Nooo! I don't want two weeks to become the norm for update times, but I'm so busy!And I only had two updates in September, but on the bright side I have a head start for October since today's the first and I already have a chapter up. Having longer update times is also annoying because it means I have less time to write in general, and I love writing. Basically I have less free time :( Although I did see X-Men: Apocalypse as well as the first X-Men movie (I think- The one that was just called X-Men). Anyways, now I can claim to have some knowledge of Charles Xavier and other X-Men.
I should probably mention I don't own X-Men either (obviously)
As always, a huge thanks to everyone who's read, reviewed, favorited, and followed this story. Over 60,000 views total! I can't believe it! :)
That one shot of MCU Loki meeting my Loki is still in the very early stages. Actually writing it is way harder than I expected :( So it might be a while. Sorry if anyone was looking forward to it. Writing MCU Loki is kinda hard in general, and especially after writing this Loki for so long.
Anyways, this chapter was super fun to write and I hope you enjoy it! And something several people recommended happens this chapter!
Okay. One last thing and then I'll shut up. I'm not sure if this was too vague last chapter, but the sand creation Loki destroyed was a recreation of the Asgardian palace. I don't think I ever actually mentioned that, but you might've been able to figure that out if you already knew what it looked like. Although I'm not sure if it's just me that thinks it looks like a pan flute.
Around half an hour later, Jarvis announces that Rhodey is due to arrive in a couple minutes. Tony grins. He tells Jarvis to direct Rhodey directly in the workshop when he gets here. After all, his War Machine armor apparently needs some work.
Over the half an hour while waiting for Rhodey, Tony had explained to Loki that Rhodey is one of his friends, but that he's a nice friend, and that he has a suit like the Iron Man suits. Tony had also equipped Loki with an earpiece. At least for the beginning, Tony is going to be hiding and watching the (hopefully very entertaining) proceedings through Jarvis, and giving Loki advice through the earpiece on what to say or do. The reason Tony's hiding is Rhodey would wonder who 'Loki' was, even if Tony's really the one who looks like Loki right now. He's going to find out eventually, though, but it could give him a hint as to what's happened if Tony were there in Loki's body from the start.
This earpiece-advice part is almost like some spy episode, while this whole incident is like something in a Twilight Zone episode. Or, as Loki pointed out, that one Kim Possible episode where Kim and Ron switched bodies. Loki had explained that Ron had to help a lot of people as Kim, and that Kim found out that people were bullying Ron (although Loki hadn't seemed to realize that stealing lunch money and threatening him counted as mistreatment at first; he'd just said they 'were like Fandral'. Tony wonders if Fandral was the most verbally abusive. Tony had been sure to explain that the bullies shouldn't treat Ron like that).
Loki seems very excited about the idea of fooling someone into thinking he's Tony, which had only sort of worked the last time Thor came. Tony wonders whether or not Loki will actually be able to act like him or not. Tony knows he's pretty inimitable (and lots of people would probably try to say that's a good thing). But at least they have an advantage in that Rhodey has no clue someone else even lives with Tony, let alone that they'd switched appearances. And maybe, if Tony tells Loki what to say, they might be able to keep this trick going on a bit longer. Of course, they're not going to do it the whole time, since Tony needs to fix Rhodey's armor, after all.
Tony has noticed that, while he himself looks like Loki, it's just an illusion. He can run a hand through the top of "Loki's" head, since the extra height is just air. Figures he can't even be taller for once. Additionally, the illusion of long hair stays still, as if it's molded from plastic or something, and when Tony ran a hand over his face, he could feel his beard even if he can't see it. Tony can still feel the arc reactor in his body, even though it's hidden from sight as well. Although he looks like Loki, his voice is still his own.
However, Loki seems to have actually shrunk down to be Tony's size when he shape-shifted into Tony. Tony's pretty sure the arc reactor in Loki's chest isn't real, though. Which he supposes is good- the thing keeping him alive is a huge pain. As in, it's actually painful to have a huge metal thing in his chest, although he's never told anyone but Jarvis and Rhodey. He wishes he couldn't still feel it now.
Loki's clothes had also changed into a replica of the business suit Tony had been wearing, although the tie is green and yellow.
Right now, Tony's in the living room, while Bruce and Loki/fake-Tony are in the workshop. Tony kicks back on the sofa with a grin, surrounded by holographic screens showing feeds from all of Jarvis' cameras in the garage.
Actually being in a different room as Loki would have seemed impossible two days ago. Although Tony had managed to avoid Loki for a bit after that ice incident, that hadn't lasted long. Once he was let into the garage, Loki had stayed within a seven foot radius of Tony for basically the rest of the day, sometimes even going so far as to physically cling to Tony as if to ensure he wasn't going anywhere and wasn't going to drop dead at any second.
It hadn't been the first time Loki had been rather clingy. The same had happened after Loki got lost in the city and after they retrieved him from the Helicarrier, as well as when Loki learned Tony is human and thus has a much shorter lifespan. All of those times, Tony had barely been able to shake Loki off to go to the bathroom on his own, having to keep up a steady stream of talking through the closed door so that Loki could hear he was still there. At least filling the silence has never been a problem for Tony- some people complain he never shuts up.
"Oh, yeah, Snoopy- call Rhodey 'Platypus', he hates that." Tony says with a smirk. Honestly, he's not even sure where that nickname came from, other than blurting out "What'cha reading, platypus?" to his friend once on his jet, before the whole Afghanistan incident. It had stuck, and it annoys Rhodey, which only makes calling him that more fun.
Loki nods. Suddenly struck by another thought, Tony says "You might want to let go of Simba for a bit, if you want to look more like me." After all, Rhodey would surely wonder why Tony Stark would be holding a stuffed toy, even if it did have an Iron Man suit. When Loki had transformed, his clothes had morphed into the business suit Tony had been wearing. He hadn't even seemed anxious about that magic, and he'd made his clothes look like a business suit when he went to Stark Industries, too. "Oh, and maybe Stitch and Jormungand too."
"I don't wanna teleport." Loki mumbles.
Right. There's that to worry about. There are always the tracking watch and Stark Phone, but those hadn't seemed to work well in the past- mostly because Loki always inconveniently ended up without them whenever he went missing. But Loki's never teleported when he's been in the water, and he's without Simba then. Tony points this out, and Loki nods, looking somewhat relieved.
Loki sets Simba on a nearby table, and for unknown reasons, he puts his Stitch backpack under the same table. Loki's gone without Simba when going in the water, but right now, he twists his hands together nervously. Jormungand, as the necklace, slithers down Loki's arm, shrinking and wrapping himself around Loki's wrist like a bracelet, under the sleeve of Loki's suit jacket.
"Sir, Colonel Rhodes has arrived." Jarvis announces before Tony can figure out what to do about the teleporting.
Tony has Jarvis direct Rhodey through the tunnel connecting to the garage, so that he won't pass through the living room and see him. Tony settles back into the cushions with a smirk, watching the screens of his garage workshop.
"Hi platypus!" Loki calls out when Rhodey enters, carrying one of the suit briefcases. The god pauses and peers at Rhodey curiously. "You don't look like a platypus. They have tails, and, and you don't, unless it's under your pants? Is it?" Loki laughs at the thought before studying Rhodey more. Tony's already cracking up at the confused look on Rhodey's face. Loki's doing a fair job of covering up his accent, but he doesn't really sound like Tony.
"But you don't even have a... mouth?" Loki pauses and tries to use his hand to represent a platypus' bill, only it looks more like a beak when he does it. At least he doesn't actually grow a bill or something- that would be really weird, and it would kind of ruin this prank they're playing. "No, not a mouth. Well, 's a mouth, but it's another word. What ducks have... beak? No!" Loki can't seem to think of the right word (although he seems to be using All-Tongue), and he lets out an annoyed sound, wringing his hands together even more.
"A bill." Bruce supplies, and Loki nods enthusiastically, grinning at Bruce and going to clap his hands. Clearly, that's the word he'd been looking for.
"Yeah! Bill! Not a beak, beaks and bills are different. The book said it's a duck-billed platypus and they're mammals 'xcept they lay eggs and most don't. Like horses and wolves and apes and people, they don't nope nope nope. But the lady mammals grow babies inside them when they do sex, 'xcept you can do sex without getting a baby."
"You'd know about having sex without getting anyone pregnant." Rhodey snorts, and Tony bursts out laughing in the living room. Loki, however, just looks confused.
"I know 'bout sex." Loki agrees, and Rhodey again laughs even as he looks at Loki strangely. "I do have a rep-reputation as a... playboy?"
Tony is somewhat surprised that Loki's borrowing what he'd said when Loki was naked in the pool and he'd explained what people would think if Loki told them he'd slept with Tony. "You're doing awesome, Rudolph. Hey, tell him you're a genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist." Tony tells him, grinning.
Loki obviously hears it through the earpiece as he grins at the praise and bounces up and down. "I'm a genius, bill'onaire, playboy, phil... phil'n-rop'st." He stumbles over pronouncing the words, but even with All-Tongue, Loki sometimes mispronounces things and omits syllables, and he clearly has no idea what the words mean. Tony doubts those words were used much in Asgard, except perhaps for playboy. Loki looks like he's trying to pull off one of Tony's smirks, but even with Tony's face, it doesn't really work.
Rhodey looks even more confused at "Tony's" behavior, and he turns his eyes towards Bruce.
"Bruce Banner?" He asks simply, holding out a hand. Bruce nods and shakes Rhodey's hand, not saying anything and looking surprised that Rhodey's actually willing to shake his hand. There are probably a lot of people who won't, because of Hulk.
"Tony doesn't let many people down here." Rhodey comments, casting another glance at Tony's decoy. It's true, actually. Bruce and Loki are part of a select few- including Rhodey himself and Pepper- who have entered this room or Tony's private lab in the tower. Even Steve and Clint have never ventured into Tony's personal labs, although Natasha had when acting as Tony's personal assistant during that whole Ivan Vanko thing.
"Well, he claims we're 'Science Bros'" Bruce answers, smiling slightly. Loki giggles at that, making Rhodey turn to him again with narrowed, suspicious eyes. Tony knows he's not of a giggler, and Rhodey's picking up on it, too. Bruce explains further. "I've been living with him recently. I moved all my stuff in the tower a while ago, and Tony decided to drag me along on his business trip."
Rhodey doesn't seem too surprised to hear that Bruce took up residence in the tower. After all, the tower could easily house all the Avengers (as well as tons of other people) and after the Battle of New York, Tony had offered it up to all of his teammates. He'd offered a floor to Rhodey, too, but the Air Force still basically owns Rhodey's time, and Rhodey had only ever stayed a couple of days at a time. Much like Bruce had, until he moved in recently.
"I'm down here lots." Loki pipes up. "Sometimes I even sleep with Ton- sometimes I sleeps over there." He catches his slip up in almost mentioning Tony and points at the bed in the corner. Jarvis had minimized the holographic mural of Loki's horse field almost twenty minutes ago, but Loki only seems to notice now. He frowns, twisting his fingers together and flicking his hands. "Where'd it go? It'll come back later, right?" Tony wonders if he's asking one of his pretend "Monster family" members, Simba, or Jarvis. Or, Tony realizes, maybe Loki's asking him since he's been hearing Tony through the earpiece.
"Right." Tony assures him through the earpiece watching Loki tug at the ear the earpiece is in with absolutely no subtlety. "You know you can minimize holograms." Tony knows Loki knows that- he'd done so when working with them and building Simba's suit, as well as reading Peanuts strips. Loki nods.
Rhodey again looks at Loki- who he believes is Tony, given his appearance- with something between amusement, worry and suspicion. Of course, James Rhodes is no idiot- far from it, even if he can't match Tony in intelligence (can anyone, really? Maybe Bruce). Rhodey obviously has noticed that something's definitely off from the start, although Tony would be amazed if he correctly guessed what happened. Mostly because what actually happened sounds insane, or like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. Or, as Loki said, Kim Possible.
"You've been drinking, haven't you, Tony?" He asks. Tony scoffs at the idea- he doesn't act like that when he's drunk. Hell, he'd given a presentation about integrated circuits when he reached a level of drunkenness where most people wouldn't have be able to stand, as Yinsen had said. Yinsen had been at that conference, and Tony remembers that now, although he hadn't when the man brought it up in the caves. Tony forces the memory out of his head, which isn't too hard since he has the screens in front of him to distract him.
"I had t... had coffee with Bruce. With that." Loki answers, pointing at a drained coffee mug with the Stark Industries logo on it. Tony blinks in surprise. He hadn't expected Loki to actually lie in order to pretend to be Tony, and actually act like he had done what Tony did.
Although he's been making it recently, and occasionally trying to sneak an odd ingredient or two in, Loki never really drinks coffee. He'd spit it out in disgust the first time he tried it. The god had actually seemed to want to try coffee again recently (Tony suspects Loki wanted to emulate him and drink the same thing). Even with decaf coffee mixed with sugar- although too not much since Loki's energetic enough already- he'd still grimaced and hadn't finished the mug.
What Loki told Rhodey is true, mostly- Tony had actually drunk coffee earlier today, as had Bruce- but Tony's still surprised Loki lied to playact the part of Tony. Of course, he's seen Loki lie before. He had lied less than an hour ago, with the petri dish smashing episode. Tony had half thought Loki would answer Rhodey's drinking question by saying he drank tea, which is what he'd done when Tony and Bruce were having coffee earlier (using Mrs. Potts and Chip, of course). Actually, it sounded like Loki was going to say 'tea' at first but had caught himself and changed it.
"You know what I mean, Tony." Rhodey shakes his head in exasperation, probably thinking "Tony" is being a wiseass, and looks at Loki again. "Have you been drinking alcohol?"
Loki shakes his head, and that's true in both counts. Tony drank some last night, but none today. Admittedly, it's not even noon and he's planning on drinking with Rhodey later, but it's still true. Loki has never touched the alcohol Tony owns, which he'd offered Loki on the first night. Loki apparently drank sometimes in Asgard but had hated it. Loki had mentioned that they said he "got even stupider than he had before". That comment had worried Tony, because it does make it sound like something happened to him. Coupled with that child-Loki illusion, which looked different from when Loki became Mowgli, Tony's very worried that's the case.
"I made a Man of Iron- no, Iron Man suit." Loki tells Rhodey, and Tony hadn't expected him to correct himself to say Iron Man like Tony does. It actually sounds weird to hear Loki not say Man of Iron. Technically, Loki's not lying now. He had made a suit for Simba, and at first that's what Tony thinks he's talking about until Loki surprises him again by lying to pretend to be him. "In a cave."
Tony's only mentioned building the first Iron Man suit in a cave once, and is somewhat surprised Loki remembers it.
"I made lots of suits and they fly an'... and I made Jarvis and Dum-E, yeah." Loki nods. "You know Jarvis, right? He's real smart, and his name stands for 'Just A Rather Very Intelligent System'. And he's holograms... blue holograms, and he says he can do stuff like me. He's really nice, too. Ton- no, I'm super super smart and nice, too!" Loki had almost slipped up again, Tony notices, but he's doing surprisingly well at catching himself. Rhodey probably doesn't know what Loki meant by doing stuff like him, how Jarvis compares Loki's abilities to his own.
"I am Iron Man." Loki adds as an afterthought, although randomly stating it is somewhat suspicious. Ironically, that's the exact line Tony used at that press conference years ago when he'd announced it to the world, and Loki even says it in the same way. But Tony's never told him about that press conference, and Loki's never seen the clips from it.
Loki laughs wildly. He's always seemed to like the idea of being Iron Man. That's been clear since his pajama section on their clothes shopping spree on his first morning here. "I am Iron Man, Man of Iron, Tony Stark! I'm Tony Stark, so I'm a superhero!" Loki adds, grinning and bouncing on his bare feet, which clash with the business suit he's wearing.
"Jarvis? Has he been drinking?" Rhodey asks.
"Mr. Stark has not consumed any alcohol today, Colonel." Jarvis replies smoothly. Rhodey nods a tad skeptically, probably wondering if Tony ordered Jarvis to say that, but he doesn't press the issue. He still looks at Loki suspiciously, especially since Loki's started humming under his breath with his usual dreamy expression on his- or, rather, Tony's- face.
"You feeling alright, man? You're not acting like yourself, and you sound different." Rhodey sounds concerned, and he's probably referring both to Loki's voice, which doesn't sound exactly like Tony's, and the way he speaks. Loki just stares at him and nods, grinning guilelessly.
"I keep telling you, you need to sleep more." Rhodey shakes his head. "I think you've worn yourself out. When's the last time you slept?"
"You're starting to sound like Pepper, Rhodes." Tony mutters, before blinking when he sees Loki repeat the line to Rhodey on the screen in front of him.
"You're starting to sound like Pepper, Rhodes. Pepper's a spice, too. And Pepper's got the same surname as Mrs. Potts but she says they're not related and she's never been a teapot."
"Are you high or something?" Rhodey asks, looking directly into Loki's glassy eyes.
Really? Okay, Tony admits that's not a completely preposterous assumption. He had taken drugs in the past, but he hasn't touched them in years. Hell, that was mostly when he'd been in college decades ago, and he'd graduated from MIT at seventeen. Okay, maybe it had continued into his early twenties, but that was still twenty years ago. Besides, Loki doesn't act like he's on crack or anything, although out of context, what he'd just said about Pepper sounds crazy. And, well, his eyes are sort of glazed.
Loki pauses, seeming to think, and then stares Tony's longtime friend bemusedly. "No. We're in a... dungeon, but not a scary one, and they're always at the bottoms... Well, we're on a cliff, but I'm lots higher in Ton- ins my tower. 'Cause it's super tall-like."
"That's not what he means, Snoopy." Tony finds himself saying around his laughter, and Loki clearly hears that through the earpiece.
Loki starts laughing too, perhaps spurred on by Tony's own laughter or just finding this prank amusing. Cocking his head to the side, Loki asks him "What's he mean?" Of course, nobody else had heard what Tony said, so it looks like he's talking to nobody. Loki talks to Simba sometimes, as well as Hel and the others, but Tony obviously doesn't, and this is kind of ruining the effect. Actually, it's probably making Rhodey continue to think he's on drugs or something. Or that he's gone insane.
"You're really not acting like yourself, Tony. I'm not sure I want you fixing my suit when you're like this." Rhodey eyes Loki suspiciously. "What's wrong?"
"I'm Tony! I can fix it! I made one!"
"How did you make one?" Rhodey folds his arms, clearly testing him with that question.
"With holograms. And Jarvis and Dum-E made it real 'xcept I didn't make the-" Tony quickly makes an ah-ah-ah noise as he frantically tries to get Loki to stop that before he says arc reactor, since that would totally give them away. Loki clamps a hand over his mouth to stop himself before he says those two words. Admittedly, when Loki frantically covering his mouth isn't exactly less suspicious.
"I made the arc reactor," Loki says hastily, pointing at the most-likely-fake one in his chest. The glow can be seen from underneath Loki's dress shirt. "It's really glowy, see?"
"How did you make it?" Rhodey asks, and Tony hopes Loki doesn't say holograms again.
Loki answers, before Tony can prompt him on what to say. "Like, there's glass-" He taps his chest. "And glowy stuff in it, and stuff got mixed up for it, like cooking. But you can't eat it! And it hums and thrums an' there's a really big one in the tower!" Tony realizes that Loki must have been watching when he'd made the arc reactor for Simba's suit, but he clearly doesn't understand it. Which is just as well, because that means he can't accidentally spill the secret to, well, anyone really. Tony doesn't want anyone getting their hands on the designs for miniaturized arc reactors.
"Normally, you'd launch into some sort of scientific explanation that I wouldn't understand just to annoy me. And you don't cook, so you why are you comparing it to cooking?" Rhodey tells him. Tony debates trying to get Loki to repeat some science stuff he feeds him through the earpiece to do just that, but sadly he doesn't get the chance.
"You're acting really weird, man. You keep sounding like you're about to say Tony, and then you switch to saying 'I', and you have an earpiece in. What's going on? Are you even Tony?" He starts to approach Loki, frowning. Loki flinches back with wide, worried eyes before scurrying to the table that Simba's on, scooping his precious lion up, and crawling under the table, where his Stitch backpack already is.
Dang. Tony should've thought of that. Of course Loki's going to be wary about strangers trying to touch him. After all, he's only been out of Asgard for about two months. Frankly, the fact he hadn't totally freaked out during their defense lesson when Natasha was lightly punching at him is somewhat astounding. But then again, Natasha wasn't a total stranger.
"He's not going to hurt you, Bambi." Tony reassures him softly through the earpiece.
Tony figures it's time to head back down to the lab. This was fun while it lasted. He gets up and heads down the stairs. He doesn't even have to enter the code- Jarvis opens the glass doors for him.
"Who the hell are you?" Rhodey asks, looking at Tony with even more suspicion. Tony sees Loki cock his head to the side and decides Loki probably thinks Rhodey's referring to Hel. Loki opens his mouth to respond but Tony beats him to it.
"It's me, sour-patch. I'm hurt. Here I thought you cared for me, and you don't even recognize me." Tony answers, mock pouting, glad that his voice is at least his own. Tony hears Bruce chuckle at that. Rhodey glances between Tony and Loki, who's still hiding under the table. Bruce is crouched down, talking softly to the god.
"Look, man, I've never seen you before in my life." Rhodey tells Tony. Tony of course knows he looks like a stranger to him, since Rhodey's never met Loki.
"Remember Spring Break, 1987? You thought I was a lady when you got in bed." Tony says, bringing up an incident that he knows Rhodey hates being reminded of, before he's unable to keep it in and bursts out laughing. He wonders if those pilots had actually asked Rhodey about that when Tony had flippantly mentioned it back when he was building his Mark Two suit.
Still grinning, Tony waves a hand aside. "Nah, I'm kidding. Whoever that guy was, I seriously doubt he looked anything like me. Well, not me, because this isn't really my body. I'm Tony."
Rhodey stares at him.
"Seriously. I'm Tony Stark, Iron Man, the one and only."
"So why do you look like...that?"
"Long story there, platypus. I'll give you the bare minimum. I know this sounds crazy, but we had a bit of an incident, and now we look like each other. But I sound like myself, right? What proof do you need that I'm Tony? If you want, I can start mentioning every embarrassing thing about you that nobody else would know. Like that one time when you ate-"
"Okay, I'll trust you." Rhodey quickly interrupts, not wanting anything to get out, especially when the Spring Break of 1987 incident had already been mentioned. Shaking his head, the airman mutters "I must be going mad."
"You haven't even heard half of it." Tony says, clapping him on the shoulder before going to tell Loki that everything's okay.
Rhodey glances between him and Loki. "This is too weird." Tony's longtime friend says.
Tony shrugs, smirking. "It made for a good prank, which you totally fell for. Good job, Loki." He grins at the god hiding under the table.
"I did not fall for it." Rhodey protests, and Tony chuckles. Admittedly, he didn't really, but Tony's going to ignore that little detail. "So you look like... whoever he is?" Rhodey asks, gesturing towards Loki.
"Rhodey, this is Loki. Loki, this is my friend, James Rhodes, but you can call him Rhodey." Tony smirks when Rhodey gives him a look that says he didn't even ask about that. "Hey, Snoopy, you can switch us back now." Tony says to Loki.
Loki casts a slightly worried glance at Rhodey, and Tony assures him. "He won't mind. He'll think it's as awesome as I do."
Rhodey, in response to Loki's unsure look, turns away from them and says nonchalantly "I don't see anything. But whatever you're going to do will probably be awesome."
"It's awesome! Like Toy Stark!" Loki laughs, still sounding somewhat awed to hear that. He suddenly hugs Tony back, like he had when they'd first switched appearances.
Tony feels Loki grow as he morphs back into his normal body. Glancing at his own hands, the engineer sees that the illusion making him look like Loki has been dropped, so his hands no longer look quite as pale or long-fingered. Rhodey stares in shock, not that Tony can blame him.
Loki announces that he's going to go outside, and Tony figures he's going to either hang around in 'Willow-Willowy' the tree (literally hanging, sometimes) or surf. Or maybe he just needs to be away from Rhodey for a bit. Loki heads off down the tunnel with Simba in his hands and Stitch on his back.
"Your hair is blue." Rhodey says with a laugh after turning around. Tony blinks and has Jarvis pull up a holographic mirror again. Sure enough, his hair is blue, although his eyebrows and goatee are still black. It's a very odd look, to say the least.
"Looks like Loki listened to my advice when you told him to turn my hair blue." Bruce says with a slight smirk as he heads out after Loki, probably both to keep Loki company and to let Tony catch up with his friend alone.
Tony goes and gets beer for himself and Rhodey, wishing he could just send Dum-E for them, although Dum-E's not here. And, well, Dum-E would most likely break something anyways. He returns and places two bottles on the workbench.
Tony makes a gimme gesture to Rhodey's suit briefcase, which holds the War Machine suit. He makes it unfold and starts checking it over. The thing is a mess.
"What did you do to my baby?" Tony asks, giving his friend a mock stern look.
"Hey, it's mine." Rhodey shoots back, crossing his arms. Tony smirks and starts to lay the individual pieces of the suit on the workbenches, kicking aside the broken glass from when Loki had smashed the petri dishes.
"The repulsors don't work." Rhodey tells him as Tony strips down parts to look at the wiring. He'll have to have Jarvis hammer out the dents in the armor, and he sets the AI to the task. He does the same to his own suit and has Jarvis hammer out some of the dents from the most recent fight against Doom-bots. There are only a couple minor dents, but the paint job is completely ruined, so Jarvis also starts to repaint it.
"So, I can't help noticing you're rather affectionate with Loki." Rhodey says, sipping his beer. "Are you two...?"
Tony practically chokes on his beer, setting the bottle down. "God no! I don't know if he can really have a non-platonic relationship."
"It sounded like he started to say he slept with you at one point- he got most of your name out before switching to pretending he was you." Rhodey points out, smirking. Tony has occasionally swung that way, and Rhodey knows that. Hell, most people know that, since it had reached the press- the press claimed it was because he was drunk, but really, there are very few sexual experiences that Tony hasn't had.
Tony groans. He knows Loki knows about sex and everything, yet he doesn't seem to grasp that in most cases, 'sleeping with someone' means having sex with them, so that's how most people interpret it.
"Okay, he crawls into my bed sometimes- mostly the one here in the workshop- but it's not like that. Loki... he's family- like, I don't know, sort of a little brother to me or something. Even though he's like a thousand years older than me."
Ugh, Tony's not good at this feeling stuff. He's not even used to the familial feelings he feels for Loki, although he actually thinks of Rhodey as family, as well as Bruce, surprisingly. All three of them feel more like family than his own father, who had never been around, since he'd been obsessed with looking for Captain America, and who'd never been pleasant on the rare times he was around. So yeah, he feels closer to Loki after only about two months than he had to his actual biological family.
Tony's realized he's fiercely protective of Loki, even early on. Hell, if he didn't know better, he'd swear he's sometimes felt parental to the god. But that's insane, Tony Stark feeling parental. He's not a parent, he never wants to be one, and Loki's not a kid.
Rhodey curiously picks up Toy Stark- currently in Tony form- and turns the toy around in his hands. "Really, Tony? You had a custom action figure made of yourself. I mean, it looks really good, almost like a mini version of you, but your ego doesn't need to get any bigger."
"That's Loki's." Tony says. "He has the whole Avengers set, and he made them look a lot better than the original action figures I bought. You know, sort of like how made me look like him, as you saw. That saved me from sitting through a tedious meeting, although Pepper'll probably kill me later."
"How did he change you? And are you serious about him being over a thousand years old?" Rhodey asks, clearly wondering if Tony's messing with him some more at that last part. Tony confirms that Loki is indeed over a thousand, like Thor.
"As to how he does that stuff- he has magic." Tony replies with slight skepticism. "Well, that's what he calls it, anyways. I haven't figured it out yet, but he's done some things that most people would call magic. Like teleporting. You know, things people used to think were only theoretically possible scientifically."
"And have you thought that if he can change his appearance, he could be someone else disguising himself and trying to trick you?"
"Yeah, I've thought of it, but I seriously doubt that's the case. He'd have to be the universe's best actor. You saw when he was trying to act like me. Besides, Thor's basically backed his story up." Although, it really would've been better if Thor hadn't been able to back up Loki's past.
Tony explains about Loki's other powers, and Rhodey looks very impressed with the list. Tony also tells of how Loki had ended up here after living in Asgard and having one of the shittiest lives imaginable, since he's part of a race that everyone there hates.
Rhodey seems surprised to hear about Asgard- Tony knows that Rhodey had taken a mythology class in college but apparently hasn't heard that Thor actually comes from a place sort of like the one in the myths. He does seem to remember reading about Jotuns, though.
"Damn." Rhodey shakes his head, looking like he wants to beat the crap out of everyone in Asgard. Tony's completely with him there. After a bit, he adds "He has to at least have some serious PTSD."
"He does." Tony mutters. He'd glossed over some of it, like Loki having nightmares every night. After all, he wouldn't want someone sharing about his nightmares. Loki had unintentionally told Dr. Carlisle, who had better keep her mouth shut about that.
They don't just talk about Loki. Rhodey fills Tony in on what's been going on in his life, and Tony demands an explanation of exactly how the War Machine armor got to be in the shape it's in.
"What did you do? Fight zombie ninja terrorists or something?" Tony mutters as he works on fixing the repulsor system.
"Take out the zombie ninja part." Rhodey replies, as Tony takes a draw of his beer bottle. Although it's still surprising that the armor managed to get this beat up and lose repulsor functioning.
Loki comes in back through the tunnel, wearing a red swim suit, although the legs are mysteriously missing, so it looks more like a loincloth. Jormungand's large again, and draped around his shoulders, although the snake's not a necklace this time. He's not even wrapped in a loop, instead Jormungand's head and tail drape on different sides of Loki's body. Tony wonders if Loki was pretending to be Mowgli again, based on the outfit and Jormungand, but Loki's still in his adult body right now. He's carrying Simba, Toy Stark, and Stitch, rather than having Stitch on his back. Bruce is walking right next to him, and they're talking about something.
"Hey, Snoopy, can you change my hair back? I mean, I can totally pull of blue hair-" Tony starts. He can't really, but he's not going to admit that. "-but I look even hotter with my normal black hair. So can you make it look how it normally does?"
"By the way, what you did before was awesome." Rhodey says, and Loki gives him a hesitant smile. Still, he doesn't do anything until Rhodey turns away again.
Loki lays a hand on Tony's head, looking as if he'd rather keep Tony's hair like this. "Hey, buddy, if you keep this up, I'm going to put dye in your shampoo so your hair will be blue." Tony says mock-severely, pointing a finger at him.
Loki just sends him a look that clearly says he could change it back, so that wouldn't do anything. Tony laughs. He has to admit Loki has a point. Loki steps back, as if he's finished.
Tony didn't feel anything, but he sees Bruce nod, and when Rhodey turns around again, he sees he nods too. Clearly, his hair is back to its normal color, but just to be safe, Tony checks it over in a holographic mirror.
"Wait a minute." Tony frowns, looking back to the workbench where Toy Stark had been earlier when Rhodey had been looking at the toy, and at Loki, who's holding Toy Stark and Simba in his other hand. Tony knows Loki didn't come back and get the toy. "Reindeer Games, how did you get Toy Stark?"
"I asked Stitch and he gaves him to me." Loki says matter-of-factly, obviously not having noticed what Tony had. "Tony, guess what? Fenrir and I were in the water, 'cause he was being my wolf family, and the water splashed when he did!"
"Really?" Tony raises both eyebrows. That's interesting. It makes it sound like Fenrir was actually tangible, at least for a bit. "That's neat. Were you being Mowgli again?" Loki nods, his hair bouncing around as he pulls on his starry long coat, which he'd been dragging along with his toys, but apparently hadn't actually been wearing as Mowgli.
"Yeah, and Willow lifted me up and Jormungand was Kaa again. He's got a real body, kinda." Loki gestures to the snake around his shoulders.
"But about Toy Stark, well, he wasn't in Stitch. He was here. Rhodey and I were looking at him." Tony hopes Loki won't panic about that, but Loki just cocks his head to the side, confused. "Uh, don't freak out or anything, but I think Toy Stark teleported to you or something..."
"I believe that's exactly what happened, although this wasn't the first time." Jarvis pipes up, and Loki casts a worried glance at Rhodey, who just smiles at him. "Stitch has spit out toys that were in other rooms, and they would disappear before Stitch spit them out. Additionally, Mr. Loki seemed to summon a bar of soap to the pool two days ago." Loki's eyes go wide at the mention of the soap, as if he'd wondered about that.
"Wait, so it really wasn't there and then it was? Like teleporting?" Loki asks, and Jarvis confirms it.
Tony notices a couple other things. "Come to think of it, you weren't wearing the swimsuit when you went outside. And you don't have your suit now, from when you were me. Did you do something to it?" Loki nods hesitantly, clutching his toys tighter and glancing at Rhodey, who's still sort of a stranger to him. Loki's changed his clothes many times before, but while Tony had assumed that the clothes themselves physically changed, but perhaps Loki simply summoned different clothes onto himself this time. That's probably the case, since he'd already had the swimsuit and coat- he hadn't needed to make them. Besides, Loki's long coat never seems to change. Well, it had changed from something when Loki first made it, but since then, it's remained the same.
"That's an... interesting coat." Rhodey eyes Loki's long coat.
"I made it. Look, here's Orion." Loki says, pointing at the constellation on his coat. The fact he openly admits to making it, especially in front of a stranger, shows they have made progress, even if he seems reluctant to do magic around Rhodey- or, rather when he's watching. "Orion's one of my favorite const'llations, 'cause he has the Horse Head Nebula!" Loki grins, bouncing up and down excitedly and pointing at his coat again where there's indeed something shaped like a horse head. Tony hadn't noticed it before.
"See, there it is! It looks just like a horse head, like my mask that my Tony gots for me only it's in the sky and it's awesome." Loki grins.
Rhodey blinks slightly at the rambling man in front of him. Admittedly, he may just be wondering about the horse mask part.
"Orion, he fought a big scorpion, and when they were puts in the sky, they... they're on different sides of the sky, so that when the scorpion comes ups in the east, Orion sets in the west. Like he's hiding, even though he's a warrior. Tasha said hiding's just as m'portant as fighting, she dids! And Violet and Elsa and Stitch hide sometimes. And horses run aways sometimes, instead of fighting! Lots of animals do, flight not fight."
Rhodey exchanges a glance with Tony, clearly wondering if Loki means Natasha. Tony nods slightly. "So do you know all the constellations?"
"The best one is Pegasus!" Loki says, grinning, and that was definitely what Tony would've guessed his favorite is. "Pegasus 's a horse, but he has wings so he can fly!" This part is said in an almost conspiratorial way as Loki flaps his arms as if to mimic wings.
"He's got wings like a bird's, not like Tinker Bell's. But he's made out of stars, kinda like she is! She's like a star. You know she comes to my room sometimes." Tony assumes he's referring to the holographic version of Tink that Jarvis made, but the way Loki says it makes him seem kind of crazy. As Loki says talks about Tink, Stitch spits out Loki's Tink figurine.
As an afterthought, Loki points to another section of his coat. "Here's the Second Star to the Right, to get to Never Land, 'xcept if you're upside down then it's to the left. And if you turn 'round then a different star is second to the right, but I think it's magic."
"Where was Tink before?" Tony asks Jarvis quietly.
"In Mr. Loki's bedroom." Jarvis replies. "She seemed to disappear before Stitch spit her out, as I said before." Tony sees Loki listening, and he puts a hand on the god's shoulder and grins. Loki smiles hesitantly back.
"Why didn't you tell me about this, earlier, Jarvis? How long has this been happening?" The second question is directed at Loki but Loki apparently hadn't even known he had been doing it. According to Jarvis, it really only started when Loki got his Stitch backpack.
"Wish I coulda done that with Simba." Loki says, and Tony's pretty sure he's talking about when he was on the Helicarrier.
Loki takes a curious look at the armor, which is being fixed by Jarvis, and says "Tony says you're like another Man of Iron... or Iron Man. Tony says Iron Man." Rhodey nods, saying he's War Machine and pointing out his armor. Loki peers at it. "Hey, that looks like Steve's suit, kinda, 'cause it's red and white and blue. Mostly blue. Do you likes blue?"
Rhodey nods. "I do, do you?"
Loki shrugs, but at least he doesn't say he hates it. Tony thinks that maybe he doesn't hate it as much anymore, and his love of Stitch shows that. Instead of answering, Loki changes the topic, though Tony's not sure whether it's on purpose to avoid that topic or not. "I have a suit too. It was for Halloween, and I made Simba's suit, see? Tony made the arc reactor, but I made the rest with holograms, and Jarvis and Dum-E made it real. Hey, Tony, your suit's there too!" Loki points at the suits that are getting fixed by Jarvis.
"Yeah. It's getting repainted. You know, you could help me out with that, like how you change Toy Stark. I bet you could make my suit awesome-looking again a lot quicker than Jarvis. Nothing against you, J."
"Of course not, Sir. As thrilling as the task of repainting your suits is, it would save you from listening." Jarvis remarks dryly.
"You'd want me to do's it?" Loki asks, sounding awed. "But Jarvis is, right?"
"I am, but I believe you'd do it much faster than I can, Mr. Loki." Jarvis replies, sounding like he'd be smiling if he actually had a body or face. Loki approaches the armor pieces, and Jarvis stops painting Tony's suit.
Rhodey says he'd really like to see it, although Loki looks at him slightly worriedly. After relaxing slightly when Tony gives him a reassuring grin, and Rhodey once again turns away, Loki places a hand on the armor pieces for Tony's suit, although they still have wet paint on them.
"Uh, Bambi, just make it red and gold, like normal. Don't change the color on me, okay? You can do that to Toy Stark." Loki nods, looking slightly disappointed, and closes his eyes as green energy starts to form around his hands. The metal suddenly loses the scratches in the paint, looking brand new. Tony grins and goes to clap Loki on the shoulder, only to gently lay a hand there instead. No point risking Loki thinking he's hitting him. "Good job, Snoopy."
"Indeed, you just saved me from hours of tedious boredom." Jarvis says dryly. Loki giggles, and Tony can tell he's remembering Tony had said basically the same thing earlier, when he'd first started to look like Loki and thus got out of a meeting.
"I helpeds!" Loki then looks at the red paint staining his hand with a grimace. "'Like blood." He mutters, shaking that hand wildly and telling it to get off. The paint disappears, and he smiles slightly.
"All right, Rhodey, let's test out that repulsor." Tony says, and Rhodey looks somewhat surprised that Tony finished working on it already. Tony rolls his eyes. "Hey, I'm a genius, remember?" Rhodey nods and has the War Machine gauntlet wrap around his hand. Tony, after fitting the armor plates back over his own suit, suits up entirely.
He doesn't actually see it happen this time, but Tony realizes that Loki's changed Toy Stark from Tony to Iron Man, probably when Tony himself was suiting up. Rhodey apparently hadn't seen it happen either, but he definitely notices the change, and tells Loki that the miniature Iron Man looks almost real. Loki smiles slightly at that, although he'd seemed worried about Rhodey noticing it at first.
They head to the gym for Rhodey and Tony to use their repulsors. Tony has shot repulsor blasts in the garage workshop countless times (and caused a lot of damage in the process) but the gym has a shooting range specifically designed for this.
Loki climbs into the boxing ring, batting at the stretchy, surrounding cords with Toy Stark. "Are we gonna do defense? Like how Baloo taughts Mowgli to fight? Or med'tate?" He asks, picking up the frying pan that he'd left there and twirling it around, probably trying to imitate Rapunzel doing the same thing.
"We can do defense in a bit, if you want to." Tony says, somewhat surprised, before shooting one of his repulsors at the targets. His repulsors weren't actually damaged like Rhodey's were, but it never hurts to practice, after all.
So, five minutes later, Tony and Rhodey are still shooting away at the targets. Bruce had joined Loki in the boxing ring, and they're sitting down on the soft mat. Bruce is apparently trying to get Loki to meditate, which isn't really working as Loki keeps getting distracted by what Tony and Rhodey are doing. Tony hears Loki talking about shooting stars, and making wishes on them like Lilo had.
And then, out of the corner of his eye, Tony sees a glow. He turns, and sees Loki standing there, one hand splayed out in front of him like he's shooting a repulsor, and there's actually a small ball of energy that looks a lot like the blasts Tony shoots hovering in front of Loki's hand. Although it also sort of looks like a ball of fire. It's even white, like Tony's repulsors, which is somewhat surprising since the energy around Loki's hands always seems to be green.
Loki's staring at the ball floating in front of his palm. At first, he almost looks excited to be doing something like what Tony's doing. But then his expression falters slightly, and the energy sphere seems to shoot off on it's on accord, flying across the room and scorching the wall, but not entirely blasting through it. Loki's face gets more and more anxious, to Tony's dismay. He tries to assure Loki that he's not worried about the damage, but Loki doesn't answer. He falls to the mat in the boxing ring, muttering what sounds like pleas as he curls into a fetal position. He's clearly having some sort of flashback, probably about what happened in Asgard when he did this. Had he done this in Asgard? Tony has a feeling he had.
Tony's stomach churns. If Loki had gotten beaten for making a force field to defend himself and had his lips sewn shut for lying about breaking some statue to avoid getting in trouble, Tony doesn't even want to know what the punishment for actually attacking someone was. Each possibility his mind comes up is worse than the last, until his stomach debates about upheaving his breakfast. He notices Rhodey looking on with pity, and he excuses himself, heading off back towards the lab. Tony doesn't even have to tell Jarvis to help him with whatever he needs.
Tony climbs into the boxing ring next to Loki, sitting down and wrapping his armored arms around the shaking god. He tells him softly that it's okay, that nobody's going to hurt him here- what he always says when Loki has a flashback or nightmare. He even sings part of Loki's song under his breath.
Once Loki seems aware of his surroundings, Bruce tries to get him to breathe slowly and deeply, which honestly does help with calming down.
When Loki's calm, he surprises them all by saying "I shot a star, just like you when you're Man of Iron." He doesn't sound like he hates the idea, at least, but then he bites his lip nervously. "Sorry! Sorry I wrecked it!" He points to the scorch mark on the wall with a slightly trembling hand.
"Hey, it's fine. Trust me, I've done way more damage with my own repulsors."
"You do it and you're super, so am I super too?!"
"You bet." Tony smiles slightly. "I didn't know you could do that, but it's awesome! And super."
"I almost forgots, 'til I did it and r'membered. They hate it more'n force fields." Loki admits softly, shuddering. "Not s'pposed to fight back, nope nope nope!"
"That rule doesn't apply here. You're allowed to defend yourself, and sometimes defense includes offense. How did you almost forget you did it?" Tony realizes that might be an odd question. He doesn't remember every single thing about his life, and he probably forgot some bad things along the way. Loki has well over ten times the number of years Tony has to remember, since he's over a thousand freakin' years old.
"I was real little, I think? I forget, but they got maddest then. But... but they really liked fighting and stuff, but it hurt most when I dids it! Like, they said I was a coward for not being a warrior but they were worse when-" Loki doesn't finish the sentence, instead slapping a hand against the mat. "'Cause I'm a Jotun and they hate magic!"
"Because they were a bunch of asses." Tony counters firmly.
"And they should gets in trouble, right?"
"You got it." Tony smiles slightly. They really have been making progress. Besides, that energy blast had seemed a lot like his own repulsors, so maybe he can actually start figuring out the science behind all this magic stuff. Loki had to somehow compress and charge particles, like Tony's suits do to form them.
Loki thinks for a bit. "They wouldn'ta liked it if you did it there. Thought all Midgardian humans are stupid and below them, 'xcept they're wrong 'cause Midgard's a trillion times better than Ass-Guard. No, infinity times better!" Tony honestly never thought about if Loki knew about large numbers like a million or infinity.
"Hell yeah we are." Tony answers. "And they were wrong about way more than that, remember?"
"Thor didn't think bad things 'bout Midgardians after he got banished, and he told Fandral to stop saying 'em. But they would've said you weren't a warrior, but Thor saids you're a great warrior, so they woulda been wrong about you. 'Cause you're Man of Iron. And it's not bad when you do it, so why'd it be bad when I do it? They're wrong 'bout Midgardians." It seems actually saying Iron Man was limited to when Loki was pretending to be Tony.
"I like you more as Tony than Man of Iron. I like you as Man of Iron too, 'cause you can beat up anyone who tries to hurt me, but I like you most." Loki says after a bit, and there are very few people who would share that sentiment. Heck, some people don't even like Iron Man. And it feels nice, knowing how Loki thinks of him.
"Are we gonna do defense?" Loki asks after a bit. He presses the frying pan, which had been abandoned on the boxing mat, into Tony's hands and asks Stitch for Maximus. Stitch spits the plush horse out. This supports the teleporting toys theory, since there's no way the plush horse could fit in the plush backpack- Maximus is as big as Stitch.
Loki starts swinging the stuffed horse at Tony, clearly wanting him to block Maximus with the frying pan like Flynn Rider had when fighting Maximus in the movie. Tony plays along, pointing out how he knows where to block and giving tips, but he's still focusing on the fact Loki shot something like a repulsor blast.
"Hey, do you think you could shoot that repulsor-like ball of energy again?" Tony asks Loki.
"The star?" Loki asks.
"It's a repulsor." Loki shakes his head, and Tony sighs. "Yeah, sure, the 'star'. I've got more petri dishes." He grins.
Tony returns to the lab to grab the box of petri dishes and a bunch of scanners before heading back to the gym. He tapes one to one of the repulsor targets and gestures at it. "Go ahead. Shoot it, like me." Tony blasts the target next to the one the petri dish is taped to, before turning to grin at Loki, various scanners he'd brought at the ready. He'd told Jarvis to use all the scanners he has in this room, too, although they're not as varied as the collection in the garage.
Loki looks somewhat unsure, and Tony wonders if maybe he's pushing this too soon. Tony fires off a few more blasts himself.
Hesitantly, Loki brings his hand forward with his palm splayed out. Aside from a brief flash of green around Loki's hands, nothing happens. This trend continues but eventually, Loki shoots out an illusion of an energy blast, which doesn't do anything. Three times after that time, he shoots out ice instead but it breaks the petri dish all the same.
Tony grins at him. "Good job, buddy."
Loki doesn't even panic this time.
Pepper waits by the Stark Jet, ready to chew Tony out as a car pulls up a little ways off from the plane. Yesterday hadn't been the first time Tony had blown off a meeting, not by a long shot. He'd actually gone to most of the meetings this past week, missing only yesterday, and he'd behaved a bit more than he used to during them. He'd still found great fun in making the board members squirm by turning what they said into dirty sexual innuendos.
She watches Happy, Tony, Loki and Bruce get out of the car, Happy helping them with their bags.
Tony notices the glare Pepper's sending at him, and he sighs. "Pep, I can explain."
"You'd better have an explanation, Anthony Stark!" She starts, and is going to start chewing him out until Loki interrupts.
"Hi Pepper!" He calls out happily, and Pepper smiles at him.
"Is that Stitch on your back?" She asks. Loki grins and nods.
"Tony got him for me, and he spits out who I ask for! 'Xcept Jarvis says they're not all in him? Are you going on the plane with us? Helen and Vi and Dash were's on a plane!" Loki exclaims excitedly, before his expression falters. "But then they almost got blown ups by those Miss Ill things, but why're they named Miss Ill? Tony saids he wanted to shove her up a butt." Pepper remembers Tony saying that about missiles on Halloween.
"It's not Miss Ill." Pepper says. "It's missile. They're a type of weapon."
"Oh. Violet saved Helen and Dash from 'em with her force field and that's good." Looking very worried, Loki asks "Are we gonna get blown up?"
"I don't think so, buddy." Tony says, sauntering up behind Loki. Tony has a lot of enemies, and Pepper really wouldn't put it past them to try to blow up Tony's plane, but it's not like they're advertising the fact they're going to be flying in it.
"Should I makes a force field if we do? Like Violet?"
"That would help, but I doubt we're gonna have to worry about it." Tony says.
Pepper turns to him. "Don't think you've gotten out of anything." She says, and Bruce chuckles. Tony glares at him.
Once they're situated in the plane, they take off. Loki seems very relieved to be able to take off his seat belt when they stop ascending. Tony gets a holographic screen pulled up, asking Loki what he wants to watch. Loki gestures with his Stitch backpack. The screen suddenly shows Stitch shouting something that sounds like "tookie ba waba" before theme music starts playing. Loki snuggles up with Simba, his Stitch backpack, and Maximus, the horse from Tangled. Somehow, Stitch had spit Maximus out even though the toy's as big as the backpack, if not bigger.
"So what are Lilo and Stitch up to now?" Tony asks, clearly trying to delay Pepper's lecture.
"'Xper'ment 540 made really big wind blasts... typhoons, and Jumba had a thing that made her get really big like Hulk-y! Lilo was off dancing though and she kept lying about Stitch to some girls. And Gantu hit his head and thoughts that 625 and Hamsterviel were just in his head, but they weren't. Like my monster family friends! Or maybe Quasi's gargoyles? Lilo named 'Xper'ment 540 Phoon, 'cause she makes typhoons."
"So what's her one true place?" Tony asks.
"She makes wind for surfers but they're boards have... things on them. Like, cloth things?"
"Sails?" Tony suggests. "Are they windsurfers?" Loki nods enthusiastically, saying he'd heard that in the show.
"Tony, I want an explanation for why you missed the meeting yesterday." Pepper says, crossing her arms.
"Rhodey came. I fixed his suit." Tony says, only partially glancing back at her.
"I was Tony!" Loki pipes up as he continues to stare at the screen. Pepper's assuming he means he was pretending.
"Well, yeah, there was that, too." Tony smirks. Pepper has no idea what he's talking about. How does Loki pretending to be Tony affect whether Tony goes to a meeting? "Literally, Loki was me and I looked like him."
"Like when Kim and Ron swapped." Loki adds, still mostly focusing on the TV.
"Tony, I'm not in the mood for jokes."
"And I'm not joking." Tony counters, pulling out his phone. He asks Jarvis for the footage from yesterday and sets the phone on a table, where it projects a holographic screen above it. She watches a video as Loki literally morphs into Tony, and the watches as Loki makes Tony turn into him. She shakes her head slightly in disbelief, because this is a little different that seeing Loki become blue.
"It wasn't the first time, either. Actually, it was the third in Malibu, although it only happened there."
"That's amazing. You've done it before?" Pepper asks Loki, who says something about Mowgli, and Jormungand being Kaa.
"So am I off the hook?" Tony asks, grinning. "It's not like I could've gone there in someone else's body."
Pepper sighs. "I guess I can't fault you for that."
A couple minutes later, Loki lets out an excited scream, pointing at the screen. Pepper glances at it. A skinny, green, one eyed alien is holding up a magazine, saying something about Kim Possible. Pepper recognizes the green alien from the movie, but can't remember his name, and she has no idea who Kim Possible is. Loki laughs, bouncing out of his seat and rushing towards the screen.
Pepper watches curiously. Whoever this Kim is, Loki seems to like her.
Lilo claims that they can rescue Stitch (who'd apparently been kidnapped, but Pepper hadn't seen that part of the episode) without Kim Possible, but the green alien sends a rather ridiculous message claiming the world's going to end.
Kim and a blonde boy arrive, and Loki excitedly pulls Tony's sleeve. "Tony! Tony! Kim and Ron and Rufus are in Lilo's house! Tasha and Clint are in Lilo's house! I didn't know they could go there!" He laughs, and that seems to be an inside joke between them. "Like when Rapunzel and Eugene went to Elsa's coronation!" Loki exclaims excitedly, grinning a mile wide. Ron looks a bit like Clint, but Kim actually looks a lot like Natasha, Pepper realizes. Ron has some pink creature named Rufus, who the fat purple alien (Jumbo or something? Pepper can't remember) claims is an experiment. "But he's a naked-mole rat!" Loki protests, looking confused.
Lilo doesn't get along with Kim, claiming they don't need her. Loki seems somewhat disappointed about that as Kim goes off to rescue Stitch by herself. Stitch is apparently captured by a man with blue skin and a woman who sort of looks like a female Loki. They're obviously the bad guys, and Pepper glances at Loki, wondering if he'll react negatively, but he says that he and Tony beat them up, and that Tony says the blue skin and green magic don't make them bad. Pepper smiles. Tony's really good for Loki, and vice-versa.
Kim winds up getting captured too and it winds up being Lilo and the pink creature (Rufus, according to Loki) who save the day. At the very end, the purple alien, apparently named Jumba, claims that Rufus isn't an experiment after all. Loki is delighted to find out he was right. The moral of the episode seems to be "don't doubt others based on what they look like or who they are."
Loki winds up re-watching that episode, and when he watches what's presumably the episode that came after that in the original series, Jarvis announces from Tony's phone that he has a call from Director Fury, and that he's being 'very insistent'.
Pepper's eyes harden, and she sees Tony's and Bruce's do the same. Tony had told her what had happened when Loki had teleported to the Helicarrier, and she's furious that they'd locked him up like some sort of criminal.
Tony answers the phone, looking at the holographic image floating above the screen. Loki looks at it, fear written all over his face, and then he just... vanishes. Pepper looks around for him but doesn't see him anywhere.
Pepper can see the interest in Fury's eye at this, and she glares at him. "Listen, you'd better stay away from him. Just because he happened to wind up on your ship doesn't mean you lock him up, and he's not a test subject! Tony told me about what you did, and we've decided to withdraw a third of Stark Industries' funding."
Fury looks like he wants to growl at that as a vein throbs in his forehead, and he barks out "Stark! Have you been in our systems?"
"Thousands of times." Tony replies flippantly.
"Yeah, well, the controls to our missiles are locked now." Fury glares at the camera. "You're going to unlock them."
"Uh, actually I think you're gonna find that I won't." Tony says before his expression darkens. "You shouldn't just have missiles at your disposal. Because, that worked so well the last time.
"That wasn't me. That was the World Security Council. I didn't think it was a good idea, either." Fury says. "But it did help us defeat the Chitauri. What if they come back, and we can't fire missiles into their portal again?"
"They weren't fired there." Tony says, even more darkly. "Besides, Natasha had basically already closed the portal. That's what stopped them, not the nuke. And I've been trying to come up with a way to prevent them from coming back."
"You still haven't reimbursed us for the containment unit you destroyed." Fury says.
"You mean my cage?" Bruce speaks up, surprisingly sharply.
"Yeah, I'm not paying for that." Tony says. "It's kind of a jerk move to have it. So there you go. No missiles, no cage, and less funding." The fact Tony's doing this basically shows how much he's changed over the years. He used to be a weapons designer, after all.
"Is this all because of what I did to your friend?" Fury asks. "Are you really going to act like a petulant third grader?"
"It's not all because of Loki, but yeah, that helped." Tony starts to say, but suddenly, the holographic screen disappears. Pepper blinks in surprise. This is Tony's tech, it's better than this. Fury's still on the actual phone's screen, which is also holographic.
Loki appears out of nowhere. Had he been invisible?! Tony had said he'd turned invisible, but Pepper thought he'd been joking.
"Bruce shouldn't be in a cage." Loki glares down at Fury on the screen. "He's too nice. And Hulk-y shouldn't be in a cage, and Tony says I shouldn't either. You were mean. Like Odin." With that, Loki turns off the phone, although Pepper didn't know he knew how to hang up on someone.
"I don't like that Furious Man." Loki says. "He's not even kinda nice like Cobra Bubbles."
"I've never really liked him much, either." Tony says. "And I'm not entirely sure I'm going to associate with him much longer. But you did a really good job telling him off."
"He's not as scary on a screen." Loki replies, going back to watching Lilo & Stitch episodes.
"...E-N-T!" Loki exclaims triumphantly, practically shouting. Bruce tries to shush him a bit, because that had been a little too loud, although he smiles at Loki to show him he'd done a good job.
Bruce is seated on the ground in front of one of the multiple coffee tables in the penthouse, while Loki is only sort of sitting still on the other side. On the floor next to him is the open box for Scrabble, with the board pulled out, half hidden under the couch. The box has maybe twenty of those little letter tiles, which Loki is fiddling with absentmindedly. Since they're missing most of the pieces, they're playing a holographic version instead, although that means they can see each other's tiles. Jarvis and Bruce are playing with random tiles, but Loki has the whole alphabet arranged in front of him, so he can spell whatever he wants.
"Good job, Mr. Loki. I see the closed-captioning has paid off." Jarvis says. Jarvis is probably right about closed-captioning helping, since Loki can see the words for what the characters onscreen are saying, and experiment is a word that shows up a lot in Lilo & Stitch. However, they'd only just thought of having captions on only a couple days ago. Bruce really should have thought of that earlier.
"'Xper'ment!" Loki replies happily. It isn't uncommon for him to omit syllables when talking, but experiment spelled perfectly on the board.
"What's going on in here?" Bruce hears a voice ask.
Tony is leaning against the wall with his hands in his pockets. Judging by the fact he looks a tad damp, Bruce is assuming he just got out of the shower. He has one eyebrow arched. "You know, I didn't even know I still had Scrabble."
"In a manner of speaking. It's missing most of the tiles." Bruce replies.
The other words Loki's written include bell, swear, holographic (ironically, since they're playing with holograms, though he'd spelled it with an s at first), circuit (spelled correctly the first try, probably thanks to that book on circuits), Simba and jungle.
Loki hoists himself up on the couch's armrest, next to Simba, bouncing up and down slightly. Bruce is still slightly amazed none of the couches have broken, but then again, they've survived Thor, too. If Bruce had to guess, some of these sofas probably cost more than some cars. If they weren't, Bruce is pretty sure Tony would buy out the manufacturers and make them improve their sofa-production.
"Z, Q, E, T, A, U, L,S..." Tony reads Jarvis' tiles, smirking. "How sad, Jarvis. The most you can do something like tea." Glancing at Loki, Tony spells tea for him so he won't think he meant the letter T. "Or us, or late. Or tale, but that's just rearranging late. "
"Actually, sir..." Jarvis sounds quite smug as the tiles rearrange themselves on the board.
"Quetzals?" Tony asks skeptically with an arched brow. "Nice try, J, but is that really a word?" Bruce nods, knowing this one. He'd woken up in Guatemala after Hulking-out once, when he was a fugitive on the run from the military.
Jarvis sighs. "Quetzals: The national bird of Guatemala, as well as one of its monetary units." A holographic website pops up in front of Tony's face, and it does indeed say that. From the looks of it, it seems to be a website for finding scrabble words, which sort of seems like cheating to Bruce. Not that this is competitive or anything, and no matter what, the AI has more references at his metaphorical fingertips than they do.
"It's a bird! I can do animals, too!" Loki says happily, clapping his hands at the mention of birds. He stares off into space for a bit, before moving some of his tiles "L... I... G... E... R! Liger! Liiii-geeeer!" Bruce doesn't bother mentioning it was his turn.
"Where did you learn that word, Mr. Loki?" Jarvis asks curiously.
"In the aminal book! No, Lilo saids 'aminal' but Bruce says it's an-i-mal'. The animal books!" Loki glances at Bruce, who nods approvingly. Loki grins, flicking his fingers.
"What other words start with L?" Bruce asks. Loki mastered the alphabet really quickly, but this exercise is still fairly challenging for him.
"Loki!" Loki says immediately, laughing. "And... ummmmm... lion, 'n Lilo. That's got two l's. And Liger! A liger is sorta a tiger and sorta a lion, but nots really either of 'em. It's like they're mixed together. Like if Hobbes and Nala had a baby."
"Actually, Mr. Loki, I'm afraid that wouldn't work." Jarvis says, and Bruce is sure he's going to say it's because Hobbes is a stuffed animal, and toys can't mate. However, he's proven wrong when Jarvis says "A liger is a hybrid cross between a male lion and a female tiger. Hobbes and Nala, being a male tiger and a female lion, would produce a tigon."
"Tigon." Loki echoes. "Tiii-goon... T...I...G...O...N...E?" Jarvis tells him that's right, expect there's no e, adding he did a good job sounding it out. "T-I-G-O-N! Hey, that's like Timon, 'xcept with a G instead of M." Loki reaches backwards and Stitch spits out Timon. Bruce wonders if Timon had already been in Stitch or if the toy had been somewhere else.
"Have you been writing anything, recently?" Tony asks Loki. Bruce has worked with Loki on writing, but he doesn't think Tony's looked at what Loki's written since that day Tony had called him down, worried about the quotes Loki had written. Bruce remembers Loki changing the lyrics to a song from The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Loki still copies a lot from books and writes down song lyrics and movie quotes. Bruce has seen the lyrics of Let It Go countless times, as well as that quote about Ohana from Lilo & Stitch.
Tony's already pulled up Loki's documents. The billionaire seems to have little regard for privacy, Bruce has noticed.
Tony gestures with his head towards the documents, indicating Bruce should look at them. Bruce starts to wonder if perhaps there's something worrying there, as there had been before. But Tony had given Jarvis permission to tell them if that was the case, and Jarvis hasn't brought anything up.
But then Bruce sees a grin form on Tony's face and realizes it can't be something bad. Thank goodness. He gets up and goes over to the screen, leaning forward to read. "Hans tried to stab Hulk-y, but Tony shot him with a star as Man of Iron, and Elsa froze Hans. And Loki did too." The last part is added, almost as an afterthought.
Jarvis informs them that he'd transcribed what Loki said, as well as what he's acted out in some of his games. He adds that he'd convinced Loki to add himself there, and that had been done not long after that nightmare Loki had had about Hans.
He also notices a script from Frozen for the scene where Elsa fights the Duke's thugs, and then the thing is copied, with Elsa's name replaced by Loki's.
There are various other scenes that seem to have come from Loki's imagination. One of the more recent ones (according to Jarvis, who seems to have time stamps for when individual paragraphs in the document were written) has Loki getting attacked by an unnamed enemy, until Simba and Fenrir scare the attacker off. Bruce notices that Simba's always written as the character from The Lion King instead of Loki's toy, although one description mentions he's still in his suit.
By far the most entertaining read is the short story where Loki, the Avengers (minus Thor, who isn't mentioned once), Simba, Elsa, Violet, and Frozone all team up with Lilo and Stitch to catch experiments. The story's actually a couple pages long, and while, according to Jarvis, Loki had simply narrated or acted out most of it, he'd apparently written a fraction of it himself. Jarvis had helped with the spelling, and Bruce honestly can't tell which parts Loki had written and which Jarvis had transcribed.
Bruce is very happy to note that, occasionally in the story, Loki uses his magic. The story never has him using his powers alone, but he makes a force field with Violet to protect them from Gantu's blaster, and he shoots ice along with Elsa and Frozone to freeze experiments and catch them. At one point the story has him and Elsa make a winter landscape for everyone to play on, like Elsa and Slushy had.
There's one somewhat unrelated scene that has that same group (with the somewhat random addition of Maximus, the horse from Tangled) fighting a robot, perhaps inspired by the Omni-droid in The Incredibles or the very real Doom-bots, which Loki had apparently seen on TV once.
The interesting part is that, not only had Loki made it so he's fighting with them, as if he and the Avengers (and various fictional characters) are a team. At one point, he and Rapunzel (who appeared out of nowhere) heal Tony, who'd been injured. Loki even shoots "stars" with Tony in the story. Of course, Loki healing Tony isn't fictional, and neither is the energy blast part, but the rest is.
"I see you made yourself an Avenger." Tony says, glancing at Loki. Loki doesn't answer. "Well, anyway, good job, Loki. I especially liked where you beat up the Duke's guards."
"Like Elsa!" Loki bounces slightly.
"And when you shot energy blasts. That was awesome, in real life, too." Tony says, and Loki doesn't respond.
"All right, I've got something for you." Tony says, rounding on Bruce. "Close your eyes." Somewhat confused, Bruce does so, and Tony grabs his arm, leading him somewhere. "Come on, Bambi." He says, presumably to Loki.
Bruce really hopes Tony will be careful enough not to run him into the walls. He hears Tony say, mock sternly, "No peeking." Sighing, Bruce covers his eyes with his hands, just to prove that he's not. He hears the sound of elevator doors closing and feels the elevator he's in descend, stopping after only ten seconds or so. He hears the doors open again.
"Ta-daa!" Tony says as they step out of the elevator.
Bruce uncovers and opens his eyes, mouth opening in shock at where he is.
It's clearly a room for the Other Guy- or, more specifically, a whole floor for the Other Guy. Sure, Tony had showed him a plan for the Other Guy's 'cool off area', but Bruce hadn't been expecting this.
The floor is mostly an open floor plan, with very few separate rooms. Bruce vaguely wonders how exactly the ceiling is supported when there aren't even pillars or walls holding it up, aside from the elevator shaft and the walls around the building. Then again, Tony's one of the best engineers in the world.
One wall, like most of the floors in the tower, is almost entirely glass although Bruce suspects it's glass like the cage that had been on the Helicarrier. The glass wall really does wonders for claustrophobia, and the Other Guy definitely doesn't like small places. The remaining walls, and even the floor and ceiling, are covered in padding, making it sort of seem like a room in a psych ward, only somehow less... intimidating. Bruce pokes at the material, raising an eyebrow. It's not like that's going to stop the Other Guy.
As if reading his thoughts, Tony says "There's a gold-titanium alloy under there. You know, what my suits are made of. I don't think the Jolly Green Giant's going to get through that, even if he is angry."
There are several punching bags scattered throughout the room, and Bruce doesn't doubt that Tony's managed to get them to withstand the Other Guy.
Around the edges of the room are large pieces of furniture, clearly built with the Other Guy's size in mind. There's even a huge bed, although Bruce can't imagine needing one when he never sleeps as the Other Guy.
Bruce doesn't even want to know how much this all cost, but he knows he'll never be able to pay Tony back for it. And that's just the literal expenses for the materials and construction. Then there's the actual thought that went into this, the unfailing acceptance that Tony's shown him since they met, even when parts of his tower have been wrecked many times by Bruce's alter-ego.
"Recognize which floor this is?" Tony asks, grinning. Bruce shakes his head. "You- or, rather, the our favorite big, green guy watched Beauty and the Beast with Loki here." Tony says, and Loki nods, humming one of the songs from the movie.
"Thank you." Bruce says quietly. "For all of this."
"Aren't you gonna test it out?" Tony asks, arching an eyebrow at him. "You know, I did make it for Hulk to be in. So what are you waiting for? Let him out."
"Let Hulk-y out!" Loki jumps up and down excitedly, falling to the padded floor with a laugh. He gets up and flings himself at the floor again.
"But you're not wearing your suit." Bruce says to Tony. "The Other Guy could-" In Bruce's mind, the Other Guy seems somewhat annoyed. Not a good sign.
"He's Hulk, not the Other Guy." Loki says. "He doesn't like being called that."
Blinking in surprise, Bruce mentally asks the Oth- Hulk- if he doesn't like that. He gets a vaguely affirmative feeling, but he'd honestly never thought about that. After all... Hulk is usually angry about something.
"About me not wearing my suit, Hulk hasn't done anything remotely hostile towards me since that one day. I haven't needed my suit the past bunch of times he's come out and I've worn it." Tony says flippantly.
Bruce is amazed in the faith Tony shows in... Hulk to not hurt him. But then again, Tony's right about not being hurt the past bunch of times, although Bruce still uneasily remembers those two times on the first day he'd met Loki...
Impatiently, Loki asks Stitch for Bruce, and the action figure of Bruce himself is spit out. Loki turns in into the Hulk toy and gives a pointed look at Bruce. "Now you do it. Wait, here!" Loki reaches a hand back Stitch spits out a white lei, which Loki passes over to Bruce. Bruce is pretty sure it's the same one he'd worn last time, although Loki then produces another one and puts it around his own neck.
Sighing, Bruce realizes that Tony and Loki aren't going to let up on this. And at least they're on a floor designed to contain the his alter-ego.
Bruce closes his eyes and lets the Other- lets Hulk out.
Loki grins up at Hulk, running up to hug him. "Hulk-y!" He calls out happily, wrapping his arms as far as they'll go around Hulk's stomach. He reaches up towards Hulk's lei. "Jarvis says white leis mean love." And love can mean family love.
He likes this room. It's really soft, and Hulk can come out here without wrecking the tower. Maybe Bruce will start actually letting Hulk out more.
"Loki?" Hulk asks, and Loki grins. "Loki is Hurt Nice Man." Hulk turns to look at Tony and grunts "Metal Man not metal?" He seems slightly confused about that.
"No, I'm not this time. You're not gonna pound me into the floor or anything, are you?" Tony asks with an arched brow.
"Hulk no hurt metal man." Hulk says. Loki grins. He really hadn't liked it when Tony had hurt Hulk at first.
Loki wonders if there are holograms in this room. He likes drawing on them. He likes drawing on paper, too, but he doesn't see any here. Besides, you can't tear up holograms.
Of course there are holograms in here, Loki realizes when one pops up, as if Jarvis had known that's what he wanted. He starts to draw Hulk, looking through the screen at his big green friend.
Tony, for some reason, encourages Hulk to punch things, although this time when Hulk pounds on the walls and the floor, they don't break like they had in the penthouse. Maybe it's because they're so soft? But Tony said that there was suit stuff under them.
Loki really likes this room, because maybe Bruce will let Hulk out more if he doesn't have to worry about Hulk wrecking stuff. Although Tony doesn't seem to care much about things breaking, and even encouraged him to break petri dishes.
Hulk plops down on the soft floor, looking curiously at Loki's drawing. "Hulk." He says, pointing, and Loki grins.
"Yeah, it's you. You wanna draw too? Jarvis, can we have another screen?"
"Certainly, Mr. Loki." A screen pops up in front of Hulk, and Loki shows Hulk how to draw with his fingers. Hulk has really big fingers, Loki thinks with a laugh, so all the lines he draws are really thick. That would be like if Loki drew with his whole arm!
Hulk starts coloring something and green, and Loki realizes he's drawing himself and Shrek. Loki grins, and asks Stitch for Shrek, even though Shrek's really Bruce's toy. Stitch spits him out- he must've teleported from Bruce's room- and Loki hands him to Hulk. Then, before Loki even has to ask, Stitch spits out both Loki's Hulk action figure, and Bruce's Hulk plush. "Has Bruce still been sleeping with him, Jarvis?"
"Yes, I've made sure Dr. Banner follows your orders, Mr. Loki." Jarvis says, sounding amused, and Loki giggles. Bruce doesn't really have to listen to him, but it's kind of nice that he does, for some things.
Hulk picks up the stuffed version of himself, looking at it, before hugging it.
"Shrek not a monster. Green not bad. Hulk not a monster." Hulk says, and Loki grins.
"Everyone said Stitch was a monster 'cause he wrecked stuff, but he's not and you're not! 'Cause you're in my Ohana."
Then, Hulk looks at him and says "Loki not a monster. Loki nice."
Loki grins, going up to hug him. He's really glad Hulk's in his family, since he can beat up even Thor! Loki kind of wishes Hulk and Tony would run into the Warriors Three sometime, because they were worse than Thor sometimes, and especially after Thor got banished to Midgard.
As he colors in the drawing he's done of Hulk, Loki sings one of the songs from Lilo & Stitch. They have part of the song at the start of every show, just like how Kim Possible has her own song.
"Now you can see, tookie ba waba
Nothing but these clear blue skies
Love it has found you, and when it surrounds you
It's just like paradise
Now the door has swung wide open
Now your heart has taken wings
Feel that magic in the air
Oh hear your spirit sing"
"Aloha..." Loki sings, and Stitch shouts "Aloha!" from Loki's back. Loki giggles.
"You'll find the place that you belong
Ohana... A family to call your own
Where you feel at home
Everybody sing!"
Loki grins at Hulk. He doesn't think Hulk had a family before, but he does now. Just like he does, himself.
Tony watches from the penthouse as a man in a wheelchair rolls out of the rather impressive jet that landed on the balcony moments ago. The man (who has to be Charles Xavier, since one, they're expecting him, and two, he'd apparently asked about the tower being wheelchair accessible when talking to Jarvis) doesn't exactly look like what Tony would expect someone classified as a mutant to look like. Tony was expecting something perhaps like Loki's Jotun form, which might have helped Loki accept his own true form. Well, he hadn't reallybeen expecting that Charles would have blue skin or something, but he'd at least expect him to look, well, different.
Charles Xavier looks, all in all, pretty average. The man (or mutant, Tony supposes) is completely bald. He's dressed in a business suit and his wheelchair looks sleeker than most. It runs a lot better than most electric wheelchairs that Tony's seen, and Tony's eyes are drawn to it, his mind automatically looking for how to make it even better. He is an engineer, after all.
The man's eyes seem to look directly in him, as if the man's rummaging through all his thoughts. Tony hopes that's not the case...
To get his mind off that, Tony blurts out whatever comes to mind, which isn't exactly uncommon with him.
"You know, I was kind of hoping you'd be blue or something. That could've really helped. Oh, well, I guess you can't get everything. Well, normally I can. You wouldn't happen to know anyone who's blue, would you? Nice wheelchair, by the way. Much fancier than most of the wheelchairs I've seen rolling around. Still, I could make it better for you. I could make it fly, or give it lasers or something. All you've got to do is ask."
"Thank you for the offer, Mr. Stark, but I don't see any reason for my wheelchair to have lasers." Charles says, sounding amused. "And about your other question..."
Suddenly, a noise that sounds like bamf along with what looks like a puff of blue-black smoke, and something blue appears out of nowhere. Not something, Tony realizes, someone.
The man- mutant?- standing in front of him has blue skin with lines sticking up minutely all over it, much like Loki's Jotun form, although Loki's a lighter blue. This guy has yellow eyes, and a honest-to-god tail that ends in a rather lethal-looking point.
The blue man introduces himself as Kurt Wagner, with a German accent, adding that he's also called Nightcrawler. As he shakes his hand, Tony realizes that he only has two fingers and a thumb on each hand.
"Okay, I had no idea you existed." Tony says, pointing at the blue guy. "But you are perfect. Seriously, you're like another Loki. You know, you kinda look like the Na'vi from Avatar."
"I've been told that, recently." Kurt grins. Tony catches a glimpse of what look like fangs. "This Loki is blue, too?"
"Yeah, but not all the time. Or most of the time. Actually, most of the time, he's not blue. He had some bad experiences with that." Tony says, before frowning.
"I don't recall actually telling you that Mr. Loki was blue, Professor." Jarvis speaks up. "Am I correct in assuming that you've figured out he's a Jotun?"
Charles nods. "The fact you mentioned he's cryokinetic helped a lot, although one of the reasons I first asked Kurt to come is because you'd mentioned he can teleport and is scared of the ability."
Grinning, Kurt says "At first, I thought he just wanted me to fly the jet."
"Are the myths accurate in the hatred between the Aesir and the Jotnar?" The bald mutant asks. Kurt, like Steve had, mentions there's only one god. Clearly, Norse mythology doesn't line up with his religion. Tony's an atheist, so it's not like it really lines up with his lack of religion either.
"Sadly, yes." Tony says. "And Loki took the brunt of it in Asgard."
Kurt mutters something in German that almost sounds like a prayer.
"Just so we're clear here, you're not going to be picking apart my mind or whatever. Got it, Chuck?" Tony asks, pointing at Charles.
Surprisingly, Charles doesn't react negatively to the Chuck part. He just reminds Tony that his name is Charles. Odd. Normally, Tony's really good at annoying people.
"I don't go into minds without permission unless there's an absolute need to, since doing so is rather rude. That being said, your reaction and wariness are not at all uncommon." Wow, this guy picked up on the fact that he's still slightly uneasy, wondering if Charles is reading his mind. The fact he'd picked up on that when Tony thought he was hiding it makes Tony even more uneasy.
"Okay, well, you're not here for me." Tony says. "So you might as well meet the man of the day." Tony starts to head back into the penthouse, as the mutant makes his wheelchair roll behind him.
Once the near the elevator, though, Charles turns to Kurt. "I'd like to speak with Loki for a bit before your part." He says, and Kurt simply nods, heading off to one of the TV screens, looking for a way to turn it on.
"I'd be happy to turn on the TV to whatever channel you'd like to watch." Jarvis says, and Kurt looks around, slightly alarmed as he tries to figure out where the AI's voice is coming from. That's the reaction most people have, Tony thinks with a smirk.
"Jarvis is my A.I." Tony explains simply, and the man nods. Tony smirks when the professor admits that he hadn't been able to tell that Jarvis isn't technically real over the phone. Then again, Jarvis eats the Turing Test for breakfast, and Tony doesn't think anyone would be able to recognize that Jarvis is an AI over the phone. It's easier to tell once you realize he doesn't have a body, obviously.
Tony and Charles take the elevator down to the floor with Loki's therapy room, which so far has only been used once. Hopefully today will go better than the last time they'd been in here, with Dr. Carlisle.
Loki's in that room- his 'therapy room', as Tony had called it- with Bruce. This room has a grass-like carpet, just like his bedroom, only this room had it first. His bedroom has stars, though, so it's a lot better than this room. Although this room has a tent in it, which is kind of neat, and it's nice to hide in.
Tony's apparently still in the penthouse, so Loki has Toy Stark with him. Admittedly, Toy Stark can't compare to the real Tony, not by a long shot, but Toy Stark's better than nothing. He's obviously got Simba and Stitch, too, and a lot of his toys are in Stitch as well. Loki, like Simba, is wearing his Man of Iron suit.
He'd just been playing 625 Sandwich Stacker and he'd almost gotten the sandwich to the top of the screen before he messed up.
Right now, Loki's sitting in the tent, fiddling with a Rubik's Cube. Tony always seems to like it when he solves it, and actually acts like he's good at it. Certainly, nobody said he was good at anything in Asgard.
He shows the finished cube to Bruce, who smiles. Loki mixes it up again, deciding maybe he'll try to make a pattern with the squares instead of just making each side one color.
Bruce looks at him and asks "Could you change the colors of the cube?"
"Like a chameleon?" Loki asks, although he knows Bruce means with his magic. After all, chameleons only change their own colors, not the colors of other things. Chameleons are awesome though. They're not bad, and it's not bad when they change colors. Bruce is sort of like a chameleon, because while he can turn green and become Hulk, he can't make other things turn green (although chameleons, like Pascal, don't actually get bigger like Bruce does when he turns green). Loki likes to think he's part chameleon, himself, even though he's pretty sure he's not. But he can change colors like them.
Still, he's changed how Toy Stark looks lots of times, as well as his Hulk toy, Elsa, and even the toy of himself. He changed Bruce's mat, too, and really liked the new colors instead of all the blue.
Glancing at the cube, Loki frowns in concentration. He imagines colors that are much nicer than the ones on the cube, and suddenly they change. He grins. Although the cube had been mixed up a moment ago, it's now solved with the new colors. Loki laughs, because that could be a prank, couldn't it? Solving it without solving it? Although he can solve it, so he doesn't need to resort to cheating like that.
The red has been replaced with a shiny, metallic sort of red, like on Tony's Man of Iron suits, only the center square resembles an arc reactor. Loki flicks his fingers over the cube, really liking that and noticing the other colors. The orange didn't really change, but the yellow has become gold, in basically the same way the red had, only without the arc reactor. The green is lighter, like the green in his eyes, and the white side has been replaced by Rapunzel's-dress-Purple, and the blue is somewhere between the shades of Elsa's dress and Stitch- actually, it's almost the same color as his real skin...
This cube almost reminds Loki of the Bifrost. It has all the colors of the rainbow, basically, and he can't wait to show it to Tony. It looks much better, after all.
Tony actually comes out of the elevator almost right as Loki's thinking that, which is really convenient. Grinning, Loki crawls out of the tent and runs to show him the cube, Simba in the other hand and Stitch bouncing against his back.
"You know, the Iron Man colors are a great touch." Tony says. Loki grins, glancing between the cube's arc reactor- it's a circle in a square-shaped space, so the cube can still turn- and Tony's. They look basically the same, just like how Toy Stark's looks realistic.
"Okay, Loki, the guy you're going to talk to is here now, as in literally right here. You ready to talk to him?"
Loki remembers Tony mentioning, before the whole ice incident in the pool (which apparently isn't a large bathtub, even if people sometimes go naked in it) that they found another therapist. Only, this man apparently is a teacher, too. Loki's never had lessons, but he knows what they're like from hearing others talk of them. Is this therapy going to be like lessons? Loki doesn't think he'd mind that. After all, having Bruce teach him stuff is pretty fun.
Loki nods slightly, hoping this man won't be like Dr. C was. Tony's saying something else, but Loki's attention is drawn to the man who's just rolled out of the elevator in a very odd chair. But that's not the weirdest part.
The weirdest part is that as soon as the man entered, Loki felt... something. Something like... magic?
Charles tried not to form any preconceived notions about Loki, although it was hard not to form some expectations based on what he knows. According to Jarvis, Loki has powers similar to several mutants Charles knows put together. He knows Loki isn't from this planet, and sure enough, when he'd looked on Cerebro, Loki had appeared as neither a man nor mutant, but something else entirely. Mutants are more evolved than humans, but it's almost as if Loki's more evolved than mutants.
He isn't planning on going into Loki's mind today- doing that too early, before Loki trusts him, would most likely do more harm than good. Besides, the main point of today is Loki meeting Kurt. He wonders if Loki even has the same sort of mind as mutants or humans, since he showed up differently on Cerebro.
Charles looks around the room he'd just rolled into moments ago. In the center are a sofa, some chairs, a coffee table, and, under these, a large rug that looks like a grassy field has been plopped down in the middle of the floor. Off to one side is a tent.
Rocking back and forth near Tony is a tall man with messy black hair brushing against his shoulders. The man's wearing what appears to be silver Iron Man armor, although the boots and gloves are missing, leaving pale, bare feet and hands. On top of the Iron Man suit, he's wearing a long coat covered in stars and constellations. He's hugging a toy lion- Simba, Charles realizes- also dressed in an Iron Man suit. Pale, long-fingered hands twist a very interestingly colored Rubik's Cube, which he'd excitedly shown to Tony- apparently, he'd changed the colors on it.
This must be Loki.
He can feel Loki's presence more distinctly than he can with Tony or the third man- Bruce Banner, Charles realizes. This is rather interesting, since normally he only feels mutants in this way and Loki isn't a mutant. But what's even more interesting is the way Loki sits up and stares at him. His green eyes are somewhat unfocused, although they eventually focus on him with surprising intensity, as if he can sense Charles in return. Perhaps he can.
Charles holds out his hand to Bruce and Loki. "My name is Charles."
"Bruce Banner." Bruce introduces himself quietly, giving a rather quick handshake.
"He's an Avenger, just likes Tony. Bruce is Hulk, 'xcept I call him Hulk-y most of the time 'cause it's more fun. Tony built a floor for Hulk so he can come out more." Loki pipes up. His comment makes Bruce shift uncomfortably and glance at Charles, clearly expecting to see judgment or even outright bigotry there. Charles doesn't even have to read his thoughts to see that. However, Charles knows what facing such prejudice is like, and he's not prejudiced at all against the Hulk- after all, he'd helped save the world from that alien invasion.
"You're Loki, I presume?" Charles asks, turning to him, although by now it's obvious. Loki nods and bows slightly. He scrambles up the Rubik's Cube and starts to twist the sections.
"What's that chair?" Loki asks innocently but completely tactlessly, eyes flicking down to Charles' wheelchair. "It's like that man's. His had wheels too." Tony and Bruce also look slightly confused at that. Charles doesn't delve into his mind to figure out what he's talking about, instead just asking Loki who he meant.
Instead of answering, Loki moves on again. "And the people in Wall-E hads chairs too, but they were floating chairs, not chairs with wheels. And they had them 'cause they were real fats, but you're not fat, so why do you have it?"
"This is a wheelchair, and I'm in it because I can't walk." Charles says simply.
"Not even a little?" Loki asks, staring at him in something like horrified fascination. Charles sees Bruce pinching the bridge of his nose, and he gives the man a look saying he's not annoyed about the question. After all, Loki's just being curious. Charles seriously doubts they have wheelchairs where Loki came from.
"Not even a little." Charles replies. While he's never gotten these outright questions from his students when they first arrive, most do glance at his wheelchair curiously, as does the general public. Admittedly, his wheelchair looks sleeker than most electronic wheelchairs out there, as Tony so helpfully pointed out on the balcony, but he knows that's not the reason people look at it. Most people focus more on the fact he's a mutant than his wheelchair, however. Or people assume he's weak just because of his disability.
Loki frowns. "That's really sad. And sorry's..." Whether he's saying he's sorry about it or if he's just describing the situation, the effect is sort of ruined by what Loki asks next. "Why can't you walk?"
"I got hurt." Charles replies simply, not going into details about Erik and the bullet that hit Charles' back.
"I can fix people! I fixed Tony's leg! It got brokes but I healed him just like Rapunzel!" Loki replies, and Bruce shakes his head slightly.
"This isn't like that." Bruce tells him quietly. Loki frowns even more, dropping the now-solved Rubik's Cube on the grass-like rug.
"I appreciate the offer, and your healing abilities sound very nice, but I don't think you can help." Charles smiles gently to show he's not annoyed about that. "You fixed Tony's leg?"
Loki nods, his hold on Simba loosening slightly. "And Clint's arm, an' I think I mighta helped Tony when he was almost dead from drowning like Ariel and David when Eric 'n Stitch weres. Rapunzel actually healed Flynn when he was dead, but he went by Eugene then."
"I wasn't almost dead- I hadn't even passed out. But yeah, you did help." Tony says, and Loki grins at him.
"Tony says it's good. Healing's good! Like Rapunzel!" Loki laughs and jumps up and down excitedly.
"It is good." This earns Charles a slight smile from Loki. "Do you heal quickly, yourself?"
"Faster'n Thor." Loki mumbles, sounding slightly proud to do something quicker than Thor. He hunts through a basket of miscellaneous objects, pulling out one of those metal disentanglement puzzles where you have to remove a loop of metal from the rest of the puzzle.
Tony explains the purpose, and Loki pulls at the ring, actually yanking the entire puzzle apart. Even though it's made of metal. Charles is somewhat surprised at this feat of strength, and Loki hastily hides the broken pieces at the bottom of the basket.
"I know a man who heals extremely quickly, just like you. He's sometimes called Wolverine." Charles tells Loki, who looks at him somewhat suspiciously, clearly not sure whether to believe him. He sees Tony's eyes light up with recognition, and he remembers Jarvis telling him that they'd found files on Logan.
Loki asks after a bit. "You don't heal fasts? Like Tony doesn't? He had this weird hard thing on his leg after he hurt it." Charles assumes he's talking about a cast, and although he's not trying to go into Loki's mind, he picks up a brief image of a neon green cast on Tony's leg.
"I don't heal any quicker than most people, but these won't ever heal." Charles replies, gesturing at his legs. Loki slowly approaches him, frowning slightly, and kneels down so his black locks brush against the back of Charles' left knee, singing something about a flower glowing and letting its power shine. Charles catches a mental image of a young animated woman with long golden hair doing the same thing, as well as the name Rapunzel.
A glow emanates from Loki's hand, and while Charles feels a sudden warmth, nothing else happens. Loki frowns. "You were right. I can't heals you, I don't think? Sorry." Loki says quietly, and Charles assures him it's all right. After all, he's been in a wheelchair for decades.
"Good thing you're heres, not there." Loki says, sees a brief glimpse of wide, ornately decorated halls, probably some sort of palace. "They woulda beat you up there."
"For not being able to walk? Just because I'm wheelchair-bound doesn't mean I'm weak." Charles replies mildly. From what he's heard, the Asgardians are very focused on physical ability.
"Tony says you can be strong and braves without fighting and hitting stuff. But he and Tasha and Clint are teaching me how anyways, so I don't get hurt again." Loki says, and Charles nods to show his agreement with that statement about strength and bravery. He sees Tony grin when Loki says that.
Loki's looking at Charles as if he's just figured something out, once again.
"Did Lucy do it?" He asks, and Bruce and Tony share a look of confusion. Charles can tell Loki's referring to his disability. "That must have hurt lots, trying to kick the... thing... football! Then falling on your back. I never had'ta kick footballs at least, thank the Norns, but you did it tons, right? And Lucy always pulled it 'way and you fells on your back like WHAM!" Loki makes an action figure that looks like a miniature Loki replicate the famous Charlie Brown football kick fail.
Tony's face grows red as he cackles helplessly, leaning against the sofa for support. Bruce and Charles aren't laughing quite as hard as Tony, and Loki doesn't laugh at all, although he does smile a bit. Mostly, Loki just bounces slightly, waiting anxiously for Charles' response. Charles can see how Loki might mistake him for Charlie Brown, now that he knows that's what Loki's thinking. Charlie and Charles are similar names, and part of it is probably that both of them are bald.
"I'm afraid I'm not Charlie Brown." Charles replies with a small smile. "I go by Charles, not Charlie, for starters. I don't go by Chuck, either." He adds, sending a level look at Tony, who doesn't look sorry for calling him that.
"Pepper...mint Patty calls Charlie Brown 'Chuck'." Loki laughs, eyes going wide. "Hey, there's another pepper! P-E-P-P-E-R! Pepper, like our Pepper who's never been a teapot, and the spice pepper. And now Peppermint! Pepper-M-I-N-T Patty, not the other Patty. What's a mint?"
Before anyone can answer, Loki jumps back to the Charlie Brown topic without any warning, even for Charles. "So he's not always Charlie 'cause Peppermint Patty calls him that 'Chuck' name. And Marcie, she calls Charlie Brown 'Charles'! She does, she does! So he's Charles and you's Charles too!" Loki finishes this triumphantly, bouncing excitedly and staring at Charles with wildly excited eyes and a ridiculously wide grin. As an afterthought, Loki adds "Marcie calls Peppermint Patty 'sir', like Jarvis."
"I'm sorry, but I'm still not Charlie Brown." Charles smiles apologetically.
"So you don't have Snoopy?" Loki asks disappointedly. "My Tony calls me Snoopy, 'n Bambi. Hey, Jarvis saids that the guy who drew Snoopy 'n the others was named Charles, too! Charles M. Schultz! Are you him?" Loki cocks his head to the side and answers his own question. "No. Jarvis said he's deads, so you can't be him."
"You're right, I'm not that Charles, either. My full name is Charles Xavier, but I'm also known as Professor X."
"'Fessor X. That's easy! Easier than whatever you just said your surname is... Zay-ver...? That's hard, but not as hard as Dr. Car-l-il... Car-something. Dr. C... I like 'Fessor X more. Tony saids you're a pr'fessor before now, even, like he already knows you. You teach, right?"
"Right. I am a professor, and I teach people with special powers. Like you." Charles smiles and Loki looks up in surprise. His hand brushes against Charles' leg when he does so. Charles doesn't need to be physically in contact with someone to use his telepathy, but being in contact always amplifies it.
Loki's eyes widen. Charles can tell Loki's thoughts are currently jumbled and confused, flitting around like a hummingbird as he tries to make sense of what he apparently feels in Charles' presence. "Feel more now, than before. I feel you. But not like Tony's arc reactor. Different somehow, I dunno." Loki looks annoyed about not knowing.
"Did you mean you can feel my presence more?" Charles asks. Loki doesn't respond, instead tilting his head with a confused expression and continuing to stare at him.
This staring goes on for almost a minute, and then Loki shakes his head, clearing his thoughts. "Maaaay-be...?" Loki replies eventually, and it sounds more like a question. "Did you bring gifts? Like for Tony, for letting you here? Do you do's that here? It's polite, right? I know you give presents. Tony gave me Simba and my other toys as presents, and my horse mask. And Bruce gots me surfboards, like Stitch's. But why would I feel presents?"
"Presence and presents do sound the same, don't they?" Bruce chuckles. "Presence is the act of being somewhere. What he meant is if you can feel that he's here."
"Feel him, I think?" Loki nods slightly, looking somewhat unsure of how to describe it. "I cans... can see you... in my head? I thinks?"
Loki suddenly starts to look apprehensive at this prospect and he pulls his hand away. The amplified feelings drop, but it almost seems like Loki somehow pushed Charles' mind away.
"You can feel him?" Tony has clearly been pondering this the whole conversation, and Charles is intrigued too. Loki must have some sort of mental powers to feel his presence, after all. Tony's next question is directed at Charles. "Wait, are you in his head?"
"No. I haven't actually gone in. This is more of an amplified connection." Charles suspects that's what Loki feels, but lacks a way to describe it.
"Are you a magic man?" Loki asks, before clamping a hand over his mouth.
"I am a mutant, although in other times, people believed our powers to be magic." Charles answers.
"Mutant?" Loki asks.
"We are an advanced form of humans, and we all have special powers." Charles explains. He could go into a long description about mutants and genetics, and how it's not really magic, but there seems to be little point.
"So you're not magic?" Loki asks, frowning. Charles sighs. He knows how much it helps to know there are others like you- he'd thought so when he first met Raven as a child, and that's the whole point of his school for mutants- but truthfully, Loki isn't entirely like them. Although Raven is also blue and can change her appearance and disguise herself as other people, like Loki apparently can.
"You might not be, either." Tony mutters. "There's got to be science behind your magic. Like those energy balls you fired out are like my repulsors." Jarvis had mentioned that, Charles thinks.
"Dr. Carlisle was your previous therapist, correct?" Charles asks.
"She said she'd help with the bad dreams and flashbacks, but she just got mads at Tony when he talked, and always wanted him to leave. Bruce too. She didn't seem to like him much, or Hulk-y, and they're family, so that's not a'lowed. Same with my Tony."
Loki crosses his arms firmly. "You don't hates them, do you? 'Cause if you do I don't wanna talk to you!"
"No, I don't hate them."
"And you won't ask 'em to leaves me?" Loki challenges.
"Not unless you want them to leave." Charles replies, and Loki relaxes after scrutinizing him to see if he's telling the truth.
"You can stay." Loki says after a bit, nodding. Tony smirks.
"I'm glad." Charles says.
"Are you gonna be like Dr. C and make me talks about Asgard and Ass-guard? Tony calls it Ass-guard 'cause he says they're asses for treating me like they did. He's really nice!" Charles is pretty sure the media would disagree with that statement. "Are you gonna make me talk 'bout nightmares and flashbacks and stuff? Are you gonna make 'em go 'way?"
"Hopefully I can help you have nightmares and flashbacks less frequently and at a lower intensity, until you have them rarely, if at all. There's no guarantee, though. And we might talk about your memories, and I also might actually look at them in the future. But today, I want you to meet someone." Charles says.
"Like the healing Wolve-rine man?" Loki asks, still sounding somewhat skeptical.
Charles nods. "I also know someone who can shoot lasers out of his eyes, who goes by Cyclops."
"That's awesome." Tony remarks. "Jarvis, remind me, I need to make my next suit shoot lasers out of the eyes."
"Noted, sir, although I'm afraid I don't see the purpose of that, given you already have lasers in the wrists, as well as repulsors and missiles."
Loki laughs. "Tony shoots stars and I did too."
"They're repulsors, not stars." Tony sighs, sounding like this is something he's said countless times already.
"I also know some people who are blue, and one of them can teleport." Charles says. This is the main point of sharing information on mutants, and it's leading up to Kurt coming down.
Loki stares at him for a bit and then starts pacing. "No, no, you're not gonna gets to laugh at me. Won't fall for it this time, nope nope nope! No tricks!"
"I'm not trying to trick you." Charles says gently, trying to send calming waves out to Loki, but surprisingly it doesn't work at the moment.
Loki starts to get more agitated, pacing even faster and muttering no continuously, eventually crawling into the tent but then writhing around on the ground to release energy.
Tony crouches by the tent and says, surprisingly softly compared to the Tony Stark that Charles has seen on TV, "Loki, it's all right. He's the last person to judge about that stuff, and the other guy really won't care. He's like you." When Loki doesn't seem to even hear them, Tony sighs and starts singing softly. "If you find the field where the horses roam, and you need a place to call your home..."
Loki doesn't seem to be calming down as Tony keeps singing, and Bruce joins in. "The moon and the stars will give you light. To sleep in the grass in peace tonight." There's a second verse, something about a silver stallion and a herd of horses galloping.
Suddenly, Charles' surroundings change entirely.
The room containing Loki, Tony and Bruce is gone. Looking around, Charles seems to be in some sort of courtyard, or a garden. It's quite beautiful, and it almost seems as if it's not from this world, and through an archway leading inside, he can see a hall similar to the one that had flashed by his mind earlier.
He sees a child that looks to be around nine-years-old, possibly younger, with the same pale skin, jet-black hair and vibrant green eyes as Loki. It must be Loki as a child, although that appearance is apparently all fake since Loki really has blue skin. Which means this courtyard is probably Asgard.
Charles assumes this is a memory, but he hadn't tried to enter Loki's mind or his memories- actually, he'd been specifically avoiding doing either of the things. After all, calming him hadn't worked at the moment, and the first time to enter Loki's mind shouldn't be when he's already panicked. That probably wouldn't end well.
This is very bizarre. He's almost never pulled into memories like this. Perhaps he's not being pulled in at all. It's more like Loki is projecting the memory outwards for Charles to pick up with his telepathic powers. Regardless, this almost never happens. Perhaps Loki has some mental powers himself?
Charles turns his attention back to what he's assuming is the younger Loki.
This Loki's eyes aren't as unfocused, but he also looks very wary, and Loki's eyes become slightly more less glassy when he's anxiously watching someone, Charles has noticed.
There's another boy, a taller one in simple clothes. "Between you and me, I like your magic." The taller boy whispers conspiratorially. "You know, I wish I could do that stuff."
Charles watches the older boy talk Loki into performing some magic, suggesting he make another one of himself, and even offer to be friends with him.
The young Loki (who sounds slightly different, and it's not just because his voice is higher-pitched) seems to be in shock at these offers, but quite pleased with them nonetheless. Charles frowns, as something is very off about this scene.
"The idiot fell for it!" Someone shouts triumphantly, and three other boys emerge. Loki visibly flinches at the sight of them. Charles is almost certain he knows where this is going, and he doesn't like it at all.
He watches Little Loki ask where Thor is- apparently, he's not one of the three children. The children start to taunt Loki, revealing that the boy had only pretended to befriend him. They gleefully exclaim that they knew Loki would fall for it because, according to them, he's an idiot.
Even though Charles knows children can be cruel to those who are different (many of his students have experienced that firsthand), it still never ceases to anger him. The boy who'd tried to convince Loki to use magic quickly starts revealing his true metaphorical colors and tormenting Loki along with the three boys who had been hiding.
Apparently, they four boys had planned this trick on Loki. They're playing on Loki's obvious desire to be accepted, viciously and cruelly using that desire to torment him. Loki looks young enough and is clearly so starved for affection that he hadn't seemed to find anything suspicious about the first boy's friendly behavior.
Although it's a memory, Charles starts telling the boys off for their behavior, as well as trying to reassure the young Loki that they're wrong.
His anger only increases when Loki seems unable to hold back the tears, despite a valiant effort at first, and then the children start to punch and kick the smaller boy, telling him that monsters don't deserve friends. Somehow, Charles can practically feel the blows land on his own body, even though he's only observing and he's not even in Loki's mind.
Charles slumps back in his wheelchair, breathing heavily. As suddenly as he had ended up in the memory, he's suddenly expelled out of it, pushed out by an invisible force. For a bit, Charles just sits there, gasping. He hadn't expected that to happen at all.
Someone presses a glass of water into his hands, and he nods his thanks to Bruce, who is the one who did it.
"What happened?" The doctor asks quietly. Charles glances at the tent, where Loki is rocking back and forth, being hugged by Tony and hugging Simba very tightly. His face is screwed up tightly, but he doesn't look completely panicked. Maybe Charles' telepathic words had helped?
Feeling guilty for accidentally causing a flashback, Charles reaches out with his mind to try to calm him down even more. It works, this time. Loki visibly relaxes as Charles telepathically tries to soothe him, and a small smile actually graces Loki's lips.
"What the hell was that?" Tony echoes Bruce's question from the tent.
Charles says. "I unconsciously witnessed his flashback. It was almost as if I was having it, too, and I even felt some of it."
"I heard you." Loki says quietly. "You were there. You sounded like Tony, got mad at 'em."
"What, so you went in his head to see what he was going through?" Tony demands, looking at him warily. Glancing at Loki, he adds "It seems you helped, though. You stopped shaking partway through, Rudolph."
"No. I did not enter his head. It seems that the memory was thrust outwards towards me, but regardless, I'm sorry, Loki. I did not mean to invade your privacy without your permission."
"But it wasn't as bad with you there!" Loki says.
"I'm glad to hear that." Charles says truthfully. "Loki, what those boys told you and did to you was very wrong." Charles says gently, wanting to make that clear. "You are not stupid, you are not a monster, and you do deserve friends." Tony and Bruce echo their agreement, and Charles has a feeling that they've told Loki that a million times. Still, what Charles witnessed was only one incident out of, most likely, countless such occurrences.
"They'd gets in trouble if they were here." Loki says.
"Wait, so if you didn't go into his head, how'd he hear you?" Tony asks. "I didn't hear you say anything."
"I broadcasted my thoughts telepathically to Loki." Charles answers. "Out of curiosity, and you don't have to answer if you don't feel comfortable, have you ever made a memory seem real to others before?" It could just be because he's telepathic that he'd picked up on it, but Jarvis had said that Loki can make illusions.
For a bit, Loki doesn't say anything as Tony rubs slow circles over his shoulders. Charles gives him some privacy, still not opting to go into his mind yet. Loki's hugging Simba slightly tighter at the question. "Gaston's knife, when he stabbed Hulk-y." He answers softly. Tony's eyes widen as he clearly remembers the incident.
"Loki, I am not trying to trick you like those boys. I would never play a cruel prank on you like that, and I know you have no reason to trust me, but I do know people somewhat like you. In fact, one of them is here to meet you right now."
"Really?" Loki asks, sounding somewhat skeptical.
"Yeah. I met him. He's blue." Tony says flippantly, and Loki looks at him in surprise. "Hey, Jarvis, send Kurt down, will you?"
Still huddled in the tent, Loki's not entirely sure what to think. This Charles guy, or 'Fessor X, seems fairly nice, even if he isn't Charlie Brown. Although Loki still can't think of him as Charles without thinking of Charlie Brown, so 'Fessor X is easier.
'Fessor X is certainly different. There's that thing where Loki can somehow feel his presence, as the man said. It's probably because of his magic, but 'Fessor X said he wasn't magical, but then he'd said people considered it magic once, which is really confusing.
And somehow, he'd heard the man when he was having a flashback, although apparently he hadn't been in his head. Still, he'd really helped with the flashback, although the flashback had still been unpleasant overall, like always.
Loki wonders if he would have felt if someone was in his head. Has anyone ever been in his head before? He doesn't think so, unless you count Sleipnir, Fenrir, Hel and Jormungand.
They said his mind was broken, though, and how else would they know? But then again, they'd told him all Jotuns are mindless savages, and that's not true. Elsa's certainly not, and Frozone isn't either, although Loki's not entirely sure if he's a Jotun.
He's not entirely sure if 'Fessor X is being truthful about a blue guy, or even if Tony is. After all, he's been the butt of jokes before, like that time with the servant that he'd just had a flashback about. Tony's never really lied to him, but he does seem to joke a lot. Tony wouldn't play mean tricks on him like this, though, and 'Fessor X said he wouldn't either.
It's just he's never met someone like him, so it really seems too good to be true (although his whole life here on Midgard still almost seems too good to be true. But it's not a dream and Tony's family and he can't be faking about that).
The elevator doors open, and apparently what 'Fessor X said isn't too good to be true, either. There really is a blue man there.
Memories of nightmares involving Frost Giants dragging him off to Jotunheim (he'd heard all the same stories as other children in Asgard about the Evil Frost Giants, after all) flash through his head. Apparently, he actually had gone to Jotunheim, only he'd been unconscious and Heimdall had gotten him out.
Everyone in Asgard says Jotuns are monsters, but Elsa's not a monster. And this guy doesn't look evil, either, even if he does have blue skin. Tony hasn't let Thor hurt him, so he wouldn't let this guy hurt him either.
"You're real? I thought I was the only Jotun here?" Loki asks him from the tent, although once he says that, he starts to wonder if this man is actually a Jotun. "Hey, you gots a tail! I wish I had a tail. Tony said I could prob'ly grow a lion tail if I wanted to." He grins at the thought, but realizes this man can't be a Jotun if he has a tail, can he? Besides, Frost Giants are really big (why else would they be called giants?) and Loki is apparently much smaller than almost all of them and this guy's around the same size as him. Plus Loki's Jotun eyes are red while this guy's are yellow, but Loki's not entirely sure whether all Jotuns have red eyes or not.
"I'm not a Jotun." The man answers, and introduces himself as Kurt.
"Oh, you're one of them!" Loki says. "You're like the wheelchair guy!" Loki can't remember the name of that guy in the movie Tony had shown him, or at least the part he'd watched before hiding under the table, but this guy looks like those blue people. They had tails, too.
Maybe Kurt had come out of the screen? That would be really cool! Then that means anyone could come out of the screen, and maybe he could meet everyone for real, instead of just having toys of them. He'd really like to meet Elsa, and Rapunzel, and Quasimodo and Stitch and, well, everyone. Well, not the bad guys like Hans and Gaston.
"Who's them?" Kurt asks.
"The guy. He had a wheelchair like 'Fessor X, and he hads a blue body that he used, sometimes. A bigger blue body, and it was in a tank first, so it wasn't 'xactly his body, but then it was. My Tony says he liked that body even mores than his normal one, and he says they didn't beat him when they were annoyed at him. He says beating him for being blue would be wrong, so they didn't."
"Oh. Are you talking about Avatar, Snoopy?"Loki nods. Tony smirks. "I made the same comparison. And you're right about it being wrong to beat him."
Loki slowly crawls out from the tent.
"I don't have another body." The blue man says. "I can occasionally look like a human, using holograms, but this is my real body."
"You choose to look like that?" Loki asks in surprise. The idea is so strange. Even when Elsa liked her ice magic, she hadn't been blue.
"Yes, and there were people who hated me for it. There still are." Kurt says. Loki knows all too well what that's like, although nobody here seems to hate him for it. "But I don't hate them. I pity them. Most people will never know anything beyond what they see with their own two eyes." Kurt adds.
"My Tony says blue bodies aren't bad, and I think he might be right 'bout that. 'Cause Stitch is blue and he's really cute and awesome, see?"
Loki turns around to show off his Stitch backpack. "Genie's blue too, and he can look like other people and do magic... an' ... Cookie Monster is blue, I think. Claire saids he's not a bad monster, though, and she said she wanted to be blue too. Rhodey's gots a blue Man of Iron suit, kinda like Steve's suit." As an afterthought, he adds. "Linus' blanket 's blue and he really loves it."
"Kurt isn't the only blue mutant." 'Fessor X says. "There's a man, known as Beast, who-"
"Beast isn't blue!" Loki interrupts. "He's brown. I saw him on the screen! He lives with Belle and Mrs. Potts and Chip, and they all became human again!... Well, Belle was already human." There'd been a whole song back when all the castle staff were objects, where they'd sung about how much they wanted to be human again.
"He's not that Beast." 'Fessor X continues. "He's a doctor, and sometimes he's not blue and sometimes he is."
"Really?" Loki asks. Isn't Bruce a doctor too? And Bruce changes colors. 'Fessor X nods, and he hadn't lied about Kurt, so he's probably not lying about this man either.
"There's also a mutant who's blue and can make herself look like anybody." The man adds.
Loki holds out his hand and Stitch spits out Elsa. "Her real body's blue too. She's a Jotun, and she's got ice magic. They'd hate her there like they hated me. They saids all Jotuns are bad and ugly, but they lied 'cause Elsa's good! Hans is bad, not Elsa! So they lied 'bout Jotuns, 'cause they were rac-ist and that's bad!"
They lied about magic, too. They never said Odin had magic, and magic like healing magic definitely isn't bad. Loki makes Elsa's skin change and her eyes become red. "Not sure if Frozone's a Jotun, but he has ice magic too."
"You are a Jotun, too." Kurt says it like he already knows, and Loki slowly nods, holding Simba and Elsa tightly. There's no point denying it if he knows, and besides, Kurt's blue too.
Loki grabs the action figure of himself and looks between his Loki toy and the blue man. Everyone in Asgard would have looked at Kurt in disgust, like they'd looked at him. But this isn't Ass-Guard, he thinks with a snicker.
He's shown his real body before here on Midgard, around Tony and the others. His body had even become blue when he'd saved Tony from drowning, and they always say they don't hate him when he's blue. Plus, this Kurt guy's blue, and they don't seem to hate him at all.
Slowly, Loki turns his Loki toy blue, and then lets his Jotun form show. Only, instead of like that one time he'd let it show in front of Hulk before turning green himself, he stays in his Jotun form.
"Whoa, you went blue?" Tony asks, grinning. "I'm proud of you, Snoopy."
Loki smiles slightly at the praise, flicking his blue fingers, and a couple snowflakes shoot from them.
He still doesn't like his real form, but Tony seems to for some reason.
"You know snakes shed their skins and grow new ones? I asked Jormungand if he could teach me hows to shed my blue skin once, but he saids I wouldn't have skin, nope nope nope. Just that my insides would show and it would be real gross and I'd die with no skin, so I can't sheds it 'cause I'm not a snake. I can look like Ass-Guardians, but they still knew I'm really like this." Loki holds up his blue hands looking between his own skin and Kurt's. Kurt has lines all over his skin, too.
"Bruce says they're not monster lines." Loki points at the lines on Kurt. "Like Esmeralda says Quasimodo's weren't."
"Actually, I gave these to myself." Kurt says, gesturing to his body. "One for every sin." Loki has no clue what that last part means, or how he could give lines like that to himself. Bruce looks somewhat unhappy to hear that, though.
"Hey, you gots pointed ears! Like Peter Pan and Tinker Bell!" Loki laughs. He's never met someone with pointed ears before. He wonders if he could make his own ears pointed, and he fingers them, trying to pinch them into a point. before he starts to wonder if he could grow a tail, like a lion. He tries to turn around to look at his butt, imagining a nice, slender tail growing out, like Simba's. Only it would look kind of weird to have a yellow tail on a blue body, so maybe the tail should be blue too?
"I have something else in common with you." Kurt adds, before Loki can manage to grow a tail or change his ears. Suddenly there's a funny sound, like bamf, and blue-black smoke appears. On the other end of the room is another cloud of smoke, and Kurt emerges from that.
Loki stares and Kurt grins at him.
"You teleported! Like Esmeralda! She had smoke when she dids it to, and she thought it was real funny when she teleported away from the guards. Like a big jest." Stitch helpfully spits out his Esmeralda figurine, and Loki holds her up for Kurt to see.
"It can be fun." Kurt grins and teleports with another bamf, appearing sitting on the sofa. "And it's very convenient."
"They wouldn'ta liked that there, nope nope nope! Or you, sorry. Didn't like it when I did magics, and they really didn't like me! But Odin can do magic too. Thor said so, saids Allfather Odin and Lady Frigga are why I'm not blue. Odin, he never, ever said he could do it! Just that it's bad an' only freaks an' cowards an' argr's do it, but..." Loki looks down, fiddling with Simba's tail. Tony's been telling him this stuff since they first met. "I think he lied, 'cause he can do it so then he'd be those, but he's nots and my Tony says I'm not either."
"He did lie." Tony says, looking immensely pleased to hear him say that.
They hated it when he lied, though, although sometimes he'd managed to get out of trouble when he lied. And then there was the one time Odin had-
Loki hastily keeps talking, trying to think of anything but that.
"I think they lied to me, when they said all magic's bad. 'Cause Rapunzel heals people like I do, and that's really goods! And, an' Violet can make force fields, and that's not cowardly 'cause she saved her family, she did! And Genie, he turned into people and made other hims and stuff like me, and you can teleport!" He looks at Kurt.
"It's not magic. I'm a mutant." Kurt says. There's that word again, and mutants sound basically like magic people, although they claim it's slightly different. Does that mean they don't like magic? But they haven't said anything bad about it, and they'd even said that
"Do you ever teleport acc'dently? To someplace you don't want?" Loki asks.
"When my powers first started emerging, yes. But I mostly only teleport to where I can see."
Loki doesn't think that's exactly the case with him. He'd teleported to the theater in the tower when he'd been dreaming, although he had been dreaming about it. And the rafters looked the same, but they weren't actually the same rafters, so does that really count?
"Wish I could do it real easy like you." Loki mutters. Then, he wouldn't even have to worry about ending up somewhere bad, because he could just teleport right back to Tony.
"You just imagine where you want to go, and at least for me, it helps if that place is in my sight. Here." Kurt holds out an arm, and Loki stares at him until he says "Hold onto my arm."
When Loki does, while gripping Simba very tightly with his other arm, since Tony knows exactly where Simba's armor is at all times, Kurt remarks. "Wow. You have cold skin." But he doesn't sound like he hates it.
"You can do side-along apparition?" Tony asks. "That's awesome! Hey can you bring me along too?"
"I'm able to teleport other people, but it usually makes non-teleporters and especially ordinary humans instead of mutants feel rather ill." Kurt says.
"Eh, what the heck." Tony waves a hand, and grabs onto Kurt's other arm. "Brucey, I am about to make an amazing scientific discovery."
"I warned you. Ready?" Kurt asks. There's that bamf sound again and Loki catches a glimpse of something that's not the therapy room, before they're suddenly on the other side of the therapy room.
Tony indeed looks like he's trying not to throw up as he staggers forward a couple steps to collapse on the sofa. Although he looks slightly ill, his eyes are wide with wonder. "Was that another dimension we went through?!" Tony launches into some sort of talk that Loki doesn't understand at all, but which Bruce joins in with much enthusiasm. It's probably science stuff.
"Normally I teleport when I'm flying." Loki mumbles. Or when he's in the air, he thinks, but with Kurt he'd just done it on the ground. "And I can't get it to work when I wants."
Kurt nods towards the tent. "Imagine disappearing and re-appearing over there."
Loki does, and he feels something, but he doesn't actually go anywhere.
Kurt teleports them both around some more, and Loki starts a game with Bruce where Bruce has to try to catch them. It's really funny, because whenever Bruce gets close, Kurt just teleports them to the other side of the room. He's making it into a huge jest, like Esmeralda had, and Loki can't stop laughing.
Eventually, Loki's ready to go behind the couch when Bruce is approaching them, and suddenly he's there. But Kurt's still on the other side of the room.
"I dids it!" Loki says excitedly to Tony, who's sitting on the couch right in front of him. He vaults over the back of the couch, landing next to Tony with a laugh.
He's going to have to practice, though, until he can do it every time.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter! It was super fun to write and we have major Loki progress! Yay! Hopefully it didn't seem too rushed and hopefully everyone was in character. Kurt was kinda hard to write, and apparently he's different in X-Men Apocalapyse than he was in X2 (which I haven't seen)
This is totally random, but I saw the live action Jungle Book and it was awesome.
By the way, Charles will be going into Loki's mind in the future and doing more therapy stuff than he did this time. As stated in the chapter, this was basically for him and Kurt to get to know Loki. Also the 'Fessor X thing is inspired by some Harry Potter fanfics I really like where Harry calls Snape 'Fessor Snape (he's usually younger in those fics)
Hopefully I can update sooner, but college is keeping me busy and I have a teaching practicum coming up, which'll be fun but mean I have even less time.