"Pure Insanity" 7/?
Title: "Pure Insanity" 7/?
Author: Lena
Fandom: Marvel
Warnings: Foul language, some violence, and I don't know what else. I'll update this as the story spews forth.
Rating: R (The version of Tony Stark in this story is RIDICULOUSLY foul mouthed.)
Disclaimer: Marvel is god, I'm just a lowly worshiper, blah, blah, blah.
Summary: A
man insists that he's Loki of Asgard, and ends up in a mental
institution. Was he really sent here as punishment for his misdeeds in
New York as he insists, or is he just a sadly deranged soul? Your guess
is as good as mine.
Beta'd By: Just me tonight, kids. Feel free to correct anything you see. My grammar sucks balls.
Tony figured that someone would likely be monitoring the Tower in some way. Hell, everyone had to be out looking for the two of them, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t prepared for that. He was pretty sure that people forgot just how fast his mind really worked. Bruce likely had some idea, since he was almost as smart, but the thing was, Tony thought on the idea of contingency plan upon contingency plan. He had known at some point that his tower and company would be taken out from under him again, and he’d put in contingencies to make sure that he could easily get it back. Now he had to contend with the idea that someone had been monitoring the Tower. They had to be, unless they were tremendously stupid, and just because he was smarter than they were did not mean that they were necessarily stupid.
However, he was prepared for that, too. He was sick and tired of people fucking with him and thinking that they knew what was best and then forcing it upon him.
Now the world would get to see what happened when Tony Stark was messed with.
He was still standing in his lab, and, although he heard no voice and saw no movement, he knew that Loki was behind him, observing for the moment.
He was still standing in his lab, and, although he heard no voice and saw no movement, he knew that Loki was behind him, observing for the moment. Everything was still waking up around him, coming to life and stretching their metaphoric limbs. He wasn't even sure how long it had been since they had last been active. Almost made him angry over that alone. Still, he had lots to be angry about right now. His computers and bots not having moved for months would just have to join the line.
One of his screens popped up in front of him, and he watched a video feed as security cameras showed that they weren’t going to be alone for long. Outside of the building, on the roof, he could see that Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton looking for a way to get inside. Part of the protocol that he enacted sent the building on lock down, so they would have a bit of a trial getting inside. Then again, they were spies, so he still figured that they might find some way of getting inside, to his irritation.
“Looks like we have company,” Tony said to Loki. “Then again, I think I’d be more disappointed if someone didn’t show up to try and catch s. That would mean that we just weren’t loved one bit.”
He heard Loki snort behind him. “I could do without the spy network trying to get inside, personally.” He could almost hear they eye roll in Loki’s voice.
“What? You wanna welcome them, then? Make them feel at home?” Tony suggested, grinning as he looked at the God of Mischief over his shoulder.
He watched Loki crack his neck in one languid motion. “I think I can handle that,” Loki said, a touch of a grin gracing his features.
OoOoOoOo
Tony couldn’t help but feel paranoid after Loki’s little visit. Sure, security had been upped around the place, but he doubted that would exactly slow the god down. Moreover, a tiny part of him almost wanted Loki to show up again. He had hinted that he knew how to make the Chitauri technology work again, and, despite everything that he had been trying, nothing was working. If the bastard would actually SHOW him how to make this stuff work, he might actually be grateful. He was pulling his hair out over this stuff.
Maybe that was why, when he was working in his shop late one night, when he felt a chill in the air and looked behind him, seeing Loki wearing that Cheshire cat grin, his hand stayed instead of looking for any way to signal the others in the building that Loki had shown up again.
He had been blasting AC/DC when he god appeared, so, if Loki had made any noise, he wouldn’t have heard it, anyway. However, he had felt a chill in the air that made the hair on the back of his neck stand at end, and there Loki was. He wondered why the air would get cold, but filed that away as something to find out if he survived this encounter.
“You know, I upped the security around here just so that you wouldn’t be able to do that,” Tony said, signaling to JARVIS to turn down off the music.
“Actually, I doubt I’m registering to your security feed at all,” Loki said, reaching out of if to touch Tony, only for his hand to pass right through him. “The fun of magic is being able to get around all sorts of things, after all.”
Tony tilted his head, already more interested than afraid now. “Now how in the hell can you do that?” he wondered aloud, already reaching across and watching as his hand passed through Loki’s arm. It was just a hologram, but the technology outside of his own lab for that sort of thing was still awful.
“Magic and science are more alike than you seem to want to believe,” Loki said, watching passively as Tony passed his hand through him a few more times. “Speaking of, I do believe I promised to show you how the Chitauri technology worked.”
“Why are you doing this?” Tony asked, finally pulling back and leaning against his workbench. Yeah, he felt a little safer that apparently, Loki wasn’t actually physically here, but he should still be contacting someone right now. Still, he wanted to satisfy his curiosity before he did anything like that. “What do you have to gain from showing us how this stuff works?”
“Who said that I was showing anyone but you?” Loki asked, grinning and showing his gleaming white teeth at Tony. If Tony didn’t know any better, he’d say that Loki’s teeth looked like razor sharp knives when he smiled. Not the most pleasant of ideas.
“Do you really think that I’d keep something like this a secret?” Tony asked him. “Come on, Loki. If you think you know me at all, do you think that I’d be able to keep anything like this from others around me?”
Loki pursed his lips, seemingly thinking on that for a moment. On the other hand, it could have just been a ploy. Hard to tell when the person you were talking to was the God of Mischief and Lies, among other things. Yeah, Tony had started trying to do his homework about Loki. Thor wasn’t around at the moment to ask questions to and it seemed that SHIELD’s files were woefully lacking. Not that he was terribly shocked. Sure, SHIELD almost had a handle on things on this planet, but it seemed that they were still mostly flailing at anything from beyond the cosmos.
“Maybe I will be showing you a way that will only work when I’m around,” Loki teased, smiling again. Yeah, probably had been a ploy to make Tony think that he was in control for a split second. Tony was ahead of Loki in one particular way: he was damn sure that he had NO control over anything that was going to happen right now.
“Not really shocked by that,” Tony said quickly. “Now, what I’m wondering, what I’m REALLY wondering, is what you want for this knowledge. Come on, I sure as hell don’t think that you’re just gonna hand this information over to one of the people who helped to defeat your little try out takeover of Earth. What do you want, Loki?” Not that he figured he’d actually give anything. No, Loki would only want something bad, right?
“Smart boy,” Loki purred. Tony had to admit that Loki’s voice had a nice ring to it. “No…this is a trade, not a gift. I’m just not sure what it is that you have that I could want.”
Tony bristled, both at being called a ‘boy,’ even as he realized he likely was in just pure years on Loki, and at the idea that Tony didn’t have anything that Loki wanted. Despite the tiny voice in his head telling him to SHUT UP, he couldn’t quite stop himself. “You’d be amazed at just what I can do for you, Loki,” he said, then clearing his throat. “You know…if I wanted to.” He really needed to learn to keep his fat mouth SHUT one of these days, or it really was going to get him killed.
Loki leaned closer, and, even though Tony knew that he wasn’t really there, he still pressed himself harder against the workbench in a vain effort to keep away from him. Loki still moved closer, almost a hair’s breadth from Tony and, although it seemed impossible, Tony could SWEAR that he could feel Loki’s breath on his face. It was also odd that, to him, Loki seemed to smell like fresh snow. “Oh I’m sure that you could,” Loki said, still grinning that maddening and frightening grin. “But I was trying to think of something…a little more tangible.”
Loki moved away, and Tony let out an embarrassing sigh of relief. He was pretty sure that, if these meetings kept up, his brain was going to totally fry and short circuit and he was going to die. “Do you think you can handle the idea of trading for a favor to be decided?” Tony offered, inwardly kicking himself for giving over something that could screw him over in so many ways, but both his own curiosity and the draw that he couldn’t quite deny to the god was making him speak, anyway.
Loki gave one of those terrifying yet seductive grins again, and Tony couldn’t help but wonder if this was how Natasha’s marks felt right before she stabbed them in the neck while in bed. She wasn’t called Black Widow because she just wore black clothes, after all. She was a seducer and killer, and Tony had the definite feeling that Loki might be as well. “I think I can handle that, Stark,” he practically purred, and Tony knew that he was fucked with a capital F-U-C-K.
Before he could even think of saying anything more, though, he heard a knock at his workshop door, and he turned toward it without thinking. When he looked back to see what Loki was doing (and to likely try to make him go away), he had already disappeared. The air was still cold, though, so Tony had the feeling that he might still be around, hiding somewhere.
Clearing his throat, he tried to make himself sound normal when he called out, “Come in!”
It was Steve that walked into the room, looking like he was fresh from a workout, judging by the sweat still sticking to his face and arms. Yeah, he looked, and he had nursed something of a schoolboy crush on the hero since his high school years, but he’d never actually do anything about it. Well, nothing more than a one night stand. He wouldn’t even do THAT because he had Pepper, whom he had conveniently forgotten during his little talk with Loki. FUCK.
“Hey, was wondering if you were going to join everyone for dinner,” Steve said, not even having the decency of sounding winded even though he had obviously just been doing some sort of workout. “Pepper ordered some Thai food and she already dragged Bruce out of his lab, so she said that I had the job of coming and getting you.”
God, this sounded too mundane to be true. Either this was a dream or his talk with Loki was some sort of fevered dream, even if the room still felt freezing to him. “Sure, just let me wrap some stuff up in here and I’ll be right up,” he said, shooting Steve a winning smile.
Steve smiling back, giving him a nod before shivering. “Wow, what’s with keeping this place so cold?” he asked, rubbing his hands up his arms.
“Machines run at peak efficiency in colder temperatures,” Tony said without even thinking about it. He waved at Steve as he headed off, breathing out a sigh of relief when the soldier walked through the door and left the area.
“Not even letting your dear Captain know that the dreaded enemy is around,” Loki purred in his ear, causing Tony nearly to jump out of his skin.
“Jesus FUCK don’t do that to me!” Tony snapped at him quickly, turning around and putting a good foot of distance between the two of them. “Someone needs to put a goddamn bell on you or something.”
“No need to be so jumpy, Mr. Stark,” Loki said, leaning backward against one of the other work tables. “Promise that I won’t bite…unless you ask.”
Tony shook his head. “OK, before you somehow cause my brain to completely short circuit, rules need to be laid out. I’m only giving you ONE favor for teaching me how the Chitauri technology works, and I’m not going to do anything that will either directly or indirectly harm any of my friends or teammates, deal?”
Loki actually seemed to think on that for a second. “Deal then, Mr. Stark,” he said. “Despite what you may think of me, I’m actually not around to kill any of you.”
“Well, I had a broken window and nearly a bashed in skull that said otherwise,” Tony grumbled. “Now, I’ve got a date with friends upstairs, so unless you’d like to explain why you’re suddenly hanging around my workshop like a creeper…”
Loki seemed to understand what he wanted. “Alright then, I’ll be on my way for now. I’ll come back tomorrow night to show you how some of the Chitauri technology works. Till then, Mr. Stark.” Loki bowed slightly before disappearing right before Tony’s eyes.
Tony started the locking up of his lab, muttering to himself the entire time, “This is going to be the death of me. I just know it.”
OoOoOoOo
Loki decided to take the subtle approach to going out after the hawk and the spider. It would be subtle for him, at least. He made sure that he was invisible, coming out onto the rooftop to observe them for a few moments, wanting to get an idea as to what their plans for them might be.
“How does Fury even know that they’re here?” Barton asked Romanoff, eyeing the door that would lead them down a stairwell and likely toward the living quarters that Stark had once used. “They escaped. They could be anywhere. Besides, no one has been in this place for months.”
Loki was happy to hear something resembling a timeframe. He had no idea how long he had been away, either locked in that ridiculous excuse for a mental asylum or being forced to live that lie of a life before. He still remembered all of the life that had he had been placed in, but he had no true idea how long he had spent in it. Time was tricky like that.
“Where else would they go?” Romanoff asked. She had a point. Loki doubted that Stark would have listened to any insistence of going anywhere else, even if Loki had tried. The tower was his and his alone, and of course, he would demand to get it back under his control. Wanting what was rightfully yours was a sentiment that Loki understood very well.
Before Barton could concede the merits and flaws of that idea, Loki thought that it would be a good time to appear. “As enlightening as this conversation really is, I’d suggest for the both of you that you leave,” Loki said, slowly appearing behind the both of them, mainly for dramatic effect.
Both of them managed to hide their surprise when they turned around, but Loki could read them both well enough to see that he had caught them off guard. “It’s not often that someone gets the drop on me,” Romanoff commented as she slowly pivoted toward him.
“Let’s just say that I’m returning the favor,” Loki replied, smile vicious. “As I was saying, go back where you came from if you value your safety.”
Both spies instead leveled their weapons on him. “We’re under orders to bring you both in,” Barton told him. Loki could still sense the rage that dwelled within Barton toward him.
“Too bad for you that’s not gonna happen.” It seemed that Loki wasn’t the only one who could ‘get the drop of them,’ so to speak, tonight. Stark had managed to get up to the roof and open the door while their backs were turned. Before either even had the chance to turn around, he managed to fire off something that looked like a gun, but, instead of bullets, little electrodes popped out and sent a surge of electricity through both of the spies, dropping them both to the ground.
“What is that?” Loki asked, head cocked in curiosity. He wasn’t sure if he’d actually seen anything like it before.
“Taser. Sends 10,000 volts of electricity. I altered it so that it can hit two people at once,” Stark said with a grin. “Handy in a non-lethal way. Didn’t seem fair to just kill them off the bat.” He paused before laughing. “Or fun, really.”
Loki thought that Stark still looked a little insane when he said that, but he’d rather that than someone too worried about morals, now that he thought about it. Stark had always been chaotic in nature. It just seemed like somehow or another, he’d been pushed over the edge.
“So, what to do with these two, then?” Loki mused aloud.
Stark holstered the weapon in the waistband of the jeans that he was wearing. “Lock them up for now. I got a Hulk-proof cage down there that I KNOW they can’t get out of. When we think of something suitably fun, we’ll bring them back out.”
Loki smiled. “Good enough for me.”
Author: Lena
Fandom: Marvel
Warnings: Foul language, some violence, and I don't know what else. I'll update this as the story spews forth.
Rating: R (The version of Tony Stark in this story is RIDICULOUSLY foul mouthed.)
Disclaimer: Marvel is god, I'm just a lowly worshiper, blah, blah, blah.
Summary: A
man insists that he's Loki of Asgard, and ends up in a mental
institution. Was he really sent here as punishment for his misdeeds in
New York as he insists, or is he just a sadly deranged soul? Your guess
is as good as mine.
Beta'd By: Just me tonight, kids. Feel free to correct anything you see. My grammar sucks balls.
Tony figured that someone would likely be monitoring the Tower in some way. Hell, everyone had to be out looking for the two of them, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t prepared for that. He was pretty sure that people forgot just how fast his mind really worked. Bruce likely had some idea, since he was almost as smart, but the thing was, Tony thought on the idea of contingency plan upon contingency plan. He had known at some point that his tower and company would be taken out from under him again, and he’d put in contingencies to make sure that he could easily get it back. Now he had to contend with the idea that someone had been monitoring the Tower. They had to be, unless they were tremendously stupid, and just because he was smarter than they were did not mean that they were necessarily stupid.
However, he was prepared for that, too. He was sick and tired of people fucking with him and thinking that they knew what was best and then forcing it upon him.
Now the world would get to see what happened when Tony Stark was messed with.
He was still standing in his lab, and, although he heard no voice and saw no movement, he knew that Loki was behind him, observing for the moment.
He was still standing in his lab, and, although he heard no voice and saw no movement, he knew that Loki was behind him, observing for the moment. Everything was still waking up around him, coming to life and stretching their metaphoric limbs. He wasn't even sure how long it had been since they had last been active. Almost made him angry over that alone. Still, he had lots to be angry about right now. His computers and bots not having moved for months would just have to join the line.
One of his screens popped up in front of him, and he watched a video feed as security cameras showed that they weren’t going to be alone for long. Outside of the building, on the roof, he could see that Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton looking for a way to get inside. Part of the protocol that he enacted sent the building on lock down, so they would have a bit of a trial getting inside. Then again, they were spies, so he still figured that they might find some way of getting inside, to his irritation.
“Looks like we have company,” Tony said to Loki. “Then again, I think I’d be more disappointed if someone didn’t show up to try and catch s. That would mean that we just weren’t loved one bit.”
He heard Loki snort behind him. “I could do without the spy network trying to get inside, personally.” He could almost hear they eye roll in Loki’s voice.
“What? You wanna welcome them, then? Make them feel at home?” Tony suggested, grinning as he looked at the God of Mischief over his shoulder.
He watched Loki crack his neck in one languid motion. “I think I can handle that,” Loki said, a touch of a grin gracing his features.
OoOoOoOo
Tony couldn’t help but feel paranoid after Loki’s little visit. Sure, security had been upped around the place, but he doubted that would exactly slow the god down. Moreover, a tiny part of him almost wanted Loki to show up again. He had hinted that he knew how to make the Chitauri technology work again, and, despite everything that he had been trying, nothing was working. If the bastard would actually SHOW him how to make this stuff work, he might actually be grateful. He was pulling his hair out over this stuff.
Maybe that was why, when he was working in his shop late one night, when he felt a chill in the air and looked behind him, seeing Loki wearing that Cheshire cat grin, his hand stayed instead of looking for any way to signal the others in the building that Loki had shown up again.
He had been blasting AC/DC when he god appeared, so, if Loki had made any noise, he wouldn’t have heard it, anyway. However, he had felt a chill in the air that made the hair on the back of his neck stand at end, and there Loki was. He wondered why the air would get cold, but filed that away as something to find out if he survived this encounter.
“You know, I upped the security around here just so that you wouldn’t be able to do that,” Tony said, signaling to JARVIS to turn down off the music.
“Actually, I doubt I’m registering to your security feed at all,” Loki said, reaching out of if to touch Tony, only for his hand to pass right through him. “The fun of magic is being able to get around all sorts of things, after all.”
Tony tilted his head, already more interested than afraid now. “Now how in the hell can you do that?” he wondered aloud, already reaching across and watching as his hand passed through Loki’s arm. It was just a hologram, but the technology outside of his own lab for that sort of thing was still awful.
“Magic and science are more alike than you seem to want to believe,” Loki said, watching passively as Tony passed his hand through him a few more times. “Speaking of, I do believe I promised to show you how the Chitauri technology worked.”
“Why are you doing this?” Tony asked, finally pulling back and leaning against his workbench. Yeah, he felt a little safer that apparently, Loki wasn’t actually physically here, but he should still be contacting someone right now. Still, he wanted to satisfy his curiosity before he did anything like that. “What do you have to gain from showing us how this stuff works?”
“Who said that I was showing anyone but you?” Loki asked, grinning and showing his gleaming white teeth at Tony. If Tony didn’t know any better, he’d say that Loki’s teeth looked like razor sharp knives when he smiled. Not the most pleasant of ideas.
“Do you really think that I’d keep something like this a secret?” Tony asked him. “Come on, Loki. If you think you know me at all, do you think that I’d be able to keep anything like this from others around me?”
Loki pursed his lips, seemingly thinking on that for a moment. On the other hand, it could have just been a ploy. Hard to tell when the person you were talking to was the God of Mischief and Lies, among other things. Yeah, Tony had started trying to do his homework about Loki. Thor wasn’t around at the moment to ask questions to and it seemed that SHIELD’s files were woefully lacking. Not that he was terribly shocked. Sure, SHIELD almost had a handle on things on this planet, but it seemed that they were still mostly flailing at anything from beyond the cosmos.
“Maybe I will be showing you a way that will only work when I’m around,” Loki teased, smiling again. Yeah, probably had been a ploy to make Tony think that he was in control for a split second. Tony was ahead of Loki in one particular way: he was damn sure that he had NO control over anything that was going to happen right now.
“Not really shocked by that,” Tony said quickly. “Now, what I’m wondering, what I’m REALLY wondering, is what you want for this knowledge. Come on, I sure as hell don’t think that you’re just gonna hand this information over to one of the people who helped to defeat your little try out takeover of Earth. What do you want, Loki?” Not that he figured he’d actually give anything. No, Loki would only want something bad, right?
“Smart boy,” Loki purred. Tony had to admit that Loki’s voice had a nice ring to it. “No…this is a trade, not a gift. I’m just not sure what it is that you have that I could want.”
Tony bristled, both at being called a ‘boy,’ even as he realized he likely was in just pure years on Loki, and at the idea that Tony didn’t have anything that Loki wanted. Despite the tiny voice in his head telling him to SHUT UP, he couldn’t quite stop himself. “You’d be amazed at just what I can do for you, Loki,” he said, then clearing his throat. “You know…if I wanted to.” He really needed to learn to keep his fat mouth SHUT one of these days, or it really was going to get him killed.
Loki leaned closer, and, even though Tony knew that he wasn’t really there, he still pressed himself harder against the workbench in a vain effort to keep away from him. Loki still moved closer, almost a hair’s breadth from Tony and, although it seemed impossible, Tony could SWEAR that he could feel Loki’s breath on his face. It was also odd that, to him, Loki seemed to smell like fresh snow. “Oh I’m sure that you could,” Loki said, still grinning that maddening and frightening grin. “But I was trying to think of something…a little more tangible.”
Loki moved away, and Tony let out an embarrassing sigh of relief. He was pretty sure that, if these meetings kept up, his brain was going to totally fry and short circuit and he was going to die. “Do you think you can handle the idea of trading for a favor to be decided?” Tony offered, inwardly kicking himself for giving over something that could screw him over in so many ways, but both his own curiosity and the draw that he couldn’t quite deny to the god was making him speak, anyway.
Loki gave one of those terrifying yet seductive grins again, and Tony couldn’t help but wonder if this was how Natasha’s marks felt right before she stabbed them in the neck while in bed. She wasn’t called Black Widow because she just wore black clothes, after all. She was a seducer and killer, and Tony had the definite feeling that Loki might be as well. “I think I can handle that, Stark,” he practically purred, and Tony knew that he was fucked with a capital F-U-C-K.
Before he could even think of saying anything more, though, he heard a knock at his workshop door, and he turned toward it without thinking. When he looked back to see what Loki was doing (and to likely try to make him go away), he had already disappeared. The air was still cold, though, so Tony had the feeling that he might still be around, hiding somewhere.
Clearing his throat, he tried to make himself sound normal when he called out, “Come in!”
It was Steve that walked into the room, looking like he was fresh from a workout, judging by the sweat still sticking to his face and arms. Yeah, he looked, and he had nursed something of a schoolboy crush on the hero since his high school years, but he’d never actually do anything about it. Well, nothing more than a one night stand. He wouldn’t even do THAT because he had Pepper, whom he had conveniently forgotten during his little talk with Loki. FUCK.
“Hey, was wondering if you were going to join everyone for dinner,” Steve said, not even having the decency of sounding winded even though he had obviously just been doing some sort of workout. “Pepper ordered some Thai food and she already dragged Bruce out of his lab, so she said that I had the job of coming and getting you.”
God, this sounded too mundane to be true. Either this was a dream or his talk with Loki was some sort of fevered dream, even if the room still felt freezing to him. “Sure, just let me wrap some stuff up in here and I’ll be right up,” he said, shooting Steve a winning smile.
Steve smiling back, giving him a nod before shivering. “Wow, what’s with keeping this place so cold?” he asked, rubbing his hands up his arms.
“Machines run at peak efficiency in colder temperatures,” Tony said without even thinking about it. He waved at Steve as he headed off, breathing out a sigh of relief when the soldier walked through the door and left the area.
“Not even letting your dear Captain know that the dreaded enemy is around,” Loki purred in his ear, causing Tony nearly to jump out of his skin.
“Jesus FUCK don’t do that to me!” Tony snapped at him quickly, turning around and putting a good foot of distance between the two of them. “Someone needs to put a goddamn bell on you or something.”
“No need to be so jumpy, Mr. Stark,” Loki said, leaning backward against one of the other work tables. “Promise that I won’t bite…unless you ask.”
Tony shook his head. “OK, before you somehow cause my brain to completely short circuit, rules need to be laid out. I’m only giving you ONE favor for teaching me how the Chitauri technology works, and I’m not going to do anything that will either directly or indirectly harm any of my friends or teammates, deal?”
Loki actually seemed to think on that for a second. “Deal then, Mr. Stark,” he said. “Despite what you may think of me, I’m actually not around to kill any of you.”
“Well, I had a broken window and nearly a bashed in skull that said otherwise,” Tony grumbled. “Now, I’ve got a date with friends upstairs, so unless you’d like to explain why you’re suddenly hanging around my workshop like a creeper…”
Loki seemed to understand what he wanted. “Alright then, I’ll be on my way for now. I’ll come back tomorrow night to show you how some of the Chitauri technology works. Till then, Mr. Stark.” Loki bowed slightly before disappearing right before Tony’s eyes.
Tony started the locking up of his lab, muttering to himself the entire time, “This is going to be the death of me. I just know it.”
OoOoOoOo
Loki decided to take the subtle approach to going out after the hawk and the spider. It would be subtle for him, at least. He made sure that he was invisible, coming out onto the rooftop to observe them for a few moments, wanting to get an idea as to what their plans for them might be.
“How does Fury even know that they’re here?” Barton asked Romanoff, eyeing the door that would lead them down a stairwell and likely toward the living quarters that Stark had once used. “They escaped. They could be anywhere. Besides, no one has been in this place for months.”
Loki was happy to hear something resembling a timeframe. He had no idea how long he had been away, either locked in that ridiculous excuse for a mental asylum or being forced to live that lie of a life before. He still remembered all of the life that had he had been placed in, but he had no true idea how long he had spent in it. Time was tricky like that.
“Where else would they go?” Romanoff asked. She had a point. Loki doubted that Stark would have listened to any insistence of going anywhere else, even if Loki had tried. The tower was his and his alone, and of course, he would demand to get it back under his control. Wanting what was rightfully yours was a sentiment that Loki understood very well.
Before Barton could concede the merits and flaws of that idea, Loki thought that it would be a good time to appear. “As enlightening as this conversation really is, I’d suggest for the both of you that you leave,” Loki said, slowly appearing behind the both of them, mainly for dramatic effect.
Both of them managed to hide their surprise when they turned around, but Loki could read them both well enough to see that he had caught them off guard. “It’s not often that someone gets the drop on me,” Romanoff commented as she slowly pivoted toward him.
“Let’s just say that I’m returning the favor,” Loki replied, smile vicious. “As I was saying, go back where you came from if you value your safety.”
Both spies instead leveled their weapons on him. “We’re under orders to bring you both in,” Barton told him. Loki could still sense the rage that dwelled within Barton toward him.
“Too bad for you that’s not gonna happen.” It seemed that Loki wasn’t the only one who could ‘get the drop of them,’ so to speak, tonight. Stark had managed to get up to the roof and open the door while their backs were turned. Before either even had the chance to turn around, he managed to fire off something that looked like a gun, but, instead of bullets, little electrodes popped out and sent a surge of electricity through both of the spies, dropping them both to the ground.
“What is that?” Loki asked, head cocked in curiosity. He wasn’t sure if he’d actually seen anything like it before.
“Taser. Sends 10,000 volts of electricity. I altered it so that it can hit two people at once,” Stark said with a grin. “Handy in a non-lethal way. Didn’t seem fair to just kill them off the bat.” He paused before laughing. “Or fun, really.”
Loki thought that Stark still looked a little insane when he said that, but he’d rather that than someone too worried about morals, now that he thought about it. Stark had always been chaotic in nature. It just seemed like somehow or another, he’d been pushed over the edge.
“So, what to do with these two, then?” Loki mused aloud.
Stark holstered the weapon in the waistband of the jeans that he was wearing. “Lock them up for now. I got a Hulk-proof cage down there that I KNOW they can’t get out of. When we think of something suitably fun, we’ll bring them back out.”
Loki smiled. “Good enough for me.”