Eleven years had flown by him like a blinding dream since that day, when Thor left them. Were it not for the oblique numbness of the long since broken child hiding behind his eyes, Loki would have felt the stern and yet strangely comforting grip upon his shoulder.

"C'mon, Snow White, we're gonna miss the train back to HQ."

"Another moment, Stark, we're not in that much of a rush."

Loki's voice reaches a restrained pitch in his throat, level and monotone, controlled, as he is with everything he does. His misty green eyes suggest nothing as he stares, nothing that his dear Tony could guess upon. Perhaps he could mark the slightest inkling from the subtle way Loki craned his head to one side, perhaps in each tiny twitch of his structure, every time he swallowed down another mound of unspoken yearning. No, nobody could pay that much attention. Rather, Tony snuffles away the damp winter cold clinging to his nostrils and stuffs his hands into his pockets, takes one resolute step away from Loki and silences once more. It's best not to trouble the bereft with your trivial worries, even if they are of seeming grandiose importance.

They do this every month. They abdicate the warming laurels of a high-built complex made for their playpen and make the solemn commute through the metallic sprawl of their metropolis to a cold ground far beyond what their city's skyline can throw its shadows upon. Here, the air is crisp with the cold, ripe with pine and fresh grass, archaic decay beneath their feet and an unshakeable fog of needing that which you can never hope to have again. Loki swallows carefully. His throat feels thick with intermittent pangs of pain and his eyes sting vaguely. Cold or pain, he's not quite sure.

In loving memory of Frigga Fjörgynnsdottir
2nd October 2146 – 19th December 2199
Beloved mother and wife
Resting with the gold of Fall

Loki can hear the faint jangle of Tony's watch. He glances down the empty space on the marble between her memory and the ground where she sleeps.

You can stand here all day; your broken will won't bring her back. None of them will come back.

In short time, they make their way out of the old cemetery following a slew of old silt left lining the unkempt blacktop pathways racing along to the edge. It met an old copse of broken trees left standing black and stark against the white skies. They were gangly, and they were dead, lonely testaments to that which could never have recovered from the past horrors they all quietly shared. One of them had broken some way through the trunk and lay awkwardly across the top of one short, chipped headstone of slate. You can hardly read the inscription beneath the faded shadow. Lars Reiersen. Infant.

Pity.

The pair share nary a word between them and keep walking, hands in their pockets and their lips finely pursed.

"You know, she probably wouldn't have wanted you to mope like this."

Together, they sit with their hands still warm in their pockets from the wintry draft in one particularly lonely railcar. Loki looks across at Tony with one slender brow raised and something resembling affront on his face.

"I'm not moping."

"You are, you always do."

"Why does it matter?"

"'Cause I'm the one who has to put up with it."

Loki scowls further and allows his head to recline further down between the slightly raised collar of his black overcoat.

"Like you've never moped."

"Well, I try not to!" Tony slips his hands from his pockets and drapes an arm over the back of the seat. He stares at Loki with some level of scrutiny. He knows that look, that quietly painful but desperately trying to hide it look. "Hey, look at me." Loki doesn't respond. "Look at me," he demands, reaching over with his other hand to tap the rough fabric of Loki's coat. "Look, I get it, you lost your mom, but you're not the only one who lost someone and God damn, you're not the only one in this damn city suffering. And I sure as hell can't be doin' this every month, this moody woe-is-me crap."

Loki stares across at him, wary, weary. Tony's mad. He always gets mad when Loki can't just look on the bright side. It's just that easy, right? Always look on the bright side. We are alive and we are thriving. The beauty of this metropolis should ensorcell the minds of many. It should erase your pain and it should erase every mental malady left to fester in the back of your mind, but ultimately, it does none of these things. Ultimately, through survival we are alone.

"Why not simply pretend I'm a woman?"

"You're implying I don't do that already."

"Oh God, I think you broke one of my ribs, have you considered getting on the comic circuit?"

"It was a joke, kiddo."

"I know."

And then silence between them. Tony continues to stare at his begrudging, defacto charge and waits. He'll say something else, he has to.

"Stop staring at me."

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"Yeah, we'll take 'why not'."

"You're insufferable sometimes."

"So are you."

They listen to the rhythmic whir of the train as it whizzes through each sectional chunk of the tunnel.

"So are you still moping about her?"

"Nobody said I was moping about her."

Tony rolls his eyes, settles back into his seat. It's going to be one of those days.

January 17th 2210. The pair like broken pilgrims march silent and unwavering through a sea of ants not at all unlike themselves. They, just like the rest of the peons they strafe by remember what this place looked like not even a decade ago and they remember the stench. Smouldered flesh into steel and rampant gunfire burgeoned rank decay rife in the streets and in the broken brickwork. It wasn't something many could shake very easily. On the hot days, they insisted on it; you could still smell the burnt meat melded into the blacktop, agonised shrieks fixed in place by deathly rigor burnt into their stonework. By night, they remembered the fallout from the nuclear glow, and they all remembered the sound of it. It was like the barking of hell's hounds themselves, and it was horrifying.

"Thor, I'm scared."

"Shh, it's okay, Loki, it's okay."

"It's getting louder."

"It's okay, I've got you."

The silent pleading for Death's cold embrace to spare them could be heard like an oaken symphony of childlike melody long broken by the pangs of thunder beyond their door. Brother's arms were warm and big, they engulfed the smaller one, shaking like a leaf and bleeding every fear his fragile body shouldn't even begin to fathom but in all cold, hard truths of this world, knew all too well and all too intimately. Little Loki. He knew too much and too soon. For all the fabricated sunshine that bled from his heart of hearts, he was but a broken chrysalis of man left to die, a carcass on the floor torn on broken shards of every puerile dream he'd never hope to have.

"Are we going to die?"

"No, we aren't going to die."

"Okay."

"You don't believe me."

"I'm scared."

"We're not going to die."

Loki clung to his big brother tightly, nestled his small face into his shirt and quietly rasped an apology for getting it wet with tears. They couldn't have been a day over ten. Together they were terminal.

The world lonely Loki had grown into startled him on occasion. It was stark against the white and it constantly changed. They had cordoned off their natural strife to roll out the steel plated pathways of machinery and perpetual evolution. He can only remember the small details of it, the intoxicated daybreak of revolution over a singing society free of the woes of war at last. It was over and done with and they survived. Their armistice rang clear and sharp like wedding bells throughout each land heralding the sunrise of a new era; an era of peace and an era of machines; an era of corporate blossoming and an era of human convenience for mankind the world over. What they did not herald, however, was the gut-borne emptiness of it all. Is he the only one who feels it? Such an implacable feeling that not all has been fixed, and this shining silver bandage that has been laid out over scarred land is but a superficial fix. There are things beneath it that will never heal, things that can never be put back into place. The gear works will only keep spinning for so long.

Should this be true for lonely Loki, or for the lonely world that which he walks too?

Machinery is base and it is cold. The day that humanity lends its weight upon the artificial and the fabricated is the day that it has given up entirely, and that day has long since come and passed, Loki fears this to be true.

He walks through the droves a silent man, an empty man, for the advent of machines and the loss of his humanity heralds one thing and one thing only. It heralds no light and it heralds no peace. It heralds war. There was a hard lesson to be learned in the sober grey of his distant youth, that war may change but ultimately, war will never leave him. It is not an affliction, it is an idea, and once, too young a child imbibed such ideas. They never left him, and war will never leave him.

By dusk, Loki and Tony sit atop their chromium perch watching over the cityscape like bored and sleepless sentinels. Their arms are knotted and their tongues fend off silence in patterns almost as mute as their nest. Speech helps them little, it's small talk and it's base at best. Tony can only wish to know the horrors that exist so frequently upon the plane of his comrade's memory and he cannot even fathom that which Loki dares not speak of. A part of him wishes that this wasn't true, but he can do nothing about it. He can fight the idea with another idea but it'll never win. You can't scrape away the years of rust and dirt away with your thumb, it's all beyond repair. Tony knows this, and thoroughly, he hates it.

He sidles up along the edge of the marble workbench and slides a small glass Loki's way.

"Chin up."

Loki looks down and picks up the glass, his eyebrows arching the tiniest bit before he brings it to his mouth.

"You know alcohol only makes it worse."

"Well, if at first you don't succeed."

Is that a smile? Tony folds his arms loosely and watches. Loki's staring back, some obscure strain of amusement making for subtle theatrics. Loki drinks up the sweet amber, which doesn't surprise Tony. What surprises Tony is the small smile on the corner of Loki's mouth. For once, he doesn't care for how vapid it is.

"Suppose you're right."

"I'm always right."

"No, you always think you're right."

"Wow, I'm hurt."

"Good, consider it payback for earlier."

Tony raises an eyebrow, a snap of his neck to one side shooting up a look of new-fangled surprise.

"Payback?"

"Yeah."

"Aw, did I hurt your feelings?"

Loki laughs.

"What? I'd duly noted that you didn't have feelings."

"See? You always think you're right."

"Well I'll be damned; you got me stumped, tin-man."

Loki says nothing. He shakes his head a little and he drinks up the remnants of the whiskey left in the bottom of his glass. For a moment, one small, fleeting moment, he considers that his darling friend exists under these notions of intoxicated escapism. It's strange to him, to consider one could find solace in the gloomy pits of amber he insistently imbibes daily.

"Listen, ah," Tony speaks up. Loki looks over at him wearily. "Look, I'm sorry about earlier."

"About what?"

"Y'know… for snapping."

It sounds so difficult for the man to apologise, but Loki listens without heed for this.

"Ah."

Loki carefully places down his glass, peers at Tony as though he peered over the darkened rim of glasses he did not have.

"No, no, don't give me that look, I'm serious." He defensively twitches his hands slightly and heaves a sigh. "I just… yeah, that was a dick move earlier. I know you're still kinda torn up about it but you know I've been kinda stressed lately and—"

"It's fine, I get it."

"No, you always say that, you never mean it."

"And how would you know that?"

"We've been friends for ten years, I know you better than you know you."

Loki laughs again; short and vapid. It means nothing.

"Okay, okay, not that well, but pretty well, c'mon, credit where it's due."

"Fine, but you're still wrong."

"Well, God loves a trier."

"In this Godless world? Yes. God loves a trier."

"You always gotta have a word in edgewise, huh?"

"Always."

The smiles are strange and vacant, the both of them through. It's always strained and it's always on the surface that they are okay. Tony gives Loki a nod, retreats to fetch his friend a second drink and perhaps the one that will make him tip over and talk for once. Tony will incessantly insist that he won't pry, that he won't take a crowbar to the steel lid of Loki's thoughts and tug, but he wants to. Loki knows this. He isn't quite sure what's more irritating about their bizarre dynamic, that Tony keeps sticking his nose in or that although it's unspoken, they both know that Tony wants to be the big brother Loki had lost years ago. It's a gentle sentiment, but painful on the underside.

There have been nights when Loki had fleetingly thought of stabbing him in light of such audacities.

You are not him, robot man, you will never be the light he was, not even the sun itself is given the dignity.

Loki throws up his walls like the calloused exoskeleton of the life he left behind projected into a small, cubed room. It's painted with the same, aged magnolia; it's scratched with the same nicks of violence and frustration that made for their childhood bible. This was their gospel, that there was no God and no end to their disquiet madness. Still the same slats of light. He's still there with you.

You are burned into the wall like an irradiated shadow; you can never go back there. Your heart may ache and yearn, but you may never.

"What's been stressing you out lately anyway? Still with that… exo-cortex thing?"

That's right. Forget about it. It doesn't matter anymore. Your mama's gone and so is your brother. Keep pretending, you're good at that.

"Uh-huh." Tony notices nothing. He slides the glass across the dark worktop and places his own down opposite. "Framework's still a little sketchy in places but ah… it's coming along."

"Uh-huh."

"Not that you'd care, caveman."

"I suppose I'm just asking for the good of my health, then?"

"Hey, whatever helps you sleep at night."

"I was genuinely curious."

"I know." He smiles. Surface tension on an aged face mapping everything he refuses to say but Loki can read regardless. "I'm getting there. I mean it's been operational for a while but the coverage isn't broad enough."

"How come?"

"Well it's supposed to be a rein on the AI tech around the world."

"I know that much."

"Can't do a good job of that if the signal doesn't stretch that far beyond the border of Mexico, right?"

"Ah."

"Yes, ah."

"You look like you haven't slept in weeks."

"Probably because I haven't." He smiles again, but it's as weary as his words and abrasive with every ounce of sleep he hasn't had. "I have, on the other hand, had a chance to mess around with the internal network." It was then that a strange smirk curled one corner of Tony's mouth. His eyes were cast downward.

"I don't like that look."

"Oh it was nothing bad… I just left a few gifts encoded in there. Kinda like Easter eggs I guess."

"And who's going to find those?"

"Nerds, probably. They'll probably extrapolate the nonsense and make it out to be some kinda code. Y'know, like when people used to listen in on shortwave radio frequencies."

"Hey, number stations are good nightmare fuel sometimes."

"Oh pff- no they're not."

The air seems to soften as Tony sweeps up his glass and rounds the countertop. He lets himself fall into a black couch set off from the counter, overlooking an enormous panorama of their machine-driven dominion. How quaint, how it lights up under nightfall. No moon but neon. The leather groans painfully beneath Tony's weight, and Loki doesn't join him.

"Yeah they are, one station does broadcasts in a small child's voice, it's quite creepy."

"And why have you been listening to numbers stations?"

"I don't know, I got bored one night."

"Ah huh, sure."

"You don't believe me."

"Learned not to believe you the hard way when you got me stood up on that one blind date, remember?"

"Fine, fine, you win."

Silence.

"Your face was priceless though."

"I stood out in the rain for fifteen minutes waiting for her."

"Exactly. Priceless."

Silence allowed them room to drink and room to think. Through the nights, their conversations grew patchy and haphazard, be it through lack of prior thought or lack of thought at all. Their grasp on friendship was alien and tenuous, but a grasp all the same was had and it made for some fragile sail across their collective sea of robots and networks and a myriad of memories they laid to waste in the metallic slagpools of their life's long forgery. They managed, and that was the important part. Tony was a giant in their realm and Loki his quiet fledgling. A realm had been woven on carbon fibres and nanotubes and metallic spindles that held together the fulcrum of life as they knew it. Not a man in the world could say they weren't at least part machine now, it was what made them strong. From microchips to nanobots to cybernetic prosthetics, the human race had since evolved far beyond that which it previously knew to be possible.

All except for little Loki, who point blank refused before he had even been asked.

This race of sheep wishes for immortality by way of transcending the barrier of humanity and into the next level of their artificial evolution, but not Loki.

Loki wishes not for immortality, not without Thor. He'd sooner die cold and alone.

"I guess you'll be gearing for the nightshift then, hm?"

"Yep, your dad's gonna be pissed if I don't have anything to show for by the end of the week."

"I'll leave you be, if you'd like."

"Nah, it's alright. Company never hurts."

"You'd be surprised."

"Oh I thought you were past this—"

"No, no, I'm sorry."

"—moping crap."

"I am."

"Really?"

"Yes."

"No, really?"

"… No."

Tony sighs and runs a hand through his hair, faint veil of sweat on his brow slick against his rough hand.

"I'd just… look, get some sleep, Loki. You'll feel better in the morning."

Loki could sit and scrapbook all of these surface comforts that Tony would offer up, and he would be kept up for hours in the thin quilts of paper shards and silly nothings that wouldn't make any difference. The sentiment was there, perhaps. Perhaps it wasn't, perhaps it was human autonomy, a knee-jerk twitch of mouth and mind to force out the first thing that sounds vaguely comforting. It could been either, wouldn't make a difference either way. There's no care in his heard and there's no receptor for the warmth of a stranger he can't even begin to devise. Ten years, and it still feels like yesterday. He still doesn't know the man he stands and purveys every day. He doesn't know the man who accompanies him to his mother's grave and chides him about their time keeping. He's like a shadow trailing behind him in the blinding metallic soar of their realm, and he can't begin to process its levels and its curves.

He doesn't want to.

He nods towards his friend and soundlessly obeys such advice. He skulks off out of the room and heads off to his quarters in some distant corner of their high tower. Apparently, this corporate madhouse makes for his and his father's home. Loki hasn't known home since he was a child.

This isn't home, this is a hostel until the skies clear and the planes of dream can take wing once more and Loki can feel free to fly away.

By night, he remembers Thor. He remembers what it was like to be held by him, soft lips on his fine hair mid-way across the borderline between waking and sleeping. He remembers his mother, her gentle warmth on the cold mornings and her smile, occasionally forced and barren, but her effort like a beacon. He remembers that they're gone, and how she died. Could it be that they're all up there somewhere? Your brother, your mother? Are they watching you and are they marking you for all of your perfection, all of your imperfection against some age-old rubric of good and bad?

No, they aren't. There is no rubric and your family are long dead and rotting in the wounded earth.