ON WITH THE SHOW!
Chapter Seven: Iron Man
"Vacation's over," he says to Pepper, waiting for him on the tarmac, trim silhouette perfect against the sun. Tony wants to frame her as Art, as Normalcy, as The World Going Right. Right there. Freeze that. Keep it forever in a place of honor.
He doesn't think she'll actually start crying, but he just couldn't deal with that, so best to head off the possibility right away. "Time to get back to work."
And there is work to do.
The sun's no brighter here on a completely safe California tarmac than it was over there, and here there's shade trees and the hum of the city just beyond, full of sandwiches and indoor plumbing and air conditioning and screwdrivers and cantaloupes and beer and Wi-Fi and chunky bead necklaces and traffic lights and grackles and highlighters and socks and, god, people he trusts. But somehow, while Tony wasn't looking, someone came along and sharpened all the edges of things. It's all hyper-focused like he's tuned the zoom up a little too far, both more real than he's ever seen anything and unreal, somehow.
Tony can't stop looking at it all, like he's never seen any of it. It's too bright, but someone has taken away his sunglasses, and anyway, he doesn't want to stop seeing any of it.
Rhodey had taken him to a forward post. Tony had been half-hallucinating and slipping in and out between this world and somewhere nice and cool and dark, and that was before they put him on the hardcore antibiotics and the really good drugs that made everything very far away. Safely stowed and guarded in a bed with an IV drip in the arm that wasn't cradled defensively over his chest constantly, Tony had stared at the machine-stitched hem of the bedsheet for so long that one of the nurses had blinked a mini-flashlight at his eyes to test his reflexes, like she was afraid he was having a seizure.
Which is stupid, aren't blinking lights seizure-inducing?
No more of that. No more people standing over him looking worried, no more blood tests, no more IVs, no more funny hospital smell, no more pulse monitors tracking out the beats of a heart hovering over the edge of death –
Intellectually, he knows he can't feel the tiny, evil monsters hidden in his flesh, kept at bay by the electromagnetic field emitted by the larger monster that's set down roots right over his heart. The edges of it pull cruelly whenever he does anything particularly stressful like wake up gasping, body refusing to believe it's not being held down under metallic, blood-tinged water – they wouldn't waste fresh on a prisoner, he'd realized cynically, groping about for something, anything to distract himself from the warring screams of this can't be happening and I don't want to die. But they itch.
Never again, Tony promises himself. No more. Not ever.
No one else has to live with this. No one else has to count down the last week of their life wondering which beat of their heart will kill them.
There is work to do.
"Are you kidding me?" he'd protested at the orderlies rolling a stretcher, an actual stretcher towards the plane, which he walked off on his own feet, thanks very much, nothing worse showing than a couple of scratches and the sling holding up the arm he'd wrenched at some point. He'd been too caught up in the juggernaut around him and the rage burning through him like one of his own flamethrowers to notice at the time.
Good idea. Needs work.
But the sling is fine. It's another layer of fabric between the eyes of the world and the staring eye of Sauron thing in his chest.
"Happy, take us to the hospital," Pepper tries to say once they've made it to the car.
Tony's so sick of hospitals. Doesn't anyone understand that he has work to do? Past time they did. "No," he cuts her off. "Happy, no. I'm not – I'm not going to the hospital, Pepper, I'm fine. They patched me up, and I want to go home, and before I do that, I want two things." He reconsiders. "No. Three."
Pepper looks skeptical. So much for the tears. Missed his chance.
"One, I want an American-style cheeseburger." God, the things he would have done for a cheeseburger, if any of the nurses had been willing, would have put Klondike bars to shame.
Military discipline sucks. Or not, as it was.
"Two –"
"Oh, no," Pepper interrupts him this time. He can only imagine what's running through her head. She knows him too well. Or she did.
She may not know him anymore.
Does he know him anymore?
"Two," he says louder, "I want you to call for a press conference."
That was not what Pepper was expecting, but she's reaching for her phone even as her brow furrows, squashing neat eyebrows together. "Now?"
"Yes, now. Almost now. Cheeseburgers first. Hogan, drive."
Happy looks almost as skeptical – his boss is acting crazier than usual – but finally gets the car moving.
Cars. Tony missed cars. Nice, sleek, spoiled-rotten but still powerful cars that are not and have never wanted to be anything even resembling, or in the same time zone as, a Humvee. He sinks back into the seat and smiles, patting the smooth leather and feeling it hum under his hand. Lovely.
Pepper's on the phone to whatever branch of her public relations team does the scut work of calling reporters, or posting stuff to Twitter, or whatever it is they actually do, so Tony hums along with the car for a few more seconds, until she hangs up.
"And three," he says, opening one eye and turning one hand up, waving it in Pepper's direction, "gimme my phone. I gotta make a call. Please tell me somebody called Loki. Please."
Because everything's about to go even further to hell, and he's been blown up and abducted and tortured by terrorists who took his stuff and forced to build missiles for said terrorists, and he's watched a friend he owed his life to die, and he's seen kids die, and he's killed people, and that was only the lowlights of the past three goddamn months, and he wants all for himself the five minutes, tops, it's going to take to find a fast-food joint next to a major airport.
He doesn't miss Pepper's tiny smile as she fishes around in her tiny, streamlined, efficient, probably very stylish purse and extracts a phone. "I called him," she said softly. "As soon as Rhodey called me. I left messages, when he stopped answering, even when I didn't have anything new to tell him."
"He does that," Tony says, needlessly, just to say words. From the driver's seat, Happy snorts. They've only met in passing, but Happy isn't dumb, and he's a friend, and to his credit, he didn't even bother with the shovel speech, just shrugged and accepted that his boss might have this guy around every so often.
The phone's smooth and new and cool, just a tinge of warmth from Pepper's hand left over, and Tony wraps his around it like a lifeline.
"He's at the house." Pepper doesn't look him in the eye, but her lips are soft and just a bit curved rather than tight and disapproving. "I thought you might want him there."
"You're the best, Pep."
"Call your boyfriend, Mr. Stark."
"He's not my boyfriend," Tony says reflexively, and isn't at all surprised to see that the screen reopens on a number ready to dial.
The surprising thing is that the call is actually picked up.
"Tony."
Loki's voice is still low and cool and British, but maybe there's a tiny hint of relief in what is not a question.
"Holy shit," Tony blurts. "You answered your phone. So that's what it takes."
"There you are. I was… I knew you'd come back. But it is…I'm pleased to hear your voice again."
"Not getting rid of me that easily." There are so many things he wants to say, and he doesn't even know what any of them are; for once in his life the Incredible Brain has come up blank and just wants to listen to the voice on the other end of the line breathe. I missed you? I dreamed about you? Stay right there and don't move, I'm coming home, I just want to see you?
I broke something, Loki. I broke something big. And I don't think I can run away to Vegas to escape it.
One of those, maybe. He doesn't have time to say anything real over the phone. Even with airport traffic, any second now there will be cheeseburgers, and if he's going to talk to Loki with his mouth full, he wants to do so in person so he can at least see the scathing glare doing that earns him every time. Never thought he'd want to see that one. "You're at the house, right?"
"Ms. Potts called. JARVIS let me in."
"Oh, so you'll answer when Pepper calls you? What the hell, man? Never mind. Stay right there, okay? Promise me?" He's never asked that before, but today, of all days, maybe Loki will indulge him.
He can almost hear the smile. "Okay."
Tony really missed the way Loki says that, like it's a loaner word from a foreign language.
"I'm coming home, I'll see you soon. Got to make a couple of stops first. Oh, and hey, turn on the TV, will you? I'm going to say things in front of cameras, you heard it here."
Across the car seat, Pepper's head comes up sharply, but now it's Tony's turn to not meet her eyes. She'll find out when everyone does, because if anyone finds out someone will try to stop him, and that's not happening. It's just not.
How could he have thought anything else was important?
"I will see you first, then," says Loki.
"Hah. Whoops, drive-thru lane. Gotta go," and Tony hangs up before he has to explain, or before he says something like good, I want you there, coming home means just that much more knowing you're there.
Pepper's just the best. How did she know?
The press conference goes about as well as can be expected.
It's not the first press conference he's had to be escorted out of by bodyguards, but this is a particularly bad one, and just to make matters worse, Obie gives up on trying to get control of the room, abandons the podium, and chases Tony all the way to the main factory where the full-size arc reactor sparks and thrums to itself.
"That went well. What happened in there, Tony?" Obie says disapprovingly, resting a hand on his shoulder. "You're not well. You should be in hospital –"
What is it with people and trying to take him to hospital? Does he honestly look that bad? Then they should let him go home, so he can take a shower – or maybe a bath, water on his face might be…not good – and put on some fresher clothes and maybe sleep for a week, maybe with company, because it's surprisingly nice having Loki asleep on the other side of the bed. The body warmth is great and unlike some people Tony's brought home, the man doesn't snore. And waking him up can be a lot of fun.
"I'm fine," Tony says – that's Big Lie Number Two, after "I see" but before "I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions" – "and I'm serious. I don't care what it does to the stock options. I don't care if we've always made weapons. I don't care if it's Dad's legacy. It's not going to be mine anymore. We're done, Obie. No more weapons."
"So, what, you want us to make baby bottles?"
The arc reactor pulses. The thing in his chest hums in harmony. He can feel it, this close, like his bones are vibrating along with it.
Just to make Obie stop, he talks about arc reactor technology.
They fence back and forth for a few seconds, but someone tipped his mentor off about the miniature chunk of compact power buried in his chest. Either Rhodey or Pepper is going to hear about that little indiscretion forever, and Tony covers it back up and pulls away from the arm thrown over his shoulders as Obie reminds him that they're a team and that Tony should trust him.
"Let me handle this," he wheedles.
Tony shakes his head, persisting. "I'm done making things that kill people. We'll go to the moon instead, or Mars, how about Mars?"
"Tony, this isn't one of your space games –"
"You know, you're right." He's still got one arm folded across his chest protectively, sling or not, but his other hand comes up between them, prodding a finger into Obie's face. He doesn't want to fight with his mentor, but why can't Obie trust him to know what he's talking about?
What the hell does Obie know, safely over here? Why won't he listen?
God, why hadn't he ever listened?
Why can't Obie just be happy for him, then?
"It's not a game. And I don't want to fight. I'm done fighting. We'll talk about this later. I'm going home."
Obie sighs, steps away, lets him go. Runs a hand over his head and grinds his teeth without even the cigar in the way, like he does when he's frustrated, when he's giving up for now but the problem had better be fixed by the time he looks at it again. "Good. Go home, Tony. And stay there for now, all right? Just lie low for a while. Rest. Don't talk to the media, don't talk to anyone. Let me handle this…new direction of yours. Find a way to spin it, see what we can do."
"There's not a spin," Tony insists, glaring at the security guard who's standing between him and the door. She moves aside. "No. More. Weapons. And that's final."
He's actually halfway out the door – Happy's squashing out his cigarette and reaching for the car door – when Obie calls out to him. "Tony."
"What." Tony can hear how flat his voice is, but he's just so done with today.
"While you're at it? Get rid of that flash boyfriend of yours."
Something in his chest skips a beat, metal shifts, everything sways and goes dark, shock raw and merciless tearing through him, and Tony flinches, every centimeter of his skin prickling. For a second he's up to his ribcage in sand, trying to tear battered plates of warped metal away from his body, fighting to escape something that's crunched tight around him, biting and betraying him in the end. The unforgiving sun blazes down, hunting for soft, fragile, newly exposed flesh, hungry to burn him the way the Ten Rings burned…
No, no, this is California, not Afghanistan, Afghanistan is over. And yet somehow, the fire… "What?"
"C'mon, Tony, really?" Obie sighs, shaking his bald head.
All the breath has been knocked out of him – Obie knows! – and yet somehow Tony's still talking, answering on reflex even if it's a stutter. "I – you know about – and he's not my boyfriend, he's just…I can't have friends now?"
"Now, don't be like that," his mentor scolds him. The engineers who work here, who have been staring at him from a betrayed distance and pretending they aren't, look discreetly elsewhere, as if the walls might have something fascinating installed in them – well, they do – like they can't hear their employers arguing, like the secret Tony's been hiding hasn't just been dragged out into the light, not kicking and screaming but paralyzed and helpless.
"The press is going to be all over you, and you need to be careful. You just upset a lot of people, Tony, and they're going to be looking for anything, anything, to drag you down and make you look bad. And your…friend? You know what that looks like? Not good."
Obie smiles reassuringly. "I'm just thinking of you, my boy."
Tony's not reassured.
Hello, house.
Hello, glass patio and bar. Hello, staircase. Hello, waterfall.
Hello, midnight snack pilot light glowing from under the snack bar.
Hello, JARVIS.
"Welcome home, sir."
Hello, switched on but muted television, shifting light flickering across the darkened front room. Hello, freeze frame of press conference that makes him look like a refugee from Arkham or Bedlam or one of those -am places, anyway, and that he's probably going to be seeing a lot in the near future. Super.
Hello, scattered migratory pile of epically improbable fantasy novels and historical commentaries, paperbacks using each other as bookmarks and left face-down, ancient and cracked spines sagging dispiritedly. Hello, mostly empty bottle of blood-rich wine that he'd cadged a sip of once with fantastically lewd bribery, and then spent an intoxicated weekend being driven to wine tastings trying to find another bottle of. Leave it to his haughty magician to pick something obscure and sinfully dark as his drink of choice.
Hello, lapidary grinder that masses a ridiculous amount and so usually lives in the downstairs workshop, off in a corner somewhere ever since the last long-forgotten project he'd used it for.
Hello, built-in flexible spotlight, dust motes trapped in its glaring beam, picked out from the rest of the room.
Hello, bright green eyes flicking up to notice him, then back to the intricate puzzle in carved metal and mesh spread out across the towel draped across his lap.
Tony's not good at words sometimes.
Barefoot, shoes and washed-but-secondhand socks discarded somewhere after the front door had closed, he shuffles across the room and successfully evades the edge of the table this time, sparing his shins. He callously evicts a cushion, tossing it across the room in a halfhearted throw that barely makes it over the arm of the couch, and flops down in its place, closing his eyes.
He lies there silently for a minute or two, listening to the soft click of metal against stone and his own breathing until it steadies out, trying to drink in the sense of peace, of rightness in the room, like he can hold it inside and keep it, a warmer bubble than the electromagnetic field guarding his heart. Somewhere quiet he can go, if he can just fix it in his mind firmly enough, because everything else is wrong.
When he cracks open one eye just a little way, he catches Loki glancing away from him, a bit of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
"Whatcha making?" he asks finally, as if this were an ordinary evening, as if he had nothing more important on his mind than bugging Loki about his magic tricks and trying to decide where to order takeout from this time.
"You're familiar with laser light shows, I imagine?"
"'course."
"This will be like that, eventually. But without the lasers. Or the dust in the air."
"Huh." Tony considers. "How'd you get the gem cutter up here?"
"I moved it," Loki deadpans.
"It's a goddamn pain to move."
"Not as much as some things. And I needed it."
"Yeah? What for? …did you just snap your fingers at me?" Tony opens his eyes and tries to glare. It probably doesn't come out as much.
"Only once." The twisty little smile is not an apology. "Here."
Reflexively, Tony puts his free hand up and catches what isn't an icosahedron, but only because it has too many sides. He briefly tries to count them, but it's too dark and there are too many and he doesn't feel like figuring out what the pseudo-Greek name for it might be. When he rolls it across his fingers, tiny etchings scratch at his skin, scored across the gemstone's surfaces, almost too small to see as if Loki's tried to etch circuitry into it and maybe succeeded.
It's just the right size to look through, like a glass eye, and Tony lets it break the world into facets. "Shiny."
Loki makes no move to take it back, and Tony puts in the effort to shift, wincing as he turns – he's wearing bruises, still – and sets his spine against the magician's side. "Hi," he says, looking up.
"Hi," Loki says back, amused and wry.
There's nothing else to say – there's everything else to say – so Tony doesn't say it. He just wants to stay here, maybe forever.
But he can't, because there's work to do.
He's taken by surprise when Loki sweeps up the pieces of his device, wrapping the towel around them and depositing it all on the table in a single gesture that quite naturally becomes twisting sideways to wrap his arms around Tony's body and press a kiss into his hair. "Don't do that again," the magician commands, but it's soft enough to sound like a plea.
And that's different, because what they have is fun – what they had was fun – but now even this has changed. Now he's broken, and he's hurting someone who's gotten closer to him than anyone has in a very long time, and just everything he touches has been ruined now.
Something halfway between a laugh and a sob comes boiling out of Tony's chest, where it's been trapped behind the arc reactor to die and rot. "Oh, really? 'cause I was thinking of making it a regular – ow! Did you just bite me?"
"Not funny, Tony," Loki growls, releasing his ear with the slightest kitten-lick to kiss it better, but the arm wrapped around his splinted one runs caresses up and down his chest, and too late, Tony drops the gemstone and tries to push him away –
Loki's hand freezes on the curve of metal beneath the battered dress shirt; he's just caught the edge of the reactor, and he's gone very, very still.
"What is this?" he asks.
"No," Tony protests, cringing, that fleeting bubble of comfort and security leaking like a balloon, jetting away at random and impossible to catch. "No, don't – please, I don't want –"
He can feel his lover breathing against his temple. "Tell me."
Black bile seethes in his throat, shame and disgust swamping him at the thought of Loki's eyes on the reactor, even though an entire troop of military doctors and nurses and orderlies, and Rhodey, and Obie, have already seen what those fuckers did to him, what he had to do to himself to salvage his life from the scrap metal they turned him into. That he turned himself into, his company made that missile, one of his people dreamed up something so evil and thought that was a good idea, and it's his own damn fault he's got a hole in his chest he could almost fit his hand into before he shoved a science fair project with delusions of grandeur in there. He's broken, he's maimed, like the Borg swooped down and didn't bother to carry him off and left him half-machine, and the wound goes deeper than the chunks it took out of his ribcage.
How can he possibly let anyone see that, much less his lover? Why would Loki want anything to do with him, once he sees the wasteland the Ten Rings made of Tony; why wouldn't he leave and go find someone as beautiful as he is, someone whole?
Panic sweeps over him, and suddenly all Tony wants is to get away, just as much as he'd wanted to be here, but when he struggles, tries to push Loki away, tries to run, the magician holds him still. He might as well try to move the gem cutter back downstairs on his own with his bare hands as break the grip pinning him in place, but he can't think, he can't breathe, he can't stop –
"Tony." The voice in his ear is barely more than a breath. "Hush, pet. It's all right. You're safe."
"No, I –" he chokes out. "Lemme go –"
"I will not," Loki says, and that mildly peeved tone is perhaps more familiar than anything else – Tony has heard that particular note in the magician's voice a hundred times, at some petty bit of Las Vegas gossip dismissed scornfully, or some senseless quirk of modern society, or silly plot holes in sillier fantasy books, or people who take apart his magic tricks and then come crying to him that they don't work. It's familiar. It's a thread Tony can catch, can tug on, can follow out of his labyrinth with that monster in the depths. "Fight me if you must. Do tell me, when you're done."
"…bite you…" Tony manages.
"Do that," the magician says calmly, and sets his chin on Tony's skull, and, Tony's willing to bet, stares into space regally while Tony drags himself back to something resembling calm.
He really is unfairly strong. Tony's not going anywhere, and weirdly, once he accepts that, it helps.
When he tunes back in, he realizes Loki is talking, quietly, as if to himself.
"…and sometimes you can't fix what you broke, believe me, I know. Sometimes all you can do is stop it from breaking any further, and it's running and running just to stay in one place –"
"No," Tony says, grasping for something he recognizes, "that's the Red Queen, and you're the Cheshire Cat, I already decided –"
"Shut up, I'm only going to say this once, because I like you, and I don't like many people. I know everything's new and different and wrong and it hurts, it hurts. But you walked out of the desert, pet, and once you've done that, you've won. You'll build it again and you'll make it better so you can spit in their eye and say to the void with you all."
"That experience talking?"
"And why should I tell you my secrets, when you will not share yours?"
That's so unfair it jolts Tony back to life like a set of shock paddles. "Hang on, you are all secrets, I don't think I've ever gotten a real answer out of you since we met."
Loki hums thoughtfully. "So, I am the one with secrets, and you are not?"
"Yes. Wait. What?"
The kiss to his temple is almost worth the triumphant chuckle. "Then tell me, pet."
"Not sure why I let you call me that," Tony grumbles – he knows the answer is I can't stop you, and he can't even retaliate, because, as Loki never tires of reminding him, they have a deal.
"The deal sucks," Tony had said at one point, honest-to-god batting his eyelashes at his lover as he climbed into his lap. "But then again, so do I. We could renegotiate," and Loki had laughed that shameless, wicked laugh of his.
Tony almost remembers being that carefree.
"I…fine."
This time, when he tries to sit up, Loki lets him go, lets Tony turn around and face him, even if he doesn't quite look at his magician as he works his free hand through the shirt buttons and pulls the fabric aside.
Too-blue light washes out Loki's face, turns him into a ghost. Carefully, he slides his hands over Tony's, opens the buttons all the way and looks.
What he thinks of it, Tony can't tell; he's gone as still as he ever was, as they circled each other and flirted an adventure at a time.
"There's…shrapnel, in my veins." His voice is leaden, dead. "Tiny, too tiny to find. This – it's an electromagnet, only super-advanced. It's a power source, I…I have some ideas. But it's keeping that shit out of my heart. And I get to live a little longer."
Loki is stone-still for another moment, and then he rests one hand over the glaring eye of the reactor fearlessly, not a flicker of disgust on his face as he looks up.
"I'll kill them," he promises, almost casually, but he sounds like he means it. Like he could. Like he could hunt down fanatic, violent, heavily-armed terrorists that the entire U.S. Armed Forces couldn't find in the uncharted mountains of Afghanistan, and return. "I'll burn them for you, if you ask it of me. I am…not without resources."
Something thumps in Tony's heart; it's not the shrapnel. "No need," he chokes out. "I – I already did."
His magician's face is suddenly unutterably sad. "Ah," he says only, and then, "…welcome to war, dear one."
Tony's not sleeping. He might dream, and anyway, he can't stop thinking.
He's staring into the near-darkness, with the arc reactor buried beneath the thickest shirt he owns that he can actually sleep in. He's going to miss sleeping naked. And being able to lie on his front without the pressure of the reactor casing against his ribs.
And this.
Loki's asleep beside him, long hair fanned out across bare shoulders, breathing slow and even, the hand visible above the covers loose and open. He's like a cat, that man. Refuses to get anywhere near wherever Tony's trying to get him to, just to be contrary, but once he's there, it's his. From experience, Tony knows that if he stares too long, Loki will wake up, like he can feel eyes on him somehow even in the depths of sleep. So instead Tony is only looking in glances, and out of the corner of his eye, just taking his lover in with the rest of the room that's his, that's home, in every centimeter of it.
There's a sliver of moonlight outside; Tony can just barely make out the crests of the waves, or maybe he's imagining it.
He wants to stay. He wants to keep this.
But he can't.
There is work to do.
He's just inputting the specs emerging from those first scribbled pages – he'd managed to keep most of them, locked into the crude armor with him and folded into the lining of his pants as he crossed the desert – all his attention on JARVIS as the AI starts converting drawn lines to motion-capture holograms, and he doesn't hear the door to the lab unlock and open and close again.
So he jumps when he looks up and finds Loki standing beside him, just over his shoulder, hands folded neatly behind his back as he looks curiously at the wireframe being taken apart and coming back together, Tony's imagination and his desperation unfolding shining in mid-air.
"Morning," Tony says hurriedly, grabbing for his cup of coffee and gulping it down, fortifying himself. He's going to need the caffeine.
"So it is. What is this?"
"Work. You saw the press conference."
"I did." Loki grins. "You certainly can make a scene, pet."
Tony points a stylus at him. "And I meant it. No more weapons. But the –" he hesitates, powers through. "– people – who took me, who did this to me," as he thumbs at the arc reactor, visible through today's slob clothes, "they had my weapons. And that means someone's taking my stuff. If I have one rule, it's don't take my stuff. You should understand that."
"Oh, certainly." The magician tips his head to one side, following the lines of the wireframe model and taking in the Mark II label in the upper right-hand corner.
"So I'm going to find my weapons, and I'm going to destroy them, and this –" He points at the revised design for the power armor, or at least what he's got so far. "– is going to make it possible."
Loki nods absently and looks down at him. "And this, this isn't a weapon, as you count such things?"
Damn the man. On top of everything else, he's learned to read Tony's engineering shorthand. Or he's a really good guesser. Magician, after all.
"It's what I used to escape," Tony says grimly. "It's gonna be better. And no. Because it's mine, and no one else will touch it." He taps the stylus against the reactor. A little more comfortable with it, this morning. Might as well enjoy that while it lasts. "And it runs off this, and right now, this is the only one there is. Anyone else, this'll be just a pile of metal."
Loki all but purrs, "Ingenious. Fearsome and beautiful. So you build this, and then, what next?"
The coffee solidifies in his gut, freezes solid, sends little shards of ice into his veins to match the metal lurking around in there, and Tony feels the pit open up beneath him, waiting for his word.
And the word is, "No."
From the other side of the projection, where he'd prowled a few steps away, Loki stops dead. Stares at him, puzzled, and Tony very nearly raises a hand to check that the reactor's still there, still lit, because something hurts in there. "What?"
But there is work to do.
"You should go," Tony says. His voice doesn't sound like his.
It's so, so rare that he can genuinely baffle Loki, but Tony's not enjoying the look on the magician's face as he turns the words over – small words, but as tiny and lethal as shrapnel, and as inextricable. He's said them. There's no taking them back. He wishes he could, but he can't.
And he shouldn't.
It hurts, but it has to be done.
"…what did you just say to me?" says Loki, finally.
Tony looks fixedly at the wireframe Mark II. Concentrate on what's important. On what matters most. On what needs to be done to set things right.
"I've got work to do," he says, words flat and hard and as emotionless as he can make them. "And I…I don't deserve to have nice things anymore. Not after what I've seen. What I've done. What's been done, because of me, because I was too busy being an idiot and fooling around to worry about the damage I was doing. Maybe I never did. And I don't deserve you. I can't – I just can't do this right now."
This, right here, is why he doesn't do relationships. Because they always end up here. This is why he sleeps with people he doesn't care about, who don't care about him, just for the fun and the stupid animal pleasure, and then sends Pepper to kick them out the next morning before they've even eaten breakfast while he hides in his work.
So he doesn't have to do this. So no one ever gets close enough that it hurts to tear them out in the inevitable end.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Loki set his hands on the table, fingers crooked as if they could tear through like claws. Not stupid, not at all stupid, someone who lives by implication and illusion, he doesn't bother misinterpreting what Tony's trying not to say outright. "Are you serious?" he demands.
Against his will, Tony slams his own hands down on the table. The coffee mug shudders, bitter dregs sloshing unevenly. "Why do people keep asking me that? Yes, I'm –"
He takes a deep breath. Tries not to look at the man he's hurting, because if he ever doubted that Loki does care for him, in some strange, amused way, that soft voice murmuring in his ear last night as he panicked dismissed all doubts. "Look, Loki, it's not safe for you here. I don't want you caught in the crossfire."
Something deep inside him whimpers, cries out, wails that he's being stupid, that he's letting Obie bully him into being what Obie and everyone thinks he should be rather than what he wants to be, but it's a voice that's been squashed so often it's almost reflexive to smash it down again and lock it away. Obie's right. Tony's breaking everything, even if he's trying to fix it, and Loki shouldn't have to be caught up in it as well. He has no idea what the media are like, how easily a ruined reputation, even a moment caught in the klieg light of public opinion, can destroy a life.
"I can look after myself," Loki snaps curtly, words bitten off, accent whipping at the heels of the words with a crack.
Silvertongue, a man with his own squad of thugs challenges, on a half-lit side street, and a knife all but materializes in Loki's ready hand.
But this is different.
"Oh, but say what you mean, Stark," he snarls, and something inside Tony turns to ash. "You don't want me here. You don't want me anymore."
Tony stares at him, drinks him in; even furious Loki's beautiful, maybe even more so, but he can't afford to burn himself out against that, not when there's work to do.
"No, Loki, I…" he denies.
And stops. Gives up.
"…yeah. You should go."
Years trawling through Sin City together, Tony running his mouth every chance he got, and months as lovers, and Tony's never seen Loki blush before. Every off-color comment and lewd suggestion and gasped-out praise and curse, and until today he's never seen color rise across those razor cheekbones aside from sheer physical exertion.
Fury bleeds into the marble planes of his face, now, and Loki bares his teeth in a snarl, bitter and hurting, an animal struck.
"…you're sending me away," he manages, and oh, Tony never wanted to hear betrayal in his voice. "You are sending me – after everything –" For a moment he's incoherent with disbelief and humiliation, and as he draws himself up into something untouchable and closed-off and wounded, Tony wants to sink into the floor and die.
But there's work to do.
When Loki speaks again it's a hiss, a sneer. "I was afraid for you," he spits. "I hurt for you. I don't like most people, I hate this world, but I thought you… I thought I could trust you. I wanted to – Well."
He snorts, looks away. "Forget it. You're no different after all. I should have known better."
Tony has to clench his hands into fists to stop himself from reaching out as Loki stalks past him, every step a strike at his battered heart. Instead, he sinks into his chair and grinds those fists against his forehead, elbows propped on the table casting the Mark II into the air like a dream.
He can't. He can't.
"Do what you want," Loki damns him, and slams the lab door in his wake.
Sooner or later, Tony's going to find a limit to how much he can hurt.
One more thing to fix. Somehow.
Until then, he goes back to work.
First, power.
Pepper almost kills him, but it's not her fault. He probably should have explained all the details to her first, rather than just telling her the bits he thought she needed to know a bit at a time.
…nah. Then she probably wouldn't have done it, and he needed her to.
She really is as capable and qualified and trustworthy as he'd called her, but plugging miniature generators into her boss's chest isn't what she signed up for, and he manages a grin for her as his heartrate gets back to normal.
The brand-new arc reactor, securely wired up, glows, and Tony rotates it fully into place musingly. This one's better. It's cleaner. It's not made out of spare parts scrounged out of stolen weapons and hammered into shape on an anvil out of the Middle Ages. There's no blood on it.
"You okay?"
"Don't ever, ever, ever, ever ask me to do anything like that ever again," Pepper orders him sternly, hands held up before her like she wants to remove them and send them to the dry cleaner. He probably should have had her take off her watch, at least.
"I don't have anyone but you," says Tony, grimacing.
Pepper gives him a totally deadpan look. "Well," she says dryly, "perhaps you shouldn't have broken up with your boyfriend, then."
"He's not my boyfriend," Tony's mouth says, on full autopilot, as he peels the sensor contacts off his skin. "And we haven't broken up, we're just…I'm busy. Who the hell told you, anyway? You know, forget it. Can we not talk about this? Ever? I've really got to focus right now."
He suspects only Pepper's long-established tradition of not criticizing his love life, no matter the form it takes, no matter what kind of fool he's made of himself this time, keeps her from saying something more than a noncommittal, "What do you want me to do with this?"
Tony glances at the original arc reactor. "That? Destroy it. Incinerate it."
"You don't want to keep it?"
"Pepper, I've been called many things. Nostalgic is not one of them."
Which is why he can't afford to think about anything else but the schematics building themselves into a masterpiece in his private server. Why he tells Butterfingers to toss his phone in the garbage along with all the rest of the crap on his desk.
Work to do.
He doesn't have time to play.
He throws himself into the Mark II and doesn't look back for weeks on end, his days becoming a rapid-fire sequence of welds and tests and rewiring and debugging circuits and sculpting in the super-advanced CAD program he rewrote for JARVIS and the basement lab. He reads a ton of research papers on metallurgy and bleeding-edge theories in microcircuitry and miniaturization. He mouths off at the bots and drinks so much coffee that the machine – no fancy espresso stuff down here, this is the next best thing to paint stripper – can't keep up with him.
He scavenges a backup coffee machine from upstairs while JARVIS processes a new render and has a brief moment of probably-caffeine-induced insanity when he can't find a spare outlet to plug it into.
He runs gears and pistons and tiny, tiny reciprocators through their paces and has to build smaller ones anyway. He catches one finger in a particularly snappy socket and mutters curses for the next five minutes until a static charge buildup problem distracts him; three hours later he remembers, and by then the minor pain is long gone.
He gets used to the blue light over his heart, to the point where he can ignore it, because when he's working he doesn't have to think.
Work like this is what Tony's for.
The first test with the repulsors turned flight stabilizers could have gone better. Tony kind of regrets getting that on video. Even if he deletes it – which he won't, because documentation, because science, yeah! – JARVIS would keep a copy somewhere.
He tries not to imagine a certain lanky, slender magician sprawled out in the two-seater sports car, boots lolling over the side, laughing hysterically at what should, by all rights, be an imprint of Tony's face in the concrete ceiling.
But it's a concept.
And bringing it to life, now that it's his, now that it's by choice, now that he's working in his own lab with his own materials and the bots peering over his shoulder like pigeons, now that he's making and not destroying –
It's glorious.
Tony loses himself in building the best thing he's ever come up with, ever, and for a while he's entirely happy.
And yeah, so he blows up some stuff.
He's lost his belief that the world is a fair place. He's lost his ability to sleep through the night or without a light on somewhere. He's lost a chunk of his ribcage and, probably, most of his remaining life span. He's lost his best friend, since Rhodey isn't speaking to him anymore. He's lost his lover, since Loki will probably never forgive him. He's lost the trust and respect of the literally tens of thousands of people whose jobs he endangered when he got up in front of those cameras and said no more weapons, and tanked the stock price, too. And from what Obie tells him, he's about to lose his own company to the damn Board of Directors.
He can have blowing stuff up.
Also, the Mark II turns out beautiful, and Tony learns to fly, just him and his tech and the open sky and speed.
That is the best thing…
Ever.
Despite the bruises, and the icing problem, and the new hole in the house.
Beating the shit out of the remnants of the Ten Rings, burning them out of Gulmira – how dare they, how dare they? – almost starts to make up for finding out that he's even more of an idiot than he thought.
That Obie has been working against him for…how long now?
Dark suspicions begin to unfold even as he takes the new red-and-gold armor into battle, only this time, he's ready for it.
Welcome to war, dear one, Loki's voice whispers, just a memory.
Bullets zing past him, and he storms through them, untouched, hearing them glance off the gold-titanium alloy and barely leaving a mark. Within the armor, Tony's unstoppable, implacable, no longer the helpless, stupid spoiled brat who'd jaunted into a war zone with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a shiny phone in the other and bite marks still dusted across his collarbones, but something closer to a god.
Or at the very least, a glorious and high-tech golem.
He can't imagine what these murdering bastards think has come for them, bringing justice down on their heads for everything they've done and everything Tony didn't lose but that they took from him. Not that he spends more than half a second wondering about it. He lashes out for everyone they've hurt and killed and stole from, everyone who doesn't have the resources Tony does, who wasn't as lucky as he's been.
Tony Stark has been in the weapons business all his life, but only now is he fighting back. He's not going to be a victim any more.
Never again. Never again. Never, never, burns in the back of his mind.
And it's…good. He fights like it's natural, like he knows what he's doing; the armor makes him think fight as much as flight, and those perfectly paired functions spin together into something stronger than both. The suit exaggerates his movements to a degree he could only have dreamed of, except he's taken those dreams and brought them to life; with every leap, he soars. Not a step out of place or off balance, he has only to point or gesture and his will is done, and he's invincible.
And every time Tony thinks it can't feel any better, something savage within him roaring flamethrower-powerful, it does. There's the satisfaction of his beautiful, beautiful technology, still handling like a dream, repulsors flaring against his palms, putting down every goddamn terrorist who tries to stand in his way.
There's the pure, bitter delight of taking out the idiots who try to fall back on their now totally obsolete tactic of taking hostages, because Tony was ready for that. Tony thought of that. Stark Industries designed the best targeting computer on the planet, and then Tony got his hands on it and ported JARVIS into it and built it into his armor.
There's the tears running down that man's face as he holds his son, and there's the awe in the kid's eyes as he looks up at the warrior striding past, triumphant and unafraid.
Tony's always enjoyed the way people look at him, but that kid's eyes are exponentially more real than any vapid fan or A-list celebrity hanger-on or hidebound business shark.
These people are alive because of him.
That means something.
Plus, the fear on the husky, self-satisfied leader's face as his former victims close in…that's justice.
Bullets, missiles, even a tank can't stop this wonder he's built, that fits around him like a second skin and makes him strong enough to start setting things right.
Bring it on.
This is his battle, his mission, and while he's fighting it, he's not afraid and he doesn't hurt anymore.
And then it all goes horribly wrong.
Pepper's voice over the phone, dismayed and frightened – and he did that to her, he got her involved, he's going to lose Pepper too – is drowned out by a nearly indescribable sound, something felt rather than seen like a powerful bass line, but slid all the way up to the scale to something that would give dogs headaches.A monstrous bumblebee drills through his eardrums and sinks its stinger into his brain, and Tony's joints lock like he's been struck by lightning, or flash-frozen, or turned to stone.
"Breathe," a familiar, treacherous voice croons in his ear, as fingers take the phone, his last lifeline, away. A blood vessel bursts in his nose. He can feel the dripof the first bead of blood tickling his lip, and he can't even twitch to smudge it away. "Breathe. That's it."
No, Tony wants to cry out, wants to scream, wants to turn and punch out the man stabbing him in the back, but all he can do is blink, barely, eyes rolling uselessly in their sockets.
Not you. How could you? I don't understand. Words he can't speak wail why? like a betrayed child.
Obadiah drips poison in his ear, words of hate and envy poorly hidden behind patronizing, insincere praise, as he lowers Tony's rigid, paralyzed body onto the couch in a parody of care.
More than ever, Tony wants his beautiful, powerful armor banded around him, protecting him – without it, what is he anymore?
A fool, blind and ignorant and naïve, and now truly helpless, as he has always been. Too busy chasing around after magic and having fun in a heady fantasyland to notice the rot spreading in his own house. Too starry-eyed to see the true nature of one of the few people he'd trusted, to realize that Obadiah Stane has been using him for years, that Tony's nothing more than a pretty, glib-tongued figurehead for people to stare at, preening and self-congratulatory, while behind his back Obadiah sold out everything the Starks father and son have ever believed in.
Blackness rushes across Tony's vision, despair, and for a moment he genuinely wishes he'd died back on that Afghanistan plain.
He'd never wanted this thing in his chest, but when Obadiah, his mentor, his second father, his enemy rips it out of him, it feels like the man's torn out his heart.
And he may as well have, because without it, Tony has minutes to live.
…scratch that. He doesn't really want to die after all.
Because he can see it so clearly now, as Obadiah gloats over his frozen, dying form. War feeding on war feeding on war, glutting itself on the corpses of the dead and leaping back into battle, and his work, the suit and the arc reactor, all that power in that little light, Tony's legacy, at the heart of it all. It'll power nastier and more deadly weapons that kill just to kill, rather than clear skies, and ships soaring off to Mars and the stars, and the joy of flight, and armor that can stand up to everything else the world can throw at it and say no.
No more.
With the arc reactor in his hands, and the armor, Obadiah will set the world on fire and sell matches to everyone who wants them, and pat their hands and tell them that a flamethrower's almost the same as a firehose.
And for all that knowledge and the terribly cold and empty feeling in his chest, it's Obadiah's offhand, faux-rueful comment, tossed back over his shoulder as he leaves with the future in his professional, tidy little case, that he's going to kill Pepper for being involved in this – for Tony getting her involved – that sinks the last barbed knife into his gut.
He should have sent her away, too.
Everything, everything is lost. It was taken from him.
Rage drives Tony to drag himself towards the curving staircase down to his workshop, one numb and frozen limb at a time, a zombie with its knees taken out from under it but the scent of life luring it on.
Dead man crawling. Undead, back from the dead, lucky to be alive, doesn't deserve to be alive, crawled out of the grave for just one more fuckup –
He can't breathe. He can feel his heart stuttering out of rhythm, and god, it's a terrible thing to be able to hear his own heartbeat as it flails and convulses, shrinking away from the deadly little fragments circling like vultures over something wounded, dying; patient and remorseless, knowing there's no escape and hungry.
Woodgrain scratches under his stubby fingernails as he begs the universe for one more breath, then demands it, then spits at that fucker and goes on anyway. Another lurch. Another few centimeters. Another limb to move forward. Another spot of floor to press the gaping reactor housing further towards his spine.
Tony curses everyone and everything, including himself, the damn blind fool, dying on the floor.
However bad the floor was, it's nothing compared to the stairs, which bump every centimeter of him, a separate blow for every movement –
But at the bottom, down all these stupid ledges, past the broken glass he'd destroyed to realize how useful the flight stabilizers could be, across the lab floor, there's a cute glass box with salvation inside, because Tony doesn't deserve to have nice things but he's kept Pepper this long and he's not going to let anyone kill her and then go on to burn down the world.
There are people in this world Tony likes.
Most of the glass has been swept aside, which is good, because his vision is going dark with the lack of oxygen to his brain, heart staggering, not doing its job, and he can't see and he can't breathe, and he can't move. His limbs are moving, but he's not making any progress, and –
No, no, no…
The world, it turns out, doesn't care, and Tony goes under into the darkness howling and scrabbling at the walls as they slip away and let him fall.
"– stupid, idiotic, fragile mortal imbecile – entirely witless, petty little creature – I should have left you to chase your tail until the sky fell down and solved things that way, at least then when you bit yourself in the ass it wouldn't have been my problem – you're more trouble than you're even possibly worth, you idiot, damn you!"
There's a voice, and Tony knows it, but he's too far under to respond or make any sense of it.
"Bastard!" it snarls, and, "Moron!" and words that Tony doesn't recognize. He speaks French and German and Spanish and Japanese and a bit of Mandarin, but that's like nothing he's ever heard before.
It sounds extremely pissed, though.
"- and oh no, you'll be fine, because you know what you're doing, of course!" the understandable words start up again in the middle of a sentence that had sounded like a reenactment, just from the tone of sarcastic British accent high-pitched in imitation of what was probably meant to be Tony. "You idiot! If you're dead, I will never let you hear the end of it, ever! I have put too much work into you – I hate you, you know that? Wake up!"
Tony takes a breath, and chokes on it, because he can breathe, there's air in his lungs and he can practically feel it roaring through his brain, flipping switches and striking sparks and lighting things up again like a disco ball in a wind tunnel. Coughing raggedly, and realizing only as he tries to convulse around it that he's on his back and there's a weight on his stomach and lower body, he forces his eyes open.
The first thing he manages to focus on, scattered across the floor next to him, is a pile of glass shards and a metal frame he should recognize, somehow, and a shadow cast across the floor.
When he stops coughing, he manages to turn his head and look up into green eyes, glaring at him poisonously, and a scowl that's bared teeth in a snarl. From below, blue light casts the planes of his face into even sharper relief.
"I hate you," says Loki, and thumps a fist down on Tony's shoulder.
"Ow," Tony says, or tries to. It comes out as more coughing, in the course of which he realizes that his racing heart is beating time again because that familiar old arc reactor is plugged into his chest and shining, and that Loki is sitting astride him, lower lip caught between his teeth and fear, actual fear in his eyes, and really, it does not take a genius to do the math here.
"How –" he asks instead, a second and a lifetime later. He's just going to lie here on the floor and breathe. It's fine.
Loki closes his eyes and braces a hand next to Tony's head as he sighs. "Damn you," he says rather than answering. "I thought – you people, you're so stupidly fragile, how do you get anything done?"
"Most of us don't run on batteries," Tony points out. He gropes at the reactor, checking it, bicycle-wheel spokes clicking beneath his fingers. "Loki, what the hell?"
"You ask me that?" The first couple of words are a shout, the rest hissed, and Loki raises a fist as if to thump him again. "You lie on the floor with your heart torn away and you ask me what I am doing? Pepper called me, because she is the one with half a brain. What happened?"
Tony grimaces as the memory of Obadiah's voice and the covetous, greedy look on his face swims its way back up from his subconscious where all his nightmares live, hot-bunking it and setting up camp in sleeping bags in spare corners, taping themselves to the ceiling like that guy in that LAN party picture that keeps making the rounds of the computer geek circuit. "You gonna let me up?" he asks.
"No," Loki says like a child, scowling. But he moves anyway, and even offers Tony a rock-solid hand as the engineer tries to sit up.
Tony puts his back against his desk – he'd almost gotten there, or maybe Loki moved him while he was unconscious – and closes his eyes in a long blink. When he opens them again, Loki's crouching by his side, one knee to the ground for balance, looking him over skeptically as if he expects to find a status readout somewhere to go with the reactor back in his chest where Tony has never been so happy to have it.
He's back. He's back. One lost thing of Tony's, found again when he needed it most.
Something wrong in the world slots back into place like the arc reactor, proof he has a heart indeed, and Tony glows a little brighter.
"My hero," Tony declares, a weary, happy smile tugging at his mouth uncontrollably.
To his delight, Loki looks away and very nearly blushes. "I'm no one's hero," he answers, voice curt. Butterfingers rolls over, the whirr of his movements broken and interrupted. DUM-E and U aren't far behind, but they sound worse. It sounds like sabotage. Tony hates someone a lot.
"Tough shit," Tony says contentedly. He reaches out, manages to grab Loki's arm, and realizes for the first time that the magician is wearing a terrifically gorgeous black suit that's not at all appropriate for sitting on garage workshop floors, and somehow, in the midst of summer, it's very cold to the touch. God, was he at a party or an important meeting or something? Does Loki even go to parties or important meetings? Tony's never been able to figure that out.
Did he drop everything and race over here, just because the lady who works for his jerk of an ex-boyfriend called him and said what, that she was worried because Tony dropped off the line mid-call?
Also, now that he has the brainpower to appreciate the sight – and concussed slugs probably have the brainpower to appreciate something so obvious – Loki looks amazing in it. Makes the shitflood that is today just that tiniest little bit better.
"You're mine anyway. You just saved my life, you know that?"
He would have crawled across more broken glass – there's tons around – to hear that disdainful snort again. "Don't make me into something I'm not. I don't like so many people that I can afford to stand by and watch one of the few I do die on the floor. Now what were you doing?"
Tony doesn't get a chance to answer before someone shouts, "Get away from him!"
He recognizes the voice.
But obviously Loki doesn't, because between one beat of Tony's still-racing heart and the next, the magician twists around, right hand brushing over his left wrist as he rises snarling, and in an instant he's standing over Tony protectively with a long knife raised before him, ready to slash down.
In the doorway, Rhodey holds his ground, sidearm leveled dead between Loki's eyes, ready to fire.
"Whoa, whoa!" Tony shouts as loud as he has the breath for, before someone gets hurt, because someone is going to. "Stand down!"
Rhodey looks skeptical, eyes a bit wild, but he backs up a pace. Tony can only imagine the expression on Loki's face, but even from the floor, it's clear that he's wound tightly enough to snap.
Floor time should probably be over, then, and Tony tries to both get to his feet and defuse the standoff. "Neither of you are the enemy, guys. God, you're fast, Loki. Calm down. It's okay. And where the hell were you keeping that pigsticker? There's not a spare fold on that suit. Rhodey, dammit, don't shoot him. Or me. Put the gun away. C'mon. Seriously."
Slowly, Rhodey holsters his gun, stepping into the lab as the magician lowers his knife, although he keeps it in his hand, depriving Tony of the chance to see where he was going to sheath it again.
"Tony," Rhodey asks, "what's going on? Are you okay? Pepper said –"
"Pepper's in trouble," Tony cuts him off. "Obadiah tried to kill me. Hired the Ten Rings. He's been selling my weapons under the table, dealing to both sides, probably for years. He was here. Took the arc reactor right out of my chest. He's going after Pep, too, I sent her to dig up those files –"
Rhodey swears fantastically. Tony catches Loki listening with interest, nodding approval even as those gem-green eyes tighten with unspoken fury – for him, Tony realizes, at the man who tried to kill his lover.
He doesn't deserve these people, any of them.
"I'll call in someone to pick her up," Rhodey says, reaching for his phone. "Come on, I'll drive."
"You drive." Tony's eyes turn to the open space and the assembler hidden below. "I'll fly."
If he survives the next hour or so, Tony will savor forever the amazement on Rhodey's face as the red and gold suit slots into place, fuses together into the wonderful, powerful, beautiful thing it is, and the outright grin on Loki's as the magician looks him up and down and laughs.
"I knew you were interesting," says Loki.
"Back at you," Tony answers, the speakers making his voice a metallic growl he's quickly coming to like, a lot.
"Anything I can do?" Rhodey asks.
"Keep the skies clear."
And so, he's fighting for his life, for all their lives, against a monstrous, oversized, overpowered, corrupted version of his own sleek and practically tasteful by comparison combat armor, with the backstabbing bastard he'd once considered family plus his own stolen arc reactor at its heart.
And so, he's not facing down some terrified terrorists with handguns, but every missile and weapon and – is that a minigun? Shit, that's a minigun – that could possibly be jacked into that colossus.
And so, it could squash him flat, suit or no, with a single armored fist.
And so, he's running on a beta version of the reactor – something big for fifteen minutes, his own voice echoes forward in time – and running out of time to shut that thing down before anyone else gets hurt.
And so, there are literally a million or more civilians caught in the crossfire, potential victims or hostages or diversions.
And so, he's outmassed, outclassed, outpowered, on his own.
And so, what?
He's Tony fucking Stark, badass, and he's going to show Obadiah how it's done.
Obadiah ain't seen nothin' yet.
Tony flies, and he fights, and he dances this dance like he's danced it a thousand times before, and will a thousand times again, and at times, between blows, between occupied cars being thrown at his head and missiles streaking past his body, he has to stop himself from laughing aloud.
There's an exhilaration running through him like fire, like alcohol, like sex; it's the joy of battle when he knows he's in the right, when he knows he's doing something important, when he's looking out for someone other than himself, and is looking totally awesome doing so.
He flies without knowing where he'll land, or how far there is to fall, or even if he'll survive to hit the ground before burning up in midair, and it's glorious.
He's back from the dead for a second time over, because the people he loves keep hauling him out of his grave and challenging him to do better, and now he's alive, and he's powerful, and he's in focus, like this is what he was meant for.
He's for making things, and he made this, and look at it go.
Look at him go!
Not useless. Not helpless. Not a victim. Not as silly as people think, as even he'd thought he was. Not some square-jawed blond hero, dukes up nobly, but to hell with that, this is better; he'll still take cleverness and mischief and the razor's edge every time.
He soars, and he flies through the fire untouched, and he darts around that lumbering monstrosity of Obadiah's, ducking and dodging and fighting back.
Any part of his mind that might have protested that this is madness is drowned out by the exhilarated laughter of the rest of him, running on pure adrenaline.
He's wrapped in a suit of high-tech armor, but wings of pure light and freedom have opened up in his chest, and he's happier than he's ever been.
Tony's got people to protect. People who care for him.
So he stands between them and Obadiah Stane, and his perverted killer armor, and everything that backstabbing traitor wants to do at the expense of everyone else.
Because Tony's just found that there's nothing better than having something to live for, even if he dies for it.
Not for the first time, and not for the last, thank goodness, Pepper Potts slightly wants to punch her boss.
She settles for removing a butterfly bandage just a little more sharply than necessary.
"Ow," Tony says, and beams at her anyway. He's been Mr. News all morning, reading her choice passages from the newspapers Happy had been sent out to fetch as soon as they hit the racks, and loading up a dozen websites every time she turned around, tabs popping up like mushrooms, and there were at least three TVs tuned to a total of eighteen different news channels – Pepper counted.
He's toting around his favorite, the one with "WHO IS IRON MAN?" on the front page, and even though he's nattering about the name not being scientifically or technically accurate, Pepper doesn't have to be a supergenius adrenaline junkie idiot to know that first, he likes it a lot, and second, she's going to be hearing that name for the rest of absolutely forever.
Agent Coulson comes in, discreetly and politely insistent, and doesn't quite dismiss her while the agent goes over Tony's lines with him one more time.
She goes anyway, assessing today's press conference and its crop of hungry, eager reporters with a weary, wary eye. She knows just about everyone in this room. Most of them know better than to pester her for hints, and she puts off – politely enough – the few over-enthusiastic hopefuls who try it, imploring them to wait a few more seconds and they'll get the full story.
Or at least, the SHIELD-approved one, which is 100 percent not remotely true. Agent Coulson has been making this will lead to paperwork faces.
Ah. She really does know everyone in this room, including the man leaning against the back wall, dressed down in beiges and browns so boring her eyes nearly slide right over him. He might almost be a writer from some struggling daily newspaper, except he doesn't have paper or pen or tablet or voice recorder, and he's watching the crowd from the back of the room, not the podium. Also, he's tucked his long hair up under a newsboy cap in equally dull brown, which Pepper suspects is a joke.
"Thank you," Pepper says quietly, joining him – not looking at him, as if she was just standing here, as if she has no idea who he is and certainly couldn't tell stories, if asked.
She really doesn't know who he is, she suspects, but she could tell stories.
But she won't, because Loki has proven himself to her in every way that counts.
He'd answered, when she'd called him – she doesn't know what Tony is always whining about – and she'd said only, I know you're mad, but Tony's in trouble, please tell me you're somewhere near the house, and he'd answered, I'll find him.
Loki sighs, now. Takes his hands out from behind his back and folds them across his chest. "I can care. I just usually don't."
"He's looking for you," Pepper warns him, letting the wistful note in his voice pass uncommented-on. She suspects her input would not be welcomed.
"Of course he is," Loki answers. He grins at her. She can't stop herself from smiling back. She can always use another pair of hands interested in keeping Tony alive and in one mostly intact piece and happy, and if this man is willing… "And he will yet find me – I am here, am I not?"
"I'm kind of surprised that you are, actually." There are a lot of professional nosy-pokes, otherwise known as journalists, around, and Loki officially doesn't exist anywhere – she got that much from Tony and confirmed it through JARVIS.
"Tony's in front of cameras," Loki says, eyes sparkling, grinning like a fox strolling out of the rabbit hutch licking fur from its muzzle. "This should be good."
It was.
End of Act Two
To be continued.
Author's Note: "Mirage" will be on hiatus for the next two weeks to give me time to regain my lead. This will ensure reliable, on-time, better chapters, with everything set up and thought out and foreshadowed in appropriate moments, throughout Act Three. "Mirage" will resume on May 14th. Promise!
