Part 3 - Chp 1
Tony wakes up.
(He breathes his soul back in.)
Physically, he’s nothing but ache--burning lungs, choking up water, head pounding a steady beat (there are words, crea— he loses them), limbs weak as the team leans back around him.
He breathes and stares up at the faces looking down and tries to figure out why he isn’t terrified or flailing, why there’s no self-defensive quip on his lips.
“Shawarma?” he asks instead. “I’m starving.”
They look around, clearly uncertain; Tony pushes himself up to check out the surroundings.
“Seriously,” he adds. “I think my stomach is trying to eat itself.”
***
So they get shawarma. Tony regrets it almost immediately, but he keeps eating because he wanted shawarma and he is hungry. It’s just… not filling. At all. And being around the others is grating his nerves in a way he doesn’t quite understand.
He doesn’t think it’s them so much as he’s just pissed.
It’s not even any one thing. It’s just a general anger writhing in his chest, just above the hunger in his belly, and for all that’s been going on he can’t think of anything that would have him this angry. Which is infuriating, which is making it worse, just like this dumb food that isn’t actually helping him not feel like he’s starving.
Thor’s watching him.
“What?” Tony says, blinking at the fury that manages to escape and turns the word acid.
It gets everyone else’s attention.
“Are you okay, Tony?” Bruce asks.
“Fine. Dandy.” Tony focuses on his food and ignores the uneasy silence.
***
Bruce wants him to get checked out.
“You died, Tony.”
Thor is making a face like this explains a lot. Tony wants to punch him in his face, but instead he agrees because otherwise it’ll raise more suspicion. They’re worried, and Tony tries to convince himself that they aren’t being sentimentally humanly weak because he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t have had that thought before and it’s a little—
well. It should be concerning.
It’s not.
***
Tony’s in his lab when suddenly he just… isn’t angry anymore.
He’s still hungry. It’s less than it was, relieved in part by going over the footage he brought back with Thor piece by piece with the notes Jane sent him while he was busy being drowned. He’s been annotating them with details he’s surprised he didn’t notice the first time, but he’s not sure why he’s noticing them now, so many as if he’d been up close and personal with the ship when he didn’t get near them at all.
He sits back and considers the possibility that something has gone wrong somewhere.
He doesn’t remember anything from when he drowned to when he woke up--not anything whole. There are bits and pieces that drift in, strange alien landscapes that are simultaneously other things, the sensation of falling, being eaten whole and the ice and fire of burning again he had at first put down to spitting up water and sucking in that first lungful of air.
(Everywhere is exactly the same distance away. Words are--)
He stands up abruptly.
“Jarvis, where’s Thor?”
***
“What happened to me?”
There’s a thud, then Thor says, “You died.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“It rather does.”
“You are being obtuse and it’s not helping. I should be freaking out right now.”
“You feel emotions that aren’t yours, know things you though you know not how, and have a striking resemblance to Loki when you snarl.” Thor emerges from the pantry carrying several different boxes of snacks. “I am aware.”
“Because I died.”
“Because you died.”
Tony breathes out, turning it over in his head.
“This is a soulmate thing, isn’t it?”
“Yours, yes,” Thor says, then shoves an arm load of the snacks at Tony. “Help me carry these. You are no doubt hungry.”
***
Loki and Tony are unique, which Tony quickly realizes Thor is saying because it’s kinder than possessive and selfish and jealous.
They are, in some ways, the original unhealthy stereotype--two souls for whom no one else exists. When Tony physically dies, even if only briefly, his soul seeks out Loki instinctively.
Death changes a person--and if they come back to the same flesh, it strips away some of who they were.
“There is always a price,” Thor says.
“So now I’m… closer to him?”
Thor smiles grimly.
“There is less of you to separate you. You died, and you came back. What do you think Loki would take as price but part of your self?”
***
Tony wakes up to a weight on his chest and green eyes staring at him, the press of a knife to his throat.
“Are you actually real this time?” Tony asks idly, though he knows Loki is, in fact, here.
“What did you do?” Loki snarls. Tony should probably be frightened, but instead he’s finding himself vaguely aroused; Loki looks glorious with anger twisting his features, and if not for Loki pinning him to the bed he’d reach up to pull him into a kiss.
(Loki won’t hurt him.)
“I should kill you,” Loki spits. “You are always--always--such a nuisance, a hindrance—”
Tony smiles, feels Loki’s anger bubbling in his chest, wildfire.
“Then do it. Go on.” Tony’s smile widens as Loki stares at him silent and pale with fury, shaking, but the knife does not press deeper. “You can’t, can you?”
“You are fixing what you ruined,” Loki snaps. Tony feels a familiar hum crawl across his skin, then a yank (all places exist in the same space, only a word away--Tony sees how Loki does it this time) and they're gone.