Author's note: And so… the mystery of the phone call is resolved. ;)
"Alright, you bring me up to speed as soon as you have more information," he tells the director on the other end of the line, thereby ending their unfortunate conversation.
The sharp click as he snaps his cell phone shut sounds angry. And he is too. From the looks of it, someone's been embezzling money from Stark Industries. Sure, the amount is only a drop in the ocean compared to the enormous sums that flow in and out of the operation on a daily basis, but it's the principle that matters. And what's even worse, someone has also been trying to access restricted files, possibly with the intent to sell secret company information to the highest bidder.
Obviously, someone in the higher echelons is a fraud, but he has no idea which one of those guys with their pin-striped suits and artificially whitened smiles or those women with their high heels and hair pulled into facelift-tight buns is the perpetrator. Nope, no clue who it might be among them who is a traitor, a rotten apple that can't be trusted.
Mr Anderson, always so brimming with new and creative ideas, but with a careless streak? Ms Tenhurst, who's particular to a fault, but shows unmistakable signs of being a gold-digger with expensive habits? Mr Chen, who never shirks a responsibility, but has a fondness for drinking and gambling?
Only heavens know.
Fuck.
He massages his temples with his fingers. It doesn't do anything for his headache.
Of course, Pepper would have handled this expertly, if she had still been his CFO. Heck, this entire mess wouldn't even have happened in the first place on her watch. And even if it did, she would have sniffed the perpetrator out in the time it would have taken him to down a bottle of scotch.
He sort of misses Pepper. She was his steadfast anchor, the bright and shining light that always managed to pull him up from his moody stints and back into the world of the living. As well as the band-aid that could be applied to pretty much any fuck-ups in his life, and things would automatically sort themselves out. Until the day she just walked out on him.
And a part of him misses her still.
Damn, he thought he was over that already.
He sinks down into the nearest chair, head in his hands, feeling like utter shit. Why does his life always have to be like this, mess upon mess upon mess?
And speaking of that bottle of scotch, that seems to be the best available remedy to his problems. Short-term, at least.
Getting up from the chair, he rummages around in his liquor cabinet until he finds something passable. Not bothering with a glass, he unscrews the top and then drinks heavily in deep, soothing gulps.
Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he stares at the bottle in misery, and then takes another few gulps.
Pepper is gone, his company is going to the dogs without her, people he thought he could trust are betraying him once more, to say nothing of him being the butt of the joke that is Asgard's justice system. Yeah, what other things are there that could possibly go wrong?
He sits there for a while, alternating between drinking straight from the bottle and feeling sorry for himself. Sometimes multi-tasking by doing both at the same time. Despite long and diligent practice, he's beginning to feel a little queasy from the large amounts of alcohol he's been consuming in this short amount of time, so he gets up from the chair, bottle still clutched into a tight grip, and saunters into the living room to find more comfortable seating arrangements.
Perhaps it's that smarmy Mr Hermann from his board of directors who's been embezzling and trying to get his grubby little hands on sensitive information. He can totally picture it, the chubby man with his beady, shifty eyes sitting there in front of the computer screen, tapping away at his keyboard, watching those numbers being directed into his own bank account while attempting to decrypt those encoded files…
"Fuck," he yells at no one in particular, slamming the door behind him in anger. Why does shit like this always happen to him?
He almost startles as his gaze falls on Loki who's sitting on the couch, still waiting. Oh yeah, it was that little detail as well.
And he really doesn't feel up to dealing with that right now. It will have to wait until tomorrow.
So instead, he plops himself down on the couch, the contents of the bottle in his hand spilling a little over the brim. His mind only vaguely registers how Loki tenses up next to him, eyeing him warily.
Right now, he desperately needs something to occupy his brain and take his thoughts off all the current shittiness. His eyes meet with the DVD remote control on the other side of the table, and its promises of mind-numbing entertainment. Yeah, a dumb-ass comedy, a brainless action movie, whatever.
He reaches out for the remote, leaning over towards Loki's side. At that, the god jerks, pressing himself back into the couch and away from Tony.
And the sight just grates him like a cheese grater rasping against his skin. Apparently it's not enough that someone in his company, on a very trusted position no less, thinks he's enough of a dim-witted idiot for them to get away with stealing a few million right under his nose while trying to nab company secrets to boot, or that Pepper considers him an insensitive jerk with a list of issues long enough to cover the distance from here to Paris. Nope, because now he's being pegged for an abusive fucking asshole to top it all off.
"Would you stop that already?" he snaps at Loki, annoyance getting the better of him as his patience is wearing paper-thin, in places dissolving into nothing. What the hell did he ever do to merit such a shitty opinion from the god who is looking at him like he's fucking Jason Voorhees himself? "I've already fucking said I'm not going to do anything to you!"
He tries to put the bottle still grasped in his fingers back on the table, but his hand-eye coordination is not quite up to par and he fails spectacularly. The side of the bottle slams against the table's edge and breaks, causing shards and liquid to spill out over the floor.
Fuck.
He only barely notices, out of the corner of one eye, the quick movement as Loki gets up from the couch and hurries out of the room.
He is back on his bed, waiting apprehensively for… something. Tony is obviously angry; he doesn't know exactly what prompted it, though it seemed to be connected to the earlier phone call. One thing is certain, though, he hadn't served to improve the man's mood. Quite the opposite.
And though it's not the first time he's seen Tony drink or being drunk, it has never been combined with a bad mood like this before.
Back in Asgard, there are many men with a taste for drinking. Some of them turn friendly and jocular with the sweet rush of alcohol in their veins, some sad and sentimental, and others yet vicious and brutal, the smallest provocation enough for them to lash out with violence.
He's not sure which category Tony belongs to, but it sure didn't seem like either of the two first ones. Not particularly wanting to find out the answer, he took the opportunity to sneak out when Tony's concentration appeared to be more focused on the broken bottle than on his slave.
The nervous anxiety is eating away at him; he's far from sure it was a wise decision to leave after Tony's having told him to wait. Maybe the man will come back for him, even angrier now that Loki took to scurrying out of the room like that, without even bothering to clean up the mess of the broken bottle like it would have been expected of a slave.
So he waits with bated breath. A sober Tony might be somewhat predictable, a drunk one… not so much. Promises made while sober might not mean very much once alcohol enters the stage, pushing everything else out.
Warily, he listens for the sound of footsteps approaching, but there are none.
Still, he decides to stay awake, just in case.
He wakes up with a startle, his head spinning and his left arm soundly asleep. Grimacing, he pushes himself up from his decidedly uncomfortable position on the couch, the previous alcohol-induced buzz in his head having faded to a slight murmur. He isn't sure how long he's been lying here like road-kill, but at least he's a few degrees more sober now than when he dozed off.
Something is nagging at the back of his head, and it doesn't take long before bits and pieces of what transpired earlier start coming back to him in a mosaic of fractured images.
Damn.
"Jarvis, where is Loki?"
"He's in his room, sir."
"Is he still awake?"
"It would seem so."
With a groan, he gets up from the couch and heads out of the living room.
His almost-steady feet come to a halt outside Loki's room, and for a while he hesitates, hand hovering above the handle. Remembering his own recent behaviour, though, he thinks better of it. Sure it's his house and all, but… So instead, he lifts his hand and knocks, three soft raps against the wooden panel.
There's no answer, so finally he pushes the handle down, slowly letting the door slide open. Loki is sitting there on the bed, arms wrapped around his drawn-up knees and a wary look on his face.
"Hey, Bambi." At least he doesn't think he's slurring. What amazing progress.
The shift in the form in front of him as Loki tenses is faint, but still impossible to miss.
Sighing inwardly, Tony pulls out a chair, sitting down opposite the bed. He suddenly feels very stupid.
Drumming a couple of fingers against his thigh, he fumbles around for something to say. And why is it that all his conversations with the god are awkward and weird like this?
"Okay, so… I got some bad news about my company and I wasn't in a good mood," he manages. "But all that stuff I said about not hurting you still stands. You know, just because I get pissy sometimes doesn't mean I'm going to turn you into a punching bag or anything."
And fuck, Loki's eyes are so damn wide, like he's a freaking puppy someone dropped off a thousand miles away from home. And that makes him want to- Alright, Tony, stop that line of thought right there.
"So just stop being so… jittery, alright? Seriously, you're making me feel like I'm the biggest asshole that ever walked planet Earth. And I'm really not."
Damn, he's so fucking tired, and he desperately needs to sleep. And he doesn't know what fucking else to say, not when Loki is looking at him like that.
Oh well. Perhaps things will be better and less awkward once they've both gotten some sleep.
"Anyway, as I was trying to say earlier before we got interrupted, I'll set you up with a task tomorrow, and we'll take it from there, alright?" He gets up from the chair, scooting it back into place, glad to leave the god to his own devices.
"So, I'll see you in the morning, Rudolph."
Inspiration for this chapter came from AidennQueen who asked if Loki would ever "catch Tony in a mood when he hasn't the patience to always reassure him that nothing bad's gonna happen, and instead gets annoyed that he's constantly being pegged as the abusive asshole he clearly isn't?" And my brain pretty much immediately decided, yeah, of course that's gonna happen. ;)
And behold right there, the amazing benefits of reviewing! :D *cough, cough* More story, and maybe your idea gets immortalized here as well! ;)
Ahem, yeah, so alrighty then… *slinks away to write more.*