Three Weddings and a Funeral (Almost) Chapter 2, an avengers fanfic

-.-.-.-

Chapter 2/7

-.-.-.-

Tony and Loki had been married for a full year now, and even Tony himself couldn't quite believe it had been so free from incident.

Well... almost free from incident.

-.-.-.-

Things were a bit strange for a while after Tony ate the magic apple that Loki risked life and limb, according to him, to steal from a tiny little old lady.

Tony had expected to feel different after eating it, like he would suddenly be able to lift cars or he would get the inexplicable urge to wear helmets around the house, but there was nothing.

Or it seemed like nothing, until he started waking up with bits of metal in his bed.

"What the hell is this?" Tony asked one morning, when he found a pile of tiny grey shards laid on the sheet between them.

"Your body is rejecting the fragments around your heart," Loki pointed out. "Did I not tell you that would happen?"

"You said the apple would heal me, you didn't exactly tell me I'd be waking up in a scrap heap."

"Oh. It must have slipped my mind," Loki replied, as he turned over and drifted off back to sleep.

-.-.-.-

A week later and Tony woke up to find his arc reactor casing had shifted during the night and it was now protruding from his chest awkwardly.

"JARVIS!" Tony shouted anxiously as he pushed on the casing, trying to force it back into his body. "Run a scan, check for damage to my heart."

"Sir, my scans reveal that all the metal shrapnel that previously threatened your life has now left your body," JARVIS explained calmly.

Loki suddenly turned over and said, "Well in that case you won't be needing this."

"No!" Tony shrieked as Loki twisted the reactor and yanked it from his chest. "JARVIS, call Bruce. Tell him I'm going into cardiac arrest right now!"

"Cancel that order," Loki said as he tossed the arc reactor over his shoulder and it landed on the floor with a solid thump.

"Call Bruce NOW!" Tony shouted.

"Sir," JARVIS interrupted. "You are not having a cardiac arrest. Your heart rhythm is completely within normal parameters for someone who is, what I believe you would call, 'screaming like a girl.'"

-.-.-.-

So it turned out he didn't need his arc reactor any more, and after discussions with Bruce the base plate and casing were removed the next day, leaving Tony with a very large, gaping hole in his chest, which Loki assured him would heal on its own.

Three days later, after an awful lot of sleep, Bruce went to change the dressing, and the hole was gone; replaced by a knot of pink, shiny scar tissue.

"Does this mean I'm a Norse god now?" Tony asked.

"Hardly," Loki replied sniffily.

-.-.-.-

So Tony had his new super healing powers, which he decided totally made him a god even if Loki disagreed, and oh yeah, there was also that time where Loki defeated an entire alien invasion single handedly.

Tony thought that was pretty cool as far as incidents went, a really should count in Loki's favour, if anyone was keeping count, which he totally was.

Tony had woken that morning feeling pretty good about how his life was going; his stock was rising, the tabloids hadn't called him a traitor for marrying Loki in a while, and the souvenir shop he'd had installed at the base of the newly renamed Avengers tower was doing a roaring trade in Iron Man merchandise.

He'd lazed in bed for a while, watching the pale watery early morning sun that trickled through the curtains and the way it highlighted Loki's cheekbones, and then he'd gone to the kitchen to make coffee and a huge pile of pancakes, dripping with syrup.

It didn't take long for the smell to tempt Loki out of the bedroom, and he padded into the kitchen looking bleary eyed, with his hair looking as is if he'd been dragged backwards through a bush by a tornado.

"Pancakes?" Loki asked, scrubbing at his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Is it a special occasion?"

"Nope," Tony replied as he put two plates on the table. "I just thought it would be nice to make breakfast for my favourite space Viking."

Loki smiled sleepily and said, "You are too kind to me. Kinder than I deserve."

"There's no such thing as kinder than you deserve, it's just kinder than you're used to," Tony said. "Now come on, tuck in before they get cold."

-.-.-.-

"So what are your plans for today?" Tony asked, after they finished the pancakes.

Loki sat back in his chair, gently patting his green silk clad stomach, hummed and said, "If I told you, you would ask me not to do it and since I am going to do it anyway, it is probably best that I don't tell you."

"Plausible deniability, I like it," Tony said, as he picked up his coffee. He paused for a moment, the cup hovering near his lips. "This thing you're planning isn't here on Earth, is it?"

"You need not worry yourself, my plans are far a field from Midgard."

"That's good," Tony replied. "I'd hate for you to piss Fury off… again… this week."

-.-.-.-

So after breakfast Loki disappeared, leaving Tony to occupy himself with the dishes and then wander down to his workshop where he tinkered around with a new design for an unbreakable bed that also housed a TV and a drinks cabinet.

It would be the forth bed they'd owned since they got married, and hopefully it would last longer than the first three. The first bed, Loki set fire to in a fit of rage one day. The second bed had collapsed while they were having sex, and the Avengers had burst into the room within two minutes, thinking Loki had finally turned evil again, only to find them still going at it in the remains of what used to be a California King.

The third bed had a wrought iron frame, and Tony had considered it almost indestructible, but Loki had developed a fondness for being tied to it, and one of the the bed head uprights had snapped clean off, and the remaining bars were bowed. Yeah, that bed wasn't gonna last long either.

Tony had just perfected the cooling system for the beer compartment for his new super bed when the call came down that the Avengers were needed because New York was probably about to go bang again.

-.-.-.-

"What I wanna know," Tony said, as he blasted an alien with a repulsor, "Is why our reputation hasn't spread a bit further. All these aliens keep invading and we keep wiping them out."

"Tony, can you concentrate please?" Natasha said over the comm as she stood on the other side of the street, firing her guns at the rapidly advancing creatures.

"Seriously though, you would think the message would get out that if you come to Earth you will get your ass handed to you by-" Tony was cut off as something hit him and caused him to stagger backwards.

A pain shot through his neck and upper chest and Tony raised his gloved hand to his neck and then up to his face where he saw the fingertips dripping with blood.

"Sir, I have alerted the medical authorities that you have been injured. I suggest you remove yourself from the battle scene immediately," JARVIS said.

"What just happened?" Tony asked, starting to feel a little strange and he was pretty sure he could hear his name being shouted from somewhere far away.

"You were hit by one of the spears. The metal is an element I have never detected before and it has penetrated the suit, causing a slight tear in your jugular vein," Jarvis said. "Sir, do you want me to take control of the suit and take you to safety? My protocols will not allow me to do that without your orders."

Tony's legs began to wobble and he dropped to his knees, then flopped heavily onto his back. "Actually I'm feeling tired. I think I need to lay down for a bit."

"You are feeling tired because you are loosing blood. Sir, give me the order to fly you to safety or you will die before the medical authorities can reach you," JARVIS said, sounding a bit panicked even to Tony's rapidly failing hearing.

"I'm going to die?" Tony asked.

"If you do not allow me to help you, sir, yes you will die."

"Wow," Tony mumbled. "Bummer."

Lights started to flicker around him; gold, pink and green, all mixing into one bright beam that shone down upon him from the heavens. Tony had never believed in near death experiences, the tunnel of light, the loving family waiting to welcome you into their arms, but here it was, happening to him.

Damn, he thought, I hope dad isn't pissed at me for shutting down the weapons division of Stark Industries.

Ten minutes in heaven or hell or wherever he was going and he'd be grounded for life.

Or afterlife.

Or something or other.

There was a thump above his head, and then the light was blotted out by the face of god, or more specifically his god, the one with the horned helmet, who currently appeared to be looking down at him and snarling with rage.

"Who among you dared lay a hand upon my husband?" Loki roared, a little too loudly for Tony's liking.

Tony could see Loki crouching over him, two knives in his hands, his legs splayed and his crotch tantalisingly close to Tony's face. It would be a good view to go out on, if he did die, he thought.

Suddenly Loki was moving, too fast for Tony's eyes to keep up with. A whirl of blades and blood and squelching sounds and inhuman screeching as Loki moved from alien to alien.

Tony wasn't sure how long this went on for; minutes, hours, weeks? But eventually the screaming stopped, and once again Loki leant over him, with bright red blood smeared across face and clothes.

"Hi Loki," Tony said weakly. "I missed you."

"Tony, I leave you alone for three hours and you cannot keep yourself from trouble, can you?"

Tony wanted to reply, but he felt strange; as if he was floating, floating in the sky with Loki's arms wrapped him, and then the view changed. The air around them swirled with colours and Tony found himself looking up at a while tiled ceiling.

-.-.-.-

Everyone got the wrong idea at first, and the news was reporting that Loki had invaded a hospital, carrying Tony in his arms, and had taken everyone hostage. It was bullshit obviously, because Loki had only taken four doctors and three nurses hostage, but the authorities over reacted, as they usually do, and evacuated the whole hospital.

The news channels did have their uses though, and they had managed to capture Loki's battle against the aliens in glorious HD. Tony had hacked into the channels servers and stolen the original footage, then had JARVIS set it to epic music so he could watch it all the time without hearing the reporters screaming "Iron Man is down! Tony Stark is injured!" repeatedly.

The resulting video was a thing of beauty.

It started with Loki arriving in a dazzling display of Bifrost light, something which Loki denied for weeks, but when faced with the video evidence he admitted he had been having tea with his mother in the palace gardens when he received word from Heimdall that Tony had been injured.

Loki looked down and then turned to face the advancing invaders, as two knives appeared in his hands, their points facing downwards. He crouched low over Tony's fallen body, his knees bent, legs apart, waiting like a scorpion ready to strike, for the first alien to reach him.

The first creature was dead in seconds, two swift taps to the chest and a slash across the neck finished it off, and then Loki was twirling, hacking at the next closest alien with the grace of a psychotic ballet dancer.

Loki would strike out, green light emanating from the knife, and six of the creatures would fall, clutching their necks as blood sprayed from gaping wounds. The combination of blade and magic made it look like he was conducting an orchestra of death.

The aliens were still advancing, and at one point Loki was overwhelmed by their numbers, but then a dozen of him appeared on the periphery of the group, laughing and taunting the creatures, drawing them away, giving Loki the opportunity to kill those closest to him.

The fight lasted only 4 minutes and 15 seconds, Tony had timed it, but at the end Loki stood with his chest heaving, dripping with gore, and surrounded by a pile of 32 bodies.

-.-.-.-

So that was the two major incidents that had happened in the last year, and sure there were lots of minor incidents too, but they hardly seemed worth worrying about.

Like the time Loki convinced Thor that if they weren't real brothers, they could at least be blood brothers, and watched as Thor cut the palm of his hand, then started giggling and walked away, leaving Thor to bleed all over the kitchen table.

Thor got a bit angry.

The resulting flood damage cost insurance companies millions.

-.-.-.-

Or time they saw a news report that a dog was trapped in a tiny gap between a housing block and parking garage in down town New York, while they had been enjoying a relaxing afternoon in front of the TV.

One minute they were curled up in each other's arms, the next Tony was falling face down into the pillows and Loki was on the television.

The dog was rescued unharmed and reunited with its delighted owner.

The owners of the 17 cars in the parking garage that Loki destroyed while rescuing the dog? Yeah, not so happy...

-.-.-.-

The real secret to keeping Loki calm and relatively incident free for the better portion of the day, Tony had discovered, was to wake him up with sex.

On a morning he was warm and pliant and liked sleepy, slow kisses while buried in the quilts like a hamster.

Start the day like this and Loki would be calm, almost laid back, if it were possible for a god of mischief to be laid back. He had a tenderness about him that Tony had rarely seen since his breakdown in the woods.

Wake Loki by opening the curtains on a morning and you were faced with an irritable teenager who was capable of throwing an alarm clock through three walls.

Wake Loki some other way, say by attacking the tower at 5am, and you probably wouldn't live to tell the tale, as a whole bunch of agents from some new unknown shady group had discovered one autumn morning.

Tony had been woken by an explosion, followed by JARVIS setting off the alarms, and he had only just realised that the bed next to him was empty when Loki reappeared back in their suite and threw himself onto the duvet and cocooned himself into it.

"We're under attack?" Tony asked, as the alarm stopped sounding.

"We were," Loki replied, his voice muffled by the pillows. "We aren't any more."

-.-.-.-

It certainly made for an interesting day, when Tony discovered dozens of pictures of his husband defeating an entire army, while wearing nothing a thin green silk robe, all over the news.

It had been a windy morning too.

"It's just my cock," Loki said dismissively, when faced with the pictures. "I'm not ashamed of it."

"You aren't bothered that pretty much most of the human race has now seen what you keep in your pants?" Tony asked.

Loki looked up at Tony and narrowed his eyes. "Are you suggesting I should be ashamed of my cock? That perhaps it is small or unattractive?"

Tony recognised that look and that tone of voice, and backed away stuttering, "No, no, Loki. Absolutely not. You have the most beautiful cock I've ever seen, I swear."

"Good," Loki said, looking back at his laptop. "Frankly I'm more worried about the state of my hair. I didn't even have time to run a comb through it."

-.-.-.-

So everything was fine and dandy as far as Tony was concerned… Well, almost. There was one slight fly in the ointment, one thing that stood between him and Loki and a happy superhero life in the tower.

Clint.

Clint still absolutely despised Loki, despite Natasha promising to talk him round after Loki helped defeat Ultimo, and Loki took great delight in annoying Clint as much as possible. Loki would flaunt his married and protected status in Clint's face, laugh at his every misfortune, and enchant his arrows so they would return to him like a boomerang.

Tony thought it was mostly childish pranks that they would grow out of eventually, but it all came to a head when Natasha had her wrist broken by the latest supervillain du jour, while Loki sat a few feet away from her, nibbling on a Panini, watching her fight some guy twice her size, and did nothing to stop him.

"Why the hell didn't you help her?" Clint screeched in Loki's smirking face. "You were right there, you could have taken that guy out with one thought and you did nothing!"

"Clint!" Natasha shouted, as the paramedics placed a temporary splint around her wrist. "I'm fine, let it go. You know he likes to see you mad."

"Oh, he'll like it when my fist is in his face!" Clint said, moving even closer.

Loki let out a small laugh. "I'd like to see you try."

"Why didn't you do anything?" Clint asked again.

"Get it into your thick skull," Loki barked back, "I am not a member of your pathetic team."

"I'd say you were more like the Avengers mascot," Tony interrupted, trying to calm the situation.

"Oh, Agent Barton, is this love?" Loki said, as he trailed a finger across Clint's chest. "Are you harbouring feelings for me that you just cannot contain? Is that what this unpleasantness is about?"

Clint sneered at him. "As if."

"Good, because you had your chance to marry me and you rejected my offer of courtship," Loki said as he extended an arm around Tony's waist and pulled him closer, preparing to teleport away. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to have sex with my husband, while you sit alone and cry in your room."

-.-.-.-

Yeah, so that really hadn't gone down well with Clint, but what really did it was the time they were in the middle of a minor skirmish and Clint took an unexpected knee to the groin and Loki laughed so much he almost fell off the roof he was sitting on.

Tony was fighting on the ground at the time, firing repulsor blasts at anything that got near him, when he heard Loki laugh, and he turned to see Clint, his eyes streaming, pulling two arrows from his pack. He loosed one into the robot that was nearest him, and then placed the other on his bow string and turned, aiming upwards.

Tony didn't think much of it at first, he'd seen Clint fire arrows at Loki before, and Loki being a god with super fast reflexes and everything, had taken great delight in catching every single one of them of them just inches from his face.

This was different though, Loki was still laughing his ass off and wasn't paying attention as Clint fired the arrow.

-.-.-.-

"How the hell could you do that?" Tony asked, as he held the cloth to Loki's still bleeding mouth.

"I know, I know," Clint said, then he smirked. "I was aiming for his eye."

"Get out of here!" Tony shouted, pointing towards the door of the medical room.

"Gladly," Clint said, and then he paused at the door, turned back and said, "Good luck, Loki."

Loki let out a wordless sound of anger then coughed in pain, his eyes leaking tears as the arrow ground against his jaw bone.

"Don't speak," Tony said, as he held the cloth up again, carefully avoiding the arrow shaft that still protruded from Loki's mouth. "Bruce will be here soon. He'll get it out and then you'll be fine. He just has a little… Hulk problem to deal with first."

-.-.-.-

It took Bruce the best part of 25 minutes to dig the arrow out of Loki's jaw, it was so deeply embedded in the bone. The arrow had entered his mouth at an angle, smashed through the joint where his jaw bone met his skull, and the tip was sticking out through his cheek.

With no anaesthetics or painkillers that would work on Loki they had to work with him conscious, Tony trying to hold his head still as Bruce worked to release the arrow head from the bone. Eventually Loki had tired of being prodded, grabbed the arrow shaft and pushed it though his face, much to Bruce's exasperation.

"Your jaw is broken," Bruce said as he taped closed the wound on Loki's cheek. "Under normal circumstances we'd use metal plates to fix it and maybe wire your teeth shut until it healed, but I'm guessing we don't need to do that with you?"

Loki's eyes went wide for a second, then he smiled and shook his head.

"I'll have to tie this, just to keep your mouth shut while you sleep," Bruce said, as he looped a wide bandage under Loki's jaw and then tied it in a bow on the top of his head.

"Come on you, lets get you to bed so it'll heal," Tony said.

Loki hopped off the trolley and nodded politely to Bruce.

-.-.-.-

Except Loki didn't go to bed.

For three days he sat on the sofa, passing Tony almost indecipherable handwritten notes that said "I'm not tired," or "No, I wish to finish watching this documentary. The life of the three toed sloth is fascinating," every time Tony asked if he was going to go into the healing sleep.

It wasn't until Tony heard the sound of the Bifrost thumping down onto the landing platform outside, and five minutes later the alarms started blaring, that he realised exactly why Loki hadn't gone to bed.

Tony was in his suit and in the elevator to the living room within minutes, and as the lift doors whooshed open he saw Loki standing, with red puffy eyes as if he had been crying.

Ah, he though, Loki had been crying, which explained why Hulk was currently gripping a screaming Thor around the waist, holding him back from Clint.

"How dare you injure my brother in this manner," Thor barked.

"Thor, he's manipulating you!" Clint shouted back.

"How dare you accuse him of such a thing," Thor shouted, as Loki stood behind him with a smug grin on his swollen, bruised face.

Clint stayed away from Loki as much as he possibly could after that one.

-.-.-.-

Everyone else, well they got on with Loki just fine.

Bruce treated his injuries without complaint, so he couldn't avoid him really. Natasha… well, she kinda avoided Loki, but Steve, well Steve had reached some kind of understanding with Loki after he helped them destroy a big rampaging robot that if he didn't start shit, he would treat him civilly.

"I'd rather have Loki on no side in a fight, than on the other side," Steve had said once, and that was good enough for Tony.

But overall Steve and Loki seemed to get along fine. They would talk politely to each other, although they were not overtly friendly, but then Loki didn't seem all that interested in making friends with any of the Avengers as such. It seemed to Tony that he simply regarded them as people who happened to share the space he lived in.

-.-.-.-

And there was still the magnificent sex of course, and that sure kept things very interesting.

In fact it had got more magnificent with time, as Tony soon realised he had some form of eidetic memory for all of Loki's erogenous zones.

Every single inch of his skin had been mapped out, and every moan and sigh catalogued. Tony knew the things that made Loki scream with pleasure, like the scrape of his teeth along the sensitive inner surfaces of his wrists, the gentle teasing of the crease along the top of his thigh, and if he could reach, running his fingernails along the arch of his left foot. Yup, that one especially drove him wild.

Yup, married life with the god of mischief was proving to be entertaining, but nowhere near as chaotic as Tony had expected.

Or at least it was, until the day Loki tumbled through a portal with a 6 foot spear through his chest.