Loki/Harry - The Sum Of All Your Fears 1/1 - NC17
My internet went in the middle of uploading this, so some sites were updated a day before other sites. Sorry, to readers on certain sites!
This was great and fun and I loved it, until I got to “April 3rd 2011” and I lost myself. It was just so hard to write the- (want to say it so badly but don’t want to spoil anything) -stuff! Anyway. I hope you like it! I have one more Loki/Harry pre-Avengers fic to go (but it’s actually Harry/Loki-ish though), and then I think I’ll work on a FrostIron fiction I had an idea for… And then on the sequel to Butterfly, because it’s bouncing around in my brain…
And it’s time to study for exams again (and purge FFNet apparently)…
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“The Sum Of All Your Fears”
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is property of JK Rowling, Bloomsbury, Warner Bros, et all. Avengers, Thor, Loki, etc belong to Marvel, Stan Lee, et co. I make no money from this and own nothing, don’t sue.
Summary: [Loki/HP] The Chitauri found him after he fell. They promised him revenge and the boy from his dreams, the boy with the lightning bolt scar that Loki should know but couldn’t remember. The Tesseract invaded his mind, polluting it, emptying it, until all that remained was fear and anger and he didn’t know who he was anymore. But Harry would save him. Because that’s what heroes did.
Warnings: Slash. Loki/HP. Pre-Movies; through Iron Man; post-Avengers. Violence. Language. AU. Implied Torture. Typos. Character death. Creepiness. Eventual happy ending. Mind Control. Induced Insanity.
Rating: NC-17.
A/N: Hmm. I seem to have a new obsession. Fellow Lokeans, arise!! ALSO! I HAVE CHANGED THE HP DATES. Harry was born in 1990, not 1980. Add ten years to everything (it was that, or make this another master of death story). Harry born: 1990. Hogwarts: 2001. Iron Man: 2008. Iron Man 2: 2010. Thor: April 2011. Captain America: July 2011. Avengers: April 2012.
XXX
“We have finally learned, at far too great a cost, that if the most powerful weapons ever created are ever unleashed, they will be fired not in anger... but fear.” - President Fowler: The Sum of All Fears (2002).
Words: 21,253
Chapter 1
June 17th 1996. London. Five.
It was to be expected, Tony supposed, what with his reputation and all. It was an eventuality, not a probability; it was like the knowledge that one day the sun would implode and wipe out life on earth. One day his lawyer was bound to issue him with a paternity suit: eventuality, not probability. But of all the women, in all the world, Tony had never expected that letter to come from Lily Potter.
They had been friends, sort of. Lily had been on holiday with her family, the two of them around ten and eleven at the time, Tony one year older. They had bumped into each other; or rather Tony had almost run her down during one of his many cries-for-attention stunts that his father simply ignored anyway. He had ended up at her hotel, eating dinner with her parents, who were lovely, and her sister, who wasn’t as lovely, and Howard Stark hadn’t noticed that he was missing. Eventually, Tony had called a much younger Happy to collect him and his father’s stolen Ferrari. But Lily had given him her house phone number, and Tony had spent the next months running up enormous phone bills calling England every other weekend, until the year Lily went to boarding school. They had exchanged letters from that point on, brief, to the point letters, because Tony always wrote down everything he had always wanted to confide in a person, but changed his mind, binned it, and rewrote the customary “I’m fine, you?” letter that still amounted to more of a conversation than those he shared with his father.
He hadn’t ever gone to visit her, but Lily had come to see him twice more. When she was fourteen and then at sixteen, and she had been the prettiest girl he had ever laid eyes on. But she hadn’t been interested in him like that because he was a playboy and a charmer and too much like James Potter (whoever that was) for her tastes. She had told him about living at her school and the parents who missed her, which always made Tony pathetically sad because he lived at home and still missed his father, but was never missed. She never told him about magic, but she listened with interest and curiosity and occasionally confusion as he tried to explain about physics or chemistry or robotics, whatever he was working on. They were friends, for a time.
They fell out of touch for a few years before Lily graduated. Tony had gone to MIT at fifteen and had only seen her once since then. Lily had started working for the Ministry of Magic, and then Tony’s parents had died, he had inherited the company, and was too busy getting drunk, or high, or setting things on fire in the name of science to really care about any of it. He missed Howard and Maria Stark, but in an abstract, he was forced to grow up, kind of way, because it wasn’t like he had ever had them as parents anyway. Not really. Lily had written to him, after hearing about his father’s death on the news. She even sent him pictures of her and her new husband, James. Tony never wrote back. He didn’t want to talk about Howard, and he didn’t want to talk about James, because the last Tony had heard James was an egotistical waste of space and Lily wouldn’t touch off him with a barge pole, and if she was going to pick anyone with the ego the size of a small country she should have picked Tony.
He had regretted it, of course; cutting her out of his life, because despite the miles between them, Lily Evans was really his only real friend. Tony had been too prideful to track her down, and the one time he had tried her house phone her sister had answered and told him never to call again and that was enough of an effort on his part he had thought drunkenly to himself later that same night.
But in October 1989, Lily turned up on his doorstep with nothing but the clothes on her back and tears on her cheeks. Tony had invited her in, given her a drink, and hadn’t pushed her away when she kissed him. They had had sex, and later he had felt guilty about it, watching her sleep with a wedding ring on her finger, but at the time he had pulled her closer and kissed her harder and moved inside her while she clung to him.
“I’m sorry,” she had whispered to him the next morning, before silently pulling her clothes back on. She drank something from a strange looking glass bottle that she had pulled from her pocket, smiling softly down at Tony who had continued to lounge across the bed naked. “James can’t have children, and we wanted one so badly. Please forgive me, but, well, you were the only person I could think of.” Lily didn’t speak to Severus anymore, she had told him that when she visited at sixteen. Severus had insulted her and she couldn’t bring herself to forgive him this time. Her only other male friend was Tony. “Don’t be angry?”
“You were using me to try and get pregnant?” Tony had asked her, sounding incredulous. He raised an eyebrow at her, running a hand through his hair as he laughed. “It doesn’t work like that, you know. It’s never a certain thing, Lily.”
“I am pregnant.” Her hand squeezed around the glass bottle that was now empty. Tony’s eyes flicked to her stomach and a frown pulled down the corner of his lips. He thought about his own father and his childhood, and how he had never wanted children. He had told Lily that once before, and she had always insisted he’d make a great dad if he wanted to put the effort in, but he hadn’t wanted to, he hadn’t wanted children, and now Lily was telling him he was having one regardless? His thoughts must have been written across his face, because she was suddenly sitting on the edge of the bed beside him, her hands on his face as she whispered, “don’t worry, Tony. This is mine and James’ baby as far as anyone knows. You’ll never have to have anything to do with them, I promise.”
Tony had let her leave then. He hadn’t tried to follow her or stop her, he hadn’t called out for her, and though he had spent more than six years thinking about whether Lily had actually had his child or not, Tony had never tried to find out. Sure he had thought about it every now and then, when he was particularly lonely, imagined what it would be like to have someone look up to him and love him, just because he was ‘dad’, but it wasn’t like he had chosen to be a father. It wasn’t like Lily had given him a choice in the matter, and she had told him in as many words that she didn’t want him involved with his son’s life, so he’d just never bothered to find out!
And yet, here he was, walking through London at Lily’s solicitor’s bequest, because she had added an extra special clause to her will. If Harry’s guardians (and there were quite a few names listed on the will before his own) were ever found to be inadequate or unable to care for Harry Potter, Tony Stark was to have full custody of his son. Apparently, Lily’s sister had been seen hitting Harry hard enough to knock him to the floor, and unlike every other time she had hit Harry, there was no Wizard there to cover it up. So, Harry had been taken into care, and social services had tracked Tony down in Malibu, and Lily’s solicitor had written to him. And here he was.
He was still trying to get his head around the fact that Lily had been dead for nearly five years and no one had told him. No one had known of him to tell him, but still. He had loved her once, so shouldn’t he have known the instant something happened to her? Shouldn’t he have felt it deep within himself?
Tony glanced at the little boy, sitting curled in on himself, dwarfed by the hard plastic chair that seemed to be present in every government building in the world. Tony reached out a hand to the child, and Harry looked up, cringing away at the same time. Harry’s eyes were the same colour as Lily’s, but they were wide and terrified, and when Tony looked into them he could see himself at that age, trembling under the force of his father’s anger-
“Don’t go in my workshop, Anthony! Don’t touch that, Anthony! Why are you such a nuisance, Anthony!”
-Tony cringed, pushing those memories forcefully back where they belonged: away. Instead, he turned his full attention to the small, dark haired boy and tried to smile. It looked more like a grimace and Harry made no attempt to return the gesture.
“Hey kiddo. My name’s Tony, but, uh,” he mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly, “you can call me dad if you want?”
“I’ve never had a dad before,” Harry whispered. His voice was almost too soft to be heard, but Tony knew that was because the child had trained it to be that way, never heard, never noticed, because it was safer. But Tony hadn’t been that kind of child. He had wanted the attention, even the bad kind, because, hey, bad publicity was still publicity, negative attention was better than nothing, even though it got him punished, even though his dad still hadn’t cared about anything more than ‘that one time I worked with Captain America’. How could Tony have competed with that?
“Yeah,” the elder man said, crouching down so that he was eye to eye with his own son. “Neither have I. What do you say we learn how to do this together, huh?”
And yeah, while he had thought about whether this child had actually existed and fantasied about what it could be like to have him, Tony had never really considered finding him, because he hadn’t wanted children and he didn’t want to work at anything so personal. He had been annoyed with the solicitor, with Lily, even a little bit angry with the child he hadn’t met at the time, but now, watching Harry grin up at him and warily reach forward to take Tony’s hand, now he was damn proud. This was his son, his damnit, and he was going to be the best father there ever was.
How’d you like that, Howard Stark? Tony was finally going to be better than his father at something.
XXX
July 31st 2001. Eleven.
Harry had turned out rather well over the past five years. He didn’t cringe anymore if Tony moved too fast, and he didn’t flinch when Tony shouted at Dummy or Jarvis or Pepper (Tony never shouted at him, because Howard had shouted enough for two sons), he’d put on enough weight so that people no longer wondered if Tony was feeding him at all, and he got more beautiful every day. Tony would often introduce Harry to people as ‘his little heartbreaker’ or ‘his snow white’, grinning widely as people complimented his eyes or his hair or his skin. When Harry was older, Tony would let them compliment his lips too, but right now, he drew the line there.
The boy looked a lot like his mother, but he had picked up most of his mannerisms from Tony. They stood the same way, they slouched the same way, and they even raised their eyebrows and drawled sarcastically the same way when they thought someone was being particularly stupid. Most people were considered stupid by Tony’s standards, but Harry was smart too. Not smart-smart, like Howard or Tony, but he was a quick study and he got good grades at school, and he’d even been accepted into some pretty decent secondary schools across the country. He’d applied to Eton too, and got in, but he wasn’t going to go, because that was in England, and Tony was in America and Harry would miss him.
But this? Magic school? That was worth moving away from home for!
“Repeat that please?” Tony bit out, with one eyebrow raised.
Harry glanced back and forth between his father and the professor from Hogwarts. Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry was in Scotland, and only people who could perform magic were invited. His mother had been a witch, and he was a Wizard, and this professor Snape was a Wizard too. Harry remembered the Dursleys, though he pretended he couldn’t when people asked about where he was living before living with Tony. Harry remembered them hitting him and calling him a freak but not knowing why, but he supposed this made sense. If he could do magic, if he could be a Wizard and go to magic school, that would make him a freak.
He glanced back at his dad, ignoring the dark haired Wizard who was glaring at him. “Dad?” Tony turned to stare at him, eyes still narrowed from his staring match with the side of Snape’s head. “Are you angry with me?”
“Course not, kiddo. But remind me to talk to Obie later. His idea of a prank could use some work, don’t you think?” Tony snorted, waving his thumb in Snape’s direction and rolling his eyes.
“I think he’s telling the truth.” Harry whispered, before glancing down at the hands he was twisting in his lap. “Strange things happen sometimes, around me. Maybe it was magic?”
Tony thought about it. He remembered the first time he had brought Harry into his lab, just to show him around, and Harry had touched something (and god but he couldn’t even remember what). It had exploded. Harry was banned from the lab, much like Tony had been banned from Howard’s, but Tony had actually fixed things in there, had improved on them or made them work. Harry had blown up everything he had touched, anything he had switched on, and one such incident had ended up with Harry in A&E receiving treatment for third degree burns to his arms and Tony had only had custody a month.
Tony never shouted though, or threw Harry from the lab, or dragged him down the corridors by his arm the way Howard always had. Tony had been kicked out for Howard’s best interests, but Harry stayed out for his own. It was strange, Tony had always thought after putting Harry to bed and going down to the lab to clean up the mess. When Harry tried to help, things exploded, but he could turn the kettle or the toaster on without having to touch them, and damn, but Tony could never figure out how. He had always assumed Jarvis had been the one to do it, and Tony was just being pranked, but magic?
Magic had never crossed his mind.
It explained how Lily could be so certain she was pregnant, after one time, though Tony was very sure he had used a condom (but he’d been drunk, so maybe he wasn’t so certain). Magic would explain why technology didn’t really get on well with Harry, magic would explain the way those burns had healed almost overnight because no way was State health care that great.
“No kiddo, I’m not angry with you.” He reached over to pull Harry onto his lap, and the boy curled automatically into his chest. “But you damn well better show me everything you learn at Christmas. And if you think you won’t be teaching me potions and stuff this summer you have another thing coming, snow white.”
Snape cringed at the mention of a Muggle trying potions, but he kept silent as he watched them. He had come to their home fully expecting the man to react badly, for Harry to be refused admittance to Hogwarts, or to even be moved to another carer, but the Muggle was calm and curious and understanding, and nothing like Lily used to describe him as. Anthony Edward Stark had always been another James Potter in Snape’s mind, and when Lily’s son had been placed into his custody Severus had been heartbroken. He had been Lily’s friend too. He had been Lily’s best friend at one point! Stark might have known her longer and Potter might have married her, but Snape was always there, he had betrayed the Dark Lord for her, he had protected her son. James had just died, and Stark had never even shown his face, but both of them got to keep Lily’s son, but not him? He deserved it more; he would have happily given Lily a child when James couldn’t. He had been angry and bitter and jealous, but now, sitting before them, watching Stark cuddle the child against his chest, Severus just felt sad. Stark seemed like a good father. James had been a decent enough father too, he grudgingly admitted, though a terrible human being. Maybe Lily had chosen rightly, in not choosing Severus; and wasn’t that always the way?
“I do have better things to do, you realise.” He drawled after a moment, sick of watching the scene in front of him, sick of a lifetime of being denied that. “If you want to see Diagon Alley sometime this decade, I suggest you get your coats. Now.”
They got their coats, and Severus brought them to Diagon Alley using a Portkey, which made Harry dizzy and made Tony bounce on the spot like a hyperactive child. Their first stop had been Gringotts, where Harry was given access to his trust vault, which was then taken away again because Tony had insisted he had more than enough money for Harry’s school things, and yeah the Goblins were creepy, but Tony would deal with them himself (because it was apparently illegal to involve Pepper since she wasn’t actually family) if it meant he was providing for his son.
With a new account set up to draw Galleons straight from Tony’s bank in America, and pockets filled with gold, they had set off into the Alley, and Stark was more like a child than Harry was. Along with Harry’s school things, and a broom, that Harry couldn’t actually use, but Tony wanted to see if he could make fly anyway, Stark brought home one of everything that caught his fancy. His reasoning was that maybe Harry wouldn’t like Hogwarts and wouldn’t go back next year, and then Tony would never get the chance to buy this kind of stuff, and anyway eventually Harry would be old enough to use it, or Tony would figure out how to replicate it into Muggle technology. That had Snape cringing again, but there were no laws against the parents of Muggleborns bringing home souvenirs, so there was nothing he could do but remind the Muggle of the Statue of Secrecy.
“Laws were made to be broken,” Tony had told him with a shit-eating grin.
Severus had been glad to get rid of them, to drop them back to their house in Malibu and slink off to Hogwarts to wallow in the memories of Lily and Harry and being the father who never was. And Tony had pulled out Harry’s Nimbus 2000 and a textbook on flying for beginners and insisted Harry give it a try. Pepper had walked in on Harry flying around the kitchen, bumping into the fridge and knocking the saucepans off the stove on two separate occasions before they even noticed she was there, and Jarvis had been long ago put on mute because he was a spoilsport apparently. That was how Pepper learnt of magic, because what else were the supposed to tell her?
“Sorry Potts, turns out Harry was genetically enhanced in the womb?”
“Hey, so, guess what? Harry’s a mutant, Pep!”
“Yeah. About that! Gamma radiation!”
Who would believe that shit? No one, that’s who, so Tony told her about magic and Harry explained about Hogwarts, and promised to call her ‘mum’ to keep her from getting her memory wiped. Pepper had blushed as Tony joked about them getting married to keep their cover, forgetting her shock in favour of embarrassment. It was a good thing Pepper had found out then, to be honest, because Tony never was much good at keeping things secret.
Harry had gone off to Hogwarts, and visited for Yule and stayed during the summers, and he and Tony would share their learnings in science and magic with one another. They’d tease Pepper, who’d blush but take it all in stride, and Jarvis would bitch at them all about irresponsibility and obligation and manners. The older Harry got the less Tony tried to hide his one night stands, which eventually led to the awkward birds and the bees conversation, which led to how exactly Tony became Harry’s father. Tony didn’t like to talk about his feelings much, or at all really, but Harry was different. Harry was his kid, and the kid deserved to know he was loved and wanted, to know the truth. So when Harry asked, one day out of the blue, “did you love my mother?” Tony thought of four different ways to lie, but told the one truth that had jumped to his mind.
“Yes.”
“I love her too.” Harry had whispered back, reaching forward to squeeze his father’s hands. “I love you as well.”
“Me too, kiddo. Love you too.”
A few years later, Harry had blindsided him again, sneaking into Tony’s bedroom where he was trying to silently extract himself from the grip of some blonde reporter, and scaring Tony half to death, calling out of the darkness. “How did you know you loved my mother?”
“What?” Tony had hissed, pulling on his pants. He led Harry from the room, into the kitchen where the kettle was already reaching boiling point.
“How did you know you were in love? How will I know I’m in love, I mean?”
Tony allowed his body to slump into a chair, accepting the cup of coffee Harry pushed towards him as his mind struggled to catch up. What were they talking about? Love, at four am? Tony hadn’t even been aware Harry was interested in anybody, or in a relationship, or dating, and now they were talking about Harry trying to figure out if he loved somebody. Where had the time gone, when had Harry grown up and gotten so old? He was eighteen now, or would be in a few days, an adult by Wizarding standards, but he would always be Tony’s baby son and no one would take that away from him. He was Tony Stark, damnit, and he hated it when people took his things.
“Who is she?”
“What?” Harry chuckled, taking a sip of his own coffee.
“This girl? Who do I have to kill to get her out of your life?” Tony was only half joking. He knew, logically, Harry was going to grow up and get married and have kids the traditional way, because he wasn’t an emotionally stunted bastard like Tony was. The Dark Lord had been defeated in May (and because Tony was human and non-magical and useless basically, Harry hadn’t told him a thing about the war until it was over), and the Boy-Who-Lived was free to do as he wished with his life now. Including dating apparently, and not introducing the girl to his father, because sure what was Tony’s opinion in the face of love? And that was the ‘other hand’. He wasn’t being logical right then. He wouldn’t be logical when he finally met the man either, but this was more emotional than logical, because his child had grown up and Tony didn’t want to lose him to anyone else.
“It’s a guy, dad.” There was that shy smile again, green eyes peeking up through a dark fringe, eying him warily. Harry curled over his knees, protecting his stomach and chest, the way he had as a child and Vernon would come towards him with a fist raised. Tony hated it when he did that, hated that someone had caused his son to act like that, had trained that behaviour into him. He hated that Harry did that with him sometimes, when something happened and Harry was afraid of the reaction: when Tony learnt of magic, when Tony learnt of his guardianship, when Harry blew things up in the lab by accident, and when Tony learnt his son was gay.
“Right. Well.” He cleared his throat, rubbing at the back of his neck the way he always did when something threw him off track. “Who do I have to kill to get him out of your life?” He said it without adding any sort of inflection on any of the words, as if he were simply repeating his earlier sentence and nothing had changed in the interim.
Harry grinned widely up at him, eyes crinkling and lips curving, and the newspapers were right: Harry was beautiful. Tony could see why this man, whoever he was, loved Harry (because obviously he must do), but Tony didn’t think he’d ever understand what was so great about that guy. No one would ever be good enough for his son in his opinion.
“His name is Loki.”
“Unusual name. One of your lot?” Tony asked, moving to make another cup of coffee.
“You could say that.” Harry grinned at him again, and there was something mischievous in it that made Tony not want to know. So he stayed silent, simply accepting the strange name and stranger’s presence in his son’s life without question.
He had asked to meet the man, but he never got to, and three years later Harry came back in tears from England where he had been working and living with Loki. It was like the night Lily had come to him, to his bed. Tony had opened the door at ridiculous-o-clock and there was a Brit on his doorstep crying desperately and asking to come inside. Hysterically, because Tony had never been good with tears, he wondered if maybe Loki couldn’t get Harry pregnant either, but he shoved that thought away with a snort because men didn’t get pregnant, and hell what was Tony going to do about it with his own kid even if they could!
“He broke up with me!” Harry had whispered. He pressed his face to Tony’s chest, the arc-reactor, which was a relatively new addition to his anatomy, lighting up the tears on Harry’s cheeks. Harry wouldn’t answer any questions, and they tip toed around the subject for the next week until eventually Tony got sick of watching Harry mope.
So then Tony got him drunk, hoping that Harry would be more talkative and give Tony enough information to track the bastard down and put a couple repulsor blasts through his chest, but Harry didn’t say a word about Loki. They talked, instead, about Voldemort and how Harry had been tortured by him a few times, and of Afghanistan and Tony’s time spent trapped in a cave there, and it was the first time Tony had talked to anyone about it, baring the basic ‘I got kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and then I escaped’ story that he fed the press and every two faced arsehole that pretended to give a shit about him when he was MIA. Pepper got a little more from him, especially now that she slept beside him at night and he woke her with his screams sometimes, but even she didn’t know everything he had told Harry that night.
Harry had been touring the world at the time. He and his friends had spent a year almost living out of tent while hunting Horcruxes, and Hermione had decided they should probably do some real, actual travelling considering they had just saved the world and earned it, but it had had to wait until the holidays and school breaks as Harry finished repeating his last year of school. He had hugged his father goodbye, told him he loved him, but that he probably wouldn’t contact him much because there weren’t many places to rent owls in the Alps, and Tony had let him go. Tony had gone to Afghanistan and never told Harry, because it was supposed to be a quick in, quick out with a brief demonstration in the middle. He had never intended nor expected to get kidnapped by terrorists.
Harry had left Tony Stark and come back to Iron Man and arc reactors and Obie having tried to kill them all, and he hadn’t been there to help just like Tony hadn’t known Harry was in danger from Voldemort for years. Without the arc reactor, there was no Iron Man. Without Iron Man, Tony was vulnerable and helpless and useless again, and having a piece of machinery in his chest outweighed the cons by miles, so he had refused to go to St Mungos for treatment and he had refused to let Harry help him even though the arc reactor was probably going to kill him anyway one day.
But in the meantime, Tony had turned into a hero, a superhero instead of the Merchant of Death, and it was a feeling too good to let go of. Harry had been a hero for years, and Loki had made him feel normal, like a regular teenager in love (and it was love on both of their ends), and now like a regular teenager he was drinking away his heartbreak, but that was fine. Harry was a Stark; he’d do as his father did, and deal with his demons some other time.
XXX
TBC
This was great and fun and I loved it, until I got to “April 3rd 2011” and I lost myself. It was just so hard to write the- (want to say it so badly but don’t want to spoil anything) -stuff! Anyway. I hope you like it! I have one more Loki/Harry pre-Avengers fic to go (but it’s actually Harry/Loki-ish though), and then I think I’ll work on a FrostIron fiction I had an idea for… And then on the sequel to Butterfly, because it’s bouncing around in my brain…
And it’s time to study for exams again (and purge FFNet apparently)…
* * *
“The Sum Of All Your Fears”
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is property of JK Rowling, Bloomsbury, Warner Bros, et all. Avengers, Thor, Loki, etc belong to Marvel, Stan Lee, et co. I make no money from this and own nothing, don’t sue.
Summary: [Loki/HP] The Chitauri found him after he fell. They promised him revenge and the boy from his dreams, the boy with the lightning bolt scar that Loki should know but couldn’t remember. The Tesseract invaded his mind, polluting it, emptying it, until all that remained was fear and anger and he didn’t know who he was anymore. But Harry would save him. Because that’s what heroes did.
Warnings: Slash. Loki/HP. Pre-Movies; through Iron Man; post-Avengers. Violence. Language. AU. Implied Torture. Typos. Character death. Creepiness. Eventual happy ending. Mind Control. Induced Insanity.
Rating: NC-17.
A/N: Hmm. I seem to have a new obsession. Fellow Lokeans, arise!! ALSO! I HAVE CHANGED THE HP DATES. Harry was born in 1990, not 1980. Add ten years to everything (it was that, or make this another master of death story). Harry born: 1990. Hogwarts: 2001. Iron Man: 2008. Iron Man 2: 2010. Thor: April 2011. Captain America: July 2011. Avengers: April 2012.
XXX
“We have finally learned, at far too great a cost, that if the most powerful weapons ever created are ever unleashed, they will be fired not in anger... but fear.” - President Fowler: The Sum of All Fears (2002).
Words: 21,253
Chapter 1
June 17th 1996. London. Five.
It was to be expected, Tony supposed, what with his reputation and all. It was an eventuality, not a probability; it was like the knowledge that one day the sun would implode and wipe out life on earth. One day his lawyer was bound to issue him with a paternity suit: eventuality, not probability. But of all the women, in all the world, Tony had never expected that letter to come from Lily Potter.
They had been friends, sort of. Lily had been on holiday with her family, the two of them around ten and eleven at the time, Tony one year older. They had bumped into each other; or rather Tony had almost run her down during one of his many cries-for-attention stunts that his father simply ignored anyway. He had ended up at her hotel, eating dinner with her parents, who were lovely, and her sister, who wasn’t as lovely, and Howard Stark hadn’t noticed that he was missing. Eventually, Tony had called a much younger Happy to collect him and his father’s stolen Ferrari. But Lily had given him her house phone number, and Tony had spent the next months running up enormous phone bills calling England every other weekend, until the year Lily went to boarding school. They had exchanged letters from that point on, brief, to the point letters, because Tony always wrote down everything he had always wanted to confide in a person, but changed his mind, binned it, and rewrote the customary “I’m fine, you?” letter that still amounted to more of a conversation than those he shared with his father.
He hadn’t ever gone to visit her, but Lily had come to see him twice more. When she was fourteen and then at sixteen, and she had been the prettiest girl he had ever laid eyes on. But she hadn’t been interested in him like that because he was a playboy and a charmer and too much like James Potter (whoever that was) for her tastes. She had told him about living at her school and the parents who missed her, which always made Tony pathetically sad because he lived at home and still missed his father, but was never missed. She never told him about magic, but she listened with interest and curiosity and occasionally confusion as he tried to explain about physics or chemistry or robotics, whatever he was working on. They were friends, for a time.
They fell out of touch for a few years before Lily graduated. Tony had gone to MIT at fifteen and had only seen her once since then. Lily had started working for the Ministry of Magic, and then Tony’s parents had died, he had inherited the company, and was too busy getting drunk, or high, or setting things on fire in the name of science to really care about any of it. He missed Howard and Maria Stark, but in an abstract, he was forced to grow up, kind of way, because it wasn’t like he had ever had them as parents anyway. Not really. Lily had written to him, after hearing about his father’s death on the news. She even sent him pictures of her and her new husband, James. Tony never wrote back. He didn’t want to talk about Howard, and he didn’t want to talk about James, because the last Tony had heard James was an egotistical waste of space and Lily wouldn’t touch off him with a barge pole, and if she was going to pick anyone with the ego the size of a small country she should have picked Tony.
He had regretted it, of course; cutting her out of his life, because despite the miles between them, Lily Evans was really his only real friend. Tony had been too prideful to track her down, and the one time he had tried her house phone her sister had answered and told him never to call again and that was enough of an effort on his part he had thought drunkenly to himself later that same night.
But in October 1989, Lily turned up on his doorstep with nothing but the clothes on her back and tears on her cheeks. Tony had invited her in, given her a drink, and hadn’t pushed her away when she kissed him. They had had sex, and later he had felt guilty about it, watching her sleep with a wedding ring on her finger, but at the time he had pulled her closer and kissed her harder and moved inside her while she clung to him.
“I’m sorry,” she had whispered to him the next morning, before silently pulling her clothes back on. She drank something from a strange looking glass bottle that she had pulled from her pocket, smiling softly down at Tony who had continued to lounge across the bed naked. “James can’t have children, and we wanted one so badly. Please forgive me, but, well, you were the only person I could think of.” Lily didn’t speak to Severus anymore, she had told him that when she visited at sixteen. Severus had insulted her and she couldn’t bring herself to forgive him this time. Her only other male friend was Tony. “Don’t be angry?”
“You were using me to try and get pregnant?” Tony had asked her, sounding incredulous. He raised an eyebrow at her, running a hand through his hair as he laughed. “It doesn’t work like that, you know. It’s never a certain thing, Lily.”
“I am pregnant.” Her hand squeezed around the glass bottle that was now empty. Tony’s eyes flicked to her stomach and a frown pulled down the corner of his lips. He thought about his own father and his childhood, and how he had never wanted children. He had told Lily that once before, and she had always insisted he’d make a great dad if he wanted to put the effort in, but he hadn’t wanted to, he hadn’t wanted children, and now Lily was telling him he was having one regardless? His thoughts must have been written across his face, because she was suddenly sitting on the edge of the bed beside him, her hands on his face as she whispered, “don’t worry, Tony. This is mine and James’ baby as far as anyone knows. You’ll never have to have anything to do with them, I promise.”
Tony had let her leave then. He hadn’t tried to follow her or stop her, he hadn’t called out for her, and though he had spent more than six years thinking about whether Lily had actually had his child or not, Tony had never tried to find out. Sure he had thought about it every now and then, when he was particularly lonely, imagined what it would be like to have someone look up to him and love him, just because he was ‘dad’, but it wasn’t like he had chosen to be a father. It wasn’t like Lily had given him a choice in the matter, and she had told him in as many words that she didn’t want him involved with his son’s life, so he’d just never bothered to find out!
And yet, here he was, walking through London at Lily’s solicitor’s bequest, because she had added an extra special clause to her will. If Harry’s guardians (and there were quite a few names listed on the will before his own) were ever found to be inadequate or unable to care for Harry Potter, Tony Stark was to have full custody of his son. Apparently, Lily’s sister had been seen hitting Harry hard enough to knock him to the floor, and unlike every other time she had hit Harry, there was no Wizard there to cover it up. So, Harry had been taken into care, and social services had tracked Tony down in Malibu, and Lily’s solicitor had written to him. And here he was.
He was still trying to get his head around the fact that Lily had been dead for nearly five years and no one had told him. No one had known of him to tell him, but still. He had loved her once, so shouldn’t he have known the instant something happened to her? Shouldn’t he have felt it deep within himself?
Tony glanced at the little boy, sitting curled in on himself, dwarfed by the hard plastic chair that seemed to be present in every government building in the world. Tony reached out a hand to the child, and Harry looked up, cringing away at the same time. Harry’s eyes were the same colour as Lily’s, but they were wide and terrified, and when Tony looked into them he could see himself at that age, trembling under the force of his father’s anger-
“Don’t go in my workshop, Anthony! Don’t touch that, Anthony! Why are you such a nuisance, Anthony!”
-Tony cringed, pushing those memories forcefully back where they belonged: away. Instead, he turned his full attention to the small, dark haired boy and tried to smile. It looked more like a grimace and Harry made no attempt to return the gesture.
“Hey kiddo. My name’s Tony, but, uh,” he mumbled, rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly, “you can call me dad if you want?”
“I’ve never had a dad before,” Harry whispered. His voice was almost too soft to be heard, but Tony knew that was because the child had trained it to be that way, never heard, never noticed, because it was safer. But Tony hadn’t been that kind of child. He had wanted the attention, even the bad kind, because, hey, bad publicity was still publicity, negative attention was better than nothing, even though it got him punished, even though his dad still hadn’t cared about anything more than ‘that one time I worked with Captain America’. How could Tony have competed with that?
“Yeah,” the elder man said, crouching down so that he was eye to eye with his own son. “Neither have I. What do you say we learn how to do this together, huh?”
And yeah, while he had thought about whether this child had actually existed and fantasied about what it could be like to have him, Tony had never really considered finding him, because he hadn’t wanted children and he didn’t want to work at anything so personal. He had been annoyed with the solicitor, with Lily, even a little bit angry with the child he hadn’t met at the time, but now, watching Harry grin up at him and warily reach forward to take Tony’s hand, now he was damn proud. This was his son, his damnit, and he was going to be the best father there ever was.
How’d you like that, Howard Stark? Tony was finally going to be better than his father at something.
XXX
July 31st 2001. Eleven.
Harry had turned out rather well over the past five years. He didn’t cringe anymore if Tony moved too fast, and he didn’t flinch when Tony shouted at Dummy or Jarvis or Pepper (Tony never shouted at him, because Howard had shouted enough for two sons), he’d put on enough weight so that people no longer wondered if Tony was feeding him at all, and he got more beautiful every day. Tony would often introduce Harry to people as ‘his little heartbreaker’ or ‘his snow white’, grinning widely as people complimented his eyes or his hair or his skin. When Harry was older, Tony would let them compliment his lips too, but right now, he drew the line there.
The boy looked a lot like his mother, but he had picked up most of his mannerisms from Tony. They stood the same way, they slouched the same way, and they even raised their eyebrows and drawled sarcastically the same way when they thought someone was being particularly stupid. Most people were considered stupid by Tony’s standards, but Harry was smart too. Not smart-smart, like Howard or Tony, but he was a quick study and he got good grades at school, and he’d even been accepted into some pretty decent secondary schools across the country. He’d applied to Eton too, and got in, but he wasn’t going to go, because that was in England, and Tony was in America and Harry would miss him.
But this? Magic school? That was worth moving away from home for!
“Repeat that please?” Tony bit out, with one eyebrow raised.
Harry glanced back and forth between his father and the professor from Hogwarts. Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry was in Scotland, and only people who could perform magic were invited. His mother had been a witch, and he was a Wizard, and this professor Snape was a Wizard too. Harry remembered the Dursleys, though he pretended he couldn’t when people asked about where he was living before living with Tony. Harry remembered them hitting him and calling him a freak but not knowing why, but he supposed this made sense. If he could do magic, if he could be a Wizard and go to magic school, that would make him a freak.
He glanced back at his dad, ignoring the dark haired Wizard who was glaring at him. “Dad?” Tony turned to stare at him, eyes still narrowed from his staring match with the side of Snape’s head. “Are you angry with me?”
“Course not, kiddo. But remind me to talk to Obie later. His idea of a prank could use some work, don’t you think?” Tony snorted, waving his thumb in Snape’s direction and rolling his eyes.
“I think he’s telling the truth.” Harry whispered, before glancing down at the hands he was twisting in his lap. “Strange things happen sometimes, around me. Maybe it was magic?”
Tony thought about it. He remembered the first time he had brought Harry into his lab, just to show him around, and Harry had touched something (and god but he couldn’t even remember what). It had exploded. Harry was banned from the lab, much like Tony had been banned from Howard’s, but Tony had actually fixed things in there, had improved on them or made them work. Harry had blown up everything he had touched, anything he had switched on, and one such incident had ended up with Harry in A&E receiving treatment for third degree burns to his arms and Tony had only had custody a month.
Tony never shouted though, or threw Harry from the lab, or dragged him down the corridors by his arm the way Howard always had. Tony had been kicked out for Howard’s best interests, but Harry stayed out for his own. It was strange, Tony had always thought after putting Harry to bed and going down to the lab to clean up the mess. When Harry tried to help, things exploded, but he could turn the kettle or the toaster on without having to touch them, and damn, but Tony could never figure out how. He had always assumed Jarvis had been the one to do it, and Tony was just being pranked, but magic?
Magic had never crossed his mind.
It explained how Lily could be so certain she was pregnant, after one time, though Tony was very sure he had used a condom (but he’d been drunk, so maybe he wasn’t so certain). Magic would explain why technology didn’t really get on well with Harry, magic would explain the way those burns had healed almost overnight because no way was State health care that great.
“No kiddo, I’m not angry with you.” He reached over to pull Harry onto his lap, and the boy curled automatically into his chest. “But you damn well better show me everything you learn at Christmas. And if you think you won’t be teaching me potions and stuff this summer you have another thing coming, snow white.”
Snape cringed at the mention of a Muggle trying potions, but he kept silent as he watched them. He had come to their home fully expecting the man to react badly, for Harry to be refused admittance to Hogwarts, or to even be moved to another carer, but the Muggle was calm and curious and understanding, and nothing like Lily used to describe him as. Anthony Edward Stark had always been another James Potter in Snape’s mind, and when Lily’s son had been placed into his custody Severus had been heartbroken. He had been Lily’s friend too. He had been Lily’s best friend at one point! Stark might have known her longer and Potter might have married her, but Snape was always there, he had betrayed the Dark Lord for her, he had protected her son. James had just died, and Stark had never even shown his face, but both of them got to keep Lily’s son, but not him? He deserved it more; he would have happily given Lily a child when James couldn’t. He had been angry and bitter and jealous, but now, sitting before them, watching Stark cuddle the child against his chest, Severus just felt sad. Stark seemed like a good father. James had been a decent enough father too, he grudgingly admitted, though a terrible human being. Maybe Lily had chosen rightly, in not choosing Severus; and wasn’t that always the way?
“I do have better things to do, you realise.” He drawled after a moment, sick of watching the scene in front of him, sick of a lifetime of being denied that. “If you want to see Diagon Alley sometime this decade, I suggest you get your coats. Now.”
They got their coats, and Severus brought them to Diagon Alley using a Portkey, which made Harry dizzy and made Tony bounce on the spot like a hyperactive child. Their first stop had been Gringotts, where Harry was given access to his trust vault, which was then taken away again because Tony had insisted he had more than enough money for Harry’s school things, and yeah the Goblins were creepy, but Tony would deal with them himself (because it was apparently illegal to involve Pepper since she wasn’t actually family) if it meant he was providing for his son.
With a new account set up to draw Galleons straight from Tony’s bank in America, and pockets filled with gold, they had set off into the Alley, and Stark was more like a child than Harry was. Along with Harry’s school things, and a broom, that Harry couldn’t actually use, but Tony wanted to see if he could make fly anyway, Stark brought home one of everything that caught his fancy. His reasoning was that maybe Harry wouldn’t like Hogwarts and wouldn’t go back next year, and then Tony would never get the chance to buy this kind of stuff, and anyway eventually Harry would be old enough to use it, or Tony would figure out how to replicate it into Muggle technology. That had Snape cringing again, but there were no laws against the parents of Muggleborns bringing home souvenirs, so there was nothing he could do but remind the Muggle of the Statue of Secrecy.
“Laws were made to be broken,” Tony had told him with a shit-eating grin.
Severus had been glad to get rid of them, to drop them back to their house in Malibu and slink off to Hogwarts to wallow in the memories of Lily and Harry and being the father who never was. And Tony had pulled out Harry’s Nimbus 2000 and a textbook on flying for beginners and insisted Harry give it a try. Pepper had walked in on Harry flying around the kitchen, bumping into the fridge and knocking the saucepans off the stove on two separate occasions before they even noticed she was there, and Jarvis had been long ago put on mute because he was a spoilsport apparently. That was how Pepper learnt of magic, because what else were the supposed to tell her?
“Sorry Potts, turns out Harry was genetically enhanced in the womb?”
“Hey, so, guess what? Harry’s a mutant, Pep!”
“Yeah. About that! Gamma radiation!”
Who would believe that shit? No one, that’s who, so Tony told her about magic and Harry explained about Hogwarts, and promised to call her ‘mum’ to keep her from getting her memory wiped. Pepper had blushed as Tony joked about them getting married to keep their cover, forgetting her shock in favour of embarrassment. It was a good thing Pepper had found out then, to be honest, because Tony never was much good at keeping things secret.
Harry had gone off to Hogwarts, and visited for Yule and stayed during the summers, and he and Tony would share their learnings in science and magic with one another. They’d tease Pepper, who’d blush but take it all in stride, and Jarvis would bitch at them all about irresponsibility and obligation and manners. The older Harry got the less Tony tried to hide his one night stands, which eventually led to the awkward birds and the bees conversation, which led to how exactly Tony became Harry’s father. Tony didn’t like to talk about his feelings much, or at all really, but Harry was different. Harry was his kid, and the kid deserved to know he was loved and wanted, to know the truth. So when Harry asked, one day out of the blue, “did you love my mother?” Tony thought of four different ways to lie, but told the one truth that had jumped to his mind.
“Yes.”
“I love her too.” Harry had whispered back, reaching forward to squeeze his father’s hands. “I love you as well.”
“Me too, kiddo. Love you too.”
A few years later, Harry had blindsided him again, sneaking into Tony’s bedroom where he was trying to silently extract himself from the grip of some blonde reporter, and scaring Tony half to death, calling out of the darkness. “How did you know you loved my mother?”
“What?” Tony had hissed, pulling on his pants. He led Harry from the room, into the kitchen where the kettle was already reaching boiling point.
“How did you know you were in love? How will I know I’m in love, I mean?”
Tony allowed his body to slump into a chair, accepting the cup of coffee Harry pushed towards him as his mind struggled to catch up. What were they talking about? Love, at four am? Tony hadn’t even been aware Harry was interested in anybody, or in a relationship, or dating, and now they were talking about Harry trying to figure out if he loved somebody. Where had the time gone, when had Harry grown up and gotten so old? He was eighteen now, or would be in a few days, an adult by Wizarding standards, but he would always be Tony’s baby son and no one would take that away from him. He was Tony Stark, damnit, and he hated it when people took his things.
“Who is she?”
“What?” Harry chuckled, taking a sip of his own coffee.
“This girl? Who do I have to kill to get her out of your life?” Tony was only half joking. He knew, logically, Harry was going to grow up and get married and have kids the traditional way, because he wasn’t an emotionally stunted bastard like Tony was. The Dark Lord had been defeated in May (and because Tony was human and non-magical and useless basically, Harry hadn’t told him a thing about the war until it was over), and the Boy-Who-Lived was free to do as he wished with his life now. Including dating apparently, and not introducing the girl to his father, because sure what was Tony’s opinion in the face of love? And that was the ‘other hand’. He wasn’t being logical right then. He wouldn’t be logical when he finally met the man either, but this was more emotional than logical, because his child had grown up and Tony didn’t want to lose him to anyone else.
“It’s a guy, dad.” There was that shy smile again, green eyes peeking up through a dark fringe, eying him warily. Harry curled over his knees, protecting his stomach and chest, the way he had as a child and Vernon would come towards him with a fist raised. Tony hated it when he did that, hated that someone had caused his son to act like that, had trained that behaviour into him. He hated that Harry did that with him sometimes, when something happened and Harry was afraid of the reaction: when Tony learnt of magic, when Tony learnt of his guardianship, when Harry blew things up in the lab by accident, and when Tony learnt his son was gay.
“Right. Well.” He cleared his throat, rubbing at the back of his neck the way he always did when something threw him off track. “Who do I have to kill to get him out of your life?” He said it without adding any sort of inflection on any of the words, as if he were simply repeating his earlier sentence and nothing had changed in the interim.
Harry grinned widely up at him, eyes crinkling and lips curving, and the newspapers were right: Harry was beautiful. Tony could see why this man, whoever he was, loved Harry (because obviously he must do), but Tony didn’t think he’d ever understand what was so great about that guy. No one would ever be good enough for his son in his opinion.
“His name is Loki.”
“Unusual name. One of your lot?” Tony asked, moving to make another cup of coffee.
“You could say that.” Harry grinned at him again, and there was something mischievous in it that made Tony not want to know. So he stayed silent, simply accepting the strange name and stranger’s presence in his son’s life without question.
He had asked to meet the man, but he never got to, and three years later Harry came back in tears from England where he had been working and living with Loki. It was like the night Lily had come to him, to his bed. Tony had opened the door at ridiculous-o-clock and there was a Brit on his doorstep crying desperately and asking to come inside. Hysterically, because Tony had never been good with tears, he wondered if maybe Loki couldn’t get Harry pregnant either, but he shoved that thought away with a snort because men didn’t get pregnant, and hell what was Tony going to do about it with his own kid even if they could!
“He broke up with me!” Harry had whispered. He pressed his face to Tony’s chest, the arc-reactor, which was a relatively new addition to his anatomy, lighting up the tears on Harry’s cheeks. Harry wouldn’t answer any questions, and they tip toed around the subject for the next week until eventually Tony got sick of watching Harry mope.
So then Tony got him drunk, hoping that Harry would be more talkative and give Tony enough information to track the bastard down and put a couple repulsor blasts through his chest, but Harry didn’t say a word about Loki. They talked, instead, about Voldemort and how Harry had been tortured by him a few times, and of Afghanistan and Tony’s time spent trapped in a cave there, and it was the first time Tony had talked to anyone about it, baring the basic ‘I got kidnapped, tortured, mutilated and then I escaped’ story that he fed the press and every two faced arsehole that pretended to give a shit about him when he was MIA. Pepper got a little more from him, especially now that she slept beside him at night and he woke her with his screams sometimes, but even she didn’t know everything he had told Harry that night.
Harry had been touring the world at the time. He and his friends had spent a year almost living out of tent while hunting Horcruxes, and Hermione had decided they should probably do some real, actual travelling considering they had just saved the world and earned it, but it had had to wait until the holidays and school breaks as Harry finished repeating his last year of school. He had hugged his father goodbye, told him he loved him, but that he probably wouldn’t contact him much because there weren’t many places to rent owls in the Alps, and Tony had let him go. Tony had gone to Afghanistan and never told Harry, because it was supposed to be a quick in, quick out with a brief demonstration in the middle. He had never intended nor expected to get kidnapped by terrorists.
Harry had left Tony Stark and come back to Iron Man and arc reactors and Obie having tried to kill them all, and he hadn’t been there to help just like Tony hadn’t known Harry was in danger from Voldemort for years. Without the arc reactor, there was no Iron Man. Without Iron Man, Tony was vulnerable and helpless and useless again, and having a piece of machinery in his chest outweighed the cons by miles, so he had refused to go to St Mungos for treatment and he had refused to let Harry help him even though the arc reactor was probably going to kill him anyway one day.
But in the meantime, Tony had turned into a hero, a superhero instead of the Merchant of Death, and it was a feeling too good to let go of. Harry had been a hero for years, and Loki had made him feel normal, like a regular teenager in love (and it was love on both of their ends), and now like a regular teenager he was drinking away his heartbreak, but that was fine. Harry was a Stark; he’d do as his father did, and deal with his demons some other time.
XXX
TBC