3
The darker half of the year, with its moribund sunsets, scalping wind, and Samhain. Days where the veil between the living and the dead, between that which is real and that which can only be whispered becomes thinner, gossamer.
His waking hours are now filled with a terrible thirst, all too familiar from those deep-dreaming nights. Some days the want is so great, it seems to Tony that the day and night is beginning to merge into one unceasing landscape of bitter thirst.
Where is his anchor now? How could he fix a point of return, when either worlds finds him thus ensnared, dreaming of the same pale wet skin and half-empty eyes? How would he find his way within the merging of these once-disparate worlds?
When the answer finally comes to him in a bout of fever, Tony returned to his dreamatorium, to his cold ivory lab, determined to take action.
~o0o0o~
The battle to draw Loki out takes place in the remote landscapes of eastern Utah , enrages the god of mischief enough to commit him to the fray and fools him into thinking he would emerge triumphant in it. Loki uses his copies only in moments of pure confidence and convenience; a telling sign of vulnerability that Tony has spent enough time pouring through video sequences and statistics to confirm.
There is a trick to trapping a god, Tony knows; a lure made out of equal measures of truth and lies, a spell weaved tight and invisible above a puzzle sufficient to tempt even the likes of Loki; enough to draw his magic out and trap it against his will. A storing device, modelled on the arc reactor, powerful enough to store and convert magic and channel it into Tony's suit.
All in all, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for a man who no longer knows the definition of sleep.
The harder part is spiriting Loki's copy away once he had caught it, without the rest of the Avengers cottoning on and pursuing him – suspicious as they were about Tony's extracurricular activities. Tony schemes and plans and sets up traps like Chinese boxes yet in the end he catches Loki's copy by sheer luck, when Clint shoots one of them a split second before he plunges a spear into Tony's chest - and instead of the gift of death Tony receives the curse of having his utmost desire handed to him on a plate by serendipity.
As he closed his arms around the fallen figure and activates the magically spurred fusion propulsion, Tony barely had time to take it all in - the cry of rage from the true god of mischief, the shock on Steve's and Clint's face – before winking out with his prize.
~o0o0o~
The water of the lake moves unnaturally, propelled by the quickening of invisible creatures beneath it. It laps warm and red and impenetrable, and sends spikes of revulsion and naked, bone-trembling fear through him. Tony pushes through, forces himself to continue wading into the waters because waiting for the lake to dry would take too long; who knows what fancy might take the bathing god to sense Tony's desire, to flee?
He bites his cheeks and focuses on Loki and Loki alone in a bid to dispel his unease. To falter now is to lose the alien god forever, he knows. The water is unfriendly, the entire forest agitated. Only the earth feels less hostile, and did it seem as if he could see and feel through them – sense their eager thirst as if smelling the onslaught of rain?
He almost feels sorry for the bathing god who seems almost doomed not to notice Tony until it is too late, blinded by the white cocoon and the endless fretting of washing, as if he is trying to rub his own skin from his bones.
He stands before the god, and the water roila around them as if seeking to drown him, but Tony knows it cannot, not whilst it has a silver of treasure tucked away like ransom; a piece of Loki's soul securely locked up in a glass cage, sobbing for reunion with his master through cherry-red lips.
'Loki,' he whispers, and he wonders how he'd always know who the man was beneath the veil is, when he'd seen nothing all these years, known nothing aside from the keen sense of deprivation that has sharpened over time from dull ache into knife-tipped hunger.
'Who are you?' the god cries as he finally senses the foreign presence; 'What are you doing?' His hands are raised within the cocoon, it seems to Tony as if they ward him off and simultaneously plead for rescue.
'I am liberating you,' Tony says, and with one hard tug Loki's veil tore with a loud shredding sound that vibrates through the forest. He thinks he hears screaming, but he hears nothing beyond the dull triumphant knell within his head – the feasting his eyes made of the meal before him.
Finally he could see skin, and it was everything Tony wanted and more.
He thinks he imagines the earth groaning in hunger and triumph as he carries the god's body out of the water and lays him out upon the soil quivering, a mermaid. One who's birth he had just compelled, torn away from its watery womb. He had done this. He, alone could do something like this; and something in Tony is as torn as the shreds of veil lying ruins at his feet at this knowledge; some part of him is irrevocably destroyed by this action.
By his own power. Him alone. All that he can do, all he dares to do.
Loki's hair is black and long, plastered wetly in curling tendrils like dark fern around a smooth white stone. His lips are blue, his eyes red with crying. Tony has never seen such colours before – the world he once came from no longer knew such colours, nor invoked in him such emotions, such profound sense of beauty. Loki's presence on the earth seemed to illuminate the soil's darkness – its patient nature, above all its constant state of thirst.
'Return me to the water,' the god pleads. 'You know not what you wrought.'
Instead of answering Tony tastes his lips for the first time, red as velvet. Red as the first bite of the first harvest apple. Red as virginity. He thought of the abduction of Hades then. He thought of the rape of Persephone.
'This cannot hurt you, for is no more than a dream for both of us,' is all he says as he covers the pale body with his dark one. He gathered handfuls of the wet loam and smeared them on the god, covering the incandescent skin, claiming the light for his own.
'You are water, made to be drunk. I will contain your liquid. I will bath you from now on.'
And then he touches only tears, feels the terrible thirst within him slake for the first time in years.
~o0o0o~