Part 3 - Chp 10
“Hey,” Tony says when he and Loki arrive back to current headquarters. It’s more crowded, messier than he remembers it being--he’d forgotten, somewhere, that they were in the middle of planning a counter to Thanos.
All the chatter dies, every eye in the room focusing on them.
“Tony,” and that’s Barton, eyes flicking between him and Loki. “You’re supposed to be—”
Tony shrugs.
“When have I ever done what I’m supposed to?” he asks.
***
There’s debriefings--not as thorough as they should be, but then everyone saw Thor’s reaction to seeing Loki and they’re strapped for time. Thor’s been very insistent that if he weren’t actually Tony, Loki wouldn’t exist.
Tony really wishes he’d stop, if he’s honest, no matter how much more he’d get interrogated.
***
“I saw it,” Barton tells him. “A few people did. Steve doesn’t really want to talk about it, most people don’t; it was fucking shit. Got this look on his face, then he just exploded into gold--”
“Do you need to tell me?” Tony interrupts, eyes instinctively tracking Loki where he just entered the opposite side of the large room. Watches him wander through projects and pieces of plan, the way he scowls at Thor, the imperiousness of it all, like a few days ago he didn’t just cease.
“Nah,” Barton says. “Probably better if you don’t know, really.”
Tony couldn’t agree more.
***
They can’t stop touching. Incidental things. Maybe they could, if they tried, but Tony has no inclination and Loki doesn’t seem to either. He knows it’s gotten a few comments, how one can’t enter a room without the other showing up five minutes later under other pretenses, and another five minutes they’ll be next to each other and bickering and absolutely not subtle at all with the ways their hands brush or they bump into each other.
It’s grounding.
Those touches are probably the only reason Tony hasn’t ground his teeth to powder, because every conversation comes back to the approaching force, to Thanos.
(If he destroys you a voice hisses, and it nearly sounds like Loki, but it’s not, not quite, is a little more feral, a little more snake hiss; it doesn’t matter, because that’s the problem, isn’t it, Tony’s vulnerable, edible to things that scale like Thanos and the Tesseract, and he can’t let Loki vanish. Not again, not ever. What if he doesn’t come back?)
He eventually hunts Thor down when the hiss grows too tight in his chest, just enough to finally drive him away from Loki for the scant time he can deal with it.
“When I go, he’s going to go. But he’s not meant to go until the end of things; he has to make it, doesn’t he?”
Thor hesitates.
“Doesn’t he?” Tony demands.
“Not even fate is set in stone,” Thor says.
“It doesn’t matter. Is that what you’re saying? That this end of the world stuff doesn’t even give any sort of guarantee?”
“I do not know of it failing to happen.”
“Right. Thanks.”
***
“What troubles you?” Loki purrs, the bed dipping beneath his weight as he wraps his arms around Tony from behind. He noses at Tony’s neck; a little of the tension eases out of Tony as he leans back into him even as he grows more certain of what he needs to do.
(When he dies, he has no control over his soul, not really; he knows that it seeks Loki out, knows that it’s safe in Loki’s spaces, but that doesn’t rule being stolen or getting bored or intercepted before he even gets there. All he needs to do is take out that step, the uncertainty between his lives.)
“I don’t want to die,” Tony says. The words sound strange in the air; they don’t sound like his. He remembers the weight of guilt and trying to pay the world back, the constant suicidal drive to undo the legacy he’d built stone by stone. He wonders a little where it went; not that he does not want to fix the world, but the tenor of it is so different--he plans to be around to see it the whole way through.
Even if he’s changed since finding Loki, he’s the one who’s Tony Stark, he’s the soul Loki is tied to and who is tied to Loki. Dying and nonexistence don’t change that.
They’re still his words, no matter if they don’t sound like him who used to be.
“I should hope not,” Loki says lightly, but there’s a strain of uncertainty underneath.
“Can you fix that? If we get you Thanos or whoever, can you fix that?”
Loki goes very still and very quiet. Tony waits him out.
“The plan,” Loki says quietly, “does not currently involve that.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
More silence. Loki’s surprised; he pulls away a little, and Tony uses the movement to twist around to look at him. It’s not just surprise--there’s genuine conflict on his face, torn between two entirely different urges.
“I should not,” Loki says.
Tony waits, because it’s not what he asked and Loki knows it.
“I could,” Loki says slowly, “steal it for you, if I had that level of power. It would not be difficult.”
Tony nods.
“Okay.”
He doesn’t say anything else, but he can see the idea eating at Loki the rest of the day, in his eyes and a low tension in the back of Tony’s own head whenever they see each other. Where usually no one needs to get Loki’s attention--he’s been one of the sharper minds working at the issue--several times Tony has to nudge him or someone has to repeat what they said for him. Tony watches the idea burrow beneath his skin and a voice that sounds a little like Loki but hardly is at all hisses good.