A/N: Here. Have an angstastic one shot while I start the sequel.
Tell Me Something That'll Change Me
A few days after the whole Team Free Steve debacle, Tony and Loki had made it across several states and were staying in a crappy motel on the outskirts of a tiny town Tony hadn't known existed.
Loki was healing quickly, mostly due to the fact that Tony had been willing to let him drink from him. The broken rib and severe head injury had both put themselves back together and the dead man's blood had flushed from his system.
A similar set of injuries on Tony would have bedridden him for weeks, if not killed him, but vampires were tough.
Tony had about a million and one misgivings about accepting Loki as his partner; never mind that Loki was technically a monster, Tony didn't actually know much about him (if you accepted Loki's claim that he wasn't Loki Burison).
Therefore, a week after Tony had escaped from Hoople and agreed to work with Loki, he sat down on their shared double bed and waited for him to get back from a hunt.
He'd also had misgivings about sharing a bed, but the faint nightmares that still stuck with him after all this time were eased a little by having Loki's oddly cool presence next to him, and Loki seemed to be the same way. Not that Tony knew what was going on in that pretty head.
A sharp knock at the door distracted him from his musings. Tony unlocked it, and Loki strode in, snatched his beer, gargled it and spat it out bloody in the bathroom sink. Then the vampire washed his face to clear it of any remaining droplets and turned to address the human in the room. "Greetings, Stark. Is anything in particular causing you to stare at me so?"
"Can you actually drink beer?" Tony blurted out.
"No." Loki said. "Not without becoming ill. My body cannot handle anything except flesh."
"Well. Uh. Can you taste it?" Tony said, knowing full well he was skirting around the questions he wanted to ask.
"It is...difficult to explain. Yes, I can taste it, but it tastes like poison." Loki said distractedly, stripping off his leather jacket, button-up shirt and black pants and solid boots to fall into the bed in his boxers. He was currently trying to adjust his sleeping patterns to sleep at night with Tony, but he was designed to sleep in daytime. "Cut to the chase, Stark. You have an agenda."
"I do. See, I want to be your partner, I mean, you're a total BAMF-"
"Pardon?" Loki said amusedly.
"BadAss MotherFucker." Tony explained shortly. "With the sword! But I know fuck all about you. I don't even know your real name!"
"It is Loki Laufeyson." Loki confirmed.
"But you used to be Loki Burison, right? Otherwise, yeah, I know nothing about you except you're a vamp and the best fuck I've ever had and a smart guy." Tony said.
"My name was Loki Burison." Loki confirmed.
"You're not really giving me much here." Tony frowned.
"How about this." Loki deadpanned. "Information for information. I give you my past, you give me yours."
Tony hesitated at that. Did he really want to? But if they were going to be a team, there had to be a certain level of trust between them. "...Okay. You first."
Loki raised a sceptical eyebrow but didn't object. "How much do you know about Odin Burison?" He asked.
"Not much." Tony admitted. "He was mostly a vampire hunter, wasn't he?"
"Oh yes." Loki said dryly. "The best. He held quite the vendetta; the Burison family always has. He effectively lead the anti-vampire movement of last century; they nearly became extinct."
"Jesus. Then the whole, uh, you situation can't have gone well." Tony winced.
"You think?" Loki said sarcastically. "I was never much of a hunter, truth be told. Odin wished to push me into it, but if I went hunting with him and Thor - you have heard of Thor?" Tony nodded and Loki continued. "It was a constant litany of criticism, how my methods were cowardly, how I was not the talented one.
"Once I left high school - attended sporadically, owing to hunting excursions - I took my opportunity to escape from the business once and for all. Did my university studies, began a proper job."
"Sounds good." Tony said with a weak smile. "What did you study?"
"A double degree in English and Philosophy." Loki replied, a note of pride in his voice.
"Hehe. I knew you were a genius." Tony said affectionately.
"Top of my year. Continuing on." Loki said. "When I was 25, this was...seven years ago now, I was working in Illinois when there were several disappearances in the area. A corpse surfaced, drained of all blood, and Odin called to tell me there was a vampire pack in the area. He wanted me to do all in my power to help, seeing as he was on the other side of the country."
"Oh god. Then it turned bad, right?" Tony said sympathetically.
"It was no feeding spree." Loki concurred. "It was a recruitment drive. There were too many of them for me. When I woke up, I was one of them."
Loki's composure was one of the natural wonders of the world, seeing as his face barely twitched when he said any of that. But the pain in his eyes was plain to see. Tony went to gently rub Loki on the shoulder - the vampire was still lying down - but Loki bared his teeth with a hiss and said "I do not want your pity, Stark."
"Not pity. You're too much of a tough bastard for me to pity you." As Tony said that, Loki's eyes flickered in surprise, so Tony continued "More...empathy. I've woken up one morning to suddenly find everything I knew tipped on its head before."
"Have you now." Loki said with a note of curiosity.
"Yep. That's a different story, though. What happened after that?"
"Ah. Well, I panicked, and killed the four vampires holding me there." Loki said. Tony gave an appreciative whistle. "It surprised me too. I found my car and went to Odin, thinking he could help somehow. He did not. I suppose I am lucky he did not kill me."
"Oh, man, that must've really hurt." Tony said, trying for all his lack of emotional capability to sound heartfelt.
"Apparently that was the correct time to tell me I was adopted." Loki said dully.
Tony's heart broke, just a bit, and he wanted to hug Loki and screech 'Too precious for this world!' but he had a feeling that wouldn't go well. Instead he kept calm and carried on by saying "So that's the last name thing?" When Loki nodded, he said "What then?"
"He threw me out, saying he did not have a vampire for a son, and gave me a headstart." Loki said, acting nonchalant as he lay on the bed, black hair haloed against the pillow.
"Headstart! Is he hunting you?!" Tony said in disbelief.
"I do not believe it was a serious threat. But, as you know, I have gained quite a reputation as a fox for the huntsmen to chase. I've been on the move for seven years." Loki said. "My head on a wall would be a prize in any collection."
"Well, I'm going to tell everyone ever that your head belongs to me." Tony said tenderly, gently kissing Loki on the mouth. Hearing all of that gave Tony much more certainty about accepting Loki as his partner; he was just a human with a shit life, albeit a douchey one who kept biting him.
Tony couldn't resist, not with Loki mostly naked. He climbed on top of him, kissing him again, but Loki pushed him away with a hand on his sternum and Tony unhappily sat back on the bed.
"Not quite, Anthony." Loki chuckled. "Keep your end of the deal."
Tony decided to not comment on the Anthony thing; if he called attention to it, Loki would mock him.
"Well." Tony said. "How much do you know about Howard Stark?"
"He manufactured my knife, and many more like it." Loki said, holding up the sheathe of his silver dagger that was printed with 'Stark' in smooth, flowing letters. "He was your father. Aside from that, little to nothing."
"You're right on the weapons front." Tony said, mock-airily. "Hunter's weapons. Every shape, every size. They were the best, and they were not cheap. But it was pretty much a monopoly. I mean, there aren't many actual companies that make hunter's equipment, so he could charge what he wanted."
"That's not particularly moral." Loki noted.
"Nope. Then, when I was 15, he died somehow while hunting with his bud Obie - Obidiah Stane - I never knew the exact details for years. Obie ran the whole thing for a while, 'til I took over and started making cleverer weapons."
"Is 'cleverer' a word?" Loki wondered. "My apologies. What changed?"
"Ah. Well, I still hunted, and one time ended up in the bloodiest, messiest piece of shit I've ever been in. About five hunters versus a dozen or so pissy ghouls who'd already taken down two of us. They wanted us dead, cause we killed one of them they were rather fond of. Pinned in, surrounded, and we were being shot at with the weapons I'd designed."
"Oh." Loki winced.
"The hunters I was with were armed the bog-standard silver knife and shotgun, and so I asked them why they didn't have any Stark Industries shit, and this guy Yinsen said none of them could afford any." Tony deadpanned, making his composure as smooth as possible.
Loki somehow managed to convey understanding, and Tony felt okay to continue. "It was horrible. The bastards took us out one by one, but we were taking them too, 'til it was just me, Yinsen, and three ghouls outside this shack we were barricaded in. I hadn't slept for two days, hadn't put down my knife for five minutes. Eventually we just went for it. Shot the bloody hell out of that Satan spawn. Yinsen died, took a hit meant for me, and the one that took him down shapeshifted into him. It just about drove me insane, killing the creature who looked just like the great man I had met. And then it was just me, completely alone, after two days of fighting, with corpses everywhere." Tony took a deep breath and blinked back tears. He was a fucking hunter, it shouldn't hurt that much. "I mean, what my father did was wrong. You shouldn't profit off hunters. They deserve to be honoured, not charged. If he hadn't done that, if I hadn't continued that, then Yinsen and all those other poor bastards would still be alive now."
Loki sat up and wrapped a deathly cold arm around Tony's shoulders. "You don't know that."
"The thought's nice, but yeah, I do. I might as well've killed'em myself." Tony said hollowly.
Loki bit him on the ear, a weird yet Lokish gesture that Tony found bizarrely reassuring. "Do not be ridiculous. However the situation came about, your father's actions were not yours. It was pure naivete, and insofar as I can tell, you have opened your eyes and corrected the issue. That is all one can do at a time like that."
The blatant fact-stating was better for Tony's mood than any number of gentle reassurances from Pepper or whoever, and he smiled a little. "Thanks, Loki."
"Sentimental idiot." Loki scoffed, but he tugged Tony properly into his side and ruffled his hair. "Continue."
"I stumbled home, stitched my wounds and told my assistant, Pepper, that shit had to change. She didn't believe me and Obie gave no fucks. Hell, he was in the league with the bad guys - Obie was a fucking demon, that's how my father died and that's how I got pinned down in a shack with my own weapons shooting at me." Tony said, taking a deep breath through his constricting throat.
Loki didn't say anything. He didn't need to, really, just rubbed his cold hand on Tony's side as reassurance. Tony waited for a moment before continuing. "I killed that bastard. Right in my office. I mean, I trapped him first, did the whole exorcism and made the actual thing leave, and then I killed human Obie too. I don't know where his history ended and the demon began, but I killed him anyway. Then I chucked his corpse out and got to work righting my wrongs. After that, I dragged Steve out of a river and brought him back from death, and here we are."
Looking over the human thoughtfully, Loki considered the weight of what he'd just been told. Tony had said it like he was ripping a chunk of his soul off and handing it to him, and hell, he probably was. "Thank you for telling me that." Loki said carefully.
"Hey, fair is fair." Tony said, referring obviously to their agreement, but also to giving Loki a chance to be a person again and saving his ass in the name of keeping his word. Fair is fair was a good way to describe the human. You're good to him and he's good to you, but cross him and you'll get everything coming to you.
"Indeed it is." Loki said, kissing the human. "Now where were we?"
Tony touched his tongue into the vampire's mouth, tasting beer and the rotten tang of blood that he found unhealthily attractive. The bastard had given him quite the blood fetish.
Got my addictions (My addictions)
And I love to fix 'em (And I love to fix 'em)