Ultron knows we're coming. Odds are we'll be riding into heavy fire, and that's what we signed up for. But the people of Sokovia, they didn't. So our priority is getting them out. All they want is to live their lives in peace, and that's not gonna happen today. But we can do our best to protect them, and we can get the job done. We find out what Ultron's been building, we find Romanov, and we clear the field. Keep the fight between us.
Ultron thinks we're monsters. That we are what's wrong with the world. This isn't just about beating him. It's about whether he's right.
FRIDAY came into existence three weeks after Loki faked his death. It was pathetic, honestly. A copy of Jarvis's source code without his memory banks and a voice pack stitched together from clips of Loki speaking in security footage. For some fucked up reason Tony thought it would be comforting to have a facsimile of Loki talking in his ear. The first time he and FRIDAY spoke Tony didn't get out of bed for two days, and Jarvis quietly changed the code without his permission. Maybe it's the ironic reversal of Loki being alive while Jarvis is dead, but when he's sorting through his backup programs, FRIDAY's disc calls to him. The lilting Irish accent doesn't resemble anyone he's known, but the program itself is a hefty reminder of why he's walking into fire.
Digital beeps turn into fake sex noises in his ear, and he figures it's only natural that Loki would be asleep at two in the morning. Anything Tony tells him will just fuel his anxiety, so the message is spare.
"Hey Slugger, got some news for you." he murmurs, "We found Ultron. He's waiting for us. Sokovia, of course. Should be quick. Tell the biters I said hi, and, uh-"
Tony swallows, shifts the phone a little higher against his ear. The Tesseract pulses in his left hand and casts haunting blue shadows on his breastplate.
"Listen, I know we already talked about this but-"
Steve calls for the team to load up from the next room, and Quicksilver walks past the server room door. Gives him some really annoying side-eye. Tony sighs.
"Fuck it, I'll ask you when I get back. I gotta go." Tony goes to hang up, and then the neurotic parent in the back of his mind brings the phone back to his ear, "Oh, and Fen has horn rash again. The itch creme is on the kitchen counter. You gotta watch him, Lokes, he's getting sneaky with the scratching."
"Tony?" Steve calls faintly.
"You coming, Stark?" Clint echoes.
"So, uh, yeah, I'll see you soon." Tony says, and taps the red icon to end the call. Slides the holo screen closed and tucks it away. The extra layer of chest armor is bulky, and definitely not his favorite addition to Iron Man, but it does the job. The Tesseract fits under the circular window, and when the blue light shines through it looks the same as an arc reactor.
"I'll catch up." Tony yells back, "Anyone else want a burger? I'm starving."
"What do you have Stark?" Rogers asks over the comms.
"Nothing good. A way to blow up the city." Tony says, "That'll keep it from impacting the surface. If you guys can get clear."
"I asked for a solution, not an escape plan."
God, but this is why he hates Steve Rogers. Zero compromise, ever. Nevermind that this rock is half a mile from creating global extinction, or that it's not physically possible to prevent the impact without destroying the missile. Doesn't matter, Rogers expects Tony to just pull a miracle out of his ass. While fighting a robot army.
"Impact radius is getting bigger every second. We're gonna have to make a choice." Tony grunts, the thin air and G forces making him dizzy as he rockets around the floating island. Turns out Romanov has his back, which might just validate his suspicion that they are witnessing the end of the world.
"Cap, these people are going nowhere. If Stark finds a way to blow this rock…" she says.
"I'm not leaving this rock with one civilian on it." Steve says.
"I didn't say we should leave." Natasha says, "There are worse ways to go. Besides, where else am I going to get a view like this?"
"The view is indeed impressive, Ms. Romanov." An aristocratic voice interjects, a hum of static erupting into Tony's earpiece while his pulse thumps in his chest. "But there is always room for improvement."
A helicarrier materializes out of stealth, two hundred yards ahead. Rising quickly. A silver blur circles the starboard side, covering it from enemy fire, and Tony grins at the sight of Rhodey kicking ass.
"Nice, right?" Nick Fury's voice chimes in. "Pulled her out of mothballs with a couple of old friends."
"Was that… Loki?" Steve asks.
"You are correct, sir." Loki says, and this time it isn't over the earpieces, it's shouted directly from his lips as he rides atop the first of a fleet of rescue shuttles. "Behold, your savior is here!"
"Stark, you son of a bitch." Rogers swears. "Any other secrets you'd like to share with the class?"
"My goodness, Captain, such language." Loki teases, "You shall have to put a coin in the swear jar."
"This sounds like a conversation for later, gentlemen." Hill says.
"Right you are." Loki says, and splits into about twenty clones, all smirking gamely and strutting around in their fetching black tactical suits. Barking instructions at people and getting them into orderly lines.
"You couldn't let me hog all the glory, could you?" Tony jokes, corkscrewing to the bottom side of the floating rock to get a look at the propulsion system. It's big, but it's not magic and that's a relief.
"Would you believe it was actually Miss Potts who insisted?" Loki says, "Evidently, between the two of us, I am the voice of reason."
"Clearly Miss Potts does not know you very well." Tony replies, over the sound of Loki cackling in his ear.
"Can you two flirt on your own channel?" Rhodey groans, "I've getting hives."
Tony smirks, and gets to work rigging the biggest bomb of his life.
"Man down." Clint grunts over the comms, "Repeat. Quicksilver is down."
Wanda screams over the comms, and Tony can't help it. He is a parent, his brain has been conditioned to run towards screaming children. They have time, he can make it. He guns the jets. The little witch is not hard to find, her power is uncontained, crackling with energy and gushing red. Pietro's body is a bullet-ridden mess at her feet, and he feels her pain like an earthquake rumbling.
All he sees is Hela, chained to a chair on a pile of bones and screaming for Lady Death to give her mercy. Tony knows a few things about dying after Niflheim, the first of them being that Lady Death is patient, she doesn't care whether she gets you now or later. The bell tolls for everyone some day.
Today isn't Pietro's day. He's a punk, a kid. Tony isn't even sure if the witch can do what he needs her to, but he has to try. The vision haunts him every moment. His friends dying, Loki bleeding, telling Tony he could have saved him, if only he did more. If only they hadn't fought with a weapon left in the locker.
This is what they call a point of no return. Do or don't. It isn't hard, you just say I want and fill in the blank. Or the opposite, in this case. Tony taps open the front of his suit and pulls out the Tesseract. Dives to ground level at mach 2.
"Catch!" he shouts, sliding into a fast landing in a rain of sparks and tossing the Tesseract like a softball. Wanda has quick reflexes, he'll give her that.
"What is this?" she asks, the cube levitating in front of her face and lighting up her crazy eyes.
Tony retracts his helmet. Pulls out his earpiece and snaps it in half. He figures he has about thirty seconds before Loki notices the radio silence. Should be long enough. Hopefully. This girl is dangerous, and a kid, and scared shitless. She's in a mountain of grownup trouble and the only bargaining chip they have to control her is a cooling corpse.
"That's a cube. A regular solid made of six congruent and co-linear squares. If my not-fiancé told me the truth, which admittedly is a coin toss on any given day, it contains a sentient blob of ancient parasitic snot that alters reality." Tony says blandly.
He lets her absorb that for a second, since there will be a test.
"And I intent to alter your reality with it." he continues. Directs her gaze to Pietro's body with a nod of his head, "All you gotta do is open the box. Pretty please. With sugar on top."
Wanda's slim fingers do their come hither thing, and although she looks about as freaked out as Pandora probably did opening her own box of despair, it only takes her a few seconds to unfold the cube into a six sectioned cross and reveal the surging waves of blood red within.
Which is precisely when Loki appears. Yeah, he probably should have left out the bit about hexahedron geometry. That totally wasn't necessary.
"Anthony!" he shouts, and Tony's head whips on its own. Its Loki, he isn't capable of ignoring him. His face breaks something in Tony. It's pained, uncovered, terrible.
The anger he expects, and the shock, even the betrayal. They have been sliding towards this since Loki put the cube in the fun drawer and walked out of his life. Thinking of it that way makes him sound bitter, but he isn't. It's not like that, the fact is just relevant. It's related to how he and Loki have to straddle this line between what they want and what has to happen for them to stay alive.
There is a fantasy land in Tony's head. A place where people fall in love at first sight, and orgasm simultaneously, and reach a terminal point in their relationship at which all problems resolve and they live happily ever after. In that mythical imaginary world, Loki would always come first. But they don't live there. They live in this fucked up reality where trash piles on top of trash until the whole planet is garbage like that Wall-E movie that Jori's obsessed with.
The anger, shock, and betrayal, Tony expects, but he isn't prepared for the hurt. For the way Loki's face pulls itself apart, and the sharp white of his teeth as he screams open mouthed and ugly. The answering stab of regret and guilt in his own chest catches him with the suddenness of an arrow to the back. Loki's face slacks into an expression of open fear, a silent plea of not again not you not like this, he bores into Tony's eyes until tendrils of red stretch into the air and obscure them from each other.
He senses more than sees Loki leap forward, knows already that this has become a race. Two lovers running for the abyss, competing to save each other. To not be the one left alive after the Aether devours his mate. Tony guns it, looping over the red cloud and firing a repulsor at full power. It catches Loki in the shoulder and throws him back. Sends him crashing and furious into a crumbled fountain.
Tony lands and dashes out of his suit, throws himself defenseless at the red mist and thinks take me, fucking bring it you piece of shit. The cloud runs through him, cutting through his pores like sand through a sift. Scents overwhelm him. Ozone and gasoline, infected wounds and grave dirt. It purrs and swoops, circles lazily like an apex predator that has time to play with its food. His body tenses like it knows it's about to be assaulted, and then the cloud pries his mouth open and plunges. It rips through all his barriers, pours all the information in existence into his brain all at once, and spreads itself like a body curling inside a sleeping bag. There isn't a scrap of him that hasn't been touched and changed, from his fingernails to the inside of his spine. The stone thumps with a power that feels like cruel laughter, and finally the last dregs pass Tony's lips so he can scream. There is nothing in his vision but red, he's blind and dizzy and utterly invaded, claimed by this bottomless void.
"Tony!" Loki shouts. It's ragged, gut shredding, and muffled by the stone like he is hearing it underwater, submerged in a bathtub full of red. He takes one shakey footstep towards that awful, destroyed voice, and he falls.
He's falling. Falling, falling. Spinning through a red writhing sea and-
-young. He's so young his tendons feel like jello. His face is baby smooth. The bathtub is cold but his blood is hot, it's unnaturally warm and gushing. He's alone, he's so alone. There's no one. Everyone at MIT is five years older and they think he's a freak. He's completely alone now that his parents are-
-no, that's not right. He wasn't alone, that isn't true. He had Rhodey. It was hard, but he had someone, he was never like this because-
-his parents are dead and he has no one. There are eight board members downstairs and they all want to buy him out while he's shocked and scared and hasn't talked to a lawyer. They think he's stupid, but he isn't stupid, he knows there's no point in fighting. There's nothing for him now so he should just-
-leave. He needs to get out of here, go somewhere else, somewhere better. He wants-
-Loki. Fucking Christ, he's so big. So fucking big and plowing Tony's ass. Oh fuck, oh shit, it's too much. Loki is gorgeous and strong and he's ripping a knife across Tony's throat. He's fucking Tony raw while he bleeds to death and calling him a gullible fool. The last thing he hears as he blacks out is Loki's cruel laughter that-
-does not sound like that anymore. His Loki isn't some murderous psychopath, he's broken. He can be more he's-
-on a gleaming crystal bridge with his cape whipping around him like the hero Tony always knew he could be. He's deadly and magnificent and taking down six undead Einherjar at a time while Tony flails in a turbulent sea, trying to stay afloat. Fenrir jumps after him and he thinks-
-thank fuck. Good boy. Put Pops in your mouth and carry him back up to Dad, just put your jaws around and-
-sink in. Puncture him straight through with a dull fang and rip him limb from limb while Loki meets his brother on the bridge and doesn't look down, doesn't notice Tony getting eaten alive-
-and well, he's alive and well and everything is fine. Everything is just fine in this lovely, safe place where-
-he can breathe. Finally he can lay his head in Pepper's lap and shut his eyes. Can open himself up to her kiss and drink her down without imagining her exploding and-
-dumping him. Pepper dumped him, that's how it happened. They were bad for each other, they agreed it was for the best. He's with Loki now, he's with-
-Pepper and the world is finally safe. His A.I. will murder the aliens the second they show their ugly mugs on his planet, and he doesn't give a fuck how many people had to die to accomplish it. His family will be safe under Project Insight's watchful-
-eye. That's it, he's a watcher, he's not any of these people. These are real but they aren't him. He's inside the Reality Stone and he's falling, stretching, collapsing, birthing-
-new life. She's crying and shaking and half insane with agony. Fucking worthless epidural, what's even the fucking point if she can still feel this fucking frost giant bursting out of her. Fucking stupid Loki, wanting to keep it. Never again. She is never doing this for him again, that worthless piece of-
-shit. Holy shit, what the fuck. No man is meant to feel that, what the fuck. How many versions of them are there? Jesus fuck-
-does Steve Rogers live up to the legend. Blond, tan, built like a Dorito, and so very sincere with his baby blues. Looking at Tony like he's a blushing virgin and unzipping his dad slacks. At last, it's time, he finally gets to see if half a decade of beating off to the Captain America poster in college measures up to the hype. Big, patriotic hands tug down the elastic and wow-
- this thing needs an interface. Tony did not need to see that. Seriously, him and Rogers? That is just preposterous. He's starting to get a handle on the feeling of plummeting, starting to get some awareness of the original him that's in the center-
-of the stage, playing to the crowd and dying, dying, dying inside. Walking dead, Yinsen said, yeah that's what he is. Tony just traded one painful death for another. So why the fuck not piss on stage, huh? Who the hell's gonna stop him? He gave Loki the company, and that's-
-a new one. Loki as his personal assistant? He has to laugh at that. Loki making him coffee in a pencil skirt. Come on, that's hilarious. Okay, he can control this somehow. There's a kind of subconscious trigger to these memories, which means all he has to do is guide them, think of what he wants to see. Loki. Not insane or lost or preoccupied just-
-his personal version of Loki. No one else's. This gilded monarch belongs to him, and now everyone knows it. Odin puts the consort's crown on Tony's head and he stands tall beside Loki, weaves a hand into his hand and swears to honor, to protect, to advise, and to guide, to be the confidante and the judge as no other in Asgard has authority to do. Loki murmurs his accordance and they turn to share a kiss. He meets Loki's green, glassy eyes and they are so beautiful, god Tony forgot-
-what a possessive fuck he is. That trigger phrase could send him to literally any version of the world where he and Loki date. This is impossible. It's so chaotic. His whole life trained him to push the limits of possibility, and now there are no limits and so nothing means anything. No context, just the confirmation of a limitless data set. Whatever he imagines the stone will make real, no matter how bizarre. And shit, how long has he been falling? He had a goal when he started, in a timeline that he needs to return to. A reality where-
-the sky is very blue, and the Earth is disappearing under him. Sokovia is a meteor, and it could crash down any minute. Gun fire and scraping metal surround him in a cacophonous blur of bodies and heat and Tony is standing in the center of the violence.
Red lances out of him in all directions and blows robots around like crash test dummies. By the time they hit the ground they actually are crash test dummies, their bodies plastic and covered in motion capture reticles and Tony stares at the perimeter of yellow limbs. There's no time to panic because another wave of bots come right after and they melt into ferrous liquid when the ground underneath them turns to lava.
That scares him, and so the lava cools to igneous rock. He's starting to get his bearings when three more bots come at him and spires of obsidian shoot upward and impale them from pelvis to processor. Tony flinches, and two bots to his left mimic the motion, their chests shearing away from their spinal structures and crumbling to piles of scrap. There are voices all around him but they sound like adults in Charlie Brown, muffled and indistinct.
There is a gap in the enemy line in front of him so he steps forward, rolls his shoulders and feels raw, untamed power unfurl and stalk down his arms, creep out to his fingers. His right foot meets a dead bot's severed head and he punts it into a distant mob. A hazy memory of his best selling bomb comes to mind and he thinks it would look awfully pretty exploding out of the severed head. It does indeed look impressive, because Tony Stark makes quality shit, but it also blows out his ear drums and knocks him back twenty feet. Takes down at least fifty bots though, so it's alright. Better than alright, it's intoxicating, the power of it. The effortless application of destructive force.
A bot comes up behind him and he slices it like a deviled egg with nothing but a reflexive thought. One second it's about to blow his head off, and the next it's a pile of inch thick cross sections. He wonders if he can do that to two at once, and so he does. Then three. Then eight. Ouch, okay, too many. The host's brain is organic, it cannot process that much input.
Too many options, too much stimulus. Limits, that's right, the parasite needs constraints. Without boundaries there is no meaning, no context, just infinite possibilities. He needs an interface.
A red visor blinks into existence, a rounded band across his eyes that highlights targets and groups them into clusters. How about a targeting system, area of effect indicators and a multiplication algorithm. Blue circles appear over the ground, warped to match the perspective of the landscape, tailored to the limits of the human eye. They move automatically with his attention, and grow and shrink as he considers which targets to hit. Like a video game, but with about ten million different buttons to push.
The notion of a video game codifies the display and the layout gets cleaner, snaps into the visual style of Fenrir's favorite sci-fi shooter. Radial menus appear around his hands and Tony grins, his body thrumming with banked fire. The blue indicator encircles a crowd of six bots and he puts his right hand over his left, pulls them apart in a harsh slicing motion and the cluster of bots all simultaneously break apart at the knees. It feels incredible, but he can do better. He's a motherfucking genius inventor with access to unrestrained variation. Forty years of sleepless nights spent wrestling his tireless creativity can finally pay dividends.
I want my suit, he thinks, and then he is already wearing it. Could have been wearing it the whole time. Flying above the horde of robots, he turns his repulsors into dark matter beams and eviscerates them down to the atomic level, then reconstructs the ions into unstable acid and watches it dissolve the next wave into corroded vibranium dust. He follows a trail of shredded bots and looks for the boy with the bullets in his blood.
Pietro's body is pumped full of lead, a mess of holes like swiss cheese, and it's so easy to fix that it doesn't even feel like a miracle. He sees the bullets reversing their path, healthy skin filling in the space, and the arrogant punk is good as new. Good as new-
and still dead. Restored but hollow, no soul. Beyond the power of his stone. He can't even register whether that should make him feel a certain way, can't even place why it was so important in the first place. The noises in his ear get louder but no more comprehensible, he is outside of time and space, riding high on pure energy.
He drops the boy on the rescue shuttle, and then it's suddenly very quiet. His skin itches under the suit, deep pain pressing up from the skin of his arms, the back of his head, the middle of his ribs. The stillness doesn't make sense to him, and his vision tunnels on whatever is directly in front of him.
Scared victims are pressing in around him and agents are running around waving their arms and shouting instructions, and Tony needs to get away. It's too much. His brain is still rattling off every conceivable way to dismantle a body to its component parts. Dangerous, he realizes, he is dangerous. Capable of killing everyone on this shuttle with a stray thought.
The battle makes more sense, the basic thrill of power, release, decimation, rebirth. He is Kali, Shiva, Dante's Inferno. Change through destruction in a white-hot crucible. The fight rages within him as much as without and he rides a high of deconstruction, induction, and implosion until there's nothing left to fight. The world is quiet and still and he feels cut loose, confused, terrified, until gravity reverses and his stomach floats inside his ribs and the chaos feels like home. The end, the poetry of the meteor. That is what the parasite longs for, and caught in this altered state he accepts his fate. He pants, exhausted, ribs burning with agony, and stares down at a metal body between his feet.
It's intact, and that upsets him. It is supposed to be broken. He makes it stand up and the carcass twitches and shambles to a parade rest, feet shoulder width apart and arms clasped at its back. It turns to granite, then stone, then dust, and then he turns the soil around it to water and transmutes the mud, sand, and water into glass. It isn't difficult, it just takes a little force.
Once the structure is crystalline it only takes a tiny shifting of particles to make it quartz, and onyx, and ruby, and ice. Heat melts the ice and an infusion of iron makes the water positively charged. A magnetic field six feet above makes it rise up in dancing stalagmites and a slight tilt of the field makes it swirl like a hurricane. Opposing magnetism below turns it into a rotating sphere, and that's it, that's Earth. A vulnerable bubble of water sprinkled with carbon, oxygen, and the building blocks of life.
He freezes it and swaps the magnetic fields, removes the positive counterbalance and watches it plummet into the ground and shatter into a thousand tiny fragments.
"Mjolnir!" someone calls behind him and he can't look away from the mess he's made. He still can't grasp the strange noises other humans make, this one only registers because it comes from his person, from the pet frost giant the host is so fond of. His body feels wrong inside his suit. The pain is becoming unbearable.
The pile of ice melts into water, which mixes into mud and he pulls it upwards in tentacle-like strands. They wrap around one another to form bones and cords of muscle, and eventually a human shape with generic undefined features. Mud-skin wraps around the body, and then peels back in one inch strips while the man's insides bloom into a cracked, brown carnation.
"Anthony, stop. Mjolnir, mjolnir, please, stop."
Arms wrap around Tony's waist and he almost peels the skin off of them. Almost pulls them into thread and weaves them into carbon fiber. Lips kiss the back of his neck and his body knows this body. His muscles relax without his permission. The parasite urges him to destroy and his lizard brain says no. Mjolnir means stop. We stop whatever we are doing and we listen.
"We need to go." Loki says, his voice shaky and frantic, fingers pulling at Tony's chest plate. "The city is falling, we must hurry."
Suddenly words make sense. The red leaves his vision, and he's in the driver's seat of his mind. His legs give out, his lungs won't inhale. The city is falling, holy fuck, the city is falling. His legs give out and Loki catches him.
"What are you doing? Come." Loki growls.
"Can't-" Tony gasps, the air is thin. It's like breathing helium from a balloon, and his ribs scream with every tiny spasm.
"By your own claim, you can do anything." Loki says forcefully, and grab's Tony's hands, tries to rotate him and pick him up in a fireman's carry but Tony resists. Turns his head away so he doesn't see any part of Loki.
"Stop, Loki, I'm not safe. Can't even think-"
"Then don't." Loki spits. With a grunt he lifts Tony onto his back, suit and all, and swears passionately in Aesir. "Damned imbecile, for once in your sorry life don't do anything."
Tony stares at the ground and panics. Thoughts threaten to solidify into ideas and the more he tries not to think about them the more they press at his control. He tries thinking about nothing, but then dumb movie quotes fill the silence. Next he tries singing his favorite songs in his head, but the Aether plays the tracks out loud with Tony's voice singing like bad karaoke. Loki huffs.
"Close your eyes." he says, "Resistance generates reciprocal force. Allow your thoughts to wander and soon enough they shall quiet on their own."
Tony does, or tries to. His wandering thoughts don't seem to run out the way they are supposed to. Listening to Loki's steps works better. They don't have any inherent meaning or give him further ideas, they just are. Just a sound with a cadence that roughly matches his pained breathing.
"I'm bad at this." Tony complains after half a minute or so.
"You will improve." Loki says. Oddly firm, assured, "You have many years yet to squabble with me."
"I'd rather we just talked." Tony confesses. Loki's steps falter. It's unnaturally quiet, and the wind has stilled somehow. Falling debris is frozen in midair and he doesn't know if he is doing that or if time has simply stopped functioning. The line of Loki's shoulders under Tony slumps.
"I wish we had." he says, and it sounds wrong. Wistful. Warped like a funhouse mirror. Loki starts to walk again, faster. "Have faith in me. I am trying, although I do not often succeed."
Vertigo cuts off whatever Tony might has said. Loki puts him on his feet and firm hands direct him to a seat in the cockpit where prying eyes can't reach, and he hears the sound of tearing fabric. His eyes start to slide open, but Loki lays a hand over them. Scratchy linen comes over his nose and cheeks and Loki ties the ends together. It's kind of a relief. He was getting tired of holding his eyes shut.
"I must aid the team in destroying the city." Loki says, "Leave that on. It will be very bad if you lose control."
"So what, you want me to sit here?"
"Yes. In fact, you must stay here. It will be catastrophically bad if you don't." Loki says, and Tony is sure now. There is a song in his gut and it's resonating, wrong wrong wrong wrong.
"You're leaving?" Tony asks, gasping around his internal wounds.
"I will return." Loki says.
Loki takes a step back, and Tony surges forward. Commit or regret. Act now or lose. He reaches blindly with everything he has left and clings to Loki's coat.
"Who are you?" he demands.
"I am Loki." The lack of insult or jest seals it.
"Not my Loki."
"Yes and no." the man whispers, and the blindfold denies Tony any warning that he is about to be kissed. Not-Loki's lips are chapped, cracked dry, and there's a touch of cold metal on one side. Woah, he has a lip ring. There's a five gallon bucket full of reasons this isn't ethical or advisable behavior, but Tony's a slut. Even in the middle of a war zone with the city rising into the atmosphere and a strong suspicion that he's cheating on his fiancé with himself, he licks his way in Loki's mouth and makes it good. Makes him shiver, and sucks on the lip ring just to feel what it's like. Loki groans, even though it's probably uncomfortable to have your piercings pulled and chewed on. Tony wouldn't know, he's never had any.
"I'm so sorry, that was wrong. I should not take advantage-" Loki rasps.
Huh, this Loki understands consent. Wonders never cease.
"Who are you, really?" Tony asks.
"I am not the only me, and you are not the only you. We are all the same, and all different."
"Then, what's 'different' about you?" Tony asks. Not-Loki's hair tickles his nose, and he brushes it aside. Follows it up to the man's face and holds it like he's held Loki's a thousand times. The man's breathing is very loud, and very controlled.
"I am the one that saves you today. As I failed to do the first time." Loki says. "And now that I've done it, I suspect I shall cease to exist. You need not waste your affection on me."
"Idiot." Tony says with conviction, "I love every version of you I can get my hands on."
Not-Loki sniffles, lets out a horrible near-silent cry. Tears slide from his face to Tony's and Loki kisses him again. Not moving or caressing, just a press of warmth. If not for the lip ring, Tony would never know the difference.
"Thank you." Loki sobs, breaking the kiss and pressing his face into the tattered blindfold and the bottom half of Tony's cheek. "Thank you."
And then he disappears. There's no shift of air, or scent of ozone, or dust of cool mist. He just stops existing. Noise explodes all around him. Life suddenly living once more. The pilot he did not notice in the chair next to him starts talking over a radio, calling for permission to dock. The people in the cabin scream as the downward pressure of gravity returns, and Tony's implants go back to crawling out of his skin.
Don't, he thinks, I need those. Those are part of us. And everything settles, calms to a dull sting of inflammation and overexerted tendons. Tony stays. The instructions were clear, and he feels oddly bereaved. Thinks of the gruff, twisted Loki with the metal on his lip and feels like a stripped screw. The shuttle lands less than a minute later, and according to radio chatter the city explodes well before impact. There are casualties, always more casualties, but Ultron is dead and humanity isn't extinct.
Yay, he thinks darkly, we won.