A/N: And I continue to be amazed and overwhelmed by the reviews and amount of faves, fuck.
StandingMoonlit, yes, the title is from Paradise Lost.
And to the person who said this one is their favorite next to OTR… whoa. Just whoa. What a compliment. Thank you so much; I was smiling like an idiot for five minutes after I read that.
Also, I used an actual quote from an old drama teacher of mine at the beginning.
"Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw."
This is the passage from Macbeth which Loki reads for his audition, in clear, carrying tones. He only glances down at his book to catch a single word and then he's right back to making eye contact with the people in the audience, using a trick from an old theater instructor: "Look at the front row, talk to the back row". He can see Tony, sitting with his arm slung across Pepper's shoulders, staring at him, but he ignores him and reads until Macbeth's lines are done. The students applaud—and for once they don't sound like they're being forced to do so. He gets off the stage, goes back to his seat. Thanos hugs him, hard, grinning.
"You read yours better than I did," he says.
"No." Loki ducks his head, hiding the blush on his cheeks, smiling faintly. Thanos touches his jaw lightly; the gesture is simple but holds a startling amount of intimacy, and Loki wonders when it got here.
"You were definitely better than your ex," Thanos mutters, rolling his eyes. Loki gives him a look.
"He wasn't so bad." Actually, Tony read surprisingly well for someone who claimed throughout all of high school that Shakespeare wasn't fun unless you were drunk. "He might get the part."
Thanos shakes his head and kisses Loki's temple, and again he is surprised by the intimate nature of the touch. "You are Macbeth, Lo'. Not Tony Stark."
Then there are tryouts for the rest of the characters—Thanos and Loki stay seated and watch as Tony goes and tries out for both Duncan and Macduff. He reads Macduff with passion and gives an underlying sense of grief to Duncan's lines, and Loki finds himself wishing Pepper weren't here, if for no other reason than so he could give Tony a proper congratulations afterwards. Even Thanos acknowledges that Tony is talented, and Loki cannot keep a small smile from flicking up the corners of his lips.
After the auditions are over, as everyone is leaving the room, Loki picks up his now empty coffee cup and walks over to where Tony is standing.
"You did well, Stark," he says.
"He was the best," Pepper corrects, and Loki does not miss Tony's eye roll.
"Well naturally, of course I was the best," he says, "but Jesus, Pepper, give Loki some credit. He put life into Macbeth."
Loki rolls his eyes too, because he can hear the sarcasm in Tony's voice. "Hardly," he says, and Thanos comes up behind him, still tapping away on his iPhone.
"Got yourself an actor boyfriend," Tony says conversationally to Thanos. "He should come with a caution sign on his forehead: Handle with Care."
Pepper giggles, and Loki wants to ask her if she knows her boyfriend has ridden him until they're both ready to pass out from aching exhaustion.
"He's got the part," says Thanos, and his voice is tight.
"Maybe," Tony shrugs, not looking at Loki. He's holding Pepper around the shoulders again; suddenly she says:
"If Tony doesn't get the main part I won't go see the play, you know. I think Shakespeare is boring."
Loki glares at her, then at Tony. He can feel all the muscles in his body tensing up; abruptly he turns away from the three of them. "Excuse me," he mutters, and storms off. Outside, it's sunny, and he walks for a while, struggling to clear his head. After a while, he goes to the library and spends the rest of the day holed up in there, ignoring texts from Thanos until the late evening. They go out together, but it's not any fun for Loki, who cannot get over the way Tony was looking at him in the theater, when he was on stage. It was during his Macduff monologue, and he was keeping eye contact with Loki the entire time, and though he was speaking clearly it was obvious he was nervous, and using Loki as an anchor to keep his voice, his movements, steady.
Loki cannot stop wondering why Tony was looking at him for support, rather than Pepper. (Or rather, he thinks he knows, and shudders to actually admit it to himself.) His date with Thanos ends early, and they go up to the third floor of their dorm, and Loki presses his fingers against Thanos' wrist and kisses him, and Thanos murmurs, "See you tomorrow," against his lips, but the tone of his voice is I love you and Loki's not ready for that, so he just nods and goes in his dorm room.
The minute he's inside and has put down his things, Tony's pinning him against the wall, kissing him roughly, and Loki finds himself gripping his wrists and kissing back. They tear each other's clothes off and bite at each other's skin, and Loki does not care that the marks will still be visible tomorrow.
"Why…" he says, when Tony's got him on the floor and is getting the lubricant. "Why are you… such an asshole?"
"I don't like his attitude," Tony grunts, lips brushing Loki's throat, and he wonders how in the world Tony knew that he was referring to the way he'd treated Thanos earlier.
"He hates you too… and so do I," Loki mumbles, then lets out a gasp of pleasure mixed with pain as Tony begins to spread him open.
Tony pauses, looks at Loki. His eyes are darkened with sex and lust and Loki's never seen a more beautiful sight. "How come you're lying here, then, even though you swore to me you weren't going to anymore?"
Loki does not have an answer for that, so he drags Tony down and kisses him, hard, and when the older man pulls away Loki tells him to get on with it, for god's sake, so he does. Loki ends up with rug burn, but he doesn't care, no matter what he tries to tell himself. It's a pleasant ache, like the weakness in his muscles, and he finds himself tracing a path down Tony's throat to his sternum.
"You really did read well today," he says quietly. "I wasn't lying."
"I know." Tony grins, and Loki chuckles before he can stop himself.
"You self-centered egomaniac."
"Ah, you love it though." There's a heaviness behind the teasing in Tony's voice, and Loki does not want to think about the implications—nor the truth in the statement—so he just kisses him again, carding his fingers through his soft brown hair.
Neither of them ever mentions how, in the morning, they wake up still tangled around each other on the floor, Loki's fingers in Tony's hair, Tony's hand on Loki's arm.
/
The following week, Tony wakes up to the sound of his phone buzzing. It's a text from Pepper; evidently she's very excited because it's in all caps:
"THE AUDITION RESULTS ARE IN OH TONY COME SEE."
And there's a note, too, on the table between he and Loki's bed; it reads simply, 'Congratulations, Stark,' in a familiar, elegant script. He thinks, oh god, I got the part, and cannot get dressed and down to the drama building fast enough.
There's a crowd around the posted sheet; people examining it, seeing what their assigned parts are, screaming with excitement, falling back to allow their friends a chance to look. Tony pushes through, looks… and his mouth falls open.
Loki is Macbeth. Not like Tony is surprised.
But Tony is Macduff. And that's just as good.
The thing that gets him, though, is that Thanos—that assfuck, that guy who thinks he's so much better than Tony just because he has what Tony wants now—is Banquo. Which means that, unless Tony's remembering the play wrong, he's going to be seeing a lot of both his ex and his ex's new boyfriend during the rehearsals.
He pinches the space between his eyebrows and sighs.
As if this year wasn't already fucking long enough.
A/N: Additional note I forgot to add at the beginning: This is my last update for an as yet unknown amount of time. Please don't forget about or abandon this story, as I will be writing in Europe when I have time and inspiration. Thank you all again so much for everything!
