Part 3 - Chp 9
The pulls--steps between--before were all quick; not instantaneous, but sure. Tony feels like taffy for an immeasurable amount of time, almost painful; opening his eyes just gives him a sick and twisted view of things stretched out, not the blurred and shadow place like normal. He closes his eyes again, swallows, and focuses a touch more strongly on the fact he knows that Loki--even just a shade of a slice of Loki--is cleverer and more capable in all his manifold than the Tesseract trying to put everything in its space.
He knows the moment they’re real again. He’s real. He staggers on his feet, blinks in the sudden light, hears the rush and hiss of… everything.
He’s inside the Tower. Still no power but there’s daylight streaming through the windows.
“Jarvis?” he asks cautiously.
“Pleasantly real, sir.” There’s a list of data already scrolling on the screen, things like temperature and energy signatures and the weather in New York. Tony breathes a sigh of relief.
“That’s great. It’s great to be back. I should have never—”
His teeth rattle as he hits the floor, blood in his mouth as he bites his own tongue. His still trying to blink the stars out of his eyes when his faceplate and then the rest of the helmet are ripped off in short order and he realizes it’s not that his chest feels weird, it’s that Loki is sitting on top of him, wide-eyed and pale and hands already cupping the sides of Tony’s face, staring at him as if he’s a ghost.
“Hey,” Tony says before swallowing his own blood.
Loki just stares.
“Do you think—”
“The light in your chest,” Loki says. He sounds dazed, but even so that has Tony shoving at him to sit up and get a good look because he’s not—
It’s green. Sort of. It’s white green more than anything, but it’s definitely not the colour that it was.
“Jarvis, is there anything weird with my reactor?” he demands, momentarily putting Loki on hold.
“It does not appear so, though the suit has limited capabilities to determine such.”
Tony glances at Loki. He has a feeling if it was bad--at least obviously so--Loki would be reacting a bit differently. As it is, he looks… well, he looks like shit, now that Tony’s actually looking. His hair is a wet and tangled mess, he’s thinner than Tony’s ever seen him, even counting when Tony first laid eyes on him. There’s dark circles under his eyes and he looks like if he wasn’t so fixated on Tony he’d fall asleep where he’s straddling Tony’s lap. He’s also utterly nude.
“Hey,” Tony says, suddenly awkward. “I’m alright.”
Loki gives him a scathing look; tries, but it’s too tired, too drained, to manage anything threatening or last more than a moment.
“How long have I been away?”
“I don’t know.” Loki shrugs with one shoulder, hands creeping up to rest on Tony’s face again, thumbs running along his cheeks.
Tony frowns; he distinctly remembers that Loki looked healthier than this when he went with Steve.
“What happened to you?” Tony asks. “Was there an attack while you were with Steve, did—”
“You were gone.” Loki’s voice breaks on the word, eyes closing and visibly recomposing himself. His hands slide so they cup the back of Tony’s neck instead, and Tony realizes he’s trembling. “Gone, gone, I— Why? What foolish thought entered your head that you decided to go back after I brought you away, I barely managed before, have I not told you enough?”
“I was here. Well. Kind of here.”
“You did not exist!” Loki shouts, fingers digging into Tony’s hair, eyes snapping open and feral and yes, he’s shaking, full-on trauma shaking. Tony doesn’t have the first idea what to do with trauma shaking, or trauma for that matter, but he gets his hands on Loki’s forearms, rubs down them lightly. The effect’s ruined by the armour, but Loki stops gripping his hair so tight even if the shaking doesn’t stop. Loki closes his eyes, leaning his forehead against Tony’s, breath ragged. “You did not exist,” he repeats with a whisper.
“I… did. I thought I did.” Tony pauses. “Loki, how long have you….” He trails off, not entirely sure what it is he needs to ask, but there’s something cold sliding between his ribs, slithering up his throat, a creeping realization of you are everything repeated again and again beginning to take a horrible, awful shape.
“I do not exist without you,” Loki says dully. “I cannot.”
“But you’re here now,” Tony says; it’s desperate, he knows it’s desperate--he’s not even really assessing, just trying to grasp for purchase, to fit his head around the fact that for all Loki is vast beyond belief he’s—
“You exist.” A spasm wracks Loki's too thin body.
--he’s still chained in such an extreme way to one being, one soul. That when Loki and Thor say everything they do, in fact, mean everything, that the actual ceasing of Tony’s soul in the universe that Loki can manipulate means that Loki vanishes—
“You’re here,” Tony says. He closes his eyes, wrapping his arms around Loki in a sudden desperate need to verify it, pressing his face into Loki’s neck, because what if Loki hadn’t come back, what if Tony had been gone too long, what if— “I believe in you, you’re here, you’re real.”
Loki laughs, dry and cracked and broken.
***
Tony doesn’t particularly want to let go. He doesn’t want to talk to the others, doesn’t want to hear what happened when Loki… ceased, doesn’t want to deal with the endless questions. He doesn’t want to deal with anything that isn’t Loki as real and solid right now.
It’s funny; he never thought he’d realize the absence of Loki, and now it terrifies him more than the fact he had stopped existing in this universe in the first place.
At some point, they end up sprawled on the floor, Tony making his way out of the suit. Loki doesn’t squirm or claw at him, just watches through half-lidded eyes with hands that never stray too far from Tony’s skin while Tony works the suit off.
He doesn’t have any sort of plan, any direction, just stares at Loki and notes the way the light of his reactor slides over his skin--white-green and ghostly, and without thinking he bends down to trail kisses after the shadows on Loki’s stomach. The light moves, so Tony moves with it, following the ever-changing shadows and tracing his hands over Loki’s form like he might be able to hold him together by sheer force of will.
(Why not?)
Loki’s eyes get hazy, blissed as Tony worships the flesh he’s in, laces a hand with one of Tony’s and Tony hangs tight, refuses to let him go at all. Just breaths Loki’s name into his skin, kisses belief and faith and hope along all the lines of his bones until Loki’s back is arching, toes curling and mouth caught open on Tony’s name.
It’s slow, slow as Tony can stand to be, slow as Loki will let him go once Tony’s swallowed him down. Tony closes his eyes, savours the taste and weight of him, holds him down and swallows the rest when Loki falls apart.
Eventually, he does it all over again, then again. Starts at touches and kisses and pressing the belief into him, slow and languid, until there are tears at the corners of Loki’s eyes, an incoherent slur on his tongue as Tony swallows, insensate babbles that reveal a little of the universe and shiver down Tony’s spine, all of it a promise and a pulse that he knows in his soul, that he nearly lost.
When he falls asleep, Loki looks the way he should--lean, face relaxed into an easy smirk, the full erotic flush of life staining his edges ruddy and near glowing. Godlike, eyes inhuman with glitter and gleam and intelligence as sharp as his smile.