Part 3 - Chp 5
“You’re benching me,” Tony says.
“We discussed this—”
“Without me there, I might add—”
“--and we think it would be for the best if you sat this one out.”
“Okay.”
Steve looks wary--which is smart really, Tony will give him that.
“Okay,” Steve repeats.
“Yup. Okay. Sure.” Tony grins, gets up, and walks out.
***
“Are you going to answer that?” Jane asks curiously.
Tony glances at the phone.
“Nope.” At the confusion on Jane’s face. “The team decided it would be best to bench me since Loki’s my soulmate.”
“So you aren’t answering their calls.”
Tony grins.
“It’s going to be about Loki. So no, I’m not, because I’m sitting this one out.”
“How do you know?”
“Call it a hunch.”
***
It’s a lot more than a hunch, in truth. Tony and Loki went over the general outline of what they were going to, and Loki’s an almost permanent presence in Tony's headspace these days. Tony might not know the exacts, but he’s got enough for educated guesses.
If he’s right, Loki should be securing himself the things he needs for the Tesseract portal, as well as making some more statements as to the extent the Avengers really are not equipped to deal with him, let alone Thanos.
Not that they know about Thanos, but hey, all things in time.
In any case, that puts Loki in only a couple places; knowing Loki’s (Tony’s) flair for the dramatic, he’s willing to bet Loki went with Stuttgart because opera houses have all kinds of pizzazz.
He just hopes people were smart enough to get out of the damn way.
***
“Tony—”
“Nope, I’ve been benched, can’t help, just a wealthy genius trying to get to his workshop, thanks.”
“Dammit Tony, stop acting like a child!”
“Talk to the team. It sounds like you guys had a vote.”
***
They send Bruce to try to talk to him.
“I told him this wouldn’t work,” Bruce sighs.
“Well at least one of you has a clue.”
“Are you even curious?”
“Ah-ah, leading question. You should leave the spy stuff to Natasha.”
Bruce smiles, just a little.
“Anything else?” Tony prompts.
***
Predictably, Steve shows up not too terribly long after Tony’s continued refusal to talk anything even possibly Loki or team related.
“We shouldn’t have taken you off the team.”
“Nope, you shouldn’t have.”
Steve, being Steve, doesn’t even react to Tony’s smarm.
“We need you on the team for this.”
“About damn time. Where did you decided to stick Loki?” He rolls his eyes at Steve’s surprise. “Did you really think I haven’t been keeping an eye on what you’ve been doing?”
***
Really, it’s all going too well.
“What the hell was that?” Tony demands as the ground lurches under his feet. It sounds like every alarm possible has just gone off.
“I’ve been with you!” Steve says, but Tony isn’t listening for Steve, he’s listening for Jarvis--who isn’t responding.
Then the power cuts.
Silence settles on the building. The only light is the dim glow of the arc reactor in Tony’s chest; not even the emergency lights are coming on.
“This,” Tony says, “shouldn’t happen. There’s multiple redundancies just to keep this kind of thing from—”
“Change of plans,” Loki gasps, appearing in front of Tony wild-eyed and pale. He grabs both of them, adds a quick “Close your eyes”, and then they all three vanish at once.