself as he staggered to his feet, swaying dangerously. “I would advise you to watch your back, Stark.” He said Tony’s name like a curse, and then disappeared in a puff of green smoke.
But in that fraction of a second before he’d teleported away, just a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the god’s face had seemed to twist in hurt betrayal. Like he’d expected the Avengers to face him with anything other than force; like he’d thought there had been an understanding between them.
It made no sense, but Tony felt something in his gut twist with guilt anyway.
Loki didn’t resurface for half a year.
Six months in which Tony set the Reindeer Blast aside, Thor returned to Earth, Bruce Hulked out after tripping and falling down the stairs, and the Avengers continued to fight under the noble leadership of one Captain America.
Loki tended to make fewer appearances when Thor was around, but somehow Tony had the nagging feeling that his absence this time wasn’t entirely down to Thor’s presence.
In a way, Tony almost missed the crazy god. He missed fighting a foe who wasn’t actually aiming to kill them all slowly and painfully, or whose modus operandi wasn’t to murder a dozen civilians and then lay their cold bodies out in the open for a laugh.
Sure, Loki was a huge pain in the ass, but at least all he did was mostly to enlarge ducks and then laugh as they quacked deafeningly and tried to eat trees.
And Tony had pulverised his eye.
So it really was no surprise – to Tony, at least – that when Loki returned, he did so with a vengeance.
Murderous, pony-sized tarantulas were involved.
No civilians were killed, but for the first time, the team returned more battered than ever after a Loki encounter.
“Is it just me, or was Loki really pissed today?” Clint muttered, one eye swelled completely shut and bleeding from a nasty gash along his thigh.
Steve was pale and shivering, two uncomfortably large wounds in his torso where the spider fangs had sunk in. Tarantulas weren’t typically particularly venomous, but he’d found out the hard way that the effects were magnified when it came to giant tarantulas.
Pointedly taking Clint’s question as rhetorical, Tony heaved himself to his feet with a groan. “You guys put Capsicle to bed, okay? I need some sleep myself.”
Bruce nodded, responsible as ever. “Yeah, go get some rest, Tony. You need it.”
Dragging himself up to his floor and into his bedroom, Tony settled himself gingerly onto his bed, gritting his teeth at the pain. He felt ready to sleep for a week, but there was no way he was dozing off like this, not when he was unable to even sit down comfortably.
He hadn’t gotten bitten, but one of the spiders had gotten a good enough grip on the suit to put hairline fractures in his femur. And that was in addition to the dislocated arm, sprained neck and bruising pretty much everywhere. It was obvious who Loki had been gunning for.
“I would recommend that you take your medication before sleeping, Sir,” JARVIS pointed out, and Tony nodded in weary agreement. Genius creator, genius AI, obviously.
He washed down the prescribed pills with some water, then lay down and waited for the pain meds to take effect. They were strong meds, at least, because SHIELD hadn’t wanted to discharge him at all in the first place, but he’d whinged until the doctor had agreed with despair in his voice.
The next thing he knew, he was opening his eyes to the darkness of night – and an equally dark figure standing by his bed.
A dark figure about the size and shape of one pissed off Norse god he’d had the misfortune of encountering earlier in the day.
He tried to sit up, but the meds were still working at full force, and all he felt was numb and woozy. The effort also left him slightly dizzy, and he gave up with a soft sound of discomfort.
“JARV?” he croaked, wondering vaguely why the alarm hadn’t been sounded.
“Your servant is asleep,” came Loki’s cool voice out of the darkness, and a frisson of muted fear ran down Tony’s spine.
“Loki? Hey,” he tried to say, except he slurred his way embarrassingly through those two words alone, and it came out more like, “Lo…ki? ‘eyyy.”
There was a sound like fingers snapping, and his bedside lamp flared to life, the gentle orange glow revealing Loki dressed impeccably in leather as always.
“You’re here,” Tony said stupidly, blinking in the sudden glare. “Why?”
The shark-like grin returned, Loki’s face looming closer as he took a seat on the edge of Tony’s bed. “Why, to admire my handiwork, of course,” the god purred, pressing a finger casually into a bruise on Tony’s arm.
Tony flinched, jolting his dislocated arm as he did so and letting out a hiss of discomfort.
“Just revenge for the pain you caused me, would you not agree?” Loki’s tone was perfectly pleasant, like he was discussing a good price for a piece of tech instead of the bodily harm Tony had sustained.
Involuntarily, Tony’s gaze flickered to Loki’s left eye, but there was no sign of the mess his blast had left in its wake. It was perfectly green and quite functional.
“You grew it back,” he mumbled, relieved and wondering at the same time. “This magic…really. Wow. How?”
Setting his incoherency aside, he reached his (relatively) uninjured arm out, ignoring the way Loki’s eyes narrowed, and brushed the pad of his thumb lightly beneath the god’s left eye. Loki jerked away like Tony’s fingers had been crawling with maggots, and he let his arm fall.
“Why are you acting so strangely, Stark?” Loki demanded, sounding suddenly suspicious, his hand coming up to rub at the spot Tony had touched.
“Meds for the pain and stuff.” Tony shrugged, returning his attention to the miraculously regrown eye. “Was sorry for that, y’know. I thought the force field would absorb most of it. Glad you don’t have to wear a patch like Fury.”
Loki remained silent, head cocking to one side almost inquisitively.
“Would be unfair to kill me when I can’t even sit up,” Tony continued plaintively, sensing his impending doom and hoping to avert it. When Loki laid a hand on his injured arm, he instinctively shrank back, trying without much luck to sink into the mattress.
“Hush.” Loki sounded distinctly amused, and Tony fell silent, eyes closing as a warm glow suffused his arm, then his thigh and his neck. It felt a little like his flesh was moving beneath his skin, but the creep factor was mostly nullified by the soothing heat engulfing his limbs.
It took a ridiculously long while for him to realise that his arm was functioning quite normally, and he sat bolt upright in excitement, only for a burst of dizziness to seize him, sending him sprawling back onto his pillows. Necessary or not, the meds were definitely still working effectively.
“You…you healed me? Now I know what it feels like…t’be Madam Pomfrey. So weird. But really cool,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster, then, “Why?”
Loki took a long time to reply, and when he did, he sounded a little confused himself. “The fruits of my revenge were less sweet than I had envisioned,” he said at last.
Tony hummed, accepting that cryptic little reply. “You’re pretty good at it. The healing, I mean.”
Loki met his gaze, raising a dark brow in his usual sardonic manner. “Only out of necessity. Thor has a propensity for getting injured on his foolish quests.”
Tony snorted. “I can imagine.” His eyes kept closing of their own accord, and it was only with considerable effort that he managed to force them open again. “Now what?”
He caught a glimpse of a crooked smirk before another snap of Loki’s fingers extinguished the lamp.
“Till the next time we meet on the battlefield, Stark.”
The next time Tony opened his eyes, the sun was out and his head was clear. His memories were a little less clear, but his strange lack of serious injuries (spectacular bruising notwithstanding) served as enough of a clue.
Now he just had to figure out how to explain this miraculous phenomenon to the rest of the team.
The next few battles were strange.
Loki seemed to be going through the motions more than anything else, allowing his deformed creations to run amok about the city without any real direction. All his attacks seemed half-hearted at best, quite lacking in the spite he had once exuded.
The moment anyone made a move to approach (Tony in particular, it seemed, although maybe he was just being overly-sensitive), the god would disappear with a flourish of his cape, never mind that his force field would’ve kept anyone out.
“This guy needs to get a hobby,” Clint grumbled one day, horror in his eyes as he stared at an escaping collie-sized squirrel and the pile of droppings it had left behind. “He keeps leaving us to clean up his messes.”
“Maybe his hobby is enlarging animals,” Natasha pointed out, and Tony had no idea if she was being sarcastic or not. He decided that she probably was.
Three encounters later – two with over-sized animals (the cats were a right horror) and one with flying towels (that one was plain bizarre) – Loki disappeared once more. For a whole month, not just from the battlefield.
Tony wasn’t concerned. Much. At least he knew that Loki hadn’t gone to ground because of a missing eye this time – or at least not a missing eye that had anything to do with him.
To say that it was a surprise to wake up to a very familiar dark shape beside his bed again was a gross understatement.
Because he was quite clear-headed this time, Tony shot upright like he’d been stung, inching away from Loki’s motionless figure. “You again? Where have you been?” he demanded, before realising that he sounded strangely petulant, which was certainly not the attitude he had been aiming for.
The lights came on (there was no display of finger-snapping this time, Tony noted with some trepidation) to reveal Loki glaring at him in obvious annoyance. “I would wager that that is none of your business, Stark,” the god growled.
Tony raised his brows, trying as best he could to look confused rather than insolent. “Right. So you’re here because…?” he led invitingly.
Loki’s chin lifted so as to better look down his nose at Tony. “I am having difficulty finding activities with which to occupy my time, and you are the cause,” he said ominously.
Tony frowned. “Yeah, we kinda figured that you weren’t really up for the messing-with-the-city-every-week thing anymore – not that we’re complaining, of course.” He paused, blinking thoughtfully. “So you’re bored. Is that it? Why is it my fault?”
“Because –” Loki let out a guttural noise that sounded a lot like a snarl, and before Tony could pull away, the god had snatched his arm up in a bruising grip. “Because of this. Because I mended your poor, broken body.” He was spitting with every syllable, and Tony cringed, arm held awkwardly above his head.
“Okay, okay, I get it,” Tony huffed, not daring to pull away.
Seriously, why hadn’t he started sleeping with his bracelets on? Although it was doubtful they’d work with JARVIS disabled and all.
Loki was sneering as usual; he sneered so much it was a wonder his face hadn’t stuck in a permanent scowl after centuries of the same shit. “You do, do you?”
And now Tony was starting to get pissed. He liked word games as much as the next guy (or the god of mischief), but this was just plain withholding of necessary information.
“Well, I would if you’d stop being cryptic and moody,” he sort-of snapped. Sort of, because he didn’t have a death wish.
Loki released his hand, flinging it away and sending Tony rolling sideways with the momentum. “I healed you,” the god repeated, and Tony didn’t know if Loki sounded angrier at himself or with the world in general. “Ever since, I have had difficulty delivering lethal blows to all of you pathetic, fragile creatures.”
Tony still didn’t get it. “But you’ve never delivered these…’lethal blows’. You’ve been protecting us from those blows,” he said flatly. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
Loki stiffened, seeming to puff up further with anger. “I have not –” he began, before appearing to give up on that line of argument. “The time was not yet right for you to perish at my hand. Do not presume to know the ways of the gods, mortal.”
A startled laugh spluttered its way out of Tony’s chest, and he held up a hand. “Wait, wait just a minute. So what you’re saying is that pushing us out of the way in battle so that we can fight another day doesn’t mean anything, but healing me once means you can’t be our enemy anymore? What are you? Self-deluded?”
“I should never have wasted my magic on one such as you. One moment of misplaced pity and now I am soft, weak,” Loki snarled, mostly managing to sound like a reprimanded child who was desperately trying to gather up the shattered fragments of his excuses. “And since you were the cause, I thought it only fair to…take my frustrations out on you.”
It was almost a chore to hold back his snort of amusement. It might have been a result of facing villains as a job, but Tony really wasn’t getting particularly malicious vibes from the god at the moment.
“Yeah? And how were you planning to do that?” he asked, brows raised challengingly.
Loki looked comically uncertain about how to respond to Tony’s uncalled for sass. “Torture?” he said, sounding like he was hazarding a guess.
And Tony did laugh at that. “Sure, pal. I’m sorry, but you’re not exactly torturer material – trust me on that.” Getting out of bed, he beckoned for Loki to follow him. “If you’re so bored, we can play Monopoly or something, but you’ll have to wake JARVIS up for that so he can be our third player.”
To his surprise, Loki actually padded noiselessly after him. The god still looked bewildered, like he wasn’t sure how the situation had gone from planning to stick a bunch of knives in Tony Stark to hear him scream, to following the same man around his own living room as he rummaged through drawers for something called Monopoly.
“Ha, got it!” Tony turned, waving the Monopoly box around and hearing the pieces rattle inside. “So, JARVIS?”
Loki hesitated. “Your servant?” he asked, as if he really needed any confirmation.
Tony rolled his eyes. “My AI, yes. Don’t worry, I’m not going to have him sound the alarm. You could kill me before anyone got here anyway.”
The frown Loki fixed him with was speculative, but a moment later, a rather alarmed-sounding JARVIS crackled to life.
“Sir?”
“It’s alright. Big bad here is a friendly, okay? Reclassify.” He waved a hand carelessly in the direction of one of the cameras. “We’re playing Monopoly. You’re gonna want the top hat again, right, JARV?”
There was a pause. “As always, Sir.”
They played till the sun rose, JARVIS trouncing both Loki and Tony with almost offensive ease.
Finally, the god rose sinuously to his feet, inclining his head politely to Tony in the most surreal manner ever. “This was a most interesting diversion, Stark,” he said seriously, although the light in his eyes was decidedly friendlier than before. “I thank you for your hospitality.”
Tony felt the careless grin tug at his lips before he could do anything to stop it. “Yeah, well, drop by the next time you’re bored. There’s a lot more than just Monopoly around here.”
It became an almost-routine, kind of like the way they had once expected a new Loki attack each time a new week rolled around.
Loki’s favourite board game turned out to be Risk, which honestly didn’t surprise Tony all that much, what with all the armies and conquering involved. The funny part was that it didn’t even touch a raw nerve for either of them.
Sometimes, their games lasted for days (well, nights, technically, since Loki always left before Tony went downstairs for breakfast, or just back to bed to catch up on his sleep), and Tony was glad none of the others ever bothered coming up to his floor, or they’d see the board still set out, little black and red Roman numerals scattered not-so-haphazardly across the world map.
They probably would’ve believed him if he told them he’d been playing with JARVIS though.
Once, Tony fell asleep halfway through Scrabble (in his defence, he had just returned from a four-hour long scrap with a number of stubborn wannabe-villains) and awoke on the couch with pins-and-needles in his arm. Loki had clearly literally dumped him on the couch with a complete lack of concern for his blood circulation, but it probably said something that he hadn’t just left Tony to drool on the floor.
It got to the point where Tony found that he was actually looking forward to Loki’s visits. Villainous past (and morally ambiguous present) aside, the god was pretty good company once the prickliness subsided somewhat.
It even got to the point that Loki started dropping by more than once a week, randomly at first, then every alternate day pretty consistently – which about coincided with the time Tony decided it was time to move on from games to movies. Loki seemed to enjoy those just as much as games, if not more.
He particularly enjoyed mindscrews like Inception, probably because he liked to pick at them for new methods to screw with people’s minds.
The months passed pretty quickly like that, until Thor said rather morosely at the breakfast table one morning, “I wonder how my brother fares. He has not shown himself for quite some time. Perhaps he is deliberately staying away to cause me undue worry.”
Tony cleared his throat, the thought I kinda just watched The Prestige with your brother last night flashing guiltily through his mind.
Thus far, it hadn’t been so hard to separate his days with the Avengers from his nights with Loki. Loki never came up in conversation with the team (till now, anyway), and Loki never seemed particularly interested in the Avengers’ doings – it was a little like having a secret boyfriend that his family didn’t know about.
Or something.
Either way, guilty conscience or not, his double lives were going to have to stay very much separate. He didn’t think anyone would take kindly to his sudden declaration of, “Actually, I’ve been hanging out with Loki most nights for a while now. Maybe you guys should come join us.”
He tried to bring it up with Loki on his next visit, just casually letting the words slip out of his mouth like they were nothing. “You know, Thor was just wondering about you the other night. It was kind of awkward for me.”
The god shot him an unreadable sideways glance. “Watch the movie, Stark,” he said, after about two seconds of silence. He didn’t sound angry, just a little…dangerous. It wasn’t a tone that Tony had heard him use in a while.
But he let Tony’s feet remain propped up in his lap anyway, so he figured that they were still okay.
The turning point came the day the Avengers answered a call that involved an obviously manmade, dangerously growing whirlpool along the coast. Despite the rhythmic crash of waves upon sand, and the summer-bright sunlight, the clash was really less picturesque than the location would have suggested.
Tony came away feeling like he had been battered by a cement mixer – or like he had been caught in a violent maelstrom no less than fifty feet across. His right arm was all but scraped raw after he had lost a gauntlet in the struggle to get free, stuttered unbalanced across the ocean back to shore, and promptly crash landed in the unforgiving sand.
Steve, Nat and Clint had come away unscathed; Bruce hadn’t even had to disembark from the Quinjet. It wasn’t their fault though – the whirlpool had been just slightly inaccessible to anyone who couldn’t fly.
They enjoyed a team meal after the somewhat dubious success anyway, and Tony had a stimulating time exchanging increasingly lurid insults with Clint, with Steve looking more and more scandalised with every turn, even as Bruce took to explaining each phrase to Thor with his usual affable (but secretly devious) demeanour.
Then Natasha just had to go and ruin their fun by sending Tony off to bed like he was some kid. “I mean it, Tony. Don’t try to sneak down to your workshop.” She arched a single brow, managing to make that small movement singularly terrifying. “I will know.”
But Tony was well-versed in following orders given by terrifying women, so he acquiesced with minimal whining, but not before shooting Clint the finger right before he turned the corner. It soothed his shrivelled little heart to have the last word – action, whatever.
Upstairs, he settled himself on his bed before calling up the newest set of suit schematics. Spinning the suit pointlessly with repeated flicks of his finger, he idly wondered if there was any way to make it whirlpool-proof.
He fiddled with the schematics for about an hour, fingers itching for the cool metal of his actual suit – but Natasha’s not-so-subtle threat was still quite clear in his mind. So he ended up falling asleep instead, somewhere between one sentence and the next as he debated with JARVIS the pros and cons of cutting off the assassin’s internet access for a few days.
(They concluded that the satisfaction such a show of pettiness would bring wasn’t worth a potential evisceration at the hands of a woman who knew how to make people hurt.)
An unknown amount of time later, but most likely a few hours, he awoke with a massive crick in his neck and fingers prodding him in the shoulder.
“Stark?” Loki said, when he seemed mostly sure that Tony was conscious.
“Never,” Tony grumbled, breaking off to yawn widely, “fall asleep sitting up. Go pick a movie; I’m just gonna brush my teeth first.”
“Hm.” The god paused, eyeing Tony’s bandaged arm with mild interest before leaving the room. A few seconds later, Tony heard the soft chatter of Loki and JARVIS speaking, presumably about movie recommendations, and he couldn’t help chuckling to himself as he trundled into the bathroom.
For a Norse god, Loki sure was easy to please.
“What are we watching tonight, Lokes?” Tony asked when he emerged from the bedroom, feeling his muscles groan in protest with every step he took. The suit might protect him from the worst harms, but it didn’t make getting tossed around willy-nilly any healthier.
Loki looked up from where he was standing in front of the microwave, a bag of popcorn twirling around within. “Source Code,” he said primly, before busying himself with snack preparation.
It was a relief to collapse onto the sofa, but Tony forced himself to remain upright. If he lay horizontal tonight, he was liable to conk out fifteen minutes into the movie, which might or might not offend Loki, considering it was his turn to pick.
“It was not an easy battle today?” Loki asked, his tone conversational as he took a seat beside Tony with the popcorn in his lap. Taking his usual cue, JARVIS promptly started the movie.
Tony shrugged, reaching for a handful of popcorn. “Kinda. Not really a battle though, not when the enemy’s Mother Nature. Manmade nature. Huh, imagine that.”
Loki let out a soft exhalation that sounded mildly amused. “Your arm is injured,” he mentioned, as if in passing, a cursory observation.
Tony grinned at that. “I’m fine, just a few abrasions is all. Stop being sweet; it’s creepy.” He leaned over, nudging at Loki teasingly with his shoulder, a movement that felt startlingly natural, probably because it wasn’t the first time he’d done it.
Loki only let out another snort. “Shut up, Stark. I care nothing about your well-being.” And damn if he didn’t make that statement sound almost good-natured.
Tony subsided cooperatively with just another muffled chuckle, choosing to focus on Jake Gyllenhaal’s face instead.
And lo and behold, he ended up falling asleep again. Maybe he had as-yet-undiagnosed narcolepsy – or maybe he was just sleep-deprived.
What made the whole thing really weird was that he woke up with his head pillowed on Loki’s shoulder. Admittedly, it was a somewhat bony shoulder and thus not the most comfortable headrest, but the point was that Loki had allowed the contact at all.
The point was that Loki had stayed.
“Wha –?” He rose to wakefulness as ungracefully as ever, pushing himself off the shoulder he had not yet realised was a shoulder, and looked around in confusion. “Oh. Lokes?”
“Finally, you awake.” Loki sounded…not exasperated – but then, he seemed to be inclined to find Tony rather entertaining in general recently.
“Sorry, did I like, fall asleep on you or something?” Tony blinked owlishly, then he repeated, “Sorry.”
Loki inclined his head. “It was of little consequence,” he said, and Tony didn’t know if he was hallucinating when his brain classified Loki’s tone of voice as gentle.
Then the god vanished with a simple, “Farewell, Stark,” and it didn’t matter anymore. Only coffee mattered.
Except it did matter, for reasons, because Tony just couldn’t put it in any better way than that.
He didn’t sit with his feet in Loki’s lap so much anymore. Instead, the shoulder-leaning became more of a thing – in that he leaned his shoulder, not his head, against Loki’s shoulder while they ran through an eclectic selection of movies.
It didn’t mean anything, not really. It just made it easier to smack his palm down on Loki’s thigh in excitement if he saw something worth pointing out on the screen, easier to reach the snacks (because Loki was a snack-hogger, who would’ve thought?), easier to talk. Or whatever.
“It seems to me that we are unlikely to ever move on to a new activity should we persist in watching movies,” Loki commented one night, scrolling through JARVIS’ admittedly impressive (and wholly legal, thank you very much) collection of movies.
Tony grinned easily – it had been a good day. Some fun time with the team, no potential disasters needing their attention, half a day tinkering away in his workshop, and now movie time with a Norse god. It was practically like being the popular guy back in school all over again, except everyone felt a lot more genuine.
“Yeah, well, I’ll probably be dead of old age if you want to watch every movie,” he said with a laugh. “If you want to move on to something else, music or whatever, just say the word.”
Loki looked back at him with a strange expression on his face, and then he shrugged, a gesture that looked almost out of place on his frame. “Merely a thought,” he said, and turned back to the screen.
“What do you do when you’re not here?” Tony asked suddenly. “I mean, I would guess, but I really can’t think of anything. Supervillain tea party? Dance-off with Doom?”
“Afraid I might be selling your secrets, Stark?” Loki didn’t turn around, but his tone was far into ‘I might sound amused but I’m really not amused at all’ territory, and Tony knew that he was treading on thin ice here.
“Just curious, that’s all. Maybe I’m just jealous that you might be spending more time with someone else,” Tony said jokingly. “I mean, you only visit during the night. What does that make me? Your dirty secret?”
Loki’s head tilted slightly, so that the edge of his profile was just visible to Tony. “I think I am the dirty secret here, Stark.” The god’s lips were pressed together thinly, the skin around his temples pulled tight, and it was probably testament to how well they actually knew each other by now that Tony was able to recognise the thin veneer of hurt shadowing Loki’s expression.
“Hey, Lokes. Hey.” He slid off the couch and took a seat beside the god, pressing their shoulders together familiarly, knees bumping. “It’s like a safety thing, you know. Having the other Avengers around would totally ruin our vibe. Plus you wouldn’t want Thor hounding you like a sad puppy, right?”
Loki’s lip curled, but the taut bow of his back seemed to soften somewhat. “Thor is no puppy,” he snorted. “He is a pest.”
“Harsh.” Tony grinned, and was pleased to receive a genuine smile in return.
Loki had a nice smile, really – the kind that brightened his whole face. It was just too bad he didn’t show it off enough.
It took Tony a moment longer than it should have to realise that he was, for some reason, still staring at Loki’s smile. And that Loki was, in turn, looking right back at him with a piercingly even gaze.
“Stark,” Loki said quietly, his lips barely parting, and while it didn’t sound like a question, somehow Tony knew that it was one anyway.
He knew what to do, had been in this situation too many times to count. Just lean forward and –
The Avengers Assemble alert blared to life around them, and Tony jumped about a foot in the air even though he had been sitting cross-legged on the floor.
“Shit. What – dammit, what time is it now?” He scrambled to his feet and was halfway to the elevator when he looked back at Loki, who was still seated like he had been turned into a statue.
Then the god cocked his head, breaking the illusion. “Go, Stark,” he said, and he offered another one of those gentle, slightly heart-breaking smiles.
Tony felt something pang in his gut. “Okay. Well, uh, let JARV know if you need anything.”
Then he turned and ran.