There But For The Grace Of God Go I
Part IV: The Window
Never regret thy fall
O Icarus, of the fearless flight
For the greatest tragedy of them all
Is to never feel the burning light
Oscar Wilde
There was so much blood.
It was everywhere. On the newly waxed floors, dribbling in slow drops from the torn holes in Loki's mouth, and all of it covered Loki's hands, like he'd dunk them into a vat of the stuff. Loki's eyes were wide as he ripped the whipstitch out with his hands, practically clawing it out.
"Shit." Tony choked out, and he ran to kneel beside Loki. "Shit. Shit. Shit!"
Loki shoved him away, glared at him, and it was enough to freeze Tony in place. The warning was evident, the edict within even more so: Do not interfere.
The string came out in a long, stiff motion that Tony could hardly watch. His throat seized, his windpipe folding in on itself like it were made of paper. But he watched it all, the whole thing, Loki ripping the threads out with long, bloodstained fingers. The contents of Tony's dinner churned uncomfortably in his stomach, the idea of retching became a blessing.
When the string fell to the ground, Loki hacked up his own blood all over Tony's floor. Tony reacted, then, his hands on Loki's back and shoulders, his fingers pulling back black strands of hair as Loki ruined his floor. Loki's pants were ragged, rough, like the voice attached to them hadn't been used in ages, or a millennia, and it took Tony a few seconds to realized the tightening grip on his knee, the fingers that dug deep into his pants.
Looking for purchase, or a niche, or maybe just to squeeze out Tony's kneecap - he wasn't sure.
"You done, Reindeer Games?" He asked, callously, with a hand on the back of Loki's neck.
In response, Loki spat out a glob of phlegm rather inelegantly, and his chest heaved with the strain of keeping himself upright and conscious.
"Hey," Tony decided that this was, in a way, one of the strangest situations he had ever gotten himself into. Though, admittedly, he hadn't gotten himself into it. "If you're going to start hacking up a lung and maybe a bit more, might I direct you to this wonderful thing over here - the toilet? It's a bit more, uh, suited to your purposes. Your Majesty."
"St...ark." Loki's voice sounded like water that had been thrown threw a fan. Or maybe shit. Tony wasn't picky about his metaphors or his idioms, so long as they got the point along. Maybe the better description would be to say that it was real live Hannibal Lecter shit, and Tony wasn't liking a single bit of it.
Loki started coughing again, and the gnawed, serrated fingernails of his hand dug deep into Tony's knee like a bear trap.
"Maybe you'd better shut up." Tony provided, helpfully. And then, softer, "Damn."
Loki pressed a hand against his throat, as if the very fact that he could speak was something physically painful, and said, "Wa...ter." He pressed on the rougher sound, and made a noise like a death rattle, shaky in his throat.
This vulnerability, however small, gave Tony pause.
"You are one needy intruder, you know that?" He said.
Loki's head turned slightly, and Tony felt he was trying to hide whatever weakness he could've seen from his face, but the glare there was something like a death knell, as clear and positively petrifying as one.
"I..." Loki started, and every word was sharp, like they had teeth or knives of their own. "Am a guest... in... your hall. To... deny me th... that which would... satisfy me... is... grievous!"
The end was half a yell, as though Loki had gotten irritated with the failings of his own body. Tony imagined he could almost see the walls around Loki, large ignominious things curled around him like cocoon, but Tony wasn't fooled, not at all.
"C'mon then," He groused, tugging at the loose shirt of Loki's. "I'm not leaving you alone anywhere, before you do something else to my house."
Loki hesitated, but complied with it, standing almost shakily on his feet. Tony was reminded of how much taller the god was than he, and shamefully planned out escape routes in his head, as though it would help him at all. Tony snatched up a towel - red, thankfully - and handed it to Loki.
The god stared at it, and then up at him, and Tony swallowed the bile in the back of his throat, "For your mouth. Looks a little nasty. You know, with the holes and the blood and the-"
Loki didn't thank him, just held the towel to his lips, and Tony felt his own throat cut him off. He could hear his heart thrumming in his ears.
"About that water..." Tony started again, though his voice trailed off, and fear seemed heavy on its hackles. Loki looked at him, in a way which made Tony feel as though his skin were being peeled off like an orange.
Tony turned, and couldn't hear Loki's footsteps as he followed him.
Tony had a feeling that Loki was one of those people that didn't enjoy being watched while they were eating. Tony was, as always, correct in this assumption. When he'd placed the glass of water in front of Loki, the god had stared at him until Tony had complacently turned away.
It was still raining, and Tony wondered if a storm would pick up. Tony enjoyed storms, though the warm, sub-tropical nature of Malibu was just as pleasant. But sometimes it was nice to have a change, and Tony didn't really enjoy leaving his house all that much recently as there were still a lot of people with a lot of questions and a lot more accusations.
Christ, he made heroism sound like the worst thing in the world. (and it was, really)
The crashing of a glass yanked Tony from these thoughts and back into the real world. It was enough to make him flinch, wildly, jump half out of his seat.
Loki's eyes were on him, and the remaining shards of his glass were on the ground.
"Bring me another." Loki rasped, though his voice sounded a great deal better than before.
Tony narrowed his eyes and looked from the shattered glass on the ground and back to Loki and said, angrily, "What the hell!"
"Bring me another glass, Stark."
Tony gestured towards the broken glass, "Why?"
"I grow impatient with this." Loki snarled, but he was searching Tony's face for something. Tony gave him a cross look that was stuck between anger, confusion and a general feeling of why would you do that?
"I don't know what they do up in the Magic Treehouse, but when people want something from others it usually comes with a please, or a thank you and none of..." He gestured again. "This!"
Loki's head curled in, and his eyes were as cold as the man they belonged to, "Midgard customs mean nothing to me."
For a second, Tony just glared at Loki, but then he smirked and said, "That didn't sound like a please, Scarface."
There was a long moment in which Loki simply watched Tony with eyes that seemed almost... empty. Devoid of something (a soul, perhaps) and Tony eventually bent down to pick up the shards of glass from the ground, which by now seemed as normal and occasional as going to the bathroom.
"It would please me," Loki said, finally, in a soft voice that barely hid a smirk, as Tony pulled up from the ground. "For you to fetch me a glass of water."
Tony tsked, "Wasn't the please I meant."
Loki's smirk was tight, taut, and seemed forced, "You didn't specify. Perhaps you should consider thinking before you speak."
Tony shrugged, "I'm a genius, but even I know that's impossible." His eyes raked Loki's features, over the scars and the forced haircut and the scabs which dotted the outline of Loki's lips. "There are some things I can't figure out, though. I can admit it."
There was a tightening in Tony's chest, and he watched the way Loki's mouth fell open, slightly, the way the god's eyes moved down and up and down again, a thinking pattern that Tony couldn't recognize.
"I am sure," There was a crack in Loki's voice again, like drywall being broken. "That there are many things beyond your cognizance."
Tony decided to just get to the point, grabbing Loki a glass of water as he spoke, "What'd you do to JARVIS?"
"I do not enjoy being watched."
The water being poured was the only sound for a few, pressing moments, "That wasn't an answer."
Loki laughed, deep and low, "A trickster does not reveal his tricks, Iron Man."
Tony sighed, eyebrows raised, and turned to place the new glass of water in front of Loki, "If you throw this on the ground, I'll beat you with a newspaper. Got it?"
The god's hand gripped the glass, and this time Loki allowed Tony to watch as he drank. He drank it all in one smooth gulp, ice and all, and Tony felt his chest tighten up even more, like he were all wrapped up in chains, pulling and pulling and pulling.
Loki's arm shook, slightly, when he put the glass down, and the god refused to acknowledge the shakiness of his traitorous body, though Tony had seen it all.
"So," Tony started, as smoothly as possible. "Whatever happened?"
This time, Loki's response was immediate, "Pose a different question." And his eyes were locked on Tony's, facing him straight on, and Tony had that feeling again.
"Well, that's not evasive." He responded.
Loki was quick, "Well, that is not persistently annoying."
Lips tightened, Tony felt himself mulling over the best way to snake answers out of Loki. It was a shame, he supposed, that Natasha weren't here. She was good at that sort of thing.
"Why me?" He posed, finally, leaning forward like he and Loki were going to share some great secret. He held in his breath like he were holding in smoke, and watched Loki almost as intensely as the other had him.
Loki's eyes flitted from Tony's, and down at the arc reactor, "It came to me, during the three days I spent in your director's cell, the reason why the scepter could not take hold of you like it had Barton. You," Another crack. "Hold technology similar to the Tesseract in your chest."
Tony felt his whole self tense up, like a cow getting ready for the slaughterhouse, and he growled, "You can't have it."
"You think you can stop me, Stark?"
"I did it once before." He shot back.
Loki's eyes narrowed, and a smirk pulled at the corners of those lips, "Yes. You did." But there was something in those words that seemed... off. Twisty, or windy, filled with the intricacies of something Tony didn't think he could really comprehend.
However, Loki continued, "But I have no need of it. For now..." There was a promise in there that Tony didn't want him to keep.
"Then why are you here," Tony asked. "Besides the possible vivisection, or genocide or whatever gets you going in the morning?"
And the answer he got back was positively poisonous, "I had no choice."
Loki's eyes widened then, and the fury in them was deep - but it was too late, for the vulnerability was already out there, in the open, for Tony to gorge himself upon.
"No choice, huh." Tony echoed. "It just happened."
The god's lips curled into a sneer, and his eyebrows wrinkled, which made the scars in turn crinkle and made Tony's stomach lurch once again, "I've no need for whatever pity you may feel."
Tony scoffed in disbelief, "Pity? For you? News flash, Diva, you tried to enslave the human race."
"Good." Loki said, and his face flattened out. "Perhaps you're not as dim-witted as I thought you."
"Yeah," Tony gave a little half-laugh. "That's what most people say after they've had me in a room for a few minutes. Along with, well, other things. Noises, mostly. Not... words."
Loki stared at him, apathetically, as though he hadn't caught on to Tony's insinuation, and seemed to search both of Tony's eyes.
"You want more water?"
Loki's response was short, cut, "No."
"How about food?" Tony slumped a little on the table, arms crossed on the edge. "You ever tried pizza?"
Loki looked away, and this time it was he who watched the rain. He didn't give Tony an answer.
"Well, I'll have some. Might as well eat before Pepper gets here. God only knows what she'll do when she does."
Most people didn't order pizza at nine in the morning.
Most people weren't Tony Stark.
He didn't leave Loki alone the whole time, had JARVIS - who had suffered some serious, but fixable and yet unknown malfunction - keep tabs on the god through the presence of the built in surveillance of Tony's home, and Tony marveled at how Loki seemed to check every inch of the place, like he were memorizing each and every molecule.
It was a lot like watching an animal in a zoo, he decided, as he gnawed on the cheese-filled crust of the local pizzeria, and even more like monitoring a very large, very luxurious correctional facility.
Tony wasn't sure why Loki hadn't made a run for it. Maybe he couldn't, maybe he was planning something else, entirely. Maybe it was both. Maybe it wasn't worth running when there was a one-hundred percent chance of Thor tracking him down.
Either way, Tony tried to not let the matter get under his skin and tried instead to get to work. Or, really, distract himself from the matters at hand. He preferred to call it work.
It didn't work.
With his goggles on and a circuit board ahead of him, Tony Stark found it very, very hard to concentrate on schematics, algorithms and the metal scattered all around him. He found it instead, very easy to think about the god upstairs, patrolling his home as though he owned it.
He tried to imagine what was going on in the wasp's nest of Loki's brain. Of what had happened to him. It was absolutely unsettling, the almost strange nonchalance the god had with what had occurred. In fact, if Tony hadn't seen anything on the outside he never would have presumed anything to be wrong with the god.
Tony wondered how he could do that, internalize all that pain without acting as though it hadn't changed him at all. And yet... it had, hadn't it? He thought through the events that had happened in the past six hours: the fall, the bandaging up, the writing, the way Tony's hands had felt balled up in Loki's shirt, the way the god had reacted to that.
Despite everything, Tony couldn't help but feel a little sorry for the poor bastard, and this thought made him indescribably angry.
Because, regardless of what Loki had been through, what still remained was the shattered metropolis on the other side of the country, and Phil's funeral, which none of them could have gone to because it was supposed to be a small affair, like Fury had thought that death hadn't mattered to any of them at all.
Tony shoved the circuit board to the ground, ripped out wires and stood in his workshop, in the great screams of "Snowblind" and felt for a moment like the angriest person on the planet.
At eleven, Tony waited rather impatiently for Pepper to show up. Loki was lurking in the shadows, somewhere, but he could barely be bother to go seek him out.
In the end, it hadn't mattered, because it wasn't Pepper who showed up.
It was Agent Romanov who did.
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