Weaved
She sees him, freaks out, yells some, in between asks what he’s wearing that Tony brushed off as being the closest thing around. She gets a work call and has to leave now.
Tony Stark was not a patient man. If something needed to be done it needed to be done now. To wait meant to think, thinking endlessly, hectically, accounting for all probabilities when he could just dive head in and deal with outcomes.
With Pepper he could deal. With Pepper it’d been a long time coming, and it wasn’t because of Loki, not solely. But a list he could jot down and off the top of his head most top reasons, most top issues, stemmed from him. Him and his habits and his reckless nature and his tendency to tune out everything around him – he can’t blame her, for being short with him, he can’t blame her when she asks him to stop when she asks him to sleep when she asks him to be normal.
And he has tried, and maybe not hard enough. Or maybe he was seriously fucked up – which he was, he won’t deny that.
And so that’s where draws the problem; he was the problem.
And so now he can’t stop asking. Would he fuck up with Loki? He can’t fuck up with Loki. Where is Loki?
Why is he in the library? He’s never in the library if Tony’s in the lab – he’s only there if Tony isn’t home, or isn’t conscious.
He shakes his head goes back to work. He can’t stop thinking about Loki, agitated with his absence, very agitated that it’s almost unnaturally exaggerated it takes great effort not have Jarvis call him here – he gets the thought to look up cats and their behavior and evidently, they could be very clingy creatures.
Chalking it up to confused cat hormones lends him around another hour, before he loses restraint and heads off in search of the mage, who was avoiding him surely – and was that how it was going to be?? Has he soiled already what they had that
no matter what life-long friends he has never like this one had – never had someone who understood, so terrifyingly well that before he knows it each time, every single meticulous mask he’d weaved would fracture and fall and he was bare before Loki, thoughts and actions and emotions that Loki stood to witness as though prior had, as though he’s known him a lifetime…
He can’t lose that. He can’t lose him.