This is a sequel to my work Reparations. If you haven't read that you are welcome to continue but there will be a lot of things that don't make sense. This is heavily AU. For those of you returning, thank you so much for coming along. For what it's worth, I'm very excited to be back in Buffalo with these two idiots and their spoiled rotten kids. Please enjoy this new period in Tony and Loki's lives.
A quick note on vocabulary: Jotun in this story are universally intersex. In the process of writing Reparations, I felt the need to invent some Jotun words for parents. Why would an alien society with no male or female have gendered names for family roles? So in this story "machem" equates to mother and translates to "carrier" while "aleha" equates to father and means "caregiver." These titles are unique to each child, since the same parent might have carried one child but sired their sibling, similar to how Loki was 'mother' to Sleipnir but 'father' to the other three.
Thank you to Wolfloner and buying_the_space_farm for beta reading and encouragement. :3
This book on human pregnancy is about as relevant to Loki as a schematic would be to a plumber, and yet here she is reading it. Needs must and all that rot.
The mutant only cruise was a good idea in theory, but in actual practice her sickness rather ruined the experience. During their eight day float along coastal Spain she slept more than she was awake. Between the bed, the theater box, and the poolside lounger she suspects she slept at least once on every deck. By the time they crossed into French waters she'd missed so much that the waking world started to feel more like a dream. In retrospect she ought to have kept on hibernating, since the next several days were marked by rough weather that sent her head first into the stateroom toilet. Six days she suffered that mutiny before Tony dragged her and the children out for a shore excursion in Monaco, from which they did not return. A nauseating stop in the local customs office and a few hefty fines from the cruise company later, she laid her head on a different lounger by a different pool and mooned over how very wonderful it was to have Tony back.
For his worth, Tony has not wasted any time. His every other word seems to concern the baby, or some matter related to it. Her. She's convinced herself it will be a girl, although the book on her lap insists that at eight weeks the babe is the size of a raspberry. It is only just now growing arms, let alone legs and the organs between them. Not that the human standard of eight weeks can be trusted... which brings her back around to the problem at hand.
As far as she is aware her family are the first Jotun to set foot on Earth since the old wars. The child will be one of a kind. There exist no books, no experts or regular check-ups or warning signs. She has naught to settle her nerves but her sundered memory of Sleipnir's birth and Tony's irrepressible optimism.
So she is reading the useless human book because she must do something, and if the child is half-human then it stands to reason that the book must also be half-true. And so she reads and ignores how very obvious all of it is. Of course she is tired, she is housing a parasite. Of course her breasts are swelling, that's their entire purpose. And yes, obviously they will be tender because swollen flesh of any variety is tender. With each page her patience thins as more and more unknowns amass in the back of her mind.
Will the child be Jotun? Will they look it? Will the heat and higher gravity of Earth harm them? And how long will she carry? Nine months seems a dreadfully short time. She thinks it took longer with Sleipnir, a good deal longer, but converting time between two realms is a question of how much sanity one is willing to sacrifice to the cause. And she does not have overmuch of that resource to lose.
Beside her, Tony is tucking into a sandwich with Jori napping in his lap. It's a relief to see him filling back out, although it hasn't been long enough for significant improvement. He always wants someone touching, she's noticed, and fortunately Jori is at an age where no amount of attention is enough.
Hela is teaching Fenrir how to swim, although Loki is certain he taught the boy when he was younger. Foolish child, forgetting something like that. They'd made an odyssey of it, had taken him to the great lake on Vanaheim and...and Loki hadn't been allowed on Vanaheim after the second war. Bother, perhaps it was Hela after all.
The familiar skitters of guilt have Loki's clawed hands itching to scratch but she balls them up in her skirts, rereading the line of text her eyes had skimmed but not absorbed. At seven weeks your little one is developing kidneys and will start producing urine by week eight. By the stars, is there anything humans won't talk about?
Now when she sees a toilet she is going to think about her misshapen, legless raspberry child urinating inside of her. Her nose wrinkles as she turns the page firmly enough that it rips an inch down the spine. Good riddance.
Tony glances up at the sound of the paper tearing. The weather is temperate here, even in winter, and so the tips of his dark hair glow gold in the sunshine. After a moment of unreadable staring he sets his food aside. Lovely, he wants to talk. Loki throws the book in the pool simply to avoid the lose-lose ultimatum of lying to him or discussing pre-natal excrement.
Tony tracks the book's flight and inevitable plunge, and closes his mouth to rewrite whatever he intended to say.
"Not a fan?"
Fenrir picks up the soggy book between two fingers and shoots them a confused glower.
"No, I don't think I am," Loki shifts to lay on her side, although it's not nearly as comfortable. As fair as the weather is, she wishes she had brought her blanket. She'd like nothing more than to wind her fingers through the holes and doze.
"Aleha?" Fen mumbles with an arched brow. Again Tony starts to speak, but Loki beats him to it.
"Toss it over the fence, dear, we don't want pulp sticking to the deck."
"Any chance there's a Jotun edition of that?" Tony flops back on his reclined chair, the hood of his heavy coat bunching under his head and making his hair stick up in the back. Her heart does a stutter, hopeless thing that it is. She can see herself reflected in his oversized sunglasses. At some point she will stop being unsettled by her lovestruck reflection, by how she must look everytime she sees him. But not yet, perhaps not for a long while.
"The Jotun don't keep written records," Loki says.
"Of course they don't," Tony sighs. "Lucky for us, I hear there's a genius billionaire looking for a nine to five."
"Are you nominating yourself to be a Jotun historian?" Loki laughs, sharp.
"More like a geneticist–"
"Oh mercy, is this why you've been slamming your tablet closed when I walk in?"
"I might have made a proposal," Tony's lips spread in a caught me grimace. He retrieves his tablet and projects the display in the air. "Look it has a cover page and everything."
The Jotun Genome Project by Anthony E. Stark and Loki Liesmith
Loki scans the holographic abstract with narrowed eyes.
"Is this not exactly the kind of study we refused the security council?"
"Well we're not the Men in Black. Nobody's gonna use this to make weapons."
"When has anyone successfully stopped a weapon being made?" Loki returns to laying on her back. Tony looks like he wants to follow her around but he can't with Jori coiled in his lap.
"Fine, we won't publish it. No report, no website, no media." Tony strikes through the words on the holo and throws the file in the little garbage can in the corner of the screen. His pulse flickers in his neck like a lightbulb about to go out. "But..."
The fingers of his free hand scratch at his chest and now Loki must bite her lip to keep from apologizing. How many times has he told her she is allowed to argue? Countless. Hundreds upon hundreds. Even so, her throat tightens and she feels a tension building in her shoulders. They've set a new record for maintaining harmony on this trip. She doesn't want the quarreling to return.
Tony huffs, and starts over. "Do you know that genetically there's only two percent difference between my DNA and a monkey's? Flip a few nucleotides around, change out a few animo acids, and I'm a four foot tall chimp painting murals with my poo."
"I did not know that, but I'll be sure to mention it the next time you fart in your sleep."
Tony rips off his sunglasses so she can see him roll his eyes.
"But don't you wonder? How different we are? Physically, physiologically?"
One word should not hold such sway as 'different.' Simply hearing it stated as a fact makes her want to crawl to the bottom of the pool. This is a matter she puts great effort into forgetting, regularly.
"So long as we're healthy I don't care," she hedges. He takes her hand, and the sudden dousing of energy, fear, and gripping, all-encompassing love feels like she has actually plunged into the water.
Tony meets her eye and she knows already she's lost.
"I do," he says, "I want to know how your body works. I want to know what your genes are like. And more than anything, I want to know for sure that the sprout's healthy. Which means I need to know what healthy is, for a Jotun." He threads their fingers and Loki's resolve crumbles. As always.
"There are no texts, only midwives."
"Then I guess we'll have to go to Jotunheim," He squeezes her hand.
She squeezes back.
It takes several days for Loki to give him a proper answer to go along with the unspoken one. Like a gentleman he waits, although not patiently and not silently. She counts her blessings that he has at least stopped trying to hide his plotting behind hastily opened news articles. It happens, strange as it may seem, during bathtime. Everyone but Hela is present, and over half of them are yelling for one reason or another. In other words, an ordinary evening.
Of all the unreasonable things to be upset about, it seems Jormungand is falling apart because the bathtub is 'too white.' She sincerely hopes he has mixed up his languages again, because if he is truly disturbed by that color then he shall find life in the new house rather unkind. On the other side of the shower curtain, Tony is fielding an equally unreasonable rant from Fenrir while he applies itch cream to his horns, and since the situation cannot possibly get any more ridiculous she decides now is a good enough time to give her verdict.
"You aren't a life scientist," Loki says. More screaming, more complaining.
After a gruff 'hold still' Tony answers. "Give me twenty four hours and I can be."
"You will hire professionals," Loki growls, nearly cracking Jori's head on the tile in her efforts to pull him back under the showerhead and rinse out his hair.
"Hey, I can hire professionals," Tony says in an exaggerated tone of spontaneous inspiration.
Someone knocks something plastic sounding off of the counter, and they are both abruptly diverted by the wet plop of Tony's brand new phone into the toilet bowl.
It's thirty minutes later while the children are occupied brushing their teeth that Tony resurrects the topic.
"Well we already have the human genome mapped," Tony says, setting a water-dotted plate in the dishwasher.
Loki tosses the last of the takeout containers in the incinerator and closes the latch. She does not know what a genome is. It sounds rather large, but perhaps she's over-associating it with the Aesir word for abyss. With a quick snapping of her fingers she burns the garbage to ash and enjoys the bite of stardust on her tongue, refreshing after a long day.
The water is far too hot when she knocks Tony's hands aside to wash off the 'germs' that she has grudgingly accepted are real. They can't harm her of course, but for Anthony's health she does whatever is necessary. He flicks soapy water on her cheek.
"Took about a decade. So add one genius, four and a half demigods, and a couple billion dollars…"
"And you will have a very expensive piece of paper with pretty graphs on it," Loki finishes.
Tony shares a very exasperated look with her, and turns off the faucet. He wipes his hands on a towel and shoves it in her face.
"Oh, look, you've got a little dirt on your everything," he grunts, and her hackles raise.
He starts to feel rather masculine as he steals the towel and whips him over the head with it, although of course he can't change from Jotun with the babe in his belly. Just his luck, that he was blue that night and not merely female. Now he is stuck for as long as it takes to deliver, and far too tired to hold an illusion for long. The improvised weapon strikes Tony's crown with a wet slap.
A turnabout brews in his smirk until the little blighters run out in their nightgowns and reassert their power over their guardians. It is a dangerous thing to give such small, ignorant beings so much sway over one's heart.
Loki drops the towel in the sink and pulls power from the Earth to fuel his retelling of the Man with the Iron Heart. When he grasps the content of the children's favorite story Tony slinks away, and Loki cannot blame him. He's a bit ashamed himself, that in his infinite loneliness he drafted a fantasy where his lover was a king and his enemies were goblins and the ghastly thing pried between his ribs was a warm light for all humanity.
The last sparks of his storytime illusion dissipate into the bedroom rafters and Loki allows himself a moment of tranquility. There's room enough for the younglings to have their own bedrooms in the new house, but he isn't sure either of them are quite ready to be alone at night.
Fenrir's hair shifts in time with his slow, even breathing, the fairy lights giving the room a dim glow. Scrape marks dent the headboard from his horns and Loki wonders if that is the proper way of things, if he was meant to dent a headboard on Jotunheim before Odin made his own plans. Given time to think, he senses this is his real reservation with Tony's enterprise, with the whole business of researching. There are existential answers wise beings know not to seek.
The door slips open and Tony's shadow tickles Loki's toes. He leaves a light kiss on Fenrir's forehead because he is turning three hundred next year and some day soon he will decide that he hates everything, including bedtime kisses. Once done, he follows Tony to the main room where he has slept since they were forcefully parted.
"What about Sleipnir?" Tony asks.
"What about him?" Loki yawns.
"Well he's half...what? Horse?"
"Half-Jotun," Loki says with willful ignorance and a very stiff lip. The shameful truth, which he would prefer not to reveal, is that he hasn't a clue what Svadilfari was. Apart from phallically gifted and a terrible decision.
Nothing in the following argument bears repeating, particularly in retrospect, when Loki has the benefit of fully understanding Tony's words. He regrets it instantly, and then finds himself simpering into the bathroom sink because he feels so unreasonably guilty. By the time Tony enters Loki is holding his still-packaged toothbrush and crying with joy at his return.
Five minutes later he recalls the damned pregnancy book's section on heightened hormones and stumbles over a surly apology. Tony spits into the sink, pointing with his now foamy toothbrush.
"All I meant was, we should take a look at his DNA. He's probably the closest comparison we're gonna find."
"The only commonality Sleip has with the sprig–" Loki starts, only to stop.
The surveillance spell he maintains over the children infuses him with an energy so strong that his teeth momentarily ache. He sets his hairbrush on the vanity with a clack of wood on marble and wipes the lingering redness from his eyes.
"Nightmare?" Tony guesses.
"Thirsty. Which means a trip to the bathroom at two in the morning," Loki sighs.
"One, two, three, not it," Tony jokes, leaning down to swish water and catching his gaze in the mirror. Loki pierces him with a dour glare and prepares to out-stubborn a cranky child.
The bed is a peculiar anachronism in the otherwise modernized home. It hasn't changed since the construction of the cottage in the seventeen-somethings. Loki never had a head for time, let alone dates according to foreign realms, but it was some time after human men wore robes and before they wore pants. Laying at his side is Tony, holding his tablet close to his chest and reading intently.
The book on gene inheritance is significantly less vexing than the one on pregnancy, but it does use much more advanced words. Loki has to stop every page or so to consult a dictionary, but once he grasps the meaning he finds it rather amusing. Pea plants, of all things, taught humans how they were created. How perfectly ludicrous.
It is the night of his dreams, despite all the bickering and blubbering. Tony's breathing is a soft vibrato in his ear, and the cool touch of his arm along Loki's side is a memory brought back into crisp realism. He is well on the way to passing out when Tony slips a hand over his and thumbs at his lines, following them ever so slowly up his wrist.
The sensation of weightlessness takes him by surprise. Not a literal lightness, but rather the emotional experience of diving into a pool. The sense of danger and novelty sending his blood pumping and his mind whirling. Tony flips their hands over and the feeling fades, returning in intermittent spurts when he cradles Loki's knuckles in his shorter fingers. The flames of the bedside lantern catch Tony's lashes and flicker in the corners of his dark eyes.
"Yes?" Loki asks, blinking away the half-finished sentences rattling between his ears. Tony nods, as if that explains everything. Without a word he swings his feet over the edge of the bed.
An irrational fear overtakes Loki but he doesn't let himself panic. Now that he's aware of them, he slots his heightened emotions into place alongside the other symptoms which he must suppress as much as possible.
"What do you need?" he asks.
A slack smile gives Tony laugh lines beside his eyes.
"If I knew, you bet your ass I'd have you get it for me," he winks. "Read your book, I'll be right back."
Back from what, Loki silently demands, but he learned regret in the kitchen of a destroyed atmo shuttle and so he does as he's told. The book's words don't stick to his mind, even after he's shaken himself and made the font larger. Long minutes stretch by while the whistling wind and the creaks of the old house form a numbing white noise. Finally, Tony returns with cold feet and some kind of string tangled in his right hand.
"What are you doing?"
Tony sits on top of the covers in the too-small space between Loki's legs, shifting about until he widens his sprawl to accommodate. He takes his hand once more, and this time the freefall is less a leap into intriguing waters and more the sort of emotional precipice one feels just before speaking publicly.
Tony looks ready to abandon the whole enterprise, until he sets his brows. The feeling molds forcefully into a tiny spark of shuffling cue cards and clearing one's throat before a podium, and then Tony tilts his head to a challenging angle. He smooths out his features into a look that would weaken Loki's knees if he weren't already sitting.
"You know your safeword, use it if you want to. Otherwise give me your hands," he says in the voice he uses to speak to his robots. To his servants. Loki swallows around a tight throat and obeys.
Up close he sees that it isn't string in Tony's hand, but rather a pair of shoelaces. Two messy bundles pulled from the eyelets of his Aesir riding boots. He ties the ends together to make one continuous span and folds them in half, forming a U-shape around the middle. The makeshift rope is warm from Tony's touch when it first brushes his skin, almost ticklish in the way it grazes the ridges of his lines and the crop of fine hair on his arm.
His partner winds the rope around twice, and Loki finds he cannot look away. It's far from confident, the way he handles the improvised restraint, but there's grace to it. A promise of skill yet to be won, temporarily hidden within mere potential.
"What brought this on?" he murmurs, alarmed at how such a simple gesture can have his entire arm vibrating with seiðr. A flush prickles up his neck, a mirror equal to Tony's, which makes them a matched set. His partner shapes another loop from the slack and squints, turning the strings over and back and peering at his abandoned tablet.
Glancing to the screen, Loki finds a line of photographs with helpful captions underneath. Although there are body parts shown and foreign hands doing odd things to them, it isn't pornographic. It is hardly even suggestive. Helpful arrows are superimposed over the regimented loops of deep crimson rope, showing which directions to pull and wrap. A guide. Neck reddening steadily, Tony attempts to feed the loop under the coils around Loki's wrist and loses his grip. The whole thing devolves into a tangle.
"Can you not watch? You're messing me up." Tony huffs out a thick laugh, scratching uncomfortably at his chest. "This is harder than it looks."
"Well you are using shoestring."
"Read your book." Tony says. He shakes his head and balances Loki's tablet on his lap, tipping his chin down in a clear command. With a gentle touch to his wrist Tony repeats the maneuver, his fingers slipping under the coils again and feeding it through. One last cinch and the cuff tightens, a sequence of orderly lines with a loop near Loki's thumb and a loose end trailing along the comforter.
Tony smiles. Real, spontaneous. Flush with the feeling of scritching pencils and graphite dust and another perfect score. It may be the most purely good feeling Tony has ever shared with him, the happy swell of learning and math and an equation solved exactly right. Before Loki has properly formed his own opinion, he knows he must give Tony that feeling again. Over and over if he can.
He unwraps his wrist, thumbing briefly at the chafed skin and then settling into repetitive practice. Loki tries to read. Not very successfully, but he tries.
He learns that genes come in sequences, like links in a chain. That all forms of life are built from a chemical code contained, identically, in every cell of their being. That some are dominant and others recessive, and that both must coexist within a system of replication in order for lifeforms to evolve and adapt. That it is part of nature for some traits to flourish in particular circumstances while others remain dormant and unexpressed.
He feels foolish, understanding so late what they've been discussing all night. Foolish, and somewhat wrong-footed. His origins are no great mystery after all. In a manner of speaking the answers have been lurking within his cells every moment that he has been alive, waiting for an over-inquisitive human to come pick the lock.
Chewing his cheek, he says softly, "Sleipnir will not be of any help until you have mapped my genome."
Tony turns the page to his own book, nodding along. The pictures have two hands this time.
"That's true," Tony agrees, his eyes never pausing in his reading. "But if we want to crack the code before the due date, we're going to need to map you both at the same time."
"We don't even know the due date." Loki murmurs.
For a splintered moment their eyes meet and Loki sees in the short alignment of irises all the fear Tony keeps to himself. Like a coward he returns his gaze to his own book, his heart hammering like he's been shocked.
The worn drag of the laces slithers over and under and around his wrists until there is hardly enough left to knot. Tony's cool touch brushes the underside of his arm, just long enough to fill his lines with beating, reinforced resolve, and then it is gone. His lover crosses one end over the other and pulls.
With a single tug everything contracts—the neat lines of shoelace, the captured beams of Loki's wrists, and the seething jumble of worry sluicing into his lungs. Tony binds it all with one self-possessed motion and when he cups Loki's hands again, all he feels is a glorious nothingness quickly filled with eraser shavings and perfect scores circled in bold red ink.
"I think I'm into this." Tony says, smiling at whatever look he finds on Loki's face. He leans in and Loki's bound hands become trapped between their chests.
Kissing him is very much like clinging to a buoy in a busy harbor, a point of invincible lightness that only becomes more precious the rougher the waters surge. He feels his lover's heart beat under the spread of his fingers, and madly imagines his own heart thumping in the same time.
His back presses into the padded headboard as Tony slots their lips into a soft, plying embrace that Loki welcomes with eagerness. The clench of the binding is tight, but his fingers are free and so he clutches at the fabric even after Tony slips away. His sigh becomes a lukewarm gust on Loki's ear.
"Are you with me now?" Tony asks, rocking like they're both much younger than they are. His arms slip between Loki's back and the headboard, holding just tight enough to make the rope bite in a wonderful, distracting way.
The fear drains slowly, like drips from a leaky tap and in time Loki's head comes to rest on Mister Stark's shoulder. His fingers finally loosen from the wrinkles of the nightshirt, worming into the gaps between the buttons and pressing into the tough, scar-plowed skin of his master's chest. He nods. Words are too big to summon, just then. The kiss to his neck feels like a blooming bullet hole, pierced right through and bleeding wide petals of his insides out where they can be seen.
"We're going to go to Jotunheim. We're going to put together a team. We're going to figure this out and everything is going to be okay." Mister Stark says into his neck, another bullet, poised in the chamber and ready to shred through the doubts Loki cannot seem to banish on his own. Mister Stark's determination beats through his mind and he can feel the prickle of seiðr pulsing from his chest and into Loki's fingers.
He wonders if Mister Stark knows the power he holds in his heart. If he knows that his force of will is a host unto itself which the very fabric of the universe bends to accommodate.
Only a fool defies the heart wish of Tony Stark, and so Loki says in a voice like rusted metal, "Yes, Mister Stark."
Reviews are welcome, follows are fic fuel. Even if it's just an emote or a keyboard smash, it all helps. :)
(and thank you to Chris for the very kind review. It really made my day. ^_^ I now have a beta who is helping with my spelling!)