Lima to Stockholm
Chapter Nine: Self-Loathing
Long after Odin left Loki's form settled into Loptr and he fell asleep huddled up on the floor outside Tony's door. He was violently awoken when an explosion shattered the door, filling the air with a spray of wooden shrapnel. "Tony!" Loki exclaimed. Even as he shifted back to his normal form, he was using his magic to draw the heat from the flames and force the smoke up to the ceiling. Then he plunged into the destruction.
Tony lay sprawled across his workbench, thrown halfway across his room by the force of the explosion. Loki's heart faltered as he saw the blood slowly dripping off the edge of the table, it had cut into Tony's side and there was deep gash on his cheek from where a splitter from the door had struck him. Tony had engaged one of his gauntlets, apparently in a last ditch effort to protect himself. The heavy smell of alcohol hanging around the engineer provided an explanation for why he hadn't fully armored himself before trying to blast his way to freedom. Loki glanced toward the wall leading to the garden guiltily, 'Or at least to the freedom I'd allowed him before.'
Carefully, gently Loki picked Tony up and carried him to Frigga's room. Loki couldn't remove the activated gauntlet and on a moment's thought decided it would be better to work around it and it's dormant twin anyway as he cleaned the blood and soot from Tony's skin. He used his magic to make certain that Tony hadn't suffered any internal damage from being thrown into the table before teasing the splitter of wood out of the wound on his face and taping it closed.
Tony briefly regained consciousness as Loki used a rag to repeatedly rinse the small burns he'd suffered in cold water. "I did it. Don't leave," he muttered blearily, tangling his fingers in the hem of Loki's shirt before passing out again.
Loki stared at Tony's hand, feeling more guilty about something he'd done than he had in centuries. He didn't notice his female clone slip up behind him until she shoved her hand into the base of his neck. In a second the two were merged.
The woman who remained shared Loki's coloring, pitch black hair and pallid skin. Like him she was tall and wiry but her brows and nose were a shade more delicate and her mouth smaller. "You created me to care for him and to form a bond with him. Now you will get out of my way while I do it," she said to herself.
Tony woke to the feel of fingers carding through his hair. He turned his head slightly and blinked up at the woman, "You're back. He, Loki? Odin? He knows I designed them?"
"He knows," Lady Loki confirmed. "He saw the plans. You'll need new equipment to build them. It's just well you.. remodeled your room. He's repairing the damage."
"He won't lock me in again?"
Loki had been trying to dig his way out of the depths of his mind where his renegade clone had confined him but when confronted with evidence of the harm he'd done he pulled back and his clone reinforced his bindings with memories of his torture on Thanos' orders and the childish act of vengeance that had led his mother's death to her. Loki laughed bitterly to himself as he remembered Frigga's words, "Alway so perceptive, about everyone but yourself." Apparently his clone had gained enough distance to turn his wickedly sharp observations against himself. Outside of his mind Loki's clone kept threading her fingers slowly through Tony's hair.
"He doesn't have to repair the door," Tony suggested. "I broke it after all, he shouldn't bother himself."
Loki paused for a moment. "You need a forge," she said eventually. "It would probably be better if your room were expanded to include the veranda, for better ventilation. We could remove the front wall entirely and add some partitions around your sleeping area for privacy."
Tony hesitated as a flush crept up his neck. "That sounds, um, practical. To deal with fumes from the forge," he stammered.
Lady Loki nodded. "Very practical," she agreed, collecting up the rest of the conversation and shoving the memory of it after Loki into the depths of her mind to keep him company.
"I don't know why you don't think I like you," Lady Loki said after a bit, her fingers drifted from Tony's hair to tracing skin along the edge of face. "I want you, truly."
Tony took a deep breath, "You'll stay?" he asked.
"Always," Loki promised and Tony reached out, touching two fingers to the back of her hand. He slowly followed the line of her arm up until his fingers were tangled in the hair at the back of her neck. Then he leaned up to kiss her, a soft press of lips that gradually changed to open mouthed kisses as Tony eased Loki back on the bed. Loki surrendered readily, letting her head fall back and gasping happily as Tony mouthed at the column of her neck.
When Loki started unbuttoning his shirt Tony shivered. He closed his eyes and tried to block out the feeling of someone's hand near the site where the Arc Reactor had been.
Somewhat later Tony sat, knees pulled up to his chest, one hand wrapped around Loki's wrist while conversely keeping himself as far away from her as possible without letting go. "'It's not you, it's me' is probably as trite here as it is on Earth," he said with a self-deprecating chuckle. "But don't go. Ten years ago the shape-shifter thing would have been hot beyond belief but somewhere between waterboarding and as good as having my heart ripped out… It only takes one hand to count the people who can touch me without my brain filling with all the ways it could end in bloodshed. It's a turn off."
"Shape- You knew?" Loki asked. The shock of it tore the moorings on the restraints his clone had placed on his full persona.
"That you change your name as often as you change your hair color? Yeah," Tony said.
"How?" Curiosity drew Loki closer to the surface. In hundreds of years neither Thor nor his friends had ever caught on to his disguises.
Tony glanced over at Lady Loki, the ghost of a wry smile crossing his lips, "You're the template right?" he said then held his breath, waiting for a bad reaction.
Loki nodded slowly. "Basically," it was how he would have looked as a female, "but how could you know that?"
"Details aside, all your looks were exactly the same, conforming to the same standard of beauty," Tony pointed out. "Except there's personality left in this look. It's the pre-airbrushed version right?"
When Loki didn't say anything Tony immediately started rambling to fill the silence. "You'd think Pepper would appreciate that I can't cheat on her but she hates it. I'm ninety percent sure she was doing the 'If you love something set it free' thing with our first break but I didn't go anywhere so I couldn't come back.
"She had a front row seat on my dating habits for over a decade, I can't convince her that I'm done with the part of my life where I liked sex way more than I liked my partners. Because there are issues but I don't care enough to try to fix them. Sex with someone I actually loved and trusted was a fucking revolution. Only she doesn't believe it. I thought about Rhodey just to prove it was her, not that I couldn't be with anyone else but that'd be too weird given the amount of time Rhodey spent protecting my nonexistent but underaged virtue in college. The only time I seriously flirted with him I was sixteen, he was twenty-one and that went over like a lead balloon. He treated me like I was his best friend's kid sister with a crush." Tony's nose wrinkled at the memory, "All nice and worried about my feelings. It was mortifying. I was a teenage boy, I just wanted to get laid. There was a point when I was thinking about the Avengers-"
"But you were both male," Loki broke in, the notion of it set both his clone and himself reeling, ultimately leaving Loki to deal with utterly unexpected information.
"And right there is why I backed off on Thor when he was oblivious to light flirting," Tony replied, still in full-ramble. "Everything I knew about your culture was literally myths and not encouraging ones plus Thor could take off my head in a second if he reacted badly. Same with Captain 1940's Americana and even if he was open to guys I can still picture his patented disapproving expression if I tried explaining that I wanted friends with benefits to cheat on Pepper so I could prove that I was happy not cheating on Pepper. Natashalie could have followed the logic but she uses sex as a weapon, even when I trusted her I didn't trust her THAT much. I figured out Clint wasn't available long before he told us he was taken. Bruce would be great except he's too hung up on the other guy to even talk about how to work around the technical issues, which yeah, a massive increase in size mid-coitus has a lot of potential to be a problem, never mind the mental aspects."
"You would not have minded if I approached you in this form?" Loki asked with disbelief. He dropped every mask on his appearance.
"Karma's a bitch," Tony muttered, relaxing enough to stop shielding his chest with his knees. "Can't exactly say I was expecting that but I'm way less surprised than I should be. Hate when I figure things out and decide not to tell myself."
Loki stared down at Tony's hand, still locked around his wrist despite the blue hue of his skin giving away his true nature. "I would rather be having sex than thinking up ways to pay you back for your sophomoric sense of humor," he complained as that was the simplest thought out of the whirlpool in his mind to deal with. 'How is his hand not freezing? Have I never even touched another person with this skin before?'
"I might lean a bit toward women in taste and a lot in practice because nine times out of ten dealing with the fallout was more bother than the night was worth when I was sleeping around. Still the guy thing ranks so far below the defenestration thing it's under the sea. And the blue skin? Yeah that works for you, way more what I hoped for from meeting an alien than Thor. Of course my first crush was the Orion Girl, original Star Trek of course."
"But I'm a monster," Loki said actively struggling against the impulse to transform into Loptr. Being Loptr and the hope that Tony would just hug him the way he had when he found out about Frigga's death was amazingly tempting but the risk involved in giving away that lie was too much.
Tony stopped. For several seconds he just stared at Loki. "This is not the Stockholm Syndrome talking, although after the last three months, I was banking on it getting me past my trust issues." Unconsciously his hold on Loki's wrist tighten as if to keep him there. "Beyond aesthetic appreciation I don't give a damn about your skin color. I don't have the cultural background to have any sort of emotional reaction to Asgard versus Jotunheim versus Nidavellir… Well I might favor Nidavellir a bit since you told me they had the good sense to adapt their machines to manipulate magic rather than their genes. And even if I did have the background to feel it, I doubt I'd agree."
"How can you say that?" Loki demanded still entranced by the sight of someone willingly touching his Jotun skin.
"Because your people aren't the only ones with prejudices. I've dismissed the ones in my culture as utterly moronic nonsense, why wouldn't I feel the same about yours?" Tony shrugged, "It's easier when you're the second generation to come to that realization. The first time Rhodey met my dad was when Howard had to pick us up from a drunk tank. I thought Rhodey was going to give himself a coronary worrying about how an old, rich, white guy would react to his kid getting arrested while out drinking with a black guy but the first thing my dad noticed about Rhodey was the air force academy ring he wore so he asks, 'How did my no good son talk a nice kid like you into this mess?'
"We had to spend the rest of that Spring Break at my parents'. Actually one of my better home visits, watching Rhodey wander around looking lost. He is damned good at making people take him on his own terms but he just didn't know what to do when he suddenly didn't have anything to prove to anyone. The only times Howard showed up for something of mine was when the media would remark on his absence, and he always made sure I knew I was wasting his time. I grew up watching anti-war protesters on the sidewalk outside of my house almost every weekend and they just made Howard more determined to stick to his path. I showed off my toys, my money but that week when Rhodey stayed with us was one of the very few times when I got to show off my family."
Tony pulled Loki's hand up in front of his eyes, "This is the last reason you should think of yourself as a monster. Fuck, you don't even know if a guy having magic is unusual for your species," he remembered. "Even if there is something horrific about their culture it's not like you'd be influenced by it. Do you know anything about Jotunheim that isn't demonization attached to your people fighting a war against them?"
"I don't know." Hesitantly Loki reached across the gap between them and covered Tony's hand with his own, tense with anticipation of rejection. Tony leaned back against the headboard of the bed and tried to get comfortable. They stayed there, hands touching, bodies two arms' length apart.
With the help of Loki's magic Tony's workshop was quickly remodeled to make room for a forge at the same time turning the room into an alcove off the garden with no doors to be locked. The remodeling happened quickly so Tony was stunned when his burns healed and the deep cut on his face faded to an insignificant scar before the work on the room was done.
As Tony settled into fabricating the designs from his three months of solitary confinement an odd thing happened, after a few days of working in a room exposed to the diurnal cycle, Tony found himself getting tired with the waning light as the sun set and waking in the morning as the sun rose. Unconsciously, following Howard's example, Tony had designed every one of his labs to use many of the same psychological tricks that casinos used to encourage their patrons to lose track of time. For all that everyone from Pepper to the Avengers had tried discourage Tony's multi-day engineering binges not one of them had ever thought to suggest that he to add windows or have the lighting in his lab adjust itself to keep his sense of time intact.
"Maybe your people were onto something with all this pseudo-medieval crap," Tony allowed as he dug into his midday meal with more appetite than he'd felt since he'd been a teenager still undergoing growth spurts. Loki smirked, pleased with himself even if he wasn't entirely sure how he'd managed the feat of getting Tony Stark to eat and sleep properly.
Without any discussion of why it might be desirable, Loki removed the doors from Frigga's room and the library when he opened Tony's workshop to the garden. If Tony realized that Loki was using spells to keep the weather away from their rooms he never mentioned it the possibility that they could be used to keep more than the weather locked out, or in. Even if the new openness of rooms was an illusion it still helped to settle Tony's fear of isolation. Furthering that assurance, Loki continued the deception that he, Odin and Loptr were separate people. With Odin in and out of the rooms and Loptr and Loki in constant residence regardless of whether one, the other or both were the clone, Tony only had to glance up or listen to assure himself that he wasn't back in solitary confinement. Loki rarely left as he was using up most of his control to keep from switching between Loki and Loptr in front of Tony.
A part of Loki wondered if he was lying to himself as much as to Tony as he watching Loptr hand Tony tools while he read over the latest set of revisions proposed by Jotunheim's envoy on his proposed military alliance against Thanos. The mere idea of reabsorbing the Odin-clone turned his stomach, the clone had been rogue for so long that Loki suspected that it truly wasn't him anymore. He wasn't even sure that it was what he'd tasked it with being. Ever since the night he'd lost control of his shape-shifting the Odin-clone watched him with a worried eye that Loki couldn't picture the true Odin turning on him, Thor perhaps but not him. Loki couldn't imagine where his mimicry of Odin had ever conceived of the notion that he needed or deserved concern. Loki had to restrain himself from spending too much time in his child-form to avoid Loptr deciding that he wasn't getting his fair share of Tony's attention. The clone had the judgement of the young boy he appeared to be and Loki couldn't risk that he'd consider the consequences if he recreated himself in front of Tony. Still there were times when Loki decided the risk was worth it to have the casual affection Tony offered the child for himself. Loki's female clone wasn't prone to materializing herself as a separate entity, she attacked Loki from within, trying to usurp control whenever she felt he wasn't sufficiently attentive to Tony's needs. 'At least she's what I meant her to be,' Loki thought with mild exasperation as he remembered:
"You tell me you won't give me alcohol because you don't like putting up with drunken idiocy and the day after you see my still it starts producing green goo that would probably be useful for creating mutant turtles if you had a sewer for me to dump it in," Tony accused. "Of course you did it."
Loki tried to blink, tried to remember how the conversation had started but it was like being trapped in a waking dream. His hand- No. Her slim, blue hand waved waved off Tony's complaints airily. "Is it so odd that I prefer you with your wits intact?"
"Flattery will get you nowhere Princess Neytiri," Tony huffed. He gestured to the still's output, "This is a travesty."
"I don't have a clue as to what you're referring to, but I'll take 'princess' as the respect due me," Loki heard herself reply haughtily.
"She's a fictional sexy, blue alien," Tony admitted with a shrug. "Just because I'm not sleeping with you doesn't mean I can't appreciating the view. The movie had breakthrough special effects, nothing on your illusions though. I get how the magic field can be manipulated to give them solidity and texture but do you control them remotely or give them a program to run off of?"
The technical question restored Loki's control. "I'm not certain that I do," he said irritably. "Control them."
"What does that mean?" Tony asked.
"That I honestly don't know if I ruined your nasty contraption or not," Loki said. With a bit of concentration he restored his normal appearance. "Until just a moment ago you were speaking with my female clone."
"Is that… healthy?" Tony asked with a frown.
Loki shrugged. "Doubtful but I'm not sure how to get rid of her now. Don't worry she likes you and if she did destroy that thing, I don't disapprove of her actions. I would not be surprised to find the brew was toxic to start with."
"All alcohol is toxic, that's why evolution gave us a liver. If you're not careful you're going to start giving Pepper and Rhodey competition in the mother hen department," Tony groused.
"Then I will be in good company."
"Yeah," Tony agreed with a sigh. He reached up and rubbed the rapidly healing scar on his cheek. "I miss them."
Tony complained about the destruction of his alcohol supply for a few days, mostly when he suspected that he was talking to Loki's clone rather than the origin. Then he forgot about it as he became absorbed in forging the metal, the spell, that would restrict the use of the new weapons he'd designed to the individuals and purpose Tony had chosen. Blacksmithing was a physically demanding, time-consuming process and working the spell into the metal took a deft touch, a level of physical and mental concentration that even Tony found challenging to maintain for more than a few hours a day.
When Tony needed a break from forging he had the Tesseract and his experiments to determine why the Arc Reactor had neutralized the Mind Stone to occupy him. Where forging the spells required precision and concentration, exploring means of expanding the field produced by the Arc Reactor took creativity and inventiveness. Ironically, Tony quickly realized that if he hadn't removed the shrapnel in his chest and, consequently, the arc reactor he wouldn't have been vulnerable to Wanda's manipulation. The Starkinium core, once activated to produce power, also created a field effect that rendered the Mind Stone, Tesseract and presumably the other Infinity Stones inert when they were brought into close proximity.
To Tony's immense disappointment there was no way to separate the Arc Reactor's field generation properties from the properties that made it so desireable for weaponization. In the back of his mind he shelved his worries about the possibility that he'd eventually have to choose between leaving the Earth vulnerable to Thanos or making the Arc Reactor weapons Obadiah Stane had envisioned the moment he discovered how Tony had come out of Afghanistan alive but the work was challenging and, at least for now, he was building things to protect the people he loved.
Nettie climbed up onto the table where Tony was working. He tried to set aside his work, tried to apply the rules he'd discovered for dealing with overly intelligent kids: First, try to remember what he would have wanted from an adult at that age. Second, think about what Howard would have done and try something different. Tony would have wanted attention and Howard wouldn't have given it to him. Tony wanted nothing more than to put aside the designs he was working on and look at his and Pepper's daughter but he couldn't drag his eyes away from the holograms projected above his work table.
"I don't like preschool," Nettie complained. "It's no fun. Greg's a tattletale. I wasn't gonna hurt the robot." The little girl sounded outraged at the thought that anyone would think she'd hurt a robot. "It says the same things over and over. It's broke! I wanted to help."
Tony wanted to explain that it was probably a toy with a couple recorded messages, not an AI like FRIDAY and the bots. He wanted let her know that her desire to fix things made him proud. He wanted to teach her how to make the toy better, maybe program it to follow this Greg around and tattle on everything that he did. It was probably petty and inappropriate but if Nettie had a vengeful streak she came by it honestly and he wasn't just thinking about himself. But he couldn't.
"It's okay Daddy, don't be sad. Mommy said you're a memory and can't talk to me."
Tony was jerked awake so suddenly he all but fell out of bed.
Tony stared at the readout from the medical scanner he'd rebuilt from the components pile Loptr's offerings ended up in. He'd been trusting, accepting Odin at his word when it came to the whole Valhalla/death and reincarnation thing. He'd assumed the lack of scars, lack of complaints from a body worn by four plus decades of abusing his health was because he'd woken in some sort of simulacrum. 'And what an odd way that was to realize that I actually do believe in souls, not just genetics and the culmination of stored experience.'
But Pepper had told their dream-daughter he was dead and the medical scanner showed an outlandishly healthy body but one that still had a missing appendix and more tellingly still had the implants he'd given himself to control the armor remotely. 'Add Thor's dad to the people who can't be trusted,' Tony thought to himself. 'Not that I'm surprised given Loki.'
Even weeks after Loki's revelation Tony still wasn't sure what Loki had more trouble accepting: the idea that there was nothing wrong with his sexuality or his species. Despite knowing the flirting wasn't going anywhere Loki seemed more than happy to continue trying in his male form or her blue form but never both at once.
'He's over a thousand years old, I shouldn't see him as a poor fucked up kid, but the more I get to know him the more I see that damage he's suffered instead of the damage he's done. No one should be that grateful to NOT have people be repelled by him being himself, he doesn't even care that I can't say yes.'
Note: In "Agent Carter" S2, period racism is explicitly an issue. Jason and Whitney Frost both bring it up, the random guy at the store reacts badly to the implications that Jason and Peggy are an interracial couple. And Howard doesn't blink at working with Jason as an equal. I think it's safe to say that whatever Howard's faults, racism is not one of them.