"I'm thinking red, maybe with extensions until it naturally grows enough to be braided."
Pepper shook her head. "One more time, Tony: he's not the Norse Loki. And yes, that means you cannot have a credit card extended to one Loki Laufeyjarson."
"But he needs a credit card."
She just shook her head again, looking at Loki. He certainly had expensive tastes, but that was all Tony's doing, with his insistence to cover the guy in nothing more than the best. Although she had to admit Tony had a point on this, as Loki had the kind of face, body type and posture that made even the cheapest rags look like couture on him, so it made sense to give him nothing but.
"I think he's flirting with the salesgirl," she said, narrowing her eyes. The girl was laughing and flustered.
"Of course he's flirting with the salesgirl, I told him to."
"Tony!"
"What? It's not as if he really has to make an effort, with that accent of his."
And oh, so that was it. Tony hadn't been happy when the language coach Coulson sent happened to be, in Tony's own words, a 'posh old English crumpet'. Now Loki had a British accent, much to Tony's displeasure and everybody else's delight.
Pepper thought it suited him.
"Hey, it's you!" the Man of Iron said as soon as he saw Thor, and steered him further into his home without allowing for Thor to greet him back. "Here, look what I have for you."
Thor didn't really hear his friend's words as his attention was all on the third man in the room. He was almost as tall as Thor, pale and black haired, as well as the owner of the most gorgeous pair of green eyes Thor had ever seen. Thor smiled at him and he smiled back with a shy little smile that made Thor want to do something ridiculous to keep it in the man's beautiful face.
"Greetings, friend of Stark," Thor said when Tony failed to introduce them. "I am Thor Odinson, Crown Prince of Asgard. May I be given the pleasure to know your name?"
"Uh," the delicious creature blushed, looking from the hand Thor had taken to kiss, to the face of Tony Stark, who for the first time since Thor had known him appeared quite speechless. "I am Loki. Are you really Thor, the god from Norse mythos, seriously?"
Loki? Like the Loki from Midgardian lore his friends kept asking about?
"Because you don't look like a god," was said with a mischievous twinkle of the eye that made Thor laugh. Somewhere behind him Tony Stark coughed. He was probably sick.
"And how do gods look like, if I'm allowed to ask?"
"Old, with white long hair, white beard and a fatherly air. According to Steve," he added with a wink. Thor had never felt so delighted.
"That sounds like my Father, King of Gods. I am simply the God of Thunder." And then he called for lightning and thunder outside, making the room tremble. "Does that adequately prove my godhood?"
"Jesus fucking Christ," Tony Stark muttered, but Thor didn't pay him attention, because Loki of Midgard was looking at Thor in awe, and it was a lovely look on him.
"Do it again!"
"We have to tell Thor," Bruce said as soon as they all ended in the same room without Thor and Loki. None of them felt entirely comfortable having Thor flirt with Loki and even less with Loki flirting back, and it was obvious in the way nobody seemed to be able to look each other in the eye.
Honestly, Clint found the whole thing both hilarious and cute even if still, yes, a little bit unnerving. But both Bruce and, most particularly, Tony, seemed to be having a lot of trouble with the two other guys making googly eyes at each other.
Which kind of served Tony right for being the one who kept joking about the whole Norse!Loki thing until it exploded in his face.
Anyway …
"I already told him, he doesn't care."
Tony's laser-like gaze focused on him. "And what exactly did you tell him?"
"I told him, 'Thor, Loki is not really human'".
"And what exactly did he say?"
"He said, he said—"
"Neither am I."
And yes, those were exactly the same words Thor had said the first time, although on that occasion he didn't appear as pissed off as he currently was.
Everybody took a step back except for Natasha, but that was just because she was an awesome BAMF.
"Look, young man," and of course Tony had a death wish. "I don't know how things are done—"
"Tony, please," Steve intervened, stepping between Tony and the fuming Norse God of Thunder. "Thor?"
And if there was one person worth of the word 'brave', that was Captain America for you. Any other lesser being would have been pissing their pants, but Steve only looked at Thor with disapproval clear on his face until the god relented and stopped trying to out-glare Tony, focusing instead on Steve.
"Yes, friend Steve?"
"Loki is much younger than he looks like. That's what has been bothering us." And yes! That was indeed what had been bothering Clint, even if he hadn't been able to understand, much less put into words. "He's still a child in certain aspects, and we wouldn't want for you to push him into something he's not yet prepared for."
Thor's face as Steve spoke did a complete one-hundred-and-eighty, going from angry to anguished in two seconds flat.
"I would never— I didn't realize—"
"We understand. But now you know."
Outside the thunderstorm finally died, and Clint allowed himself to relax the hold on his bow.
"I need a moment," Bruce said as soon as he finished covering Loki's cuts and scratches with clean gauze. Fortunately he didn't leave the room, choosing instead to go sit on the floor by the corner, hands over his head while muttering at himself.
It was a good thing, because whatever else Tony might be, he simply wasn't good at the emotional thing.
He could try, though.
"Want to explain why you did what you did?" he asked, waving at Loki's chest.
Loki only looked at his hands, blood still stuck under his well-cared nails. He was fastidious with his appearance, and to have him just observing without obsessively attempting to clean them made Tony's stomach churn in apprehension.
"I wanted for it to stop hurting."
Tony shared a worried look with Bruce before turning back to address Loki again. "What hurts? Where does it hurt, kiddo?"
Loki pushed his hand on the middle of his chest so hard it had to cause some damage, especially with his self-inflicted injuries, making Tony jump and Bruce cross the room in two strides to stop him.
"Inside," Loki explained in a wet and small voice. "It's hard to breathe, and it hurts, and I cannot reach it, and I'm scared."
And oh god, but one of the reasons Tony agreed to develop Loki's program was for the chance to experiment with a nuanced physically reactive interface beyond anything he had developed before. And the results had been satisfactory, because Loki was obviously a sensual creature, capable and willing to explore the multiple sensory stimuli Tony presented him, but those were usually of the ridiculously expensive and pleasant type: silk and linen and leather and Egyptian cotton, Kobe burgers and caviar and champagne, cello concerts, spa visits, movie nights and museum outings.
Yes, they had experimented with pain, but nothing beyond pricking his fingers and asking him to rate how much his body hurt after the days Natasha made him do laps and crunches in order to keep his muscular tone. Neither he nor Bruce had felt like purposefully harming Loki in order to test his endurance to pain, and now they had no way to tell how serious this was, nothing to compare it to.
"Make it stop," Loki said, his words broken and muffled by Bruce's shirt where he was latched on him. And the look Bruce shared with Tony proved the man was as much at a loss as Tony himself. But unlike Tony he wasn't freaking out at the emotional rollercoaster in his arms, and was able to regain his composure after a moment.
"We'll figure it out, all right? Let's start with a scan."
And with a scan they started.
Steve followed the rest of the team out of the living room, the only one to actually try to be discreet about it. He shouldn't have bothered, as Loki just remained bundled in the blanket Clint had thrown over him hours ago. He wasn't even asleep, but his eyes had a faraway quality that made clear he wasn't really present either.
It had almost been a week of Tony and Bruce trying to find what was wrong with Loki only to have every exam fail to show anything conclusive. They had started with physical causes, worried that the process that made Loki possible had failed somewhere and was making him self-destruct, but so far they had been proved wrong. Unfortunately it gave credence to the theory nobody was eager to be proven true: that something in Tony's programming was to blame, and that its interaction with Loki's body was beginning to corrupt.
Everybody in the kitchen looked worried to certain measure, giving Steve the kick he needed to finally speak his mind.
"I know I'm not exactly qualified," he said, "but the therapist I went to when I first woke up gave me a book, and I'm sure I'm getting something wrong, but doesn't Loki seem depressed to you?"
The look everybody gave Steve made him take a step back in apprehension, but still it wasn't enough to escape Bruce and the quick kiss he dropped on his lips. Steve wasn't even able to push him back, as the equally quick 'I love you' was followed by a flurry of movement as Bruce and Tony left the kitchen while they volleyed words like melatonin shots and sunbathing and exercise, as they wondered out loud whether they had to call Fury or find a therapist on their own.
"It was Thor's fault, wasn't it?" Clint said, shaking his head as he left, closely followed by Natasha.
And yes, it probably was, as looking back it all coincided with Thor's return to Asgard.
"Your name is Heimdall, right?" Steve asked, looking upwards. "Could you tell Thor to wait for a while, until Loki is better, before coming back? Uh … thank you. And I hope you have a nice day."
He really disliked having Loki feel this bad, but if they were right and Loki was closer to humanity, emotionally speaking, than Tony and Bruce originally estimated, then they needed to deal with this mess before Thor returned and made it worse.