A/N:

1) Please note that this story features the following tags & warnings: Sci Fi, Space age, Established Relationship, Major character deaths, Romance. So sorry I cant seem to figure out how to put REAL TAGS on the site.. or how to put in proper breaks because the system keeps taking it out :( If somebody can let me know I'd be really grateful for the tip!

2) This story is part of a much longer series known as 'Flawed Design'. For more info, check out out my profile page.

1

Loki Laufeyson hardly every speaks, so Tony chatters to him and for him, and sometimes over him.

Like a critter. Sometimes he even sings.

Loki requires sustenance only once but every four moon-cycles, so Tony simply sets an alarm, not on his AI butler but on Loki himself, so that the god would remember and knew to seek Tony out whenever the need to replenish himself arose. He's not sure if Loki even realises that he walks around with an alarm bouncing around him like a hipflask (although it's a spiffy alarm, anything designed by Tony is spiffy even if it's being held together by resin and wood) – anyhow it works like a charm, and saves Tony the effort of wandering all over the place calling out to him like a stray cow.

Somewhere along the way Loki has picked up the habit of staying very still for days and often did; there were times this habit made him so hard to spot that Tony had more than once considered braiding into Loki's silver hair strips of ribbons steeped some in glow-in-the-dark bioluminescent solution.

Loki's open mouth is always wet and slightly cold, and Tony is unceasingly reminded of vague memories of standing under the rain; not just any rain but the fat, earthly kind you get in humid, monsoon-ridden countries with the constant sound of pouring rainwater around you.

Once he'd asked Loki if he still dreamed whilst caught in one of his increasingly frequent dead-tree trances. Loki hadn't answered, hadn't even flicked his lashes in the way that told Tony he was present today and willing to listen, even if he seldom knew how to respond. But weeks later he'd surprised Tony by saying very softly, 'I don't remember anymore.' Well. Of course. Tony found it perfectly acceptable, had nodded and pressed his lips (what passed for it) on the exposed triangle of skin that stretched like pale moonlight against his collarbone; skin that Tony knew would have given him frostbite in another time, had he still been human.

That Loki kept their human form after all this time, when Tony himself no longer does (no longer can, his mind unhelpfully supplies) has always been a constant source of bemusement to him. In another space and time he'd have called it vanity, but Tony knows they wouldn't be able to comprehend the concept today, not really, although the word itself existed in their memories.

Besides, Loki hasn't been capable of responding to insults for some time, and it's no fun having an argument with himself. They'd not argued since-

Well. Tony doesn't remember, but it's not in this sector of the universe. So that takes about a couple of hundred light years away from their last disagreement, give or take.

The earth had fallen to myth half an eon ago, and they had since walked so many other solar systems, made their home in countless other worlds and even the occasional moon. They'd been known as gods and demons, hailed as fathers of a new race (several times in fact; there are temples somewhere out there in the galaxy with Tony's face on it, something he finds disturbing on an almost cosmic level).

There are races out there who called them time travellers, creators, destroyers, wandering spirits, hungry ghosts.

There was a planet called Lokitory, in the XFD protogalaxy; once they had stopped there briefly for provisions and ended up staying a local millennia, and Loki had been insufferable for a few hundred human years after that.

Every now and then Tony would ask JRVS VII how long they'd been alive, and the answer always tickled the memory of laugher in his circuit-board. Long had he ceased to wonder why Loki had never left. Especially after all this time, when Tony is now just a mess of wires in a rusty suit.

Perhaps it is because Asgard too is no more, leaving Loki with no home and no people to return to even if he had thought to look for something to return to. Leaving Tony the only one besides himself who still remembers that Loki once had a source, called somewhere home.

Tony isin't above asuming however, that a portion of the reason might just be him.

Maybe.

~o0o0o~

Most of his time Tony spent pottering around, performing upgrades and minute, totally unnecessary housekeeping on JRVS VII (he refuses to acknowledge that more often than not it happened the other way around now, with JRVS VII performing mantainence on him). Then, when an interminable time have passed or when JRVS VII reminded him of his responsibilities, perhaps tired of having its various settings readjusted for the umpteenth time, Tony would start to fret that he'd misplaced Loki again would make his way to wherever he had seen him last.

Sometimes, this place would turn out to be much, much further than he remembered. Almost always the god would still be standing where he'd left him, staring simultaneously into both past and future and remembering everything and nothing. He'd blink when Tony takes his hand and follow him unquestioningly back to the nest, or home, or wherever Tony thought was a good place to spend some time together.

Despite these developments, and the irritating habit they'd developed of spacing out on each other more and more, Tony still made sure that they slept together every night. At least in the same general vicinity. Sometimes night came in the blink of an eye and sometimes it took a decade; occasionally there were no nights; only endless space. Tony takes all this in stride because Loki doesn't notice such things anymore, so there's nobody to remark on the passage of time and light or pontificate and argue to, on the nature of science or the wonder of aesthetics. It doesnt matter anyways, seeing that all these universal truisms have a tendency change so much and so many times that Tony is by now well acquainted with the futility of trying to encompass the universe in words. The universe simply is.

As he and Loki simply are.

Tony likes to watch the stars die. Implicit in their beauty and the breath-taking violence of their destruction is the reminder that his and Loki's time would someday come. They no longer dreaded this unmaking as they had in the early days, when both Tony and Loki were little more than representatives of values; pulled along by the many aspirations of their species. Those were the days Tony had presumed his relentless hunger for always somethingmore as an inalienable part of his and Loki's nature. Those were the days when Loki schemed of Tony's immortality and Tony imposed himself upon Loki's ever-escalating ambitions (and sometimes admitedly, just upon Loki's person).

Those where the days when ideas and promises and arguments were bandied around and they'd been filled with so much mindless purpose, deeply affected by so many trasient things.

Looking back, Tony sometimes wondered how they'd managed to see the past the ends of their own noses, given the scale of the passion with which they did everything back then.

~o0o0o~

Yet surely there are men who have made their art
Out of no tragic war, lovers of life,
Impulsive men that look for happiness
And sing when they have found it.