Silence and Icy Wind
Tony was sad to be leaving.
"Take care of each other," he said.
Tony had gotten old. He looked at his two lovers. Bruce looked the same as the day they had met, but even wiser. Bruce had always looked too wise for his face.
Loki looked softer, in some ways even a little younger than when they had first met, when he was hard and twisted, when he had belonged nowhere. It's hard to feel young when you have no home.
Tony felt very young right now.
"Take care of each other for me, because I won't be here to do it. That's the worst part about all this. But you love me - both of you do - and you're going to do what I say." Tony's eyes sparkled just as they always had, but his smirk was a little wobbly.
Then he looked up at Bruce, more serious now, and he cupped Bruce's face with a trembling, wrinkled hand.
"Bruce. Take care of Loki. He can see straight through the universe and reach out and break it between his fingers. He needs you to tell him not to. That the universe is worth keeping. It's beautiful and full of secrets and lies and patterns and you're going to go out and find more of them together. You've got to hold him and make him understand that life is worth cherishing."
Bruce closed his eyes and his forehead wrinkled, in pain and acknowledgement.
Tony held Loki's hand in his, gnarled thumb stroking down the slim, strong, perfect, pale fingers.
"Loki. Take care of Bruce for me. Tell him it's all right. It's all right to be sad or angry. Tell him everything he does, everything he is, is worth the trouble. Make sure he knows. Kiss him for me. Every day."
Loki's eyes held reverence and pain and the searing heat of love. He held the withered hand in both of his own, so gently and carefully. It took an effort for him to smile, but he did.
"Got it? Good," said Tony. "And I know you'd humor me right now, so if you can't take care of each other all the time, then at least remember: neither of you is alone. Neither of you has to be alone. Because this is my last request and if one of you needs something the other had better be there."
But neither of the two were thinking about the future at that moment. They couldn't. All they could do was to drink in Tony with their eyes, try to absorb as much of that life that he had as they could before...before it ran out.
And it did, that night. Bruce took his eyes from the body first, turning his back, walking out of the room with deliberate calm. Loki stayed and stroked the wrinkled hand as it grew cold, unwilling to leave.
It was so awkward, without Tony. Tony was the one that had bound them together. Tony was the one who loved them both, so warmly, so brightly.
They tried. They did. But everything was dull and colorless without Tony, without the others. The tower was so empty.
Steve had gone down in battle. Clint had lost to cancer. Natasha had disappeared after that; it felt as if she'd faded like mist with nothing to pin her down. Thor - well, neither of them could honestly say that Thor would be a comfort now. Though he was wiser now, and an admirable king of Asgard, he could still be brash, overwhelming, a jostle that neither of them needed in their precarious semblances of sanity.
Bruce hid in his lab, but he kept expecting Tony to poke his head in and make snarky comments. When he didn't, Bruce felt somehow snubbed. It was like a continuous suspended state of expectation that he knew would never be realized and it was wearing on him.
Loki stood out on the roof in the wind hour after hour, feeling his temperature slowly sink to match that of the air, imagining that he was fading into the substance of the universe, his consciousness evaporating like a haze.
They tried to speak to each other, but the quiet greetings were empty, and they may as well have not spoken.
They ate together in silence, neither accustomed to starting conversation, both tangled up in their own thoughts and feelings. Sitting across from each other wasn't making them feel less than abandoned.
Eventually they made the choice to go their own separate ways, neither able to stand being in the tower any longer. Bruce took a position in a lab somewhere in Canada, studying some kind of extremophile bacteria that had been found in the ice. Loki went, as Loki goes, in an instant, to a place all his own, not quite part of any realm but a tiny pocket simply itself, to practice magic, to get the mortal world out of his head and remember who he was.
Bruce looked at his slides blindly, seeing nothing.
He was supposed to be analyzing the proteins, studying their flexibility. It didn't make sense, it didn't compute, it didn't mean anything. Bruce pulled back from the microscope and rubbed at his eyes.
Why was he even here? There was nothing here.
There was nothing anywhere.
There had been so much life in Tony, and after having that, it seemed impossible to live in a world without it.
Bruce felt angry tears forming in his eyes, and he stood, muttering that he was going on break, leaving his colleagues to salvage what he had been doing.
He didn't expect to be able to do this forever. That's why he'd chosen such a remote place to work. Bruce wondered how much longer he should try to fight the Hulk. Hulk was wearing him down bit by bit and Bruce felt as if he were only a thin veneer, fabric stretched tight to bursting like one of his many destroyed shirts.
Bruce walked past the kitchenette; he didn't feel like tea. He walked out through the coatroom without putting on a coat and wandered out into the freezing cold. Bruce walked from nothing, on out into nothing.
There was nothing in the world for him.
Nothing but silence and icy wind.
"I didn't expect to find you like this."
Loki sat at the edge of the chaos of broken ice and splintered trees, looking at Bruce sidelong.
"What did you expect?" Bruce asked, propping himself up on his elbows to look at the sorcerer. "I don't know if you've forgotten but this happens to me sometimes. Especially when I'm under emotional strain. How could you not expect this?"
Loki frowned.
"Because you have lost control of the Hulk exactly twice in the last forty years. You have seemed so...competent."
Bruce chuckled darkly. "Is that what you see?"
Loki's forehead scrunched just slightly in the middle as he looked at Bruce intently. "What is it like?" he asked.
"It's never easy," he said. "Got any clothes?" he asked, shivering, and Loki conjured some and handed them over. Bruce put them on as he talked.
"I'm always angry; Hulk's always right there, waiting to take over. It usually depends how much other stuff I can get into my head, how easy it is to hold him back. With Tony it was the closest it's ever been to easy, I think because he was always ready with something amazing, distracting, perplexing, to keep the anger from being dominant. I got to depending on that, which was very bad. Because it was always going to end."
Bruce took a large, shuddering breath.
"I tried to keep it going, tried to keep something good or fascinating or beautiful in front of me all the time. But it was all feeling so empty, and I knew that one day, I would lose track of all that, and I would have to let Hulk out. So I came here, hoping that when that day came, I maybe wouldn't hurt anyone." He chewed on his lower lip. "I don't suppose you know if anyone's hurt?"
Loki shook his head. "My tracking spell brought me straight here. I have no knowledge of events here outside of that which my senses tell me now."
Bruce nodded acceptance.
Then he had a thought.
"If you didn't expect this, why did you come?"
Loki looked resigned, and a little uncertain.
"I have also...not been entirely...stable...since I left the tower. There were many things that I intended to do, but that bears so little resemblance to what I actually did that I need not mention them."
Loki began to pace as he talked.
"I stood on the edge of the Bifrost and looked out. I stood at the mouths of the caves of dragons. I looked for something, anything, that could make me feel less...hollow."
Loki looked angry now.
"I didn't want to be that thing anymore. That terrible twisted thing I was when I gave up. I tried everything, everything except coming back here and asking you for help, because I did not want to disturb your peace. But it was his last request, I kept coming back to that; that he wanted you to help me. And so I came."
Loki turned his eyes to Bruce again, asking for something, anything.
"I don't get peace," Bruce said. "I never have. I only get this struggle day after day and if you want to try to distract me from it, you're more than welcome."
Bruce approached Loki.
"I don't know how much I have left in me," Bruce said, "but I'll give all of it to you, if it'll help." And he took the sorcerer's cold Jotunn hand in his own still chilled human one.
The little warmth seemed to melt him.
Loki broke down. "I miss him," he said, beginning to sob.
Bruce reached out, kissed Loki through the tears, over and over, each one a warm, enveloping, comforting thing. Each one hungry and yet gentle, telling Loki over and over that he didn't have to be alone.
"I do too," he said. "I understand. And I'm here."
Loki melted into the embrace, pulling Bruce closer, enveloping him in long arms. When his crying had quieted, he told Bruce, "I missed you, too."
When they allowed themselves to look back and remember Tony, they remembered other things too - how sometimes, after Tony had woken up early and gone to his workshop to work out an idea or just play with one of his engines until he was up to his elbows in grease, Bruce and Loki would lag behind lazily in bed, and Bruce would run his hand slowly through Loki's hair until Loki was nearly asleep again, then his hand would slow even further until it was simply resting above Loki's nape, and then Bruce would doze off again too, the minute twitches of the scientist's fingers reminding Loki that Bruce was there.
They remembered how Bruce had taught Loki the Japanese tea ceremony, learned while he was studying Zen Buddhism, its meditative, ritualized movements a comfortable pattern for Bruce, and how Loki took to it with grace, loving the formality and the precision and the weight of every movement - it was like a complex, demanding spell, but with no resulting magic, save the tea, and the calm.
They remembered quiet laughter at the ridiculous speed of modern culture, the demand to have everything immediately. They remembered many times when Bruce had woken up, surrounded by rubble, and was reassured by the sight of a neatly folded pile of clothes and Loki sitting next to them, silent, long dark hair falling over the back of his leathers.
They remembered Bruce getting caught up in the beauty of frost giant biology, the tiny crystals that formed in the tissues when flash freezing was triggered glimmering under the microscope, the precision of the compartmentalized circulation and body temperature control that allowed one part to freeze while the rest of the body remained flexible.
Bruce had been looking for something under that microscope that he wasn't going to find, not even in the deepest, darkest corners of this world. How could he have imagined that giving up everything would be easier, when he ran straight to the thing that was most like what he was running away from? Ice, loneliness, beauty, magic. Life that functioned like nothing else known on this world. There was no avoiding that he had been drawn to these things.
Drawn to what reminded him of Loki.
The silence and the icy wind.