Part 2 - Chp 2
He gets woken up by an insistent prodding in his side. Tony blinks, rubbing his face and trying to figure out where he’s fallen asleep. His neck is killing him and he stares at Bruce for a long moment before he registers that it’s Bruce and he has coffee.
Tony lunges for the mug before Bruce can change his mind--Bruce is a strict tea drinker himself--greedily sucking it down and burning his tongue in the process. It’s perfect, black and vile and mostly caffeine, everything good about coffee.
Bruce just shakes his head, pulling a stool up to sit by Tony.
“What’s up?” Tony finally ask once he’s drained half the cup and probably destroyed a few taste buds in the process.
“Remember how Thor’s been working with me so I can narrow down the biochemistry on soulmates?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I wanted to talk some science with you.”
“You know I love it when you talk dirty to me,” Tony says with a leer.
Bruce smiles.
“So, turns out there’s a difference between god to human soulmates and human to human soulmates…”
***
Tony wakes up again; this time he’s managed to make it to his bed, in part because Bruce had nudged him out of the lab and towards it after their conversation had started to wind down. The room is dark, and a quick glance at the clock confirms that it’s night, not just the lights and windows being dimmed.
He feels weird, out of sorts, and he isn’t quite sure why he woke up at all. He rolls onto his back, rubbing his breast bone beneath the arch reactor--it aches, he must have slept face down at some point--and stares at the ceiling. He wonders if he’s going to be able to fall asleep again.
Tony a voice hisses down his spine.
Tony bolts upright, nearly falling off the edge of the bed in the process, and starts swearing.
“Loki,” he says, torn out of him; immediately, he’s a rush of emotions, too much to process--fury, relief, alarm, surprise--and then his eyes adjust to the dark, parse what he’s seeing, and it gets worse.
Terror, he realizes dimly. He’s actually frightened, copper tang on his tongue--he bit his lip, broke skin--scrambling back from where Loki is already crawling up onto the bed. Tony shakes as Loki reaches for him
(the room smells like ice and blood, smell of something half-rotted and burned and scorched (not something, Loki), there’s blood staining the bedding that claws are tearing through as Loki prowls closer, blood and frost and ugly charred flesh leaking clear fluid into his fur, flash of teeth just as coated in the red-red-red fluid fuckfuck—
Loki twitches away, tumbles off the bed, and Tony catches a glint of silver and gold that spark in fur, gets a second look. Loki’s all beast and human at once, a giant thing writhing on the floor, snarling and spitting, turning his claws on himself to try and tear the chains off, fur and scale quickly covering the floor in the attempt and—
fading. Half-faded. Loki isn’t here, it’s a projection, and as quickly as Tony realizes it he notices the blood on the bed vanished when Loki fell off.
Loki isn’t here.
He catches a flash of teeth as Loki’s mouth (fangs-wolves teeth-beak) opens to bite down on himself, an animal trying to gnaw itself apart to escape a trap--he’s going to kill himself; the terror snaps and Tony’s scrambling off the bed closer to the rapidly fading projection, crouching down by where Loki’s on the floor and hands hovering, wishing he could touch but it just passes on through.
“Loki,” Tony says, then again, sharper, with real command in his voice, “Loki, look at me.”
Loki goes still, body massive and serpentine, four and eight arms both with wicked claws all, breath ragged and head momentarily caught between serpent and wolf, tongue lolling out of his mouth. The illusion gets a little more solid as Loki’s eyes manage to focus on Tony, green—
but not right, Tony quickly realizes. Green, but there’s blue in there, webbing over the hue and turning it wrong, just as blue as the sparks on the chains when Loki struggles against them. An ear--the deer one, the other is all wolf--flicks towards Tony before Loki keens.
Tony risks trying to touch him. He can’t quite, though he feels cold jolt up his arm this time, and just lets his hand rest just where Loki would be if he were here. It seems to soothe Loki a little, eyes closing and breath starting to even.
“Loki,” Tony murmurs. “What happened to you?”
Loki’s eyes open again, focus on Tony, but he doesn’t manage to say anything, just more whines and growls, quickly growing frustrated, a jumble of images that don’t make anything coherent brushing past Tony’s head. He twitches, like he’s going to start fighting again, and Tony quickly shushes him.
“Yes-no,” Tony says. “Blink once for yes, twice for no. Okay?”
A blink.
“Are you near the Tesseract still?”
A blink.
“Are they hostile?”
Another lone blink.
“Do you think you can get loose?”
Two blinks. Tony chuckles darkly--he has a feeling if Loki could get loose, whoever had decided to chain him in the first place wouldn’t last too long. He’s reminded all too much of SHIELD; even with Hydra involved, Tony’s had a lot of time to consider the fact that it wasn’t even a month before Loki helped tear both apart.
“We’ve figured out where the Tesseract is,” Tony says. He pauses, unsure how much he can safely tell Loki. “If you’re near it, you’re about a light year and half away at current speed. Are they aiming for Earth?”
Loki makes a noise.
“Don’t know?” That gets a blink; Tony nods, leaning back on his heels and trying to figure things out. “We’re going to figure out a way to get to you once we’re certain of the coordinates. And the Tesseract--don’t think I’m not pissed at you for just up and vanishing with my toys, by the way.” His fingers twitch, almost about to drum the cold beneath his fingers, before he stops himself. Loki snorts.
“Is it a big group? Okay. US military scales here--platoon? Bigger or smaller? Company? Fuck. Battalion?” Tony stares at Loki, stomach sinking. “Regiment? Brigade? Brigade. High end?” A blink.
Of course.
Tony rubs his face.
“And let me guess, they’re totally just a scout force of aliens that happen to know how to bind a newly fed god, right?”
Tony almost wants to say Loki’s huffing cough is laughter.
“Okay. Okay. We’ll get it figured out. Easy peasy, we’ve faced worse. Remember that whole Hydra fiasco? Definitely worse than galactic hostile aliens.” He frowns at Loki. “How long can you keep this up?”
Loki shrugs, twisting his head so that it’s pressing--would be pressing--along Tony’s thigh. As is, it’s just cold.
“Just… try to stay as long as you can. Jerk.”
The cough is definitely laughter.