The opening band is some chick with a gap tooth, sitting on stage alone playing a guitar and warbling about how she likes her weed exotic.
While Tony totally agrees, he doesn't think she counts as a band.
She's either too drunk or not drunk enough to be good. The audience definitely isn't drunk enough to not notice.
Halfway through her set some girl who looks to be about nine starts screaming for Loki Lauff. The next thing Tony knows he's kind of afraid it's about to get violent. The next next thing he knows Pepper is screaming like she's been possessed by the devil.
"Come on jerkoff, if you don't cut the fashionably late shit someone's gonna get killed."
Tony has narrowly avoided getting his feet impaled on a pair of criminally tall heels when suddenly every light in the entire venue is killed.
There is a moment of collective silence, like the break before the storm, and Tony can't breathe. He feels himself being shifted and moved by the crowd. Usually being lost in a haze of smoke is his preferred state of being, but here he feels claustrophobic, and blind, and he doesn't know where his body is going. In a brief moment of panic he can't help but wonder if the dark ate Pepper.
"Pepper!" He calls out and he swears at least three guys elbow him in the ribs, and someone pinches his ass.
Apparently silence is some kind of unspoken code at these things.
In the darkness a single dissonant, eerie note on an out-of tune piano is pounded over and over and over again. Every arrhythmic tap sends a chill shooting down his spine. It's like his every bone is a stretch of blackboard with a single claw-like fingernail digging trenches across its surface.
Every last one of Tony's hairs is standing on end and he's nearly crossed the line from fidgeting into shivering when, an eternity later, a single beam of blinding white light shoots clear through the void of darkness and silence.
It slices through the audience in staggering waves. Tony can see bits and flashes of things he can't process. He feels dizzy. He doesn't know where to look, so he closes his eyes.
'Open your eyes." Says a soft voice and Tony feels it linger in the shell of his ear as his eyelids fly open.
The stage is empty. Tony's confused. Then he notices everyone around him gasping and pointing upwards and when his eyes follow their hands Tony forgets how to breathe.
There is a man, naked as the day he was born, bathed in white light, and bound in gold ropes and leather, hanging from the ceiling hanging just out of arms reach. Tony reaches his hands up anyway.
"Hello Darling." Says Loki Lauff again, in that soft dangerous voice, as if with every word he's somehow daring you to do something outrageous.
The crowd goes absolutely wild.
"Now sssssssh." Says the man and they all fall dead silent.
Tony wonders if he's some sort of Jedi or something, because he has never seen that work at another concert in his entire life. At other concerts the band goes "How are you dudes tonight?" And apparently the audience can only communicate through incoherent vowels, because that's all they do.
Loki Lauff exists outside of that universe, in a single beam of blue light in the void, lounging in a leather hammock like it's a red velvet bedspread.
The thought of that skin against the red, red like his car, the thought of all that white skin and those long limbs spread over the hood of his car—
"Fuck." Says Tony and, once again, at least four people elbow him.
"Maybe…" Says Loki Lauff and the audience screams. He peers down through a hole in the strips of leather and his eyes are green and lined in something so black that it turns the whites of his eyes luminous and his skin to marble.
A long hand reaches down and Tony reaches up. That single shock of white skin turned blue at the wrists and tapering down to impossibly slender fingers makes Tony ache. He's standing on tip toes and the crowd is trying to push him down to get at Loki first but he won't let them and the tips of their fingers are a hairsbreadth away in the blue light—
Loki snatches his hand away. Tony wants to bang his head against the floor.
"…later." Loki nearly purrs and it takes Tony a good twenty seconds to remember that he was finishing a thought from earlier. "This has got to be something to remember. I'm going to take this one slow."
The audience screams and this time Loki doesn't stop them. He rolls around in his hammock, basking and stretching like a cat in the sun.
It's not until Tony catches a glimpse of what he think might be the single biggest cock he's seen in his entire life that he realizes that the void has suddenly become peppered with mirrors, and light is spilling forth like water in every direction.
"Jonce?" The cat calls from his leather perch and suddenly the room is filled with thunderous melodic crash and bellowing of a church organ. It nearly shakes the walls and Loki seems to roll in the sounds like he can physically feel them. Tony vaguely registers something happening on stage, but he can't look away from Loki.
"Let's be sensible and start at the beginning, hmmm Jonce?"
"Cool-city, yeah?" Says the so-called-Jonce, presumably. Tony doesn't have a fuck to give him.
"Track one off of the Rise and Fall of Loki Lauff and the Age of Frost: Five Lifetimes."
Tony swears the room drops twenty degrees and he can see his breath as, from somewhere far away, someone begins to drum.