A/N: This is probably the end of the line for us, guys. I want you to know that I've thoroughly enjoyed receiving everyone's feedback and I hope you all enjoyed everyone's individual tales. As promised, here is a special bonus. It took me a whopping two hours to put together the bulk of this story, then a whopping two weeks to tie up the loose ends. I still don't feel 100% satisfied with the way it ends, but I'm a writer. I'll never be 100% satisfied with my work. If you feel like, leave me some ideas for another fic. I'm eager to keep moving forward. Much love, Daph.

Loki


For a very long time, rain was Loki's absolute favorite weather. Colors seemed brighter, air was crisper, his senses were completely and utterly alive. Nothing could compare to the unbridled joy he felt as the water puddled in the streets splashed under his boots, or the way the cool drops felt as they slid through his dark hair. He could never have placed it, but something about those days felt right.

Frigga would often scold him, desperately trying to hide a smile as she did, for tracking mud through the palace. When he wasn't coming in covered in mud, she would tell him that he'd catch cold running around in the rain (though he never caught cold and thought nothing of it). She tried everything in her power to keep him from spending all of those dreary days outside. But she never could.

Once he was old enough to ride, he would go out and saddle his horse, taking the giant black stallion out to gallop through the fields for hours on end. After they returned from those romps, they were a sight to behold. Steam rose from the stallion's neck and hindquarters, muscles quivering. The young prince would be shivering as well, his clothes stuck to him and his armor dripping. Draping a towel over his hair, he'd return the horse to his stall (and the saddle to its rack) to give him a good rub-down and brush. He'd then return to the palace, a wide smile on his face.

But those days were long gone. Now he sat in a cell, day in and day out. It was comfortable, more a set of bedchambers with the door locked from the outside than a prison cell, but he was still a prisoner. His only company was the AI called JARVIS, and occasionally his adoptive brother, trying once again to get him to return to the way things had been ages before.

When heavy drops fell against his windows, he would curl up in the window seat with a large, leather-bound tome. It was one he'd read a hundred times, but he never tired of the stories it held. They were the stories of his childhood. The adventures he and Thor had shared. The battles they'd fought together. The mischief he'd gotten into, both alone and with accomplices. He'd never be able to go back to those times, no matter how much Thor begged and pleaded him to. There was too much betrayal and too much blood on his hands.

So he sat, and read, and lamented the best days of his life gone by.

Those days, the dreary ones filled with rain, were the ones when Thor would never bother him. He'd found something else to amuse him on those days. And Loki was perfectly fine with that. He was fine with sitting alone, reading, thinking about the days of old.

But sometimes...Sometimes he wasn't fine with it. Sometimes, he didn't want to sit alone and think about things that were and could never be again. He couldn't ruminate over old tales without the introduction of anything new. He was the God of Lies, of Mischief. He thrived on gleaning new information from others by the mean of his own wit. He longed for it so heavily after the first six months in the cell that it became a physical ache, digging at his core until he could no longer bear it.

He began by visiting Bruce Banner's lab, watching in the shadows as the scientist ran experiments on his own volatile blood. It was riveting, fascinating. For a while. But he grew bored of the silence, of not quite understanding the full thought process of the scientist.

He didn't dare approach Banner on those trips. The mortal man would surely raise the alarm and have him thrown in a real prison cell, deep in the bowels of Stark's monument to himself. And Loki, as easily as he could escape it, did not want his current lodgings taken from him. His plush, king-sized bed was much more comfortable than the cots the cells held, and was only reluctantly given to him at Thor's urging.

No, Loki merely trudged through the boredom, the monotony. And for a while, it worked. Banner discovered something new: the cure to some rare form of radiation poisoning, or a way to treat some ever-changing strain of a virus. But never anything of relevance to what the man searched in vain for. His failure was so often that Loki began to pity the mortal.

Until a call in the middle of a stormy night, a sleepless one for more than just the god, shook him from his rainy day traditions.

The initial, awkward round of questions that he and Tony Stark exchanged puzzled him. They spoke of simple, general things. JARVIS's circuitry and general programming, the development of new elements and synthetic materials from them, and the movement of the stars were among the many topics they covered. But, as time went on, and the two men began to see that neither was going to share the information they exchanged with the others, they began to speak of things a bit closer to themselves.

One particularly stormy night, Loki summoned his volume of childhood stories and shared them. It was a quieter night, with Stark silent as Loki read from the ancient volume, adding his own commentary where he deemed it necessary.

Tony Stark never said a word. If he had objections to the things that Loki had done (or things that had been done to him), he kept them to himself. He understood that the methods used in the rest of the nine realms were methods that weren't necessarily shared on Earth. The experiences he'd had shaped Loki, the same way the experiences Tony'd had shaped him.

Loki enjoyed the inventor's company. Loathe as he was to admit it, Tony's company was sometimes much needed on those days when the heavens cried. On the nights that Loki went on his own, rather than waiting for a summons, Tony still sat and talked with him. Because if another creature knew what it meant to be alone, Tony Stark was that creature.