A week had passed since Loki's fainting and the Avengers were still treating him with precarious unease. To the trickster, it made him roll his eyes in annoyance and not at all tickled his insides with gratitude and acknowledgement.
Steve had been cooking and offering Loki various meals, which although he had cooked before Loki's passing out, he hadn't ever so directly offered him the food. Normally he would have just left it out in the kitchen until the demigod had wandered through and taken the plate, hurrying back to his room to entertain himself with his books rather than the Midgardian foolishness of a 'television.'
However, since his fainting?
Loki could barely make it two feet into the kitchen before Steve would dutifully hover around him, offering to open cabinets for the god, and help out in every which way he could.
Of course, Loki milked this for the first couple of days, but after a week? Loki wasn't some petulant child who needed to be treated like fine china, he was a god after all, and he was far superior to this team of heroes.
That's the air of pride which carried Loki into Tony Stark's lab that fateful, fateful Friday.
Chin held high and confidence pouring out from the trickster's green eyes; he dragged a lean finger over a pile of scrap metal in a rather bloated box.
"Do you ever clean?" Loki uttered in distaste, smudging the dust between his fingers as he eyed the Man of Iron working elbows deep in a new project. At least, Loki assumed it was a new project as it was just a heap of junk with barely movable parts and oil leaking from more than three different places.
"Not really, but are you offering, Reindeer Games?" Tony retorted mildly over this shoulder, tongue parting his lips as he rummaged around the metal. "God, you think it'd be a lot easier to manipulate this without it being attached to….whatever it was attached to before."
Loki rolled his eyes, "Truly fascinating, Stark."
Tony shrugged his shoulders, pulling back with satisfaction as he wiped his grimy hands on a black splotched blue rag. At least, Loki thought it was once blue back in the day.
"Hey, you're the one who decided to willingly come down to my lab for the day," Tony mentioned, walking over to another box of robotic pieces, fishing for something in particular.
"Why yes, as you stated you would have a project for me to manipulate. Yet, I see no such promise appearing before my eyes, so if you don't mind, I think I shall be going now," Loki began to turn on his heel just as he heard the triumphant billionaire pull out a small, metallic box.
"Here it is!" Tony held the box outstretched to the trickster.
Loki eyed him with suspicion.
"What is it?"
"Just take it."
"What is it?"
Tony sighed heavily, rolling his brown eyes. "It's your new project." Tony muttered an almost inaudible 'duh' once Loki tentatively reached out his slim hand and took the box.
"It's a prototype for making the team equipped, with your magical aide, of having things appear and disappear," Tony waved at Loki's form in a sputtering array of arm gestures. "It's pretty early stages but I was thinking you could tinker with it with your magic. You know, spread your holiness into the box and make it equipped to do…whatever it is you do."
Loki raised a brow at Tony, pondering the idea over in his mind as his eyes followed the curves and smooth corners of the box.
"While magic is more complicated than you have the brainpower to understand, your idea is…amusing, at best."
"Amusing schmoozing," Tony remarked, waving his hands in the air again and picking up his scotch from a nearby lopsided table. "It's still in the planning stages, and I don't have your wit or flawless accent to make the idea sound more up your alley." Tony shrugged, tipping his drink to Loki subtly. "There's only one of you, after all."
Loki smirked in mischief, "Are you sure about that?"
Tony's face took on a squeamish look. "Eugh, please no more of your weird duplication shit. I still haven't gotten over the pranks you pulled from the last one-which, by the way, you still owe me for saving your ass when it came to what you did to the mayor."
Loki's pleasure reached his eyes then, his orbs twinkling.
"You've got to admit, she even laughed about it after the fact," Loki replied, observing the memories of the event fondly in his mind.
"Yeah, after she was ready to throw you into jail and make you the next prison bitch," Tony downed his scotch, and waved to a box by Loki's right. "Now, put that down and make yourself useful and bring me that crowbar from over there." Tony gestured to the general vicinity of where Loki would expect to find a crowbar.
Loki gently set down the metallic box on the nearest workbench and set about finding the crowbar. Pulling the rusty contraption from behind a few stray tires and an empty bottle of gin, Loki held the tool as far from his Asgardian clothing as he possibly could, imagining the filth that crawled over his fingers from merely touching the damned thing.
He was about three feet away from Stark when the world began to shift off kilter.
Loki reached out an arm and this time grasped onto the back of a lone chair, his knuckles turning white as his strength caused the chair to wince and groan.
Thinking that he was maybe tilting his head, Loki straightened himself but it did nothing to re-straighten the world around him. The horizontal edges of Stark's lab began to shift perpendicular to the drinking billionaire.
Loki swallowed thickly, his tongue feeling too large for his mouth as cotton balls seemed to sprout within his ears.
The filthy crowbar slipped from Loki's weakening grip, clattering to the ground with a loud yelp.
The shallow edges of Stark's frame rippled as the mechanic began to turn around and level an annoyed glare at the trickster.
That is, of course, until Loki just managed to see the flicker of confusion flash in Stark's eyes, his body turning to face Loki head-on.
"Y-ou- o-kay, L-o-ki?"
Every syllable in Tony's worried tone contorted and stretched out in the presence of Loki's ears. Loki meant to shake his head, thoughts dripping in his mind and repeating themselves over and over as he wondered, what's happening to me?
"L-o-ki?"
His vision shifted in and out like a camera lens on a swaying leaf, as the world turned ever sourer, the ceiling mixing into the floor and vice versa.
He couldn't even feel his mouth open as he heard his echoing voice whisper, "I-I'm not."
Whether that was in relation to Stark's question or just an admission that something was significantly wrong with him, he wasn't entirely sure. His bones began to feel like liquefied jelly as his world continued to sway as if he were standing on a boat.
Maybe barely standing was more accurate.
"M-be I sh- call -uce."
Speech was becoming intangible to Loki as he closed his eyes to shut out the world, hoping it would stop the world from spinning and warping and distorting, but all it did was make the nausea more pronounced.
Loki felt his body yank forwards, his mouth sputtering as something slopped out from his lips, landing onto the ceiling with a sickening plop.
Fear laced its way through Loki's veins, his mind chattering alone alone alone alone to a nonsensical degree.
This must have been the longest, most agonizing bout of sickness Loki had ever felt in his life, and as a Jotun runt pretending to be Asgardian, he had shared his fair bit of sickness in the past.
But this?
This was something warped and unfamiliar, strange and disconcerting.
Loki could feel his brain beginning to hover in the air above his skull, stripped of its holder and dancing like a bear with a tinfoil hat.
His joints began to loosen and his body in reality must have been swaying, as the familiar round of dizziness from his previous fainting spell collided full force into Loki's mangled form.
He gave a guttural sound of shock before he limply collided into something warm.
~#~
The next thing Loki was aware of was the smooth rise and fall of his chest. It felt like his arms were crossed over his torso and the simple act of breathing let Loki know that he was still alive. There was both some comfort and discomfort in acknowledging that thought.
Loki then became aware of his heart beating, which was more soothing than he ever recalled it being before.
His senses were gradually returning to him and he recognized the feeling of someone else's breaths beneath his body and the warmth of their exhales on the top of his head.
The smell of unpleasant moth balls and stray amounts of dust filtered through his nostrils and he huffed in response, hoping to expel the little demons.
A voice behind him prompted his eyelids to flutter open.
"Loki?"
The trickster groaned in response, Tony Stark's voice sounding more graveled and bent than he could care to remember.
Stark tensed beneath him, as anxiety gripped him in a choke hold.
"Are you with me?"
Green eyes traveled over the rusted crowbar, now separated into two distinct pieces, lying a good two feet from where the two men were lying.
It's not that Loki couldn't answer Stark's questions; it's just that his brain was barely functioning at its normal rate and he didn't dare possess the strength needed to deal with the fool. Had he been in his right state of mind, he would have known this wouldn't ease Stark in the slightest. The man could talk for ages about nothing at all, for goodness sake.
"I-I mean, you can't be dead, right? You'd tell me if you were dead, right?"
Loki sputtered a hissing laugh at Stark's concern.
"I'd be too busy being dead though, wouldn't I?" it was a lame retort but with Loki's strained voice it came out well enough.
Tony huffed out a relieved sigh.
"Oh thank god, you're alive," the mechanic uttered, a slight bend of sarcasm dripping into his voice.
"It appears that way," Loki replied, wanting then to begin separating his limbs from the mess of Stark's but finding he had no leeway.
Before he could start the process of arriving once again on his own two feet, Bruce Banner's duplicate face appeared in Loki's line of vision.
"Still think you're just fine?" Bruce's clipped tone asked the trickster, a throwback to the week Loki had spent reassuring his new teammates that his first fainting spell was just that, a first and never to be repeated again.
Loki shrugged with one shoulder, "Maybe it's something worth looking into."
Bruce quirked a questioning brow but held out his hand for the trickster to reach out for.
Begrudgingly and with slight embarrassment, Loki accepted the gesture, still feeling weak and off from his latest spiral into the chasms of darkness.
"I'd like you to meet me in the infirmary before you head back to your room," Bruce said, already expecting Loki to wander off unsteadily down the corridor and retreat to his bedroom.
"Why? I didn't fall and hit anything this time." Loki bluntly stated, rubbing the back of his neck so as to hide the tremors in his hands.
"Except me," Stark muttered under his breath, standing up faster than Loki did in a way that made the trickster momentarily despise him.
Bruce eyed the trickster with consideration and an overflowing amount of patience.
"I don't want to push you, Loki, as I know you're easily skittish, but fainting twice within one week is…concerning to say the least," Bruce motioned to the room around them briefly. "Besides, you're a part of this team now and as a teammate, we tend to care for one another. I don't like seeing you in this state of illness and I'm sure you don't enjoy experiencing it."
"And if I did?" Loki challenged, chin rising in the air as his eyes narrowed at the doctor.
"We'd totally call you a masochist from now on," Stark supplied, peeking over the side of Bruce's shoulder.
"Do you enjoy experiencing it?" Bruce countered easily and Loki's distaste showed plainly on his face. "That's what I thought. Just, be careful and try and give us some warning next time."
Loki scoffed, "Right, like I can wake up in the morning and say to myself 'You know, today I think I'll faint.'"
Bruce shook his head mildly, "You know what I meant."
"How could I? When you make it sound like it's ever so voluntary for me to willingly experience these…episodes," Loki spat in contempt, anger swirling inside his chest.
Bruce sighed pitifully, hoping to evade another argument with the demigod as the last one had gotten them all in trouble with a police officer.
"All I ask is that you take care of yourself better. That means eating meals with us more often than spending time secluded in your room. And actually sleeping and eating said meals would help too," Bruce pointed out, giving the demigod an unamused look. "It's one thing to fill your plate with food and another to actually swallow its contents."
Loki sighed in mirth, tapping an impatient foot on the floor.
"Also, if this happens again, we're going to have to alert Thor," Bruce rubbed the side of his stiff jaw. "I know you didn't want him to know about last time but now that this has happened twice….he really should know about it."
"That oaf doesn't deserve to know anything about me. Not after his bargain with the Allfather was to send me into the company of you so called mightiest heroes."
"Even so," Stark cut in, brown eyes leveling the noncompliant demigod. "Thor still knows you better than we do, especially about your species. And, since we're no medical doctors on your Frost Giant heritage, and because said heritage makes up your anatomical make-up, it's better than going on nothing, which is pretty much what we have right now."
Loki let out a controlled, steady exhale, counting to ten in his mind to quell the anger within his throat.
"Very well, I will accept these terms and conditions. But mark my words, you will not have to bend over backwards to aid me in this manner again."
Loki quickly turned on his heels then, sauntering off to exit Tony's lab.
He didn't miss a beat when he overheard Stark muttering, "Yeah, because it's oh so voluntary."
A/N:
Hey everyone! Here's an update to this fic! I'm already cooking up in my brains the ideas for the next two chapters, and then there'll be some resolved two chapters afterwards, so we may wind up with a 7 chapter long fic. I've been in an awesome writing mood and will likely have another one-shot up by the end of the week. :D
I hope everyone is enjoying this! Poor Loki though ^^; Thank you for all the faves and follows! *hugs*